Archive for the ‘Communication’ Category
@anywhere
March 15th, 2010 | 
Author: When we designed Twitter, we took a different approach—we didn’t require a relationship model like that of a social network. Keeping things open meant you could browse our site to read tweets from friends, celebrities, companies, media outlets, fictional characters, and more. You could follow any account and be followed by any account. As a result, companies started interacting with customers, celebrities connected with fans, governments became more transparent, and people started discovering and sharing information in a new, participatory manner.
We’ve developed a new set of frameworks for adding this Twitter experience anywhere on the web. Soon, sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate these open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com. Our open technology platform is well known and Twitter APIs are already widely implemented but this is a different approach because we’ve created something incredibly simple. Rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in a few lines of javascript. This new set of frameworks is called @anywhere.
Twitter will be part of our favorite sites!When we’re ready to launch, initial participating sites will include Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube. Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page—and that’s just the beginning. Twitter has proven to be compelling in a variety of ways. With @anywhere, web site owners and operators will be able to offer visitors more value with less heavy lifting.
Source :
http://blog.twitter.com/2010/03/anywhere.html
Posted in Communication, Internet, Twitter | 
Tags: @Anywhere, social networking, Twitter | 
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Twitter CEO unveils ‘@Anywhere’ platform
AUSTIN, Texas–Twitter CEO Evan Williams took no time in getting to the juicy part of his keynote address at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival on Monday afternoon. He announced the “@Anywhere” platform, a way to pull Twitter links and data onto partner sites and media outlets.
A brief demo of @Anywhere showed off “hovercards” that bring up Twitter information with a mouse-over, let readers or users connect with their Twitter accounts much like Facebook Connect, or explore more specific possibilities, like instantly following a newspaper columnist’s Twitter account by clicking on his or her byline.
“Discovery is one of the hardest challenges,” Williams said. “It’s putting these in context where you’re already aware of them…Twitter is a very easy way to keep in touch.” The company has 13 launch partners, including Digg, The New York Times, MSNBC.com, eBay, Amazon, and Bing. As Williams describes it, “it’s not an ad platform, it’s an ‘@’ platform,” referring to the syntax of using the ‘@’ symbol to denote communication between individual Twitter users.
Williams was interviewed onstage by Umair Haque, director of the Havas Media Lab in what was arguably the most highly anticipated event of the SXSWi lineup. A massive event hall at the Austin Convention Center was filled to capacity, with a line snaking through the hallways half an hour before the talk was scheduled to begin.
The Twitter CEO was sketchier about the details of how @Anywhere will make money, though there are some guesses that big partners will have to pay up for access to the “firehose,” much like its search deals with Twitter and Bing that were announced late last year.
“Inevitably, it’s going to take experimentation,” Williams said. “Google started out thinking that they were going to sell search services.”
A report circulated last month that Twitter was gearing up to launch an ad platform in conjunction with SXSWi, stemming from comments that the company’s head of product management made in a conference panel. Company executives had heretofore been ambivalent as to whether they would start rolling out ads any time soon–or ever.
SXSWi is more or less Twitter’s birthplace: the company made its debut there in 2007, and became an instant sensation with the early-adopter geek crowd. It took about two more years before it could be deemed a legitimate, mainstream sensation, but SXSWi is its home turf.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20000474-36.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Verizon to cut 13,000 jobs
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — After posting a fourth-quarter loss, Verizon Communications, Inc. said Tuesday it plans to cut about 13,000 jobs this year.
Verizon recorded a net loss of $653 million, or 23 cents per share, compared with a profit of $1.24 billion, or 43 cents a share, a year earlier.
The loss came after the company took a charge of $3 billion for cutting a total of 17,000 jobs last year in both its landline and wireless divisions. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had forecast earnings of 54 cents per share.
Total sales rose to $27.1 billion, up from $24.6 billion in the same quarter last year, but below analyst estimates of $27.3 billion. The company’s fixed-line revenue plunged 3.9% to $11.5 billion from $11.9 billion last year.
Verizon (VZ, Fortune 500) CEO Ivan Seidenberg said on the company’s quarterly earnings call Tuesday that it will slash about 13,000 positions in 2010. The telecom giant previously cut 13,000 jobs from its landline business in 2008 and another 13,000 again in 2009.
Verizon’s total headcount at the end of 2010 was nearly 223,000, with 117,000 employees in the fixed-line business.
The layoffs will not be specific to any geographic area, said Bob Varettoni, a Verizon spokesman.
“We have reduced headcount in many ways: by reducing the number of contractors we use, by offering enhanced incentive separation packages, attrition, and other means,” said Varettoni. “Any layoffs were kept to a minimum because of these measures.”
Separately, Home Depot (HD, Fortune 500) also announced Tuesday that it plans to cut jobs. CEO Frank Blake said in a memo to Home Depot employees the company will eliminate 1,000 jobs nationwide.
“We are a strong company, and we are taking the necessary actions to make us even stronger as our business builds momentum,” said Blake.
Source :
http://money.cnn.com/2010/01/26/news/companies/verizon_layoffs/index.htm
Apple seeks ban on U.S. Nokia imports
The ongoing patent battle between Apple and Nokia escalated Friday, when Apple moved to block imports of Nokia cell phones to the U.S.
Apple made its request in a complaint filed with the International Trade Commission in Washington, an independent federal agency that examines issues including unfair trade practices involving patent, trademark, and copyright infringement. The agency will need to approve the request before it begins an investigation.
Will Nokia devices be blocked from the U.S.?
(Credit: Nokia)
In December, Nokia filed its own complaint with the USITC. In it, the Finnish company alleged that Apple infringes seven Nokia patents “in virtually all of its mobile phones, portable music players, and computers” and sought to ban imports of Apple’s iPhone, iPod, and MacBook products.
Responding to Apple’s latest move, Nokia spokesman Mark Durrant told Bloomberg that “Nokia will study the complaint when it is received and continue to defend itself vigorously. However this does not alter the fact that Apple has failed to agree appropriate terms for using Nokia technology and has been seeking a free ride on Nokia’s innovation since it shipped the first iPhone in 2007.”
Apple has not yet responded to a request for comment on the filing.
Back in October, before the patent debate between the two companies moved to the trade commission, Nokia filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Delaware regarding 10 patents related to wireless handsets, which Nokia says Apple has refused to license. Every iPhone model since the original, introduced in 2007, infringes on those patents, Nokia has charged.
Apple then filed a countersuit accusing Nokia of copying technology inside the iPhone.
In November, research firm Strategy Analytics reported that Apple had surpassed Nokia in quarterly mobile phone profits, bringing in $1.6 billion from the iPhone, compared with Nokia’s $1.1 billion in cell phone profits.
Nokia’s new mobile chief, Rick Simonson, acknowledged in an interview earlier this month that 2009 had been a difficult year for the company.
“Yes, we have lost ground in the smartphone space over the past 18 months, but the decline has stopped and stablized in the second and third quarters of 2009,” Simonson told the India Times.
“The new year will see [our] recovery in smartphones with the introduction of Maemo and the stabilization of the Symbian operating system, which by the way, continues to be the platform for the largest number of smartphones, globally,” Simonson added.
Source :
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10436415-37.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Firefox gains 30 million users in eight weeks
Mozilla’s open-source Firefox browser has gained 30 million users over the past eight weeks, as it continues to gain on Internet Explorer.
Chief Executive John Lilly revealed the increase in user adoption in a Twitter post on Monday, and Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, confirmed it to ZDNet UK on Tuesday.
“We’ve seen a significant increase in the number of users for Firefox,” Nitot said. “Firefox checks for new versions every 24 hours, when it’s running, and when it checks, it pings the Mozilla server. We count the number of pings.”
Read more of “Firefox gains 30m users in eight weeks” at ZDNet UK.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10384402-2.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Posted in Communication, Entertainment, FireFox, Internet |
Tags: browser, FireFox, Internet, Mozilla |
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