Ask.com, the fourth-ranked search engine, has completed its acquisition of Lexico Publishing Group, which owns Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com.
Ask.com, a wholly owned subsidiary of InterActiveCorp, had announced the all-cash deal in mid-May. Financial terms of the deal, which closed Thursday, were not released. Lexico, …
Original post by Natalie Weinstein and software by Elliott Back
The German baby taken from his parents after they put him up for sale on eBay for a euro–apparently as a joke–is back home, according to the Associated Press.
“The child has been returned to his parents,” prosecutor Johannes Kreuzpointer told the AP on Thursday.
The parents had told the …
Original post by Natalie Weinstein and software by Elliott Back
VeriSign, which runs the master database for the .com and .net domains, has replaced its CEO and president, who resigned suddenly earlier this week.
Jim Bidzos
(Credit: VeriSign)
The company said Thursday that William Roper had resigned as of Monday. Roper, who had served as CEO for just over a …
Original post by Natalie Weinstein and software by Elliott Back
Names, addresses, and Social Security numbers of pre-2006 staffers were taken from offices of Colt Express Outsourcing Services. Google has confirmed that personal data of U.S. employees hired prior to 2006 have been stolen in a recent burglary. Records kept at Colt Express Outsourcing Services, an external…
Original post by Gadgets, gizmos, and video games - CNNMoney.com and software by Elliott Back
0 comments | Operational Accounting, Financial Services, Sales Channel, ZDNet Australia, Google Inc., Finance, Privacy & data protection, Social Security, Government, Sales |
With only a weeks to go before the 2008 E3 Media and Business Summit, video game publisher Electronic Arts is giving the press a sneak peek at its new video game lineup, including products resulting from its partnership with Hasbro.
Mr. Potato Head hosts EA’s game Hasbro Family Night
…
Original post by Holly Jackson and software by Elliott Back
(Credit: Apple.com)Are you a .Mac subscriber who’s been using the built-in bookmark syncing app? Come Sunday that service will no longer exist as part of the MobileMe transition, so if you want to do one last sync you’ve got to get it done this weekend.
Shortly after the MobileMe announcement last month Apple sent out an e-mail to current .Mac subscribers detailing this change. Friday, the company extended the transfer deadline to July 6, along with providing a how-to guide to make sure you’ve got everything synced up one last time. You can get full instructions on how to do the sync here.
The July 6 deadline, which is Sunday, leads me to believe that the MobileMe changeover may be dropping a day or two early from the expected July 11 release date.
Original post by Josh Lowensohn and software by Elliott Back
If you’re at work and your co-workers won’t stop chatting, there are two options: either tell them to go talk elsewhere or get a good pair of earplugs and/or headphones. If you’ve gone for the latter and can’t seem to get over the concentration hump of focusing with music blaring, there’s SimplyNoise, a white noise generator that runs right in your browser.
I’ve had a white noise loop kicking around on my iPod for years, and it doubles as a great way to get in the zone for napping. In SimplyNoise’s case, you can dial in how much noise you want with a simple volume slider that’s independent of your system volume. This works great in theory, but managed to crash my browser nearly every time I messed around with the slider, so your mileage may vary.
If you’re looking to get a similar white noise experience on your computer, there’s also a standalone player over on Download.com.
[via Delicious]
You can adjust the white noise slider from 1-100 percent. The higher you go, the louder it gets, so be careful.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Original post by Josh Lowensohn and software by Elliott Back
A day before the United States celebrates its independence, we continue to question our individual freedoms online. In Thursday’s Daily Debrief, CNET News.com Editor in Chief Dan Farber and I discuss a federal judge’s recent ruling in the ongoing Google-Viacom lawsuit that orders Google to turn over …
Original post by Kara Tsuboi and software by Elliott Back
Look where I've gone at home
(Credit: FlightMemory.com)
If you’re a serious airline geek like me, you’ve saved every airline boarding pass you’ve ever used. No, it doesn’t make sense but you do it anyway. But until recently, my boarding passes sat in a box with really no practical use except for the occasional bookmark. That was until I learned about a Web site that lets you put your flight history to very good use.
FlightMemory.com is a fantastic and free Web site that allows you to log your commercial flights into a database that will then give you oodles of cool statistics. You can see how long you’ve spent in the air, how many miles/kilometers you’ve flown, your total number of flights, your shortest and longest flights, a map of all your routes and your top airlines, airports, routes and aircraft types. FlightMemory even will tell you how how many times you’ve circles the Earth, and how many times you’ve flown to the moon and the sun. Logging in all those flights does take a lot of time, but the results are worth it once you add everything in. Though my boarding passes only dated back to 1996, I was able to recall most of prior flights from memory (geek alert!). For many flights I couldn’t recall whether I had a window, middle or aisle seat, but the site will track that as well.
And abroad
(Credit: FlightMemory.com)
According to my profile I’ve circumnavigated the Earth 16.47 times and I’ve flown to the moon 1.7 times. I’ve barely made it to the Sun but I doubt I
I’ll fly 93 million miles in my whole life. My total flying distance is 410,056 miles, which translates to 39.01 days in the air. Yet that’s nothing when compared to my friend who is a flight attendant with United Airlines. He’s flown 3.56 million miles (that’s 14.92 trips to the moon) and has spent 10.93 months aloft. And he still has flights to record.
FlightMemory also lets you purchase a poster with a world map of all your routes. I want to make it to South America before buying mine, but I’m saving space on my wall now.
Original post by Kent German and software by Elliott Back
Say you just captured an amazing video of your cat doing something funny. It’s time to upload it to YouTube right? Why stop there? HeySpread, a service from the folks at Particles was just updated Thursday morning to take the video you just captured and push it out to nearly 20 different video hosts at once.
Better yet, it keeps track of the views once they’re there. You can view each video with daily-stats analytics, view breakdowns, and comparison charts to see how the same video is doing on different services. It’ll also let you compare it with other videos (even if they’re not yours).
In case you’re already entrenched in YouTube, a built-in tool called YouClone will let you copy all your videos off YouTube and post them to other services without having to track down the original. All you need is your YouTube password and it will do the rest.
The service is not free, and uses a credit system that charges one to three 5 cent credits per video uploaded, transferred, watermarked, and tracked. If you’re a videographer looking to get a video out there it’s not a bad deal when you think about how much your time is worth.
If you’re a cheapskate like me, there’s also a free video stat-tracking service called TubeMogul that will do the tracking without the small fee. As for uploading to the rest of the services, though, you’re on your own.
Hey!Spread - Video Distributing Web Service from Bruno Celeste on Vimeo.
Original post by Josh Lowensohn and software by Elliott Back
This morning video chat tool Tokbox has quietly slipped in a new feature called public feed which lets anyone with a Web cam leave a message for others on the service to reply to. Up until now the service has been mainly a P2P chat service between people who know one another, but this new feature is turning it into a social network for budding Web cam enthusiasts.
Tokbox's new public feed lets you post out a message to the entire community there.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Seesmic, another video start-up, has had this as its main feature up until recently where it’s gone towards blog owners to get them to use its video recording and threading for video comments.
One thing that seperates this new feature from Seesmic’s is that your replies don’t show up underneath other people’s videos. You can reply to anyone’s public video directly, and even call that person but others won’t see your response, making the conversation a little one-sided. Still, it’s a nice addition to viewing what other people are up to without instigating a live chat with them, and I can see publicized replies being added later on down the line.
The feature goes hand-in-hand with another people-finding tool that was recently introduced. If you’re friends with another Tokbox user you two share similar friends, it’ll pull up a listing of “people you may know” the same way Facebook does.
The service also recently introduced AIM and MSN integration, so you’ll be able to pull in your buddy list from either of those services and chat with your buddies on the service’s Webtop. Facebook chat users have also not been left out in the dark, as the company quietly released a Firefox plugin yesterday that lets you add video chat to Facebook’s chat service. Once installed you get a new option in FB chat to send someone a video chat request which will send them a link to a special Tokbox room where both of you can talk without leaving the page.
Original post by Josh Lowensohn and software by Elliott Back
A fresh look at Yahoo’s search results Thursday by Hitwise Intelligence raises the question of whether Yahoo could survive just fine without its search engine.
Such a question is rather important to Yahoo investors, given the Internet search pioneer has given a cold shoulder to Microsoft, which has previously …
Original post by Dawn Kawamoto and software by Elliott Back
A fresh look at Yahoo’s search results Thursday by Hitwise Intelligence raises the question of whether Yahoo could survive just fine without its search engine.
Such a question is rather important to Yahoo investors, given the Internet search pioneer has given a cold shoulder to Microsoft, which has previously …
Original post by Dawn Kawamoto and software by Elliott Back
Swurl is a service for people who want to create a blog made from their activity on various social services. Like FriendFeed, SocialThing, or any other aggregator you start building your Swurl blog by plugging in your user names on each service. There are currently 19 to choose from, with all the usual suspects like Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Amazon and Yelp.
What’s nice is that Swurl will retroactively seek out all your old posts and filter them in. Each post is set up by your day of activity, so if you didn’t add anything to any of these services there simply won’t be a post. You can also view your entire stream of activity in a large calendar, called a “timeline” that can be perused by year (check out mine here).
Besides aggregating your news feed, Swurl has a social component that lets you do the same with others. You can follow other users just like you would with Twitter or Tumblr, and their streams of information will show up in chronological order in the friends tab. You’re also able to see their friends list, and dig into their timelines to view their past activity.
There’s already an active community of Swurlers using the service. Advanced users should also not shy away from what seems like a very simple tool; you can drop in custom CSS, tweak the colors, and look and feel of your page down to a very high degree.
One thing missing is a way to create entirely new posts through Swurl, so it’s definitely not attempting to take over standard blogging platforms. FriendFeed, which essentially does the same thing as Swurl, will aggregate your business from all these networks and also manages to add its own publishing tool to boot. There is no such system on Swurl at the moment, but there should be.
[via Lifehacker]
Swurl turns your social activity stream into both a blog and this handy timeline. Here you can see shared pictures on Twitter, links on Delicious, and Twitter tweets–all on the same page.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Original post by Josh Lowensohn and software by Elliott Back
Viacom is getting its hands on some of YouTube’s sensitive user data as a result of the copyright infringement lawsuit the conglomerate filed a year ago.
The two companies are in the discovery part of the case and must make certain information available to each other. On Wednesday, a …
Original post by Greg Sandoval and software by Elliott Back
Google is making its Google Talk instant-messaging application available for Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch.
One of Google’s software engineers posted the news in a blog on Wednesday.
(Credit: Google)“In addition to sending your friends Gmail messages from your iPhone, you can now chat with them while you’re on the move, too!” Adam Connors, of Google’s mobile team said in the blog.
The application doesn’t require any software to be installed or downloaded. Instead it works within the phone’s browser, so users can simply go to the site www.google.com/talk, sign in, and start chatting.
Connors pointed out that there are a few differences when using Google Talk on the iPhone versus a computer. For one, to receive messages, the application needs to be open on the Safari phone browser. When users navigate away from the Google Talk window in the browser, their status is set to “unavailable.”
That said Google has tried to keep the experience close to what users experience on their desktop or laptop computers. They can select contacts from a quicklist, search contacts, and manage conversations.
With half the world’s population soon owning a cell phone, the opportunity to reach more people on the Web via a mobile device is huge. Google recognizes this as a big advertising opportunity. As a result, the company has launched several initiatives to make sure it gets a piece of the action.
It’s already adapted its Web search, mapping service, and advertising tools to work on cell phones. And it even bid in a U.S. auction of wireless spectrum to help ensure rules requiring open access on those networks were achieved. The company has even gone so far as to develop its own mobile operating system, known as Android, to ensure that its applications and services are tightly integrated into mobile devices.
Original post by Marguerite Reardon and software by Elliott Back
Google is making its Google Talk instant messaging application available for Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch.
One of Google’s software engineers posted the news in a blog on Wednesday.
(Credit: Google)“In addition to sending your friends Gmail messages from your iPhone, you can now chat with them while you’re on the move, too!” Adam Connors, of Google’s mobile team said in the blog.
The application doesn’t require any software to be installed or downloaded. Instead it works within the phone’s browsers, so users can simply go to the site www.google.com/talk, sign in and start chatting.
Connors pointed out that there are a few differences to using Google Talk on the iPhone versus a computer. For one, to receive messages, the application needs to be open on the Safari phone browser. When users navigate away from the Google Talk window in the browser, their status is set to “unavailable.”
That said Google has tried to keep the experience close to what users experience on their desktop or laptop computers. They can select contacts from a quicklist, search contacts, and manage conversations.
With half the world’s population soon owning a cell phone, the opportunity to reach more people on the Web via a mobile device is huge. Google recognizes this as a huge advertising opportunity. As a result, the company has launched several different initiatives to make sure it gets a piece of the action.
It’s already adapted its Web search, mapping service and advertising tools to work on cell phones. And it even bid in a U.S. auction of wireless spectrum to help ensure rules requiring open access on those networks was achieved. The company has even gone so far as to develop its own mobile operating system, known as Android, to ensure that its applications and services are tightly integrated into mobile devices.
Original post by Marguerite Reardon and software by Elliott Back
Got dial-up and don’t want to give it up? You’re not alone.
An estimated 10 percent of Americans are surfing the net via dial-up connections, according to a report released Wednesday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
And a lot of those people apparently see no …
Original post by Dawn Kawamoto and software by Elliott Back
After navigating some rough seas, Sony’s Electronics division has been starting to right the ship.
Over the past year, the company has been forced to rethink its product lineup, and catch up to competitors in some cases, but now the Japanese electronics giant’s U.S. division is looking …
Original post by Erica Ogg and software by Elliott Back
SAN JOSE, Calif.–What is Facebook really worth?
One of the burning questions in technology the past year, also played a major role in the dispute between social networks ConnectU and Facebook, according to documents obtained by CNET News.com.
Some interesting details about Facebook’s valuation were revealed in
…
Original post by Greg Sandoval and software by Elliott Back
