AOL Offices on Swine Flu Alert Daily Intel reports that several AOL offices - including the downtown NYC office - are on alert for swine flu after an employee was diagnosed with a suspected case.
We all got a memo yesterday saying someone in the downtown NYC office has a suspected case of swine flu," an AOL insider tells us. "They're disinfecting his desk and all the common areas, employees are advised to take precautions, etc." The Infected also apparently visited Boston and Baltimore recently, and so those offices are on high alert as well.
Swine flu will continue to impact businesses as the pandemic grows. Many businesses will have to deal with employee shortages. Some employees will need to be hospitalized and some will also die. Most of the people dying from swine flu are in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s - the brunt of the working population. You can a list of h1n1 swine flu resources here.
Google Trike: Bike Carries Google's 3-D Camera
The Google Trike is going around Britain taking multiple images of national tourist treasures. These images will help Google Britain's famous landmarks on Google's Street View map. The bike carries the same 3-D camera that Street View cars carry. It's good exercise for whoever is riding the Google Trike. A Reuters video is below and Wired's Autotopia has more.
Facebook Reportedly Buying Employees' Shares Venture Beat reports that Facebook has nearly finished raising $150 million. They say part of the money is being used to buy out employees' shares in the company.
Hundreds of the Palo Alto, Calif.'s employees have now toiled at the company for more than two years, and many have worked three to five years. Increasingly, some have become restless, and would like to cash in on the huge value they've created. Most employees were awarded several thousands of shares valued at far less than a dollar each. Now, by selling to those shares investors for a private market value of $10 each, employees can enjoy a nice windfall. According to our sources, the transaction will include the buying out of roughly 15 million common shares - thus equaling around $150 million total value.
Facebook declined comment on the financing.
Silicon Alley Insider has a good summary of the employee stock buy back. It sounds like a good payday for loyal Facebook employees.
Google Outage Reduces Web Traffic by 5% InformationWeekreports that Internet traffic fell by 5% on Thursday morning because of Google's outage.
People did notice and complained loudly. Blog posts proclaimed Google's failure. Twitter jittered with tweets. Lattes languished undrunk on office desks as workers muddled through life without Gmail.
As a consequence of Google's problems, business Web sites that depended on services like Google Analytics took twice as long to load on average and were twice as likely to fail, according to Web infrastructure management company Gomez. And among online retailers, transactions took four times as long as usual to complete.
Google was quick to apologize. Senior VP of operations Urs Hoelzle explained the situation on the Official Google Blog. He said that a routing error had sent some of the company's Web traffic to Asia, causing a bottleneck that affected 14% of Google's users.
An entry here on Gomez says the outage caused a ripple effect that "was magnified when web sites automatically tried to re-establish connections with Google's services, causing further network congestion." Google's post explaining the error can be found here.
Cool Touch Displays From International Display 2009
Here's a look at some cool, cutting edge displays that were shown at the
th International Display 2009 and Touch Panel Japan's 1st International Touch Panel Technology Expo.
Giant Spiders of La Machine Invade Yokohama
Two giant spiders from La Machine crawl through Yohohama's Bayside area in the clip from The Japan Times. Pink Tentacle has some photos of the huge spiders.
Google Launches Similar Images Feature
Google has launched a Google Labs feature called Similar Images. As the name suggests the technology shows you images that are similar to the one you select. It can be useful in helping you focus on specific images when there are two very different items you are looking for that have the same name - like jaguar. It can also be helpful in narrowing down the number of images when there are lots of different images of a celebrity, place or product to comb through. The video below explains more uses of Similar Images.
The Pirate Bay Four Get Jail Sentence
A Swedish court has jailed four defendants in a copyright test case involving The Pirate Bay, one of the biggest file-sharing websites. TorrentFreak says the four defendants will each get 1 year in jail each and fines totaling $3,620,000. One of the defendants is calling the verdict an "epic win" according to PC Magazine.
Jefferson Graham Explains How to Submit Stock Photos
Jefferson Graham from USA Today has an article about online stock websites like iStockPhoto.com. Jefferson Graham says that you have to get approvals if you are going to submit a photograph with a person or a corporate logo. Graham interviewed Nick Monu, a Rhode Island medical student, who makes six figures a year selling stock photos.
Jennifer Lopez Defeats Cybersquatter Reuters reports that actress and singer Jennifer Lopez has won her cybersquatting complaint. Jennifer Lopez argued that a man in Phoenix, Arizona had registered two domains that used her names primarily as a way to make money from pay-per-click advertising. The World Intellectual Property Organiztion (WIPO), a UN agency, ordered the domains transfered to the Jennifer Lopez Foundation, which helps promote better access to healthcare for women and children. Reuters says Jennifer Lopez also registered her name as a trademark in the United States. It sounds like the trademark helped bolster her case against the cybersquatter.
Reuters notes that several other celebrities including Pierce Brosnan, Tom Cruise, Celine Dion, Scarlett Johansson, Nicole Kidman, Madonna and Julia Roberts have booted out cybersquatters through the same dispute method at WIPO.
Intel's Claytronics is Programmable Matter
Dvice reports that experts at Intel and Carnegie Mellon University have create Claytronics, a type of programmable play-doh. Claytronics is technically a programmable matter made up of millions of 200-micrometer-diameter spheres that can be programmed to form shapes and change color. The cool looking technology could have many uses. In the short video below you can see how the technology would be very useful for presentations and design. The project's page is here on Carnegie Mellon's website.
Malware URLs Placed on Fake Parking Tickets
eWeek's Security Watch blog is discussing a novel malware attempt that involved a malware url that was placed on faking parking tickets.
Anyhow, SANS Institute researcher Lenny Zeltser recently uncovered the two-part parking ticket/malware scam, through which someone placed phony tickets on the windshields of a number of vehicles in a parking lot in North Dakota informing their owners that they had somehow violated the regulations and instructing them to go to a Web site to get more details on their fines. Researchers at McAfee also highlighted the scheme.
Of course, upon visiting the site, the advertised URL demands that people download a piece of software to view pictures of their vehicle when it was "in violation," and that program of course instead delivers malware onto their computers.
"Attackers continue to come up with creative ways of tricking potential victims into installing malicious software. Merging physical and virtual worlds via objects that point to Web sites is one way to do this. I imagine we'll be seeing such approaches more often," Zeltser said.
The attack is a unique idea and it meant that people had to be close to their victims. There's an extra level of creepiness with people placing something on a car or possibly sending something via snail mail that would get a person to access a malware website. On the other hand there is probably more risk here for criminals which might discourage then from trying physical or snail mail approaches. Fake parking tickets aren't going to go over very well with the city authorities, so they may be even more likely to try and find the source and make an arrest.
Report Indicates Domain Registrations Are Slowing
The Wall Steet Journal's Digits blog reports that a Verisign report indicates that domain registrations fell 17% in the fourth quarter compared to the 4th quarter fo 2008. There were also slightly less new domains registered in 2008 compared to 2007.
Domain registrar VeriSign's latest report on the state of the industry shows that while more than 10.1 million new Web addresses were registered in the fourth quarter, this was a 17% drop from the year-earlier period.
The report, which drew from data provided by VeriSign, domain-data provider ZookNIC and the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, also showed a yearlong decline: new domain registrations averaged 11.9 million in 2008, compared with 12.2 million in 2007.
It should not be a big suprise that the pace of domain registrations is slowing given the major recession that is occuring.
Microsoft to Cut 5,000 Jobs
Microsoft has announced plans to cut 5,000 jobs over the next 18 months. 1,400 of the layoffs will occur immediately. They are the first major layoffs for the software giant.
The layoffs, 1,400 of which come immediately, appear to be a first for Microsoft, which was founded in 1975, aside from relatively limited staff cuts the software company made after acquiring companies.
The company announced the cuts as it reported an 11 percent drop in second-quarter profit, which fell short of Wall Street's expectations. The company also said it is unable to offer profit and revenue guidance for the rest of the year, because of the market volatility.
Microsoft blamed deteriorating economic conditions worldwide and lower revenues from PC software for the need to cut jobs. The Microsoft layoffs rumors have been discussed on blogs and technology websites for the past few weeks.
The Robot Farmer
A Robot inventor and farmer named Wu Yulu once accidentally burnt down his house and plunged his family into debt when he was trying to build one of his robots. Now Reuters says Wu Yulu has turned things around and his robot inventions are starting to garner him some attention. One of his inventions is a rickshaw-pulling robot that helps him plow and run errands. He also has a robot that climbs walls.
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