Category Archives: General news

News.com interviews MSN head Yusuf Mehdi

Stefanie Olsen of News.com interviewed Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President, MSN Information Services & Merchant Platform. We think the sun has not set on even the first day of the search opportunity. In all our research, one out of every two people searching for something do not even get an answer. MSN Messenger is just effectively a couple of simple tweaks away from becoming a social network, because you have all your buddies and your buddies know who their buddies are. This is the ability to actually connect the two, and it’s very, very close….

NY Times: Phishing

Saul Hansell writes about phishing scams in today’s New York Times. Brightmail of San Francisco, which filters e-mail for spam, identified 2.3 billion phishing messages in February, 4 percent of the e-mail it processed, compared with only 1 percent of its messages as recently as September. Phishing got its name a decade ago when America Online charged users by the hour. Teenagers sent e-mail and instant messages pretending to be AOL customer service agents in order to fish, or phish, for account identification and passwords they could use to stay online at someone else’s expense. After AOL switched to a…

NY Times: Concerns Raised Over Consultants to Pension Funds

Mary Williams Walsh wrote a long article in today’s New York Times about the relationship between money managers, plan sponsors, and the consulting firms who represent both. Pension consultants sort money managers into asset classes and build databases using their own criteria to help trustees compare and select managers. Some consultants also sell their databases and tracking software to money managers and even sell advice on how to achieve higher rankings. True. Like an Internet search engine, products must be sorted into asset classes and sub-classes. Callan sells its database and tracking software in the form of PEP. Wilshire has…

Fast Company on blogging

Jena McGreggor discusses corporate weblogs in the April issue of Fast Company. Some of the uses mentioned, such as project status, seem like candidates for a wiki instead of a weblog. The article makes Scoble seem like a marketing arm of Microsoft, in the same class as Macromedia blogs. I would have liked to see mention of Scoble having a Userland weblog and not a MSDN weblog. Robert Scoble may well be one of the most powerful people in Redmond right now. A trusted group of employees started blogs to answer users’ questions, and the blogs have grown into online…

Kisses, the sexy urinal

Bathroom Mania has a new urinal, Kisses, “shaped like a woman’s mouth, dolled up with red lipstick, wide open and ready for business.” Fashion Wire Daily reported on these new additions to the new Virgin Airways Clubhouse in New York’s John F. Kennedy airport….

Pew Internet and American Life Project on Content Creation

Pew Internet and American Life Project’s latest survey covers content creation online. Some interesting findings from a phone survey conducted between March 12 and May 20, 2003. 13% maintain their own Web sites 7% have Web cams running on their computers 2% maintain Weblogs, 11% read weblogs, and about a third of readers have left comments. 10% of bloggers update daily. Power creators, average age of 25, are most likely to be blogging. It is interesting to note what has happened since May 20, 2003 that has most likely increased those numbers. AOL launched its AOL Journals service. TypePad launched….

Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Carb Karma ice cream

Ben & Jerry’s has a new ice cream flavor for everyone caught up in the Atkins craze: Chocolate Carb Karma Ice Cream. It uses Sucralose (Splenda® Brand) instead of liquid sugar, more water than milk, and adds polydextrose, sorbitol, glycerine, carob Bean Gum, acesulfame to its ingredients list. Sounds very scientific and not the natural Vermont’s Finest I am used to….

Selling phone numbers on eBay

With number portability in full effect, eBay has some listings for phone numbers. Would you like to own 212-867-5309? I have thought about wanting this number (in the 415 area code), but you would get so many crap calls it might not be worth it. I would rather have 362-4368 from AC/DC’s Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap than a Tommy Tutone song….