Posts tagged uses
President Obama Uses Cyberattack Scenario to Promote New Security Legislation
Mar 9th
On Wednesday evening, a group of senators gathered as New York City’s power grid was rendered useless by a cyberattack – thankfully the attack was only a scenario-based demonstration for politicians. The details of the faux attack scenario, which the White House hopes will convince Congress to pass legislation giving the government more control over [...]
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The Hats Swap Heads: Microsoft Uses EU Leverage to Pin Google on Patents
Feb 22nd
Microsoft confirmed to ReadWriteWeb this morning that the formal competition law complaint it filed this morning with the European Commission is against both Motorola Mobility (MMI) and Google, its would-be parent company. The office of the EC’s Competition office confirmed to ReadWriteWeb this morning it has received Microsoft’s complaint and will review it in due course, but will not yet release a copy to the public due to court rules.
Today’s move marks perhaps the final step in Microsoft’s spectacular transformation from the de facto force of evil in all matters of intellectual property, to the champion of the oppressed and the standard bearer of the people. Wearing the black hat now is Google, which just two years ago considered a bold solution to the video patents problem: open sourcing the technology and dare others to sue.
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If Google completes its acquisition of MMI (only a few roadblocks remain), the newly combined company will be the holder of essential patents pertaining to the H.264 video standard. In an early morning blog post today, Microsoft VP and General Counsel Dave Heiner noted that MMI presently charges a 2.25% fee for rights to some 2,300 essential H.264 patents, for roughly $22.50 shaved off the sale price of a $1,000 laptop. By contrast, the MPEG LA group (whose name Heiner omitted, though we all know to what he refers), which collectively licenses rights to other essential patents also surrounding H.264, charges a somewhat different fee.
“Microsoft’s patent royalty to this group on that $1,000 laptop? Two cents,” Heiner writes. “That’s right. Just 2 cents for use of more than 2,300 patents. (Windows qualifies for a nice volume discount, but no firm has to pay more than 20 cents per unit.) Motorola is demanding that Microsoft pay more than 1,000 times that for use of just 50 patents.”
Heiner added that Microsoft ends up paying a kind of penalty whenever a PC manufacturer implements Windows in a premium model – hike the hard drive capacity, and Microsoft pays more. “Windows implements more than 60 standards, and a PC supports about 200. If every firm priced its standard essential patents like Motorola, the cost of the patents would be greater than all the other costs combined in making PCs, tablets, smartphones and other devices,” he argues.
Neither Google nor MMI have issued a response.
The timing of Microsoft’s move is interesting. If its motivation were to block approval of the Google + MMI acquisition, it could have acted well before the EC Commissioner for Competition, Joaquin Almunia, issued his approval of the deal last week. Instead, Microsoft’s strategy may be to see the deal go through and then sink MMI. When Google offered $40 per share for MMI last August, that 75% premium on its public share price at the time reflected the perceived value of MMI’s patent portfolio – the principal reason, investors believe, Google wants the company.
MMI shares are trading unchanged as of this morning. In his approval of the deal last week, Comm. Almunia indicated he believed Google would have no reason to raise MMI’s royalty rates after the deal goes through. That’s not exactly a statement of skepticism, although Almunia did warn that his office would continually ensure that the combined Google’s conduct would be “fully compliant with EU competition law and with the FRAND commitments given to standard setting organizations.” If Almunia’s stance changes even slightly in the wake of Microsoft’s complaint, the needle on MMI’s public share price could start ticking negative.
And perhaps that’s the idea. If the new Motorola is compelled to charge significantly lower fees for its portfolio, Google may end up propping up a deadweight property at the same time Microsoft is going for broke.
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How Wikimedia Uses Nimsoft to Keep Track of Uptime
Feb 22nd
We all know that the Wikimedia Foundation is the operation behind Wikipedia, but what you might not know is that they have close to 100 paid staffers minding the store. And keeping the various multi-lingual servers up and running is a lot to deal with, even when someone isn’t trying to launch denial of service or other attacks for political reasons on them. And perhaps they have more to deal with than your average IT operations staff, when you consider that their websites get half a billion unique visits and have to manage servers in three different locations: Florida, Virginia, and Amsterdam.
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Over the last two years they have been using Nimsoft’s WatchMouse SaaS-based server monitoring tool to keep track of their digital assets. Prior to WatchMouse, they had a homegrown solution that told them when a server was down, or waited for a user to let them know. But this wasn’t perfect, because so much of Wikipedia’s content isn’t directly accessed by users, but through third-party apps via programming interfaces. This is a lot harder to track. Plus, Wikimedia wanted to become a lot more transparent about its operations, and have a dashboard (available here) that shows uptime and other statistics, as you see from the screencap below.
“Transparency is a big part of who we are as an organization,” said CT Woo, the director of technical operations for the foundation. “We have an obligation to make information about how we operate available to our user community.” The status page is hosted on Amazon’s Web Services by Nimsoft. Since deploying the solution, they have been able to better keep track of server uptime and performance issues and become more proactive when there is a connectivity problem or traffic bottleneck.
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Google AdWords Sitelinks Now Uses Related Ads
Feb 14th
Google announced a new version of their AdWords Sitelinks. They call them “enhanced” sitelinks for AdWords. Enhanced Sitelinks look at the other text ads in your account and when it makes sense, they will combine those text ads for your single ad and make it into an AdWords listing with…
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Tax Resolution Service in Houston, TX, Uses SEO Firm to Provide Tax Help to … – PR.com (press release)
Feb 12th
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Tax Resolution Service in Houston, TX, Uses SEO Firm to Provide Tax Help to …
PR.com (press release) Through search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, Prospect Genius is helping to increase the prominence of Taxation Solutions, Inc. in online searches for tax resolution and IRS assistance. One of the main objectives of this SEO campaign is to help … Tax Attorney Firm in Cambridge Hires Local SEO Team to Bring in More Maryland … |
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Tax Resolution Service in Houston, TX, Uses SEO Firm to Provide Tax Help to … – openPR (press release)
Feb 11th
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Tax Resolution Service in Houston, TX, Uses SEO Firm to Provide Tax Help to …
openPR (press release) Through search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, Prospect Genius is helping to increase the prominence of Taxation Solutions, Inc. in online searches for tax resolution and IRS assistance. One of the main objectives of this SEO campaign is to help … Tax Attorney Firm in Cambridge Hires Local SEO Team to Bring in More Maryland … |
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Harvard Researcher Uses Social Media To Predict Stock Market Volume
Feb 8th
Social media sentiment can predict flutuations in stock market volume as much as six to seven days ahead of time, according to a Harvard Business School doctoral candidate who has been studying the impact social media has on equities.
That could become a valuable tool for hedge funds and investment firms. High volatility often makes it easier for firms to trade stocks. Volatility predictions can also be factored into more comprehensive trading models and better predict whether a stock’s price will rise or fall.
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Frank Nagle is still working on his research but so far his findings echo those of other people who have looked at the issue. Most notably, what people say about a brand on social media is often a better indicator of how a stock will perform than what people say on social media about an individual stock.
“As far back as six or seven days, people’s perceptions of a brand matter,” Nagle said. “The problem has been that public perception has always taken longer than a buy or sell sentiment to factor into share price.”
Nagle’s research also shows in certain concentrated industries sentiment about the overall industry may have more of an impact on share price than sentiment about the individual company. He offered the airline industry as an example, where a relatively small number of publicly-traded companies focus on providing one core service. An increases in tweets about air travel, for example, may predict forthcoming volatility for the volume of shares for companies within that industry.
Nagle cautioned that, at least for now, social media sentiment is probably not enough to make an educated buy or sell decision, but it can – and will – be a factor in trading models going forward.
“It’s useful to know what the public is saying about a company to help make those decisions, and theoretically using that data to make those decisions could be possible in the future,” he said. “But for now, if the only piece of information you’re using to make buy and sell decisions is social media, I would be concerned.”
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How Pinterest Uses Your Content Without Violating Copyright Laws
Feb 1st
Pinterest, the increasingly popular pinboarding social network, is able to present a visually arresting interface in large part by using copyrighted images pinned by users.
“It’s a huge concern for creative bloggers,” said Amy Anderson, who blogs on the arts and crafts site Crafter Minds. “I don’t think Pinterest does anything to help protect copyright besides removing content when people ask.”
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Pinterest is able to avoid violating U.S. copyright laws thanks to a provision in the Internet Service Providers Act, which gives immunity to sites that publish information provided by others, according to Aaron Messing, an associate with OlenderFeldman LLP in New Jersey. As long as Pinterest continues to comply with a provision of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act that requires it to remove content when asked by the copyright owner, users are free to continue pinning any images they find on the Internet.
Pinterest did not respond to a request for comment, but its Web site has instructions for requesting the removal of copyrighted content.
“If they were manually showcasing content and/or putting this content up themselves, they would definitely be in violation and break their protections,” Get.com co-founder Steven Fruchter said in an email. “Since their users are the ones ‘pinning’ content, which is then downloaded and served via Pinterest’s servers, they are considered a user-generated site, which only needs to take down content after they receive a take down notice by the copyright holder.”
Among many Pinterest users, as well as several artists who have had work pinned on the site, a code for giving proper credit is developing. Artist Laura C. George said Pinterest has no way of knowing if links tied to images link back to the original artists’ Web site, but so far Pinterest users have been better about giving credit than Tumblr.
“That being said, it’s still awful that I might discover a new painter on Pinterest and not be able to find them. To not know their name or have their website,” she said. “It’s truly an awful situation…it seems impossible to enforce this type of rule on such a huge site with thousands of members and billions of pins. They would have to check the link to every ‘original’ pin and research to make sure it was the original. That’s insane.”
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Tech Savvy U.S. Coast Guard Uses Social Media to Protect Us
Jan 13th
I am often shocked that many are not aware that the Coast Guard is part of our Armed Forces. Our families wouldn’t be safe without them. I have to say that I am very impressed by the whys and the hows the Coast Guard has set in place in regards to their social media efforts. [...]
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Mold Remediation Service in NYC Uses SEO Strategy to Help More New Yorkers – PR.com (press release)
Jan 7th
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Mold Remediation Service in NYC Uses SEO Strategy to Help More New Yorkers
PR.com (press release) As a result of this search engine optimization (SEO) initiative, local residents and business owners looking for mold remediation companies or black mold removal will be able to save time and reduce the frustration of an unproductive Internet search … |
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