Niall Kennedy's weblog, newest first. Page 17 of 72.
Disney just announced the acquisition of Pixar for about $7.4 billion. 2.3 Disney shares will be exchanged for every Pixar share, including the shares of Pixar’s largest shareholder, Steve Jobs, who owns 50.6% of all outstanding shares. Jobs joins the Disney board of directors as part of the deal which is expected to close this summer. Tags: disneypixarstevejobs…
UPN and The WB will launch a new network named CW this fall and shut down their existing channels. No word on how the change affects airing of Simpsons reruns. Tags: cwthesimpsonsthewbupn…
Yahoo! Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker recently told Bloomberg News Yahoo! does not intend to gain market share in the search space. “It’s not our goal to be #1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share.” (via Steve Rubel) Decker says Yahoo! will instead improve advertising on its search results pages to bring in more revenue. The comment may have been made on Decker’s appearance on Bloomberg Morning Call last week, but I have not been able to find the video. Yahoo!’s stock price is up about 2% this morning after a 20% slide…
This post is part 3 of a series about the early days of shopping comparison site PriceGrabber.com. You may want to read part 1 and part 2 before continuing. We’ve all seen the overconfident hitter come to the plate, take three home run swings, and look back at the catchers mitt every time he fails to connect. Given a small team with limited resources I prefer the BIlly Beane approach of playing small ball to bring in the wins. Landing small business development deals in succession can establish a small player and bring in the revenue needed to swing for…
On this week’s episode of Om and Niall PodSessions Om and I discuss changes in the search industry over the past week and their implications for future business development around the world. This week’s session is titled search around the world as we cover the changing landscape in the United States, Europe, and Asia in about 20 minutes. The DOJ paid Google a visit this week after the company refused to hand over search logs and information for its hundreds of millions of users. The long list of requested data made online users realize just how much personal information is…
A group of crackers named Bantown claims to have hijacked 46% of LiveJournal’s active accounts, over 900,000 total, via a cross-site scripting attack according to Brian Krebs of The Washington Post. The group was able to steal the cookies of LiveJournal users clicking on links created by the group on their hundreds of automated journal accounts. LiveJournal altered their URL structure last night to allow each user to have their own private cookie domain. The Bantown group continues looking for sites to BBQ, or swap user profiles for something a bit more sexual, often involving farm animals. Some of…
The latest episode of OnPodSessions, When to sell out, is now available for download. This week Om and I talk about large companies acquiring startups, what they are looking for, and how various startups position themselves. The selling out podcast is 23 minutes long and a 10.6 MB download. Last week I read a blog post and PowerPoint presentation by Joel Toledano of Yahoo! Search’s business development team. The presentation and blog post was a follow-up to an entrepreneurial event organized by CalTech and MIT. I felt like the presentation suggested small companies need approach Yahoo! about being acquired and…
I just noticed MSN’s Road to the World Cup site in the UK. Soccer stars such as Michael Owen, Edgar Davids, and Gianluigi Buffon are now representing their national soccer teams with individual blogs. It looks like the players are just well-known front-men who contribute quotes to a team staff member each day. I wanted to have player or team blogs for the San Jose Clash and Los Angeles Galaxy six years ago but the tools were nowhere as advanced as they are now. Many more teams now have access to a variety of software for fan marketing. The new…
Yesterday afternoon I collaborated with Caterina Fake, Chris Ratcliff, and Josh Kinberg to create WhuffieTracker. WhuffieTracker is an Web application that tracks your ego and citations from a variety of online sources. Our team’s idea was to combine all of the ways someone might be talking about you online, regardless of the discovery or publishing source, into one package you install on your own server to track your whuffie over time. The collaboration was part of a hackfest called Mash Pit. WhuffieTracker prefers to consume information using RSS feeds corresponding to activity around a certain URL or, in a…
SD Forum is hosting a half-day session all about Python on Wednesday, January 25 from 9 a.m. until 1 p.m. in Santa Clara. For just $25 you can spend your morning learning about Python from Guido van Rossum, Greg Stein, Bram Cohen, Alex Martelli, and active startups using Python. $25 for all that and $10 less if you are already a SD Forum member. Tags: sdforum, python…
This post is part 2 of a series about the early days of shopping comparison site PriceGrabber.com. You may want to read part 1 before continuing. PriceGrabber was created in 1999, at the height of the Internet boom, with only about $1.5 million in seed money. The company was able to raise a sizable amount of capital using the tools it had created for the general Internet marketplace of expert users and enthusiasts. By tracking exceptional deals from merchant crawls performed multiple times a day PriceGrabber was able to turn bubble-worthy goofs of other companies into seed money for a…
Microsoft getting ready to launch new online classifieds system and social networking site called Windows Live Expo. Windows Live Expo allows users to post ads for free in a variety of categories including items for sale, personal ads, jobs, and events. Other teams within the Windows Live group have added functionality on top of the online service including placing listings with one click to a MSN Spaces blog or limiting the visibility of your listings to a social network defined by your Messenger friends list. A team within Microsoft has been working on the product since April 2005 and…
Toni Schneider has left his position at Yahoo! to become CEO of Automattic, the corporate side of WordPress. Toni was previously leading Yahoo!’s API team and his move to Automattic comes less than a month about six months after his golden handcuffs came off from the Oddpost acquisition of June 2004. Om Malik broke the story of Tony’s departure this evening on his blog….
Apple iLife 06 feeds not valid RSS
If you are a Mac developer and received a developer transition kit from Apple you can now exchange the old system for a new Intel-based iMac. Apple will send out the 17″ iMac first, allowing you to transition all your work off the old box, and Apple will even pick up all shipping costs. Sweet deal. The developer transition kit gives you a $1300 iMac for about $1000. Tags: imac…
The latest episode of Om and Niall PodSessions is now available for your listening pleasure. This week Om and I talk about the latest consumer electronics announcements from CES over the last week and some of the emerging trends for new gadgets in the living room. I liked the Intel Core Duo announcement and its energy-efficient design. New laptops utilizing the technology have over 11 hours of battery life! I was also impressed by XM Radio’s new XM Passport hardware, a tiny 1.5″ square satellite radio tuner that can be inserted into multiple devices similar to a SIM card. Om…
Yahoo! is not the default search engine for Firefox browser in the United States but they have specially coded their page to help users change their preference. When you first visit Yahoo.com a small box appears to help you switch from Google search to Yahoo! (as pictured above). Pretty smart! I’m surprised the other search engines bundled with Firefox such as Amazon and eBay have not done the same thing for their power users even if they cannot be a replacement for all things search. Tags: firefox…
Successful companies can be formed out of the failure of a dream and a side project created for friends and family growing into much more. This is the story of the birth of PriceGrabber.com, a shopping comparison search company that grew from a side project into a half-billion dollar sale in about five years. Grabware was envisioned as a software distribution company providing on-demand distribution of software through store kiosks. A buyer would approach the terminal, choose a few shareware titles or full versions of the software, and an in-store fulfillment service would burn a CD and print a user…
The United States Patent and Trademark Office rejected a trademark application last September for the term “podcast.” Attached to the rejection letter is a complete printout of the podcasting entry on Wikipedia, citing the previous history of the term and its use describing a characteristic or feature of a product. A few searches in the trademark database found entries for “podcast ready” audio players and a rejected application for vidcast, both citing blog entries. The accuracy of the podcast entry on Wikipedia has been under dispute and depending when the trademark office took a look at the entry the examining…
Microsoft unveiled some new Windows Live Messenger features during Bill Gates’ keynote tonight at CES. My favorite new feature is Messenger activities prompted by a chat bot. Activities Microsoft showed off a chat bot that allowed a user to ask questions about TV programming. One possible response from the bot is a link to a list of shows playing that night, The link opens up directly inside the chat window in an activities pane, allowing the user to browse the content and ask the bot a few more questions. The bot is learning about the individual user and his…
Yahoo! Podcasts now supports feeds with video content, or vidcasts. You can add a video series to your personal subscriptions, tag a vidcast, as well as rate and review vidcasts. Videos can be played inside your browser window using either Windows Media 9, RealPlayer 10, or QuickTime 7 players configured through a Yahoo! cookie. Eric Rice’s videoblog is one example listing. Even though the site now supports video all of the text and images on the site seemed focused on audio content. Audio content from the Yahoo! Podcast directory could be integrated with Yahoo! Music and hopefully vidcasts will make…
Pacific Digital is also showing off a WiFi picture frame at CES in Las Vegas. The new MemoryFrame products will connect to Windows Vista PCs using Windows Media Connect, Windows Connect Now, and Vista’s integrated RSS features. The picture frame can connect to other PCs on a home network using WiFi and display shared content. I could not find any pricing information but current 10.4″ wireless picture frames from Pacific Digital cost about $400. Tags: photos, windowsvista, windows…
eStarling just released a picture frame with built-in WiFi that can receive photographs from any RSS feed or POP e-mail account. You configure the device once using a USB connection and it will automatically update itself over a 802.11b wireless network (even with WEP encryption). Pictures formatted in JPEG or bitmap format are displayed on a 5.6″ LCD. You could subscribe to a specific tag on Flickr or send e-mails from your cell phone to a special e-mail address such as a free Gmail account. I would love to give one of these to my mom and have it…
Last weekend I decided to break free of the standard boring job résumé or CV and express my job history in the Atom syndication format complete with audio enclosures. Syndication geeks may appreciate the implementation details. I used the published and updated dates to represent my start and end dates. My first day on the job seems like a good match for the published element’s intended use as the “time of the initial creation or first availability” and my last day on the job is the last time the entry was “modified in a significant way” or updated. Since…
Blog zeitgeist tool TailRank is opening up its parsed feed update stream to third-party developers through a new feed delta API. Developers can request the latest 100 posts discovered and parsed by TailRank’s spiders. The API is a good way to capture a snapshot of the most active and highly linked blogs written in English at any one time. Past research and development projects have seeded their data sets from Weblogs.com and perhaps TailRank can be a new source of information for newcomers to analyze the blogosphere in different ways. API keys will be available at no cost for non-profits…