There have been persistent rumours about Steve Jobs’ health. This has included false rumours about his demise. When there are health concerns about the CEO of Apple, the stock market reacts. Today, Steve Jobs gave some details about his health:
The financial troubles with newspapers have been well documented. Advertisers are finding more success on the internet. Nevertheless, it is still jolting to see that The Miami Herald is for sale:
National Geographic is a renowned publication. It is not a brand name that is associated with video games. That is about to change:
Fire Eagle is Yahoo’s entry into the geographic location service. It answers the basic question of ‘where are you?’ and the advertisers then proceed to stream relevant information:
“…”These services are all being sold to consumers as only providing real benefit. No one is talking about the fact they are about building and collecting more data ,not just about the content you like but where you go and where you are at the moment.”
Fire Eagle, which has just been opened up to the public, helps manage location information for websites and for any device that has internet access.”
link: Privacy worry over location data
The service raises obvious privacy and security issues. Yahoo attempts to be reassuring that it is possible to opt-out at any time. Further, Yahoo points to its privacy policy as an indication that it is aware of some of the potential pitfall of this service. Nevertheless, Yahoo does not go far enough in its explanation.
When Yahoo markets this user information, then it passes on the responsibility to safeguard this information to its business partner. The data then are no longer under Yahoo’s direct purview. The attention to privacy, and resultant security concerns, differ from company to company. Yahoo can be seen as a distribution cog. Yahoo’s fallback position may very well be that Yahoo is not responsible for business policies of other firms.
It is incumbent upon Yahoo to let its users know that, in this business model, their control of the data may be temporary and cursory.
Catherine Forsythe
Microsoft has put an abrupt end to its book digitizing project. Next week, the sites will be taken down:
“…”Today we informed our partners that we are ending the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects and that both sites will be taken down next week,” wrote Satya Nadella, a senior vice president at Microsoft, in a matter-of-fact blog post.”
link: Microsoft Gives Up on Book Search
It seems that Microsoft is focused solely on money-making efforts. Projects like indexing all the world’s information remains Google’s initiative. In the long run, that business model might come back to haunt Microsoft.
Catherine Forsythe
Director of Operations
FlyingHamster: http://flyinghamster.com/
