Technology updates, commentary and reviews related to business, personal and mobile computing
Regardless of your political views, these seven websites can help you track the actions of your elected officials. Most of the sites included in this article can be used to perform wide ranging research and others can monitor the legislation introduced and votes cast by Members of Congress. Two of the sites also track in great detail the political contributions made to elected officials.
eBay announced that a group of venture capital funds and investors will buy Skype in a deal that values the company at $2.75 billion (US). The investor group will buy approximately 65% of Skype with eBay retaining 35% ownership. Skype was acquired by eBay in 2005 for $2.6 billion plus payouts totaling an estimated $3.1 billion in a transaction The New York Times calls “one of the worst technology transactions of the decade.”
TechCrunch reported that a group of venture capital and private equity firms are joining forces in an effort to acquire Skype, a software application and service that enables video and voice calls, instant messaging and file sharing.
In 2005, eBay purchased Skype, but made a huge mistake in the terms of the deal by failing to acquire ownership of the software that defines Skype. Instead, eBay licensed the software from Joltid Limited, a company owned by Skype’s founders. This mistake continues to haunt eBay, who now finds itself in a legal battle over the software licensing, which I covered earlier this month.
Twitter has been one of the biggest internet crazes of the past year. Twitter was created in 2006, but its biggest growth spurt started near the end of 2008. Although their growth is strong, the number of new visitors that Twitter retains is fairly low. Further, in using the CB radio analogy to describe Twitter, there is a great deal of static over the air waves.
Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca is the first race track to be included in the Street View feature of Google Maps. The filming for Street View took place at the American Le Mans Series (ALMS) 2008 season finale.
Mozilla has released Firefox 3.5.2. According to the release notes, this update to the internet browser addresses approximately seventy issues including four that are security related. The complete list of changes can be found here.
Firefox 3.5 has already been updated twice since its June 30th release date. It was a stable product when released and continues to pick up momentum. The Mozilla Blog announced the one billionth download of Firefox since it was originally released in November 2004.
With efforts already underway for versions 3.7 and 4.0, it is no wonder that Firefox continues to gain popularity among internet browsers.
In 2005, eBay purchased Skype for a reported $2.6 billion and now, four years later, eBay is in a legal battle with Skype’s founders over software licensing issues. eBay made a huge mistake in the terms of its Skype purchase. One of the most important components, namely the peer-to-peer communication technology that drives Skype, was not a part of the sale. Instead, eBay licensed the peer-to-peer technology from Joltid Limited.
It appears the second Twitpocalypse is due to hit around the end of September. Why so soon? Why at all?
Back in June, Twitter faced its first, so called, Twitpocalypse. It was blown a bit out of proportion and described somewhat inaccurately. The problem did not affect Twitter itself, but rather some of the third party applications written to access Twitter
The Google Wave product preview will be expanding beyond developers on September 30, 2009 adding another 100,000 users in addition to the developers currently using Wave. According to a recent post on the Google Wave Developer Blog, the new users will be added from people who signed up and offered to test and report bugs.
If your WordPress blog requires users to log in, I’m sure you are already aware of the WordPress branded login and registration pages used. While it may be frustrating to bloggers and website owners, it can be downright confusing to your visitors. Unless your site is technical in nature, your typical user has probably never heard of WordPress and may think they’re logging into a site other than yours when they see the WordPress logo.
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