Posts from ‘February, 2009’

Via the New York Times
By MATTHEW WALD and MIGUEL HELFT
Published: February 9, 2009
AN FRANCISCO — Google will announce its entry Tuesday into the small but growing business of “smart grid,” digital technologies that seek to both keep the electrical system on an even keel and reduce electrical energy consumption.
Google is one of a number [...]

Via Mashable
VoIP company Gizmo5 has introduced a free (we’ll get to that bit later) Skype gateway called OpenSky. It enables any VoIP client, SIP or mobile phone to make calls to Skype users.
The service works like this: you register for free over at my.gizmo5.com and then you can call any Skype user through an alias, [...]

Via Tech Crunch
by Robin Wauters on February 10, 2009
Companies using Twitter for commercial purposes may soon start getting charged for that activity, according to an interview British trade magazine Marketing (part of BrandRepublic) held with co-founder Biz Stone.
This is what Stone reportedly said:
“We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them. [...]

Via ARS Technica
By Ryan Paul | Last updated February 10, 2009 8:20
A group of software vendors has published an open letter to president Obama encouraging the new administration to adopt open source software in the government’s IT infrastructure. The letter says that open [...]

Via Tech Crunch
by Erick Schonfeld on February 5, 2009

With Time Warner reporting earnings yesterday, we now have online advertising numbers for the fourth quarter from the four largest players: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL. Tallying up their online advertising revenues provides a decent proxy for the health of the overall online advertising industry [...]

Via Tech Crunch
by Devin Coldewey on February 5, 2009

This has to be one of the dumbest things I’ve heard in a long time. The UK has spent £4.4 billion ($6.6bn US) on a controversial high-tech National Identity Card scheme for the whole country. The card, intended to be issued to government workers first [...]

Via Media Shift
by Mark Hannah, February 5, 2009
In times of crisis, communications professionals have an important — and increasingly complicated — role to play. We used to be the first to offer public responses to catastrophes, able to develop elucidating messages before much of the news media was on the scene. Nowadays, the type [...]

Via Mashable
February 5, 2009 - 5:19 pm PDT - by Adam Ostrow
Facebook announced this afternoon that it’s joining the OpenID Foundation – an interesting move considering that Facebook Connect, the company’s identity platform for third-party websites, has so far looked like more of a competitor to OpenID than an ally.
In a blog [...]

Via Tech Crunch
by Jeff Widman on February 5, 2009
Last month, I e-mailed my entire family and suggested they setup Google Alerts on their name. When a week later someone created a malicious Facebook group slandering my sister (very uncool), I was reminded of the importance of knowing what people are publicly saying about [...]