Despite Mr. Ballmer’s theatrics, iPhone users are in plain sight at Microsoft. At the sprawling campus here in a Seattle suburb, workers peck away on their iPhone touch-screens in conference rooms, cafeterias and lobbies. Among the top Microsoft executives who use the iPhone is J Allard, who helped create the Xbox game console and is chief experience officer for the entertainment and devices division.
Nearly 10,000 iPhone users were accessing the Microsoft employee email system last year, say two people who heard the estimates from senior Microsoft executives. That figure equals about 10% of the company’s global work force.
Google gains on Yahoo in race to win big display ad money:
Google is championing a new stock market-like system for buying display ads. Using its exchange, ad buyers and sellers are matched to ad spaces in a real-time auction. Ad buyers calculate how much they are willing to pay for a particular ad position on the fly, based on how likely the ad is to be seen by the types of viewers they are targeting.
Google released its new technology, called the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, in September. Yahoo has run its own exchange, called Right Media, for years, but has only recently begun to roll out real-time bidding.
I’m sure Google could develop a good security system that wouldn’t require us to take off our shoes:
Another point of failure, acknowledged last week by the White House, was that a misspelling of Abdulmutallab’s name at the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria initially made the State Department believe he did not have a U.S. visa and therefore was less of an immediate concern.
“A system shouldn’t get stymied by a single misspelling,” Holt said. “If you mistype something in Google, Google comes back and says maybe you want to look at this other spelling.”
Several new companies, like the Beverly Hills-based Ad.ly, are facilitating the relationship between brands eager to jump on the social-networking bandwagon. “The beauty of Twitter is that everyone is an influencer in their own right,” said Sean Rad, Ad.ly’s CEO.
“Everyone is a content creator and holds a level of influence within their following.” He explains that the company is designing a “pricing algorithm” that assesses the value of someone’s audience depending on how many followers they have and how many of those people are actually listening, among other variables. Other reality stars, like Kim Kardashian’s sister Khloe, Kendra Wilkinson, and Lauren Conrad, can command anywhere from $5,000-$10,000 per tweet. Even a fake Twitter account for Twilight god Rob Pattinson can command anywhere from $1,000-$5,000 per tweet.
Like many newbies on Twitter, I vastly overestimated the importance of broadcasting on Twitter and after a while, I realized that I was not Moses and neither Twitter nor its users were wondering what I thought. Nearly a year in, I’ve come to understand that the real value of the service is listening to a wired collective voice.
Not that long ago, I was at a conference at Yale and looked at the sea of open laptops in the seats in front of me. So why wasn’t my laptop open? Because I follow people on Twitter who serve as my Web-crawling proxies, each of them tweeting links that I could examine and read on a Blackberry. Regardless of where I am, I surf far less than I used to.
At first, Twitter can be overwhelming, but think of it as a river of data rushing past that I dip a cup into every once in a while. Much of what I need to know is in that cup: if it looks like Apple is going to demo its new tablet, or Amazon sold more Kindles than actual books at Christmas, or the final vote in the Senate gets locked in on health care, I almost always learn about it first on Twitter.
Scott Pelley visits Kenya, the site of the great wildebeest migration, and looks at the threats to this natural spectacle comprised of over a million animals.
But the overwhelming search leader, Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), also managed to grab more market share.
Neilsen said searches using MSN, Windows Live and Bing grew from 9 percent of the market in July to 10.7 percent in August, an increase of about 22 percent for Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT). Google grew nearly 3 percent to 64.6 percent.
No. 3 Yahoo Inc.’s (NASDAQ:YHOO) market share dropped about 4 percent to 16 percent.
When asked about the recession, Jackson added: “A Recession is predominantly for the middle class. Where I come from the majority of people have always lived in a recession.”
