Bill Gates has bought a stake in the UK carpet retailer Carpetright, according to this article. A strange choice of business, at first sight, but what if he’s working on interactive floor coverings? Put the Carpetright story together with this one, and all becomes clear.
News International is (according to this article) about to launch a vertical search engine focussed on the UK property market. To some, this might seem like a fairly uninteresting development in online property advertising. There are lots of property websites in the UK, Rightmove being the most prominent. Zoomf (who I’m involved with as a non-exec director), Propertyfinder and a host of other companies are also in this very competitive niche, so you might ask who needs another property website?
On the day that rumours spread about Microsoft taking a $500m stake in Facebook, Nielsen released their latest stats on social networking sites, and it seems I might be right about nothing lasting forever. According to this article at Media Guardian, although Facebook is the most popular social networking site today, it’s growth is slowing, and other sites, including Perfspot, are growing faster.
If I had equity at Facebook, I think I’d be selling it to Microsoft before they read the Nielsen report.
According to this article at WiredNews, the emoticon is 25 years old tomorrow. They were first used by a Professor Fahlman at Carnegie Mellon University, apparently.
I found this article from Microsoft really helpful, if a little serious, on the subject of how and when to use them. It explains that “emoticons are sideways faces that express emotion”
About 20 million people seemed to have made it down to the South Bank this weekend for the Thames Festival, though it doesn’t seem to have got much news coverage. They closed Southwark Bridge on Saturday for a food fair, and it was so busy they had to stop people going up the steps from the Embankment. A highlight was the Transe Express performance, in which several crazy musicians and trapeze artists were suspended in a metal contraption with winches and pullies, to play some drums and bells. Very odd.
Lots of people will already know that a lot of spam is sent from machines (sometimes called zombies, but mostly people using them are quite unaware) that have had a virus installed on them. This is common because it makes it harder for anti-spam software to spot which machines are sending what spam, and because sending lots of spam takes lots of computing power. Writing viruses that create zombies that send spam is a lot cheaper than buying lots of machines.
Lots of people are probably also aware that much spam is concentrated on the sale of drugs that help with sexual performance, including the famous Viagra tablet. For some reason, cheap viagra (which is mostly fake anyway, I’ve read) sells better than other things that spam emails are promoting.
Viagra is made by Pfizer, and a report just out (thanks to the Register for the story) has shown that a lot of the Viagra spam is coming from zombie machines inside Pfizer. They don’t even know they’re sending it, apparently. Though I guess they do by now. So the guys that make Viagra, have had their machines taken over by criminals, who are using them to sell Viagra
The Internet really is all about unintended consequences, isn’t it?
If you’re feeling brave, go and have a look at the video at http://thinkprogress.org/2006/10/23/bush-says-he-uses-the-google/
I don’t really know where to start with this. The serious and comic potential are both so great.
Has he used it to search for bad guys in Afghanistan? Does he know it’s not real-time?
Our website for Channel Five went live today at http://download.five.tv/
It’s been an interesting project, more complex than we first thought, and I think the site looks great. Go and buy some videos, and make our clients some money!
Also, the blog’s properly working again now. I took a while to move it to blog.markhopwood.com, and it’s finally OK. Don’t get me started on Apache, suexec privileges and stuff: let’s just say I know a lot about Apache that I didn’t think I needed a few days ago. If you’re getting a 500 error on Plesk, drop me a line. I’m practically an expert.
Hello,
This used to be called “Mark’s Blog” and I thought that was boring. Arcane perspicacity came from combining 2 interesting words, and perhaps saying something more interesting about things that are clever but only noticed by a select few.
I can change the title whenever I want, so who knows how long this will last?
