Mar

24

A great quote from Stephen Roach, chief economist for the investment bank Morgan Stanley, on a proposed senate bill that will impose a 27.5 per cent tariff on all Chinese exports to America.

“At a time when the US is more dependent on foreign capital than ever before, to impose tariffs not just on a major provider of goods but a major lender of capital I think would be close to economic suicide.”

Mar

19

Google’s acquisition of Measure Map will become part of their free ‘Web Analytics’ service.

Measure Map measures and provides visitor activity numbers in a sort of dashboard format so you can easily tell how many visitors, links, posts, comments you have had in any given time period. What’s interesting though is that I think Google’s web analytics can already track visitors and links. It is probably the posts and comments feature that prompted this acquisition. Or maybe it is just buying the team’s “user experience” skill.

Mar

14

A CNet article on Google’s purchase of Writely:

In the area of Web applications, the last two years have seen an explosion in Web services aimed at consumers or small businesses. These services, many of which are still in beta, span many areas and companies. Here’s a sampling:

• Online Calendars: One of the more active areas, with offerings from 30 Boxes, CalendarHub, Trumba, Joyent, Kiko, Planzo and Spongecell.

• Productivity application suites: Full-blown applications bundles offered by the likes of HyperOffice, gOffice and ThinkFree.

• E-mail and collaboration: Examples include Goowy, Zimbra, Meebo (Web-based instant messaging) and Jotspot (hosted Wikis).

• Project management and personal organizers: AirSet, 37Signals.com, Zohoplanner and Stikipad.

• Multimedia social software: Includes sites like the popular Flickr photo sharing service, Riya (photo search), You Tube (video sharing) and Podbop (music podcasting).

Why the sudden boom in Web 2.0 companies? There are a few reasons, both technical and business related, say investors and analysts.

More people have high-speed Internet connections, making applications such as photo, music and video sharing feasible. The underlying software to build Web services is being upgraded as well, lowering technical barriers that existed only two years ago.

More Web developers are using a programming technique known as AJAX, which stands for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML. The end result of using AJAX is interactive Web pages and sites that can automatically refresh information from a server. Overall, it makes for a better user experience, say developers.

Mar

12

Enabling the curl extension on my PHP IIS installation is simpler than I thought.

After some googling and finding some good posts (such as this one http://www.tonyspencer.com/mt/archives/2003/10/curl_with_php_a.htm), I realized that since I manually installed my PHP5.0 with the windows zip package I already have php_curl.dll in my php/ext directory. All I had to do to run curl is just two steps:

  1. uncomment the line that has extension=php_curl.dll
  2. restart IIS web server

You can use phpinfo() to verify before and after you enabled curl.

Btw, if you are relatively comfortable with IIS and web server in general, you should always use the manual installation of PHP (http://us2.php.net/downloads.php).

Mar

9

Company News | Reuters.com
Backed with $9 million in funding by Bain Capital and Ignition Partners, La La Media works like an online music co-op by enabling members to trade physical CDs they own for physical CDs they want.

La la founders argue that, unlike underground online file-sharing services, which have been sued for copyright infringement, La la is protected under an exception to the U.S. Copyright Act. They contend that the owner of a CD can transfer a legally acquired copy without permission or payment of additional royalties.

A member will pay $1 to La la for facilitating the trade on receipt of a disc from another member, plus a 49 cent shipping charge.

La la said it will set aside 20 percent of its trading revenue for recording artists.

Other Web sites, such as Peerflix and BarterBee, are also enabling consumers to swap used merchandise.

Peerflix allows members to legally trade DVDs, while BarterBee lets people swap between multiple media, such as DVDs, music and games.

Blogroll