| Second Chance for Clear |
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Looks like the Clear airport VIP service will rise from the dead. The NY Times reports that an investment group has signed a letter of intent to buy Clear’s assets and restart the service. And customers will return with open arms — according to the Times: “[The investment group] also said that they conducted a survey of Clear customers over the summer, and that 70 percent said they would return to the service. Another 20 percent said they would return depending on which airports were included.” And if you’re in that 10% that’s given up on Clear, don’t worry: your biometric data will be destroyed. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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Comments (0)September 29, 2009
| Loss of Web Search Ecosystem |
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Last night I was searching for “fatty paycheck”. (*See below for an explanation of the query.) I was looking for a page I remembered viewing that had “pimp” in the URL. It wasn’t in the top 50 hits from Google. Hmm … was the page gone? No — a quick Yahoo search easily turned it up in the top 10 hits. See, this is what bothers me about Yahoo selling out to Microsoft — it’s the loss of Web search ecosystem. I often find stuff via Yahoo that I don’t with Google. Next year that won’t matter anymore. There’ll be 2 choices: Google or Bing. And speaking of Bing, my page was hit #48 there. So they were marginally better than Google. *Fatty paycheck: Back in March 2009 a young woman was offered a job at Cisco. She Tweeted about it sarcastically, saying, “Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.” About an hour later a Cisco employee replied “Who is the hiring manager? I’m sure they would love to know that you would hate the work. We here at Cisco are well versed in the Web.” End of job offer. Much Internet scorn was heaped upon the fatty paycheck Tweeter. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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September 28, 2009
| iPhone App Store: 2 Billion and Counting |
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Apple announced today that they’ve dished up the 2 billionth iPhone App Store download. According to the All Things D blog, they’re pulling in $720 million a year from iPhone downloads. As Peter Kafka says, “Not bad for a side business.” |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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| Reflecting On Why I Got Into This Business |
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Lately I’ve been spending too much time talking to people about how to update a Twitter stream or manage Facebook security settings or even the merits of Gmail vis-a-vis Hotmail. Questions that are tech-related, but that don’t really deal with how to find and use information. ‘Cause it’s all about the info, baby. That’s why I got into this biz. Find the facts. Mine the data. RTFM. So it was rather serendipitous that yesterday the NY Times had an article titled “Dialing for Answers Where Web Can’t Reach” about Question Box, a relatively low-tech approach to getting information to people who don’t have Internet access. The article focused on an Ugandan farmer who needed to know what was eating his coffee plants. He turned to Question Box: “The premise behind Question Box is that many barriers keep most of the developing world from taking advantage of the wealth of knowledge available through Web search engines, said Rose Shuman, the service’s creator. That could be a drag on economic development. ‘So I was thinking, why not bring the information to them in a way that’s most convenient and useful to them?’ said Ms. Shuman, who is based in Santa Monica, Calif. Instead of searching for information themselves, people in two rural agricultural communities in Uganda can turn to 40 Question Box workers who have cellphones. The workers dial into the call center and ask questions on behalf of the locals, or they put the call on speakerphone so the locals can ask for themselves. The operators then look up the requested information in a database and convey it to the workers, who pass it along to the villagers. The workers are compensated with cellphone airtime.” At the end of the day, what would you rather have: the information you need to battle agricultural pests, or nifty technology that lets you change your Facebook status to “Trying to save the coffee crop”? |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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| How Good Lawyers Survive Bad Times |
 By Nelson, Calloway, Kodner In a single volume, How Good Lawyers Survive Bad Times, will provide you with tips, resources, and tools to help you survive in bad times, as well as teach you management, finance, marketing and technology essentials necessary to succeed. Good lawyers can indeed survive bad times. Library Record • Borrow it • More Titles |
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Submitted by: Malgorzata Pawska, Digital Content Coordinator
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September 24, 2009
| A New Twist On “Embrace, Extend and Extinguish” |
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Back in the Bad Old Days, Microsoft used a simple strategy to crush its rivals: Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. They’d move into a product area, add some proprietary standards that nobody else could support, then strangle their competitors. This worked real well, for example, against Netscape during the browser wars in the 1990s. Now Google’s turning the tables on Microsoft. They’ve released an Internet Explorer plug-in called Google Chrome Frame that replaces IE’s page rendering engine with the WebKit-based one used by Google Chrome. In effect, your IE browser looks the same on the surface, but under the hood it uses the GCF plug-in to display pages much faster. It’s like Google’s saying to Microsoft, “If you won’t update your browser and adopt HTML 5, we’ll do it for you.” I’ve downloaded and installed GCF in my version of IE8. Pages do seem to load quicker. But I haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid — I know most people won’t even know about/care about/use GCF. But that’s not the point. Google is serving notice to Microsoft that it can no longer rely on “Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish”. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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| I Was Wondering How Long It’d Take For Scribd To Get Sued |
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Social docs site Scribd is being sued by a children’s author. Elaine Scott found that her 1985 book “Stocks and Bonds: Profits and Losses — A Quick Look at Financial Markets” had been posted on Scribd and consequently downloaded more than 100 times. She fired off a C&D notice to Scribd, then followed that up with a lawsuit. Ms. Scott claims 2 violations of copyright — one for the upload (even though Scribd gets a “safe harbor” under the DMCA since they took it down), and another when her book was added to Scribd’s copyright protection system as a result of the takedown notice (hmmm … interesting). According to the complaint (available from — you guessed it! — Scribd): “Scribd is building two profitable businesses on a foundation of enterprise-wide copyright infringement — a website that provides storage, searching, and retrieval of documents, and a copyright system fed by stolen works that is used to identify and prevent the uploading of unlicensed copyrighted works. The value of the copyright protection system may someday exceed (or already has) the value of the document storage and retrieval system, especially if it were illegal to operate a Scribd-type business unless the business also implemented a copyright filter.” Um … OK, if you say so. But I cannot believe that Scribd’s filter uses the full text of each work to determine whether something is copyrighted. Indeed Wired’s Threat Level blog reports that Scribd “creates a digital fingerprint, or a ‘hash,’ to identify infringing copies.” If that’s true, then the suit IMHO doesn’t have much to stand on. Anyway this is the first Scribd lawsuit that I’ve heard of. I guess it was inevitable, given that many full-length books are now being posted there. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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| Google Adds More Pieces of LIFE, Really Loosely Joined |
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Google has digitized more than 1,800 issues of LIFE magazine from 1936-1972. They’re available via Google Books. Last year Google added images from LIFE to a special archive in Google Images. It’s great the Google is digitizing one of the most important U.S. news magazines ever — and a staple from my childhood — but they’ve really fragmented it. I wish they would either (a) put it all in Google LIFE, or (b) create Google Magazines and dump it all there, along with stuff from all the other mags they’ve digitized. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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| Meg Whitman Says “Elect Me Now” |
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Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay, declared her candidacy for governor of Cal-ee-fornia on Tuesday. Her Web site is megwhitman.com. (This is not a political endorsement by either Jenkins or myself.) Link via NYTimes. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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| Google Book Deal Legal Drama Drags On [UPDATED] |
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On Tuesday The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers filed a memorandum in support of their motion for an adjournment of the Fairness Hearing scheduled for October 7. You may remember that last Friday the U.S. Department of Justice stated its belief that the Google Book deal needed to be modified before the DoJ could give its blessing. In the motion, the AG and AAP claim that more than 400 “objections, briefs of amici curiae, and statements, both in support of and in opposition to the Settlement Agreement, have been filed with the Court.” But the deal-breaker was the DoJ saying “uh uh”: “It is because the parties wish to work with the DOJ to the fullest extent possible that they have engaged, and plan to continue to engage, in negotiations in an effort to address and resolve the concerns expressed in the U.S. Statement of Interest. The parties are committed to rapidly advancing the discussions with the DOJ. Nevertheless, it is clear that the complex issues raised in the U.S. Statement of Interest preclude submission of an amended settlement agreement by October 7. Because the parties, after consultation with the DOJ, have determined that the Settlement Agreement that was approved preliminarily in November 2008 will be amended, plaintiffs respectfully submit that the Fairness Hearing should not be held, as scheduled, on October 7. To continue on the current schedule would put the Court in a position of reviewing and having participants at the hearing speak to the original Settlement Agreement, which will not be the subject of a motion for final approval.” The plaintiffs also asked that a status conference be scheduled for November 6. Link via CNET News. UPDATE, 9/25: Judge Denny Chin granted the motion to postpone the October 7 fairness hearing. The parties will meet on that date for a status conference instead. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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