I’ve worked plenty of thankless retail jobs so I can sympathize with the grind but please, customer service people, check the boxes of stuff that gets returned to your store. A Nintendo DS box filled with rocks and newspaper was apparently returned to a Wal Mart store in Florida, then put back on the floor TWICE, and sold to a mother who gave it to her son as a birthday present. → Read More
We received devastating news that Nahum Sharfman, founder of Shopping.com, and his wife, Nava, died in a plane crash in Greece. According to The Marker (the article is in Hebrew, here’s the translated version), Sharfman, who was a well-known entrepreneur in the Israeli tech space, perished in a plane crash on the Greek island of Korfo. The story has also been broken on Twitter. Initial reports attribute the cause of the crash to human error combined with severe weather conditions.
A successful entrepreneur, Sharfman founded Shopping.com which he brought to a successful IPO in 2004. Shopping.com was later acquired by eBay for $650 million. Earlier, Sharfman co-founded Commtouch and also brought the security technology company to an IPO in 2000. Prior to starting his own ventures, Sharfman spent 11 years working for National Semiconductor. He received a Ph.D. in High Energy Nuclear Physics from Carnegie Mellon University and M.S. and B.S. degrees in Physics from the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology. Sharfman was also chairman of social content sharing site enips. → Read More
It’s pretty much obligatory at this point: someone announces a new piece of hardware, gets a lot of attention, and iSuppli tears it apart and prices the components. Whether they’ve managed to get ahold of a Pre and actually tear it apart or they just dug up a list of components, we’re not sure – but iSuppli has pinned the final bill of materials for the Palm Pre at $137.38. Thats 46% of the $300 iSuppli expects Palm to charge Sprint for each handset, and 68% of 200 bucks they expect Sprint to charge the customer after subsidies. Not too bad – but of course, it doesn’t include R&D costs, marketing costs, nor all of the talent Palm had to hire to dig them out of their grave. [Via TGDaily] → Read More
If you have to wear a tie more than once a year, you might as well have a cool one. The iTie serves two functions: one, it has two little straps that attach to the buttons on your shirt so it doesn’t blow around, get dunked in your coffee, or, my personal favorite from when I used to wear a tie, get toothpaste all over it. → Read More
Last week, Microsoft officially opened up PubCenter to the masses, allowing anyone to sign up for the ad program. We’ve written about how Microsoft’s PubCenter, a self-serve third-party ad publishers platform through AdCenter, was doing well with private beta testers over the past year, with PubCenter paying significantly more than competitors Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher (one particular site owner says he is receiving from four times more in revenue from Microsoft than Google AdSense). We are now hearing and reading on PubCenter forums that since the program opened up to the public last week, revenue has plummeted and many publishers are switching back to AdSense due to the sudden drop in payouts.
One publisher, who wishes to remain anonymous, said that Microsoft has cut his payout by 80 to 90 percent and that many of the publishers on PubCenter are leaving to go back to AdSense. According to our source, this new revshare went into place on either the 18th or the 19th of April. Here’s a direct quote from the publisher: “Realistically, Microsoft’s payout has been too high from the beginning, but this drop puts it well below the scope of being remotely competitive and instead files it under ‘worthless.’” → Read More
Samsung’s got two new portable camcorders coming out in July. The SMX-C14 will feature 16GB of onboard memory, expandable via SD while the SMX-C10 won’t feature any standard memory, relying solely on your ever-growing pile of SD cards. → Read More
People search engine Spock is about to be sold, say multiple sources. Spock was a hot startup back when it launched in 2007, but after an initial spike in traffic, the company has gone sideways and faded into obscurity. People search, it seems, will be dominated by the likes of LinkedIn and Facebook, who are both now being smart about search engine optimization.
Now they’ve burned through much of the cash they raised, which includes an announced $7 million round plus additional undisclosed funding. And they’ve been trying to sell themselves for some time – we’ve confirmed with a couple of buyers who looked at it and passed. Meanwhile, Spock has started charging users to access their data.
But one company may have bitten and are close to buying the company. Sources are saying that the infamous Intelius (founded by the equally infamous Naveen Jain), a people search engine that charges users to access data, may be buying Spocksoon. If these rumors are accurate, God help Spock. Not only is Intelius embroiled in all kinds of legal and ethical disputes, but they also have a shaky history when it comes to acquisitions. See this article, for example, about a 2005 acquisition of addresses.com, which ended up in litigation. Our coverage of Intelius is here and here. → Read More
Wow, good double deal on Dell monitors. Take your pick of the 23-inch 1920×1080 S2309W for just $159 or the 22-inch version for $139. Both feature DVI and VGA inputs, but you’ll have to use some of the money you save to buy a set of speakers as there aren’t any built in on either model. Still, nice big cheap monitors, eh? Dell S2309W and Dell S2209W [Dell.com via dealnews] → Read More
Don’t forget that Banjo-Tooie is now on Xbox Live! Yup, I bought it this morning, and it immediately took me back to Happier Days, a youth defined by watching WWF (at the time) and playing N64 and PlayStation all weekend long. → Read More
Not too shabby, Slacker. Less than 4 months after Slacker for BlackBerry was launched at CES 2009, Slacker, Inc. has announced that it has surpassed 1 million downloads. Now, 1 million might not seem like all that much in the shadow of the iTunes App Store and its 1 billion served – but remember, this is the BlackBerry we’re talking about. A huge chunk of BlackBerry owners never download applications, with another significant chunk only ever downloading between 1-5. Taking that into considering, 1 million downloads in 4 months is a pretty big deal. That said, we’d still be interested in hearing the number of downloads the iPhone port has seen so far. It’s been available for about a week less than its BlackBerry brethren, but spent a ton of time in the App Store’s Top 25 Free Apps list. We’d be willing to bet it passed the million mark quite some time ago. → Read More
One way to possibly track the spread of the swine flu is to look at where spikes in search activity around related terms is occurring. Google already does this with its Google Flu Trends, and has now extended that analysis on an experimental basis to Mexico with a site it just put up called Experimental Flu Trends For Mexico.
This could prove to be an early warning system. Last week, Google detected spikes in flu-related searches in Mexico City, for instance. The darker the region, the more flu search activity is being detected (see map below).
Both Google Flu Trends and the experimental site for Mexico filter out searches that are not consistent with people looking for information about the disease. A broader analysis on the term “swine flu” can be found on Google Insights for Search, which shows the rise in that search term’s popularity over the past few weeks, along with the states where the most search activity is happening. (See map above). This method is less likely to be predictive of the actual spread of the disease because it just measures raw searches.. Nevertheless, the top ten states where people are searching for the term are: → Read More
There’s a lot of buzz swirling about Wolfram Alpha, the new computational search engine — perhaps too much. But regardless, people want to see the service in action to decide for themselves. And some of those people tuned into the preview webcast put on by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society yesterday. Unfortunately, if you listened in live, it was audio-only. But Harvard followed up by posting a video of the event to YouTube later in the day — a video without a single shot of the service!
So if you’re interested in watching 1 hour and 45 minutes of footage of creator Stephen Wolfram walking you through something just off screen that you can’t see, we’ve embedded it below for your viewing “pleasure.” But hey, the video is available in HD and at least the camera turns off of Wolfram for the Q&A session, to liven up the action a bit. Still, if you’re really interested in learning about the service, you may want to listen in. → Read More
While that certainly doesn’t look like any Android UI we’ve seen, BoyGeniusReport is hearin’ whispers that the handset you see up above is one of Motorola’s first outings in Android territory. Codenamed, nicknamed, or just plain name-named (they’re not sure which) “Ironman”, Motorola is supposedly aiming at a Q3 release. Specific specs are absent, but this handset will purportedly be a relatively high-end beast: Wi-Fi, 3G, a “screamin’ CPU”, and a high-res camera are all mentioned. → Read More
We’ve received multiple tips of a new phishing attack that has broken out on Facebook. If you get an email message that looks to be from Facebook with the subject, “Hello,” and featuring the text below, don’t bother clicking on the link included. Doing so takes you to a site called fbaction.net that mimics the look of the main Facebook login page, hoping to get you to sign in. Naturally, if you do that, the site will have access to your account and can send out more of these messages to your friends.
The message body will apparently read something like (with YOURFRIEND being replaced by the name of a friend of yours): → Read More
While some phones stay true to a single flick (take Sony Ericsson handsets and any Bond movie ever, for example), some leap around Hollywood like a heiress on a booze binge. One example of the not so loyal? The Nokia 5800. After making its ultra-early debut in The Dark Knight, it’s jumping over to the Star Trek camp. On May 1st (7 days before the film’s release), UK retailer Phones4u will be slinging the 5800 Star Trek edition in red, blue, and black/silver. It’s free of charge, if you’re willing to lock on to a Vodafone, O2, T-Mobile, or Orange contract. So what makes it Star Trek? Unfortunately, no phaser is included. It does have Star Trek screensavers, wallpapers, and ringtones preloaded – and that’s almost as cool, right? … Right? Anyone? [via UnwiredView] → Read More
If you like stairs and you also happen to like scooters but you can’t decide between a flight of stairs and a scooter, maybe you’ll find yourself in the market for this Pumgo thing. It’s a pedal-powered scooter. You know, for when pushing your foot along the pavement isn’t as exhilirating as pedaling. → Read More
Time Warner announced first quarter earnings today, giving us a peak at how AOL is doing. It’ seen better days. Revenues were down 23 percent to $867 million. Of that advertising revenues made up about half ($443 million), but were down a gut-wrenching 20 percent. Yahoo, in comparison, saw a 12 percent decline in advertising revenues during the quarter, and Google saw 6 percent growth in total revenues on an annual basis. Even Microsoft did better on the online advertising front, suffering a smaller 16 percent drop in the quarter.
Also revealed in the 10Q filing with the SEC is Time Warner’s intention to separate the old dial-up access business and spin off the rest of AOL: → Read More
