Archive for March 19th, 2008
Posted by: in Services
Filed under: Video, Web services, Social Software
What are you doing Friday night? Songkick is a new service which aims to put live music at the center of your evening plans. Through geolocation, analysis and some old-fashioned Web 2.0 style goodness, Songkick does its ideal to suggest shows worth seeing, highly relevant to you and within your area.
We talked with Ian Hogarth from Songkick while we were in Austin for SXSWi. He does a bang-up job of explaining why Songkick is a relevant service, approaching a problem in a one-of-a-kind way.
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Posted by: in Services
Filed under: World wide web, Web services
There are plenty of web services that will let you translate chunks of text from one language to another. And Reverso is certainly one of them. But Reverso has a few tricks up its sleeve that you won’t find in Google Translate, Windows Live Translator, or Babel Fish.
Near the top of the Reverso web page are four tabs: Translation, Dictionary, Conjugator, and More. The translation tool does a decent job of translating text to and from several languages: English, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish. But if you click on the Dictionary tab, you can enter a word, select a dictionary, and get a more precise definition. And if you click on the conjugate tab, you can practice conjugating your verbs in the language of your choice.
Unlike many other popular web translation services, Reverso does not offer a way to translate entire web pages on the web. But Windows users can purchase Reverso’s desktop application that offers this feature. Or you could, you know, use another service if and when you want to translate complete pages.
[via A Little Bit of Everything]
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Posted by: in Services
Filed under: Internet, Office, Web services, Google, web 2.0
Google seems to be rolling out improvements to Google Spreadsheets like there’s no tomorrow. Or like there’s no Microsoft Office tomorrow anyway. When you click the tiny chart icon in the Google Spreadsheets toolbar, you now get a whole slew of charts and other gadgets to choose from in addition to the pie, bar, and line charts that Google introduced a while back.
The new gadget gallery includes:
- Tables and pivot tables
- Maps and heatmaps
- Google web and image searches for selected values
- Organization charts
Users can also create their own custom gadgets using the Google Gadgets API. In non-chart/gadget news, Google has also added the option to receive email notifications when someone changes a spreadsheet, and a variety of other bug repairs and feature enhancements including improved sort, filter, and unique functions.
[via Google Operating System]
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Posted by: in Rights Online
MozeeToby writes “The Columbus Dispatch is reporting on a criminal investigation currently being performed in Franklin County Ohio. It seems several voting machines listed a candidate as withdrawn from the race when in fact he wasn’t. By the time the investigations tracked down which machines had been affected, the candidate’s name was back on the ballot. Normally, we could dismiss this as confusion or a mistake on the part of the voter(s) who noticed it. In this case, the person who first noticed the discrepancy was Ohio Secretary of state Jennifer Brunner. Further compounding matters, the Franklin County Board of Elections had disabled virtually all logging on the machines to speed setup of the balot. Naturally, the county board remains sceptical of these accusations.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Filed under: Deals, Industry, Competitive strategy, Boeing Co (BA), Politics, Northrop Grumman (NOC)
 Boeing (NYSE: BA) is thumping its chest about the likelihood that it can get Congress to reverse a deal giving a $35 billion military tanker contract to Northrop Grumman (NYSE:NOC) and EADS, the parent of Airbus.
According to Reuters Mark McGraw, a company vice president, said he was “as confident as I can be” that congressional auditors would find fault with the U.S. Air Force’s February 29 choice of the rival team. Brave words, especially when the Air Force claims that the Boeing proposal lost on each key metric for building the tanker.
Boeing is counting on members of Congress who don’t want American jobs to go overseas to push back on a contract which includes Europe-based EADS. But, it might not be that easy.
The Wall Street Journal reports that “Government contracting documents show that the U.S. Air Force preferred the size and ability of aerial refueling tankers” being offered by EADS and Northrop. The EADS Airbus 330 can carry more fuel that its Boeing competition.
Boeing is nearly certainly wasting its time. No matter how much some Congressmen would like to save jobs for their districts, they can’t be seen as favoring a deal which is probably substantially inferior.
Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.
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Filed under: Bad news, Industry, Competitive strategy, AMR Corp (AMR), Oil, Delta Air Lines (DAL)
Delta (NYSE:DAL) offered buy-outs to 30,000 employees in the hopes that at least 2,000 of them will leave. The company will also cut the number of routes that it flies. According to The Wall Street Journal “the airline was forced to take further cuts because fuel prices have risen nearly 20% over the past three months, increasing its fuel bill for this year by almost $900 million.”
Delta’s plan is now old news What is not is that all of the major carriers here and abroad are going to have to make similar moves, putting tens of thousands of airline workers out of work. AMR (NYSE:AMR), the parent of American Airlines, states its fuel bill could be up $4 billion this year.
The airline industry might be headed toward another set of bankruptcies. Most of the massive carriers have razor thin margins and plenty of debt service. There will now be a race of cost slicing against the effect of the recession on traffic and oil prices on margins.
The airline industry has very few outs. If carriers cut too many routes, they open themselves up to competition. If they cut too few, they may have a cost base which they can’t support. That leaves chopping employees as the only way to save a lot of money.
The news of more buy-outs and lay-off is coming, and coming very soon.
Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.
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Posted by: in Services
Filed under: World wide web, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0
Facebook is adding new privacy controls this day which will give you more control over your interactions with people in your friend lists. For example, you can share pic albums or applications with your professional contacts while hiding away the good stuff for closer friends.
The company also confirmed plans to launch a web-based instant messenger service that will let you communicate with other Facebook members in real-time. TechCrunch has the video you can see above showing how Facebook Chat could work. But the application is still in development and there could be some changes before it’s officially launched in a few weeks.
As IM clients go, Facebook Chat doesn’t look that impressive. You’ll only be able to communicate with other Facebook users, not AIM, MSN, and Yahoo! Messenger users. But Jabber support could be added in the future, which would let you access Facebook Chat with third celebration software like Trillian, Pidgin, or Adium.
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ohxten sends news from earlier this month that GCC 4.3.0’s new behavior of not clearing the direction flag before a string operation on x86 systems poses problems with kernels — such as Linux and BSD — that don’t clear the direction flag before a signal handler is called, despite the ABI specification.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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