Yahoo, eBay join forces in partnership
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060525/ap_on_hi_te/yahoo_ebay
Internet powerhouses Yahoo Inc. and eBay Inc. are joining forces in an alliance that further defines the battle lines in an online showdown with rivals Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and AOL.
Under their partnership, Yahoo will become the exclusive provider of graphical advertising throughout eBay's Web site and will provide some search-generated ads, as well. Yahoo's brand and search engine will also be blended into an eBay toolbar that has been downloaded by 4 million users so far.
Ebay's PayPal service will become the preferred payment provider for purchases made on Yahoo's site, which provides a wide array of shopping, auctions and subscription services.
EBay's Skype Internet telephone service will be used to explore building another marketing vehicle that would allow advertisers to connect with prospective customers on the phone instead of through their Web sites. If the experiment works, it would mark Yahoo's entrance into "click-to-call" advertising, something that AOL already offers and a service that Google has been exploring, too.
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2006/tc20060327_215976.htm
The owners of the privately held social-networking site hope to fetch as much as $2 billion. And media giants like Viacom may make a good match.
A Facebook deal would help Viacom founder and Executive Chairman Sumner Redstone fend off a growing challenge from News Corp. The media conglomerate run by Rupert Murdoch has poured enormous resources into the Internet during the last year. It acquired social-networking pioneer MySpace.com last year for $580 million.
The World’s Most Innovative Companies
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_17/b3981401.htm
Today, innovation is about much more than new products. It is about reinventing business processes and building entirely new markets that meet untapped customer needs. Most important, as the Internet and globalization widen the pool of new ideas, it's about selecting and executing the right ideas and bringing them to market in record time.
Chess in Dallas
Chess in Dallas is not comparable to chess in Los Angeles in terms of strong tournaments and high rated players. Even though UT Dallas has the best US college chess team with a few GMs/IMs, there are not that many tournaments in Dallas where these players participate. Still they have an active chess club (Dallas Chess Club) that runs several tournaments per month.
My first tournament was not that competitive, but I cannot complain. With some luck, I got the first place, some money and some rating points.
The second tournament was not that lucky. After a lousy start and the regular first round loss, I went to win the next three rounds, to reach the final round half a point behind and playing for the first place against a 2200 master. I was close to get it.
This is the position I reached in the final round with Black against the 2200 master. Here I played 33. … Qb4 and after 34.Qxb4 Bxb4 35.Kf1, I accepted the draw (the bishop is still better, but it is hard to find a win), got the second place and a small prize.
Later on, I discovered that I had 33. … Qa1+ taking the a4 pawn, winning the game and taking the first place and prize (I saw the other two checks Qc1+ and Qe1+, but somehow I missed the right check). Bad luck!
USC Hacker
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=187201428
Eric McCarty claims he hacked into the University of Southern California's computer system to warn of its vulnerabilities. The case could be a watershed event in the area of security research.
McCarty hacked into a SQL database that contained the Social Security numbers, birth dates, and other identifying information for more than 275,000 USC applicants dating to 1997.
Real-Time Maps
http://technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=16807&ch=infotech
uses location data to make real-time maps of how people move through space, gives insight into where people like to work and how traffic flows through the city — information that could help architects and city administration design better digital spaces.
Big communication companies want to get ahold of the data because they think they could sell them in the future. This is the model that Google is using in San Francisco. They are giving a free Wi-Fi infrastructure to San Francisco, but they want to be able to develop new business models based on data about how people use the infrastructure.
New Social Networking Technology Packs a Wallop
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=16773&ch=infotech
A San Francisco startup called Wallop, which emerged from stealth mode on April 25, is using technology originally developed at Microsoft's research laboratory in Redmond, WA, to build an online social space that promises to redefine the notion of social networking, by focusing it on conversations and media tidbits, such as songs and photos, rather than on members and their profiles.
"On Friendster and MySpace, collecting more profiles is really the only thing to do, and you define yourself by how many friends you have," says Karl Jacob, Wallop's CEO. "That's not a very good parallel to the real world, where what's important is our special relationships with friends and family, and where we have conversations about stuff." Part of the point of Wallop is to make it easy to share digital versions of that "stuff" — photos, videos, songs, or text musings — with clusters of interested friends.
Blogging Trouble
LA Times Discontinues Reporter's Column
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060430/ap_on_re_us/times_column_reporter
Frey said he did not object to anonymity on the Web but rather to the use of "pseudonyms to pretend to be something or somebody they aren't."
