Undoubtedly, the recession wasn’t really hitting the internet as hard as what it was other industries. Sure we has a bit of trouble over at Microsoft but that’s because they are also a trading company in the real world. What I mean to say is that the online world was fighting off the worst of it.
In fact, companies such as eBay and Amazon actually didn’t do so bad. People began to sell their stuff when they needed the cash and others bought them because they didn’t have too much cash to splash. It was all making perfect sense until the internet could take no more as real companies started to turn their back on it.
Advertising is plummeting. A new report states that advertising on a worldwide scale is down by five percent. In America, the figure is even bigger at 7% worth an estimated 0.4 Billion dollars. Companies who usually do quite well from advertising such as Monster reported that they lost 31% compared to last year.
Wouldn’t you know it; internet giant Google is the only ad publisher to report a growth, however even this is in single digits.
Now that advertising is failing the next sector to be hit will be entertainment. Big companies that have real world trading have more of a chance of survival but for online magazines and games where they often depend on advertising alone to keep the ship afloat – there may be trouble ahead indeed.
The IDC, who released the report did have some good news however.
“We think the industry will continue to see losses in the third and fourth quarters, but the growth rates–or the loss rates, if you will–will eventually begin to improve,” Karsten Weide, program director for digital media and entertainment at IDC, said in a statement. “However, we also believe the industry may have to wait until mid-2010 until it sees real growth again.”
One look at my Twitter account will prove that I like the old inter-web. I Tweet, Google, chat, play, surf and download. Am I addicted? No. On average I’d say I spend around 4-5 hours a day at my computer which isn’t bad for someone who makes a living as a writer. However, imagine if you or I were addicted to the internet and were beaten to death for it.
Deng Senshan was shipped off to a paramilitary style boot camp by his parents to cure his computer/internet addiction. These camps are notorious for treating teens harshly with physical and mental abuse. They have even been known to shock their young clients with high amounts of electricity as a punishment.
Upon arriving at the camp, Deng was placed into solitary confinement as though being addicted to the internet was illegal. Then, just days after arriving at the camp, instructors beat him to death because “he ran too slow”.
His family, who paid £600 to have him sent to the camp for a month are calling for the immediate closing of the camp. Three instructors who are taught to have killed Deng are being held by local police.
Internet and gaming addictions are becoming widespread in countries such as the US, UK and France, but loosing your life for it is wrong. I guess this story goes to show what living in China on a day to day basis is like where instructors are allowed to beat, shock and mentally torture kids.
As I write this post my tweet is still trying its hardest to do just that – tweet. No I haven’t gone crazy but Twitter is down and wounded. I look down through the other tweets of the people I’m following and their all saying the same thing – barely getting tweets through.One of my followers commented “that was a fun little time without Twitter”, not knowing that it was all still going on. One blogger at AwakenedVoice.com had foreseen this and reckons it’s down to the amount of third party apps relying on the system. “I think it is very likely that the future will yield a Twitter crash. This crash could be caused by any number of factors.
The Twitter infrastructure may become increasingly unreliable due to the volume of third party requests on the system. The crash could end up being a result of an altered Twitter API due to a change in architecture. Twitter might end up altering their terms of service, possibly in an attempt to make some money, thereby making some of these services unauthorized users. Twitter might be purchased by an entity that makes wholesale changes to all of the above. Or Twitter might end up failing and close down.” This may well hold water as another one of my followers, Emmzy_138 mentioned that TwitPic is also acting up.
The Twitter blog today recognized the problem and gave us a reason : Twitter is under attack. Here is what they said in what was a very short but tense post. “On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack. Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate.” I will update this post as I get more information. Subscribe to Crenk here to stay informed.
Google have just announced that they have acquired a new technology company that will serve YouTube very well indeed.
That have just invested shares worth over $106 million dollars in On2 Technologies which are a video compression company. This new venture could change YouTube forever giving it faster download speeds and less buffering as a result.
This may also help to cut Google’s massive bandwidth bill of over $300 million per year that is necessary to keep YouTube up and running. By compressing the size of the videos (some of which are as big of 2GB since HD was introduced) this would make the site smaller and easier to manage while attracting more because of a better user experience.
“Because we spend a lot of time working to make the overall web experience better for users, we think that video compression technology should be a part of the web platform.
“To that end, we’re happy to announce today that we’ve signed a deal to acquire On2 Technologies, a leading creator of high-quality video compression technology.”
Last week, here at Crenk we reported that Microsoft and Yahoo! are entering into a deal to combine search technology and the revenue from their engines in a bid to strike Google who has a share of around 65% of the global market. Yahoo! and Microsoft barely have 28% – combined.
It has emerged that the companies’ lack of market holding has led to Yahoo! putting a clause in the agreement which states that Yahoo! can back out of the deal at any time before the scheduled five year renewal if their revenue share falls too low.
Yahoo! and Microsoft failed to specify what exactly the number was that would entitle Yahoo! to pull out should revenue fall below it however it is expected that the danger zone will be in the first eighteen months.
This is because any new service, whether continuing on from an old one or starting from scratch will experience growing pains. A few other details have emerged since the deal was officially filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
For example, Microsoft must hire 400 Yahoo! engineers and pay them “market-competitive” wages. Furthermore, a full deal must be struck by October 27th otherwise the debates will be brought to a arbitration panel. Time is money.
I guess now we all have to play the waiting game. I wonder in two years time will be caught saying “I Binged myself and I’m 5th in the search results!”.
The United States Marine Corps (USMC) are currently deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq, fighting day in day out against insurgency and terrorism under the constant threat of IEDs and enemy Kalashnikov or RPG fire. They bravely soldier on throughout.
However, when it comes to Web 2.0 they’re left quivering in their combat boots. The USMC has just announced that it is placing a network wide ban on Web 2.0 sites such as Twitter, MySpace and FaceBook in an effort to make their systems more secure.
They say that these sites are easily hacked and used by hackers and scammers and indeed those against US operations to post links to malicious sites in the hope a marine on R&R or a USMC staff member might click on them.
This would expose the soft underbelly of the USMC’s network and would lead to disaster. Here is what the USMC order read :
- “These internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries…”
- “The very nature of SNS [social network sites] creates a larger attack and exploitation window, exposes unnecessary information to adversaries and provides an easy conduit for information leakage that puts OPSEC [operational security], COMSEC [communications security], [and] personnel… at an elevated risk of compromise.”
Donating to charity or even volunteering can be tough. You either don’t have the time, the cash or simply don’t want to. However, most of us will want to help a good cause in some way or another. Intel, Facebook, and Grid Republic have teamed up to allow Facebook users to do exactly that with their new app ‘Progress Thru Processors’.
This app, which was launched yesterday and is available to all Facebook users will utilize extra processing power from their computers when it is not in use and use that power on a huge network of other donators to run many different programs on central computers in labs and research facilities. The reason why these labs such as Africa@home and Climateprediction.net can’t simply do it themselves is because the amount of power needed to examine protine particles or predict theretical weather simulations is huge and extremely expensive.
The whole operation could not have been done without Grid Republic who had the technology to link up the PCs with extra processing power and use them properly giving each one a small crumb of the huge task, which will hopefully all come together to solve sciences big questions.
“By simply running an application on your computer, which uses very little incremental resources, you can expand computing resources to researchers,” Deborah Conrad, Intel vice president and general manager of corporate marketing, said in a statement.
Intel says that the application will not affect performance and thus will not be noticed by the user. Progress Thru Processors is available to download right here.
Even though there is a global recession closing businesses, putting people out of work and somehow still giving top bankers big bonuses, companies still have bills to pay. The most widely used way to pay bills is via the tried and tested paper way. A bill comes in, it’s circulated and approved by all those necessary before being shipped down to accounting where it can sit for weeks before it is paid.
That’s assuming that it makes it that far. Anyone who ever worked in a big company will tell you that invoices and bills seem to grow their own legs and go walkies quite a lot, often unnoticed until an angry supplier calls up.
Bill.com looks to change all that. The company, which has just raised 17 million dollars, takes the whole thing digital. When a paper bill comes into a company, they fax it to a special number and when an e-mail bill comes in they e-mail it to a special address. Then, when they log into Bill.com they will all be there in digitised form. Then all the managers who need to sign off on the bill can simply click ‘Approve’. The bill is then set to a status where by accounting will take control. They can then pay the bill via transfer and all is done and dusted.
Many companies report that Bill.com has halved the amount of man time it used to take in paying bills. This is because everything is all in one place where everyone can approve or pay the bill at a time that suites them. This way, a bill doesn’t become stuck at a managers desk for days because he/she is busy, leaving others waiting around to sign. It also dramatically reduced the chances of the bill getting lost or misconstrued.
This is a great web tool for any medium or large business where bills seem to eat up too much company time.
Right next to downloading, music streaming is the next big thing in terms of entertainment on the net. It’s really starting to pick up with many people launching their own private radio stations. While the vast majority are in too small a niche to actually make money, the big companies will.
Spotify are the biggest at the moment. They are the ones to go to for video and music streaming. Recently however, Microsoft announced that it would launch its own music streaming service. This was originally intended for July but has become delayed.
Several other companies are now catching up quickly with streaming services already launched or in the works.
TechCrunch.com contacted Microsoft and this is what they had to say for themselves:
We don’t have much detail to disclose on this subject but what we can share is that, in the coming months, MSN is planning a new music service in Beta via its Music channel in the UK.
“At this stage we won’t be confirming the details behind this but more information will be available soon and will be communicated in due course.”
At any rate, Microsoft had better hop to it if they want to succeed in what it becoming a crowded market. If they let users get too comfortable with one source (as we have see happen in the past with iTunes) then they will not want to move onto any future service provided by Microsoft.
Apple have today announced that Eric Schmidt who is the CEO of Google and a member of the board of directors at Apple has stepped down from his position at the company. Schmidt has held the prestigious position since August 2006 and says that he is leaving the job because conflicts of interest arose.
These “conflicts of interest” arose around 15 months ago when Google started making their way into Apples territory such as announcing their upcoming Chrome OS and the recent debacle over Google Voice being denied into Apple’s App Store.
An official statement from Apple read:
“Eric has been an excellent Board member for Apple, investing his valuable time, talent, passion and wisdom to help make Apple successful,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple’s core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric’s effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest. Therefore, we have mutually decided that now is the right time for Eric to resign his position on Apple’s Board.”
To be honest readers, I don’t find this too surprising. Schmidt was being asked to leave certain meetings at Apple when they were discussing plans that could be used by Google. This is no kind of behaviour to be going on in one of the world’s biggest companies. He will be replaced by a more effective person who will not have conflicts in other businesses with Apple.
Since 3D filming was created the only way to marvel at the spectacle was to go to the cinema and pay extra for the pleasure. At the moment, Ice Age 3D is about as close as you’ll get to the 3D experience. However, recently huge advancements have been made such as Fujifilm announcing the world first consumer 3D digital camera. Now, Sky TV in the UK say that they will be offering Europe’s first ever 3D TV service by next year.
“In the next step in the Sky+HD journey, Sky today announced that it will launch the UK’s first 3D channel next year,” said Sky in a press release
“The service will be broadcast across Sky’s existing HD infrastructure and be available via the current generation of Sky+HD set-top boxes.” This is good news as the UK has just undergone a massive nationwide digital switchover and people having to change their set-top boxes all over again would anger some.
However, those wanting to enjoy 3D films, entertainment and sport will have to change their TV for a 3D ready TV. These are expected from large companies such as Panasonic and will be on sale in 2010 to coincide with the launch of the 3D service.
“3D is a genuinely ’seeing is believing’ experience, making TV come to life as never before. Just like the launch of digital, Sky+ and HD, this is latest step in our commitment to innovating for customers.” said Sky.
Right, those of you who read my twitter will know that I’ve decided it’s time to get into shape. I’m by no means obese. However I would like to be able to jog for five minutes without needing to stop ten times for ten-minute breaks.
I put some good play lists on my Mp3, dug the tracky bottoms out of the wardrobe (oh, the shame) and put on the stopwatch. Then it dawned on me – I don’t know the first thing about getting fit. Therefore, I did what anyone in their right mind would do – I Googled.
After sifting through dozens of brutal websites, I came across a few military style sites when it clicked – surely, armies across the world must have SOMETHING! This article is a list of the top three Army websites of real world militaries about getting fit. These cool web apps and videos will hopefully have me in ship shape in no time.
1. The Royal Commandos: This section of their website is dedicated to getting you fit in a short space of time in order to gain entry to them. There are tons of videos showing you how to do the exercises properly, what you should eat and what makes a good schedule. Because it’s from one of the world best fighting forces where physical fitness is of top priority during training, you know you’re not getting the wimpy approach. Easy to use and tones of information on there.
2. 62nd Infantry .com – This is an unofficial website run by the 62nd Infantry Battalion of the Irish Reserve Defense Forces. It focuses less on interactive features and more on the training side of things, which I liked. There are charts to figure out your BMI, motivation techniques, goals and targets. Although this is aimed at meeting fitness levels to gain entry for training, it can be used by the average Joe to shed the pounds.
3. Canadian Army. This site doesn’t go into to much detail like the previous two sites, but it does give you some good step-by-step instructions and some goals for joining which you can use as personal targets.
Now, I’m off for a jog.
