Archive for the 'Business' Category
“…a familiar line spouted by Americans these days is, ‘Why should the US curb energy consumption, when India and China are guzzling petrol and polluting the whole globe?’…”
California consumes more petrol than India!
Amazing Stat: California Uses More Gas than China
Streaming allows the upload and download at the same time, without the first person completely uploading the file. New startup brings streaming of files to web — innovative!
Streamfile
VCs are collectively pumping about $7b per quarter on average in the US, with an average deal size of $7.5m, so approx 1000 new/renewed investments per quarter! The hot industries are usual suspects: software, energy and bio-tech.
VC Deals In Charts @ TechCrunch
Former Vice President of USA and an environmental activist, Al Gore, issued a challenge yesterday to all fellow Americans to achieve 100% energy from indigenously produced renewable sources within 10 years. This is not only a challenge for Americans, but a mission for all residents of the planet who ought to play their own part [...]
Free, open-source boot disk utility Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN) automatically and completely deletes the content of every hard disk it can find on your computer when you run it.
Darik’s Boot and Nuke Securely Wipes Your System in an Emergency
Yahoo! is taking a bold step tonight: opening up its index and search engine to any outside developers who want to incorporate Yahoo! Search’s content and functionality into search engines on their own sites.
Search War: Yahoo! Opens Its Search Engine to Attack Google With An Army of Verticals
JumpBox offers a neat array of read-made open source software stacks as Virtual Appliances, pre-configured with “best practices”.
JumpBox
The new version touts two major upgrades. ‘First, TrueCrypt now performs parallel encryption and decryption operations on multi-core systems, giving you a phenomenal speedup if you have more than one processor available. Second, it now has the ability to hide an entire operating system, so even if you’re forced to reveal your pre-boot password to [...]
The total economic cost of software security flaws has been estimated at about $180 billion a year. A former cryptographer for the National Security Agency and NASA suggests creating a tax on software based on the number and severity of security bugs, even if the cost gets passed on to consumers, in order to hold [...]
Gmail has introduced a new privacy feature that will let users see how many computers their account is open on, and also allows them to sign-out remotely.
Google Lets You Monitor Access To Your Gmail Account
Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he had no sympathy for the parents, and that he was tired of “Googlers” who felt entitled to perks like “bottled water and M&Ms”.
On Day Care, Google Makes a Rare Fumble
“Information technology giants are teaming up in defense against potential patent-infringement lawsuits, the Wall Street Journal said on Sunday” - Reuters
Companies Include Verizon, Google, CIsco, HP and Ericsson and the group is called Allied Security Trust. (via slashdot)
Tech majors to join hands against patent suits
Come 2Q09 and you’ll find thousands of new top-level domain names (TLDs), from .paris to .pepsi, in one of the biggest shake-ups in Internet history.
Internet body approves domain name big bang
Dutch security researchers rode the London Underground free for a day after easily using an ordinary laptop to clone the “smartcards” commuters use to pay fares, a hack that highlights a serious security flaw because similar cards provide access to thousands of government offices, hospitals and schools.
Hackers Crack London Tube’s Ticketing System
The Dynamic Tower design is made up of 80 pre-fabricated apartments which will spin independently of one another. According to the creators — this building never looks the same, not once in a lifetime; and would be energy self-sufficient and even feed extra power back into the grid!
Dubai plans ‘moving’ skyscraper
Fiona Bruce of BBC presents the definitive profile of Bill Gates as he prepares to step down next week from full-time involvement with Microsoft. (Available to view online for 6 more days and dowloadable to view for 30 days).
Note: BBC iPlayer downloads only works in the UK.
Bill Gates: How a geek changed the world
“Indian inflation has risen to a new 13-year high, hitting shares and weakening the rupee. The wholesale price index rose to 11% in the 12 months to 7 June, up from the previous week’s 8.75%. The inflation rate is now at its highest since 1995.” - BBC
India inflation rate rises to 11%
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Top oil exporter Saudi Arabia said Monday it will soon call for a meeting between oil producers and consumers to discuss what it called the unjustified rise in prices.
Saudis seek meeting on oil prices
“When fully commissioned later this year, the £250m farm set on abandoned state-owned land will be twice the size of any other similar project in the world, covering an area nearly twice the size of London’s Hyde park. It is expected to supply 45MW of electricity each year, enough to power 30,000 homes.” - Guardian
EU [...]
Large UK-owned companies are outstripping their European rivals when it comes to creating wealth, a study has concluded.
UK firms ‘top Europe wealth list’
The Business Innovation Factory Conference website maintains an archive of video recordings of presentations given by industry leaders during past years of the conference on their business practices and ways in which you could excel in running your own business.
Business Innovation Factory (BIF) (in their own words):
“An independent, non-profit organization launched in 2005, the [...]
“Why? Because if you’re willing to take the company up on the offer, you obviously don’t have the sense of commitment they are looking for.”
An intriguing article points out the practice followed by Zappos (an online retailer with >$1 Bil sales), which pays its newly recruited employees $1,000 to leave the job.
Why Zappos Pays [...]
Startups.co.uk presents Startups 100 - the “The ultimate hitlist of the UK’s best new businesses”.
In their own words - “Startups 100 is the definitive countdown to the UK’s most innovative, inspiring and ground-breaking new companies. As our criteria explains we’ve been unashamedly unscientific in our methodology - this is our list of who we think [...]
Watch a 5 minute documentary on Net Neutrality, explaining the past, present and the possible future of the way the Internet functions and is controlled/regulated.
Related post: Internet, as we know, may end soon?
“U.K. consumer confidence fell to the lowest level since at least 2004 (when the survey began) in May as increases in living costs added to gloom about the economy, Nationwide Building Society said.”
“‘Consumers are starting to feel the pinch’, Fionnuala Earley, Nationwide’s chief economist, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. ‘The housing market isn’t [...]
