Facebook Gets 200 Million Cash Injection
Friday, den 29. May 2009
The ambiguity regarding Facebook’s issues of working capital has been clarified. The questions regarding the social network platform’s deficit in operating costs and revenue have been answered by a Russian holding company. Digital Sky Technologies [DST] invested USD 200 million into Facebook allowing 100 million in shares to be bought; ensuring shareholders could get cash for their stock without going public.
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Search Battleground Intensifies As Microsoft Stakes 100 Million
Wednesday, den 27. May 2009
The search market is worth USD 22.12 billion of revenue to Google on an annual basis and is evidently worth fighting for. It is alleged that Microsoft are investing USD 100 million into advertising for their new search engine, interestingly named, Bing; the namesake of revered television character Chandler Bing from the hit US sitcom Friends.
A leaked internal email from Microsoft earlier in the year, requesting that personnel play with the search engine and deliver feedback stated the brand name of the search engine as Kumo, however it seems they might be opting for something more catered toward the US market. After the recent launch of WolframAlpha, Google responded with a Searchology promotion, unveiling mixed media search results that looked remarkably like the ones outlined in the leaked Microsoft Kumo email earlier in the year.
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Enhance Your World With Augmented Reality
Tuesday, den 26. May 2009
The news this week has been ablaze with a variety of stories that reflect our ever deepening need for technological immersion. My personal favourite is a new mobile phone that promises to enhance the reality around us. The new virtually virtual reality phone from Nokia will use every application at its disposal to label the world with digital features such as the height of a building, the name of passing person and even identify the stars in the sky. It is essentially a Wikipedia overlay for the world.
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Rise Of The Sentiment Software Agent
Wednesday, den 13. May 2009
For want of a better word, internet marketing is about to get a little bit ‘matrixy’. Just as the world collectively grasps the idea of a search engine with spiders and bots that crawl pages indexing data, along comes the intelligence engine. This uses a software agent worthy of being named Smith; it is emotionally aware and scours blogs, articles, tweets for sentiment data in online banter.
A social media consultancy called Sentimine based in the United States has developed a content analysis tool to follow trends related to a certain keyword and label them as favourable, unfavourable or neutral. This is being used to gather information about brand opinions so manufacturers and PR companies can determine whether the attitude towards a product is positive or negative.
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Even Robots Need Social Networking.
Thursday, den 7. May 2009
Facebook could be now being used to bridge the social gap between humans and robots, researchers are giving a robot its own Facebook page so that it can begin to create meaningful relationships.
The robot’s Facebook page will be occupied with interaction the robot has made with people and will include pictures of the robot with human company.
The bringing together of the robot and Facebook is an idea presented by Dr. Nikolaus Mavridis and his co-researchers as they look further into why people are reluctant to bond and stay in touch with robots.
While they have found that humans can be rather engaged by robots initially, they eventually grow disinterested within a couple of weeks, especially once they have exhausted the behaviour range of the robot and its understanding.
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Cyber Crime On The Increase
Wednesday, den 6. May 2009
The current economic crisis is leading many people to trawl the internet for get rich quick schemes that are leaving them wide open to cyber crime in the form of criminals being able to set up spoof websites that can then hack into users computers and steal personal data. Website viruses are increasing to the point where computer security company, Sophos, have stated in their 2009 Security Threat Report, that an infected website is discovered every 4.5 seconds. Emails with malicious attachments have increased five-fold since the beginning of 2009.
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Google's Lobbying Budget Sparks Concerns
Friday, den 1. May 2009
In January the US based Consumer Watchdog group sparked concerns regarding Google’s lobbying activity surrounding the Obama administrations’ stimulus package. They claimed that Google was lobbying to relax privacy laws which would enable them to sell private medical information that was hosted on its Google Health application.
Google retorted claiming that these accusations are “100% false and unfounded” , adding “Google Health does not sell medical data”. A letter this week from Consumer Watchdog stated that it never said that Google Health sold medical data, but that its lobbying activity was pushing to exclude it from the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act [HIPAA], positioning itself in a place to not be in any breach of legislation if it decided to sell medical data.
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