Dec 18
NEW YORK (AP) — Match.com, an old standby of online dating, wants to make some new connections among the fast-growing number of Facebook users worldwide.
Dating Web site Match.com, owned by media mogul Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp conglomerate, plans to launch two new features this week that bring greater social networking capabilities to its more than 15 million Match members and to the roughly 58 million active users of Facebook. Continue reading »
Dec 17
Facebook is suing seventeen people and a Canadian Internet porn company for allegedly trying to mine the popular social networking site for its users’ personal details.
Facebook alleges that in June servers controlled by the defendants used automated scripts to make more than 200,000 requests for personal information stored on Facebook’s site. The allegations are contained in an amended lawsuit filed earlier this month in U.S. District Court in San Jose, California.
The company first filed suit back in June, but amended the complaint this month after obtaining court orders to identify who controlled the servers trying to access its site. Continue reading »
Oct 29
NBC and News Corp.’s new internet video site, Hulu, is finally seeing the light of day. Today, Hulu finally launched the private beta of their site, which includes almost a hundred different TV series and movies. After a number of delays, Hulu has their site out the door in October, as promised.
Hulu is a web platform for viewing and sharing TV shows, movies, and clips. The programming selection (via newTeeVee PDF) for Hulu on launch is pretty impressive. Content providers include Fox, NBC, E!, Bravo, FX, SciFi, USA, and Universal. Hopefully we will start to see some more TV networks and movie studios jump on this because I’ll admit that I was a little disappointed to see that a couple of my personal favorites, Lost and Adult Swim weren’t included in the list. Continue reading »
Oct 11
Google powered more than half of all search requests carried out around the world in August, according to a report.
A global study by analysts comScore revealed that more than 61 billion searches were performed by more than 750 million users in the month.
Users performed more than 37 billion searches via Google, more than all the other major search engines combined.
Yahoo was the second most used engine, followed by Baidu, the Chinese language search engine, the report said.
“Seeing Asian search engines like China’s Baidu.com and Korea’s NHN ranked alongside Google and Yahoo underscores the fact that search has become a truly global phenomenon,” said Bob Ivins, executive vice president of international markets at comScore, in a statement.
Read full story.
Oct 05
NEW YORK - Sample addresses in nearly a dozen languages will be added to the Internet’s central directories as early as next week, paving the way for Web surfers around the world to get online without knowing any English.
At this point, the 11 domain names are meant primarily for software developers and Web site designers to test the new system, but they are the first such names entered in the 13 key domain name directories, known as root servers, after years of discussions and limited-access tests.
If the global tests go well, non-English domain names could be in use by the end of 2008. Continue reading »
Oct 05
Radiohead’s official website was back online last night after overwhelming demand for the band’s new album caused it to crash. Traffic on the site slowed to a crawl after the rock group told fans on Monday that they could pre-order the new release, In Rainbows, from www.radiohead.com at any price they wanted.
The band’s spokesman, Murray Chalmers, said the collapse of the site was caused by waves of British fans logging on after the announcement about the album. They were followed by fans on the east coast of the US, who woke to the surprise news, followed by Radiohead enthusiasts on the west coast.
“It’s getting busy in there, busier than they expected,” guitarist Jonny Greenwood wrote of the band’s official W.A.S.T.E. store, which is selling In Rainbows. “So, if you please bear with us, it should get cleared out soon.” He added: “I sound like a bouncer. Get behind the rope. No denim. Thanks for your patience with the site and interest in the record.” Continue reading »
Oct 05
Writing your own operating system can be anything from a summer hobby project to a full-fledged commercial endeavor taking many years to complete. One might think that with so many operating systems in existence today, that there is little or no need for new work on the subject. A company that would disagree is Amazon, who just published a paper (PDF) detailing a distributed storage project called Dynamo.
While Dynamo is not a complete operating system by itself, it is an intriguing solution to the problem of always-available, fault-tolerant online database storage. For the last year or so, Dynamo has been at the core of many of Amazon’s web services, including the shopping cart, customer preferences, and the product catalog. It has also been used to power S3, Amazon’s online web application storage service. Continue reading »
Oct 05
Microsoft Corp.’s quest to be a player in health-information services faces a broader challenge already rankling the health-care industry: how to collect information that many consumers don’t even share with their families.
[MSHEALTH]
Yesterday, Microsoft announced a Web site called HealthVault designed as a central place for consumers to store their health-related data and share it with doctors and other medical professionals. The site also offers Internet search and a Web page for viewing and organizing articles and other information on health.
The service throws Microsoft into a crowd of insurance companies, employers, Internet companies, start-ups and tech companies trying to provide digital-health records to patients and consumers. Included are Aetna Inc. and WellPoint Inc., which hold billing and claims data that they are trying to use to build personal-health records, and newcomers like Microsoft and Google Inc., which says it is working on a system but hasn’t disclosed specific plans. Continue reading »
Oct 02
Yahoo! has upgraded its search engine to tackle consumers’ “internet search fatigue” — and close the gap with Google, the sector’s runaway leader.
As part of its makeover, the revamped Yahoo! search engine will suggest ways to phrase a search as a user types into the query box and will produce more links to photos, videos and music on the main results page.
The new “Search Assist” tool will also pull information from Yahoo!’s calendar service, Upcoming.org, to highlight local events when they are relevant to a search request. Continue reading »
Sep 26
EW YORK (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc on Tuesday launched an early version of its highly anticipated digital music download store, which is seen as a potential rival to Apple Inc’s dominant iTunes service.
The “Amazon MP3″ store allows users to buy music without copy protection technology, so the songs can play on a variety of devices, including Apple’s market-leading iPod.
The retailer believes selling music without protection will attract consumers who have been reluctant to buy songs that are digitally formatted to restrict where they can be played or transmitted. That is the case with iTunes, where most song downloads for 99 cents apiece are usually only compatible with an Apple iPod player. Continue reading »
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