2012-10-19
Yahoo quit South Korea
Yahoo Inc's South Korean operation said on Friday it will quit the country, underscoring its struggle against Google Inc and local competitors expanding aggressively into mobile advertising and online services.
South Korea is the first Asian country Yahoo is leaving, the firm said. An industry pioneer and household Internet brand, it has been overshadowed by global rivals including Facebook Inc and Google in recent years.
"Yahoo has faced several challenges in the past couple of years and decided to pull out of the (Korean) business to put more resources on global business and become more powerful and successful," Yahoo said in a statement.
Yahoo Korea, which started business in 1997 and is wholly owned by the U.S. search company, has around 200-250 employees in South Korea. It will terminate Korean online portal services in December, the company said.
In the South Korean market, it has failed to beat local rivals such as NHN Corp, Daum Communications Corp and SK Communications Co.
Yahoo appointed Google veteran Marissa Mayer as its chief executive in July, its third CEO in less than a year.
Former CEO Scott Thompson resigned after less than 6 months in the job over a controversy over his academic credentials.
Before that, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang had stepped down as CEO, and an internal reorganization cut thousands of jobs.
Yahoo remains one of the world's most powerful websites, with more than 700 million monthly visitors who use products like its email service and read its news pages.
Dr. Blinky serves as a physical, blinking extension of your smartphone's notification bar. In other words, it's a beeper for a mobile world.
Dr. Blinky helps keep you connected... to your own phone.
(Credit: Dr. Blinky )
Industrial designer Kotaro Shimogori has taken to crowdfunding site Indiegogo to raise funds for a Bluetooth-powered appliance that functions as a physical extension of your smartphone's notifications bar. But if you lived through the 1990s with me, you probably recognize Dr. Blinky for what it really is -- the resurrection of the pager with a 21st century spin.
In a nutshell, Dr. Blinky connects to an app on yourAndroid phone (the iOS app is in progress) that you can configure to blink whenever you want to be notified of a new call, text, e-mail, or whatever. Dr. Blinky can also be set to blink in different patterns for different types of notifications.
So if being separated from your phone by the few layers of fabric that make up your purse or your pocket just seems unbearable, perhaps you'll want to chip in a few bucks to the campaign.
Perhaps Shimogori should join forces with the team behind another Indiegogo campaignwe've reported on lately to see if Dr. Blinky might also clip to your license plate to help outsmart red light camerasThe crowdfunding project has just gotten started, and early birds who pledge $25 or more can be first in line for one of the 21st century beepers. The site claims the devices will eventually have a retail price of $70.
2012-10-18
Youtube was down for 30 min.
Servers at YouTube failed Thursday afternoon, making the website and its videos across the web temporarily unavailable. The downtime sent people into a panic between 4 p.m. ET and 4:30 p.m. ET. The site is now back up, but "YouTube Goes Down" is still a worldwide trending topic on Twitter.
[More from Mashable: 12 YouTube Recipes for a Cozy Autumn Meal]
"A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation," said the error message.
The "500 Internal Server Error" came after a filing error leaked Google's earnings four hours too early.
[More from Mashable: Interscope’s New Website Relies on Artists’ Social Media Activity]
YouTube is down. Does this mean worker productivity is up?
— Digg (@digg) October 18, 2012
YouTube is down. This is it, my friends. The end of the world.
— Claw'b GraveRobber (@RobDenBleyker) October 18, 2012
youtube is down. i think its a good reason to jump in a ditch. #whyyoutubewhy
— Madison Beer (@MadisonElleBeer) October 18, 2012
YOUTUBE IS DOWN?!?! THIS IS WHY ONLINE MEDIA WILL NEVER TAKE OVER TELE...*your skybox is not responding*
— Stephen Byrne (@3sixty5days) October 18, 2012
BONUS: 33 More Entertaining 404 Error Pages 8bitpeoples True to its name, 8bitpeoples's 404 error page features a conversation
2012-10-17
Dr. Blinky
Never miss a call with DrBlinky!
DrBlinky is an autonomous, super compact & super light weight Bluetooth 4.0 enabled visual notification device for your smartphone.
Kindle for school
Amazon.com Inc announced an initiative on Wednesday to get its Kindle e-readers and tablet computers into schools, entering a market that has been particularly successful for rival Apple Inc and its iPad device.
Amazon said it has been testing Kindles in recent years with hundreds of kindergarten through 12th grade schools in the United States, selling the devices at bulk discounts and helping them purchase and distribute e-books to students.
On Wednesday, the company unveiled Whispercast, a service that lets schools manage fleets of Kindle devices from one online location.
Administrators and teachers can set up user accounts for each student and arrange them into one or more groups, such as a specific class or grade level. They can also set limits on what students can do with the devices, such as blocking Facebook and web browsing and disabling purchasing, Amazon said.
Amazon's education push is part of a broader effort by the world's largest Internet retailer to get Kindles into as many hands as possible. The company sells Kindles at cost and hopes to make money selling e-books and other content such as apps, games, music and video through the devices.
"We want to make it as easy as possible for everyone to own a Kindle device. Any time we can make that easier, we do that," said Jay Marine, vice president of Kindle product management. "And we have a particular mission to increase reading, especially among kids."
Education is a potentially huge market for tablets and e-readers, partly because they are easier for administrators to manage than personal computers and laptops, according to Carl Howe of consulting firm Yankee Group.
Apple's iPad has been a big hit with educational institutions in the United States. In the second quarter of 2012, the company said sales of iPads in the U.S. education market almost doubled year-over-year to just under 1 million units.
Amazon's Marine said Kindles are easier to carry for students than lots of physical books. Students who are learning to read may also be less intimidated by big books, because the content is housed in small, thin devices, he added.
Amazon has been offering discounts on the hardware for bulk purchases by schools. The company does not currently offer bulk discounts on e-books, but Marine said that may come in the future.
Whispercast will also work in coming months with apps that run on Amazon's Kindle Fire tablets, he added.
Clearwater High School in Florida and St Rose of Lima School in Texas are among schools that have been testing Kindles with students.
Clearwater High has been using about 2,000 Kindles for more than two years and recently the test was expanded to more than 122 schools in the same district, according to Principal Keith Mastroides.
The devices make students more enthusiastic about reading and studying in general, he said.
Still, Yankee Group's Howe said there are limitations on how useful e-books can be in education. Physical books can be re-sold easily, unlike digital versions, he noted.
It is also more difficult for a student to study from multiple e-books at the same time, Howe explained.
"Imagine a student in a library with 10 books with book marks in each one," he said. "Try doing that with an e-reader. It's pretty hard and kind of a mess."
Whispercast is also designed to make it easier for businesses and non-profit organizations to use Kindle devices.
Companies can use the service to centrally distribute documents and other items such as conference agendas or training materials to employees or customers, Amazon said.
(Reporting By Alistair Barr; Additional reporting by Poornima Gupta; Editing by Tim Dobbyn, Bernard Orr)
2012-10-16
tablet comparison chart
Tablet Comparison Chart | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)