Niall Kennedy's weblog, newest first. Page 45 of 72.
Dave Matthews Band will play a free concert at the Polo Fields in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park on September 12. “The concert will benefit Bay Area community charities addressing issues of homelessness among single adults, youth and families, pediatric AIDS and other terminal childhood maladies, Bay Area park improvement and music education resources.”…
Charles Fishman writes about Whole Foods in the July 2004 issue of Fast Company. The management insights are very interesting. Every new hire has to win a two-thirds yes vote from their team before being permitted to join the staff permanently. (via Jason Kottke) Every four weeks, individual work teams (there are roughly 10 per store) are assessed for productivity, and profit sharing is awarded in every other paycheck….
In an interview with the Guardian, Ashley Highfield of the BBC mentions their new push into search as alternative to U.S. based companies such as Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. “[A]s the market came to be dominated by US sites – the most popular of which is Google – there was value in investing licence fee payers’ money in a UK-centric search engine.” The BBC’s current search offering uses Inktomi but optimizes results for a UK audience….
aDesigner is a disability simulator that helps Web designers “test the accessibility and usability of Web pages for low-vision and blind people.” Only available on Windows 2000 and Windows XP….
Jason Cook wrote a optimization guide for Atom and RSS and it is now available on Webmonkey. GZip compress, use conditional gets, and validate your feeds. A good use of statistics to drive the point home….
Wired News: ” Los Alamos National Laboratory director Pete Nanos shut down the country’s leading nuclear weapons lab on Friday, after a set of classified computer disks disappeared and a student was hit in the eye with a powerful laser beam — all in the space of a week.”…
The July 2004 issue of McKinsey Quarterly does a good job breaking down what makes sports successful and what hinders large scale success. Tekla V. Back, Philippe Blatter, and Jacques R. Bughin authored “Playing to win in the business of sports” and focused on tennis and golf as two case studies. Some interesting facts:The 2002 FIFA World Cup accounted for 8% of global television-rights revenues in 2002 (about the same as the NBA and NASCAR combined).In the United States the average golf or tennis TV viewer has an income of more than $100,000 a year.Professional tennis is fragmented. The International…
News.com reports Microsoft Live Communications Server 2005 will allow corporate users of AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger to communicate. Microsoft will pay AOL and Yahoo a royalty for connecting to Live Communications Server….
Major League Soccer announced Salt Lake City as the site of the league’s newest expansion team. The team will be owned and operated by Dave Checketts’ Sports Capital Partners. The team will play at the University of Utah’s Rice-Eccles stadium for its first two seasons. Rice-Eccles stadium is the home of the United Soccer League’s Utah Blitzz and was the site of the 2002 Winter Olympic opening and closing ceremonies. The playing field is synthetic Field Turf, not real grass….
Kodak has new 35mm and Advantix film named Plus Digital Film. Take your 35mm camera, pop in the 35mm and I am sure most consumers will think they have just upgraded to digital photography. What is digital about this product? If you process your photographs using Kodak’s Perfect Touch processing service they will return your prints with a free CD. In case you regularly forget to check the box on the envelope indicating you would like a scan of your photographs on CD, your film’s packaging lets the photo lab know you would really like a CD with your…
John Battelle interviewed Tony Scott, CTO of GM, in the July 2004 issue of Business 2.0. When you go to a gas station now, you can stick the nozzle into the gas tank and it works. But in the early days of the auto industry, there were 2,000 car companies, nothing was standardized, and demand far exceeded supply. In that early era, you could do whatever you wanted. The tech industry has by and large been in that same mode. But that’s now changing. Today in the typical car, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a GM or a Honda (HMC),…
John Gruber of Daring Fireball takes a closer look at Spotlight and Dominic Giampaolo’s modifications to HFS+ which enable the rich desktop search. Some interesting issues. [T]he new Tiger version of Mail stores each message as a separate file that allows Spotlight to effectively return individual mail messages as search results. No other major mail client uses a one-message-per-file storage format. Importers are fired on every file the moment it is created, saved, changed, or moved, including when files are made available through a newly mounted drive….
Google filed a S1/A with the SEC this morning. Among the changes are a list of subsidiaries (exhibit 21.01). Applied Semantics, Kaltix, Neotonic, and Orkut are listed as subsidiaries….
The Roomba Discovery is the second version of iRobot’s robotic vacuum cleaner. Twice as powerful, quicker charge time, self-charging home base, intense cleaning mode, and larger dust bin are just some of the new features. $250 from the iRobot Store. There is also a special page for current Roomba owners….
Procter & Gamble has partnered with Atlantic Records to create a Cover Girl music label. CG Vibesplans to promote itself on social networking site Tickle.com. In need of a targeted sell, a consumer staples company decides to use the online world to target women and help sell more makeup….
If your choice of ketchup makes you feel like a Democrat buy some patriotic W Ketchup today. Dedicated to Ronald Reagan. Made from the finest California tomatoes using ketchup techniques passed down through American generations. Made in Ohio. “You don’t support Democrats. Why should your ketchup?”…
David Pogue of The New York Times looks at the new search offerings from MSN and compares the experience and the result to Google and Yahoo. “MSN Search couldn’t look more like Google if you photocopied it.”…
Technorati broke past the 3 million weblog mark last night. “On an average weekday, we’re seeing over 15,000 new weblogs created per day. That means that a new weblog is created somewhere in the world every 5.8 seconds.” Technorati pulls new weblogs from sources like weblogs.com and blo.gs. You could of course ping Technorati directly, but I would like to see a more stable what’s new service with the traffic and hosting burdens shouldered by the industry….
Bloglines revealed a new user interface last night, as well as a new feature for adding an item to your “clippings” and posting to a blog. The clipping service uses the link and the title element….
BBC News: “Pickberry in Sonoma County is using a wireless net to gather data from sensors in its fields that monitor key conditions such as temperature, humidity and soil moisture.”…
Whitney Matheson created a list of 10 best and 5 worst album covers of the summer for USA Today. (via Jason Kottke) I am so disappointed when I buy a CD with bad liner notes or none at all. Keep the good stuff coming and I will place the work on a shelf in addition to my hard drive. Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy was an early work to buck the trend of plastic conformity….
Google updated their Gmail program policies as of June 28, 2004. Users may not “sell, trade, resell or otherwise exploit for any unauthorized commercial purpose or transfer any Gmail account.”…
Daniel Gross writes about the capitalism of soccer and the protectionism of American sports in Slate.. “American sports are virtually all socialistic while the European soccer leagues more closely resemble the entrepreneurial capitalism we Americans fetishize.”…
Novell released version 1.0 of Mono today. Mono is an open source implementation of the .NET framework for use on Linux, Unix, MacOS X and Windows system. Release notes….
BBC News reports on a new soccer jersey developed by David Evans at Northumbria University. Silicon strips at the top of a player’s back monitor sweat loss. A heart monitor keeps track of the player’s vitals. A vibrating patch on the jersey’s arm alerts the player to come to the sideline for some attention….