Yahoo owns 39% of Alibaba which is said by some to be worth around $11B. This is a significant stake of the online market in China and includes stakes in Taobao and Alipay which helps to props up Yahoo share price. Yahoo portal on its own is on life support.
Yes in the beginning users had options, now Google has massive market share and not many alternatives out there. Users are locked in and Google is expanding into new verticals highlighted by recent moves into Fashion, and Travel (amongst others). When growth in display ads are not meeting quotas, Google has to look into taking over new markets and easy to reach search verticals. Makes it very dangerous for freedom of information if Google is also plugging its own products.
Characteristics of the engineering and technology companies started in the U.S. from 1995 to 2005. 25.3% of these companies, at least one key founder was foreign-born.
Duke/Berkley report.
Immigration and visa nightmares are a large and growing problem for high-skill employers in the U.S.. Wall Street and Silicon Valley tend to complain the loudest about such things, but they happen everywhere — right now celebrated Colombian journalist Hollman Morris looks as though he won’t be able to take up his Nieman fellowship at Harvard, since the State Department has denied him a visa for reasons that no one can understand. Between dealing with capricious decisions and navigating the insanity that is the USCIS bureaucracy, it’s little surprise that many employers choose to simply set up shop abroad.
No different from.tv or any other new top level domain. It is currently possible to open up any tld you want now (.city.dog.etc) if you have around $100,000 and the capabilities to manage a registrar through Icaan. However,.com,.net.org and country tld will always be king in people minds..travel has been around forever and nobody uses it. Expect more of the same with all these new domains coming on the market.
Don't you think black hat SEO could game such a system even worse than the current results? Also the cost of employees manually reviewing search results is a little cost prohibitive. Who checks the checker?
China needs pirated software to help local business grow. Lived there for a while and couldn't find any person, company, or government organization that paid for licensing. All off the street corner for 10 kuai.
If the government in US, Ireland, Netherlands, etc did not receive this 20% tax... then who did it get paid to? Does this mean 100% of Google profit was taxed at 20% overall... i doubt it.
Think the article was saying that Google pays the US 2.4%.
Lived in China for a while and it's just a routine PR stunt (same as currency)... US gets angry and China takes a couple examples then it's back to business as usual. Seriously why would the Chinese government care if the middle class has fake Louis Vuitton purses, or watches Hollywood movies? There is little incentive for the government to stop pirates.
This is a signal that if WinCE 7 (or whatever) doesn't sell well, they're going to go after Android and iPhone handsets with patent claims. Switch to WinCE 7, or something bad might happen to your platform.
If corporations want personal privacy maybe shareholders and management should face personal legal ramifications for breaking the law. Instead corporations (banks) just got bailed out for ruining millions of lives and causing this great recession.... unbelievable. What's next? Why not just let corporations take over the government...
Lived in Beijing from 03-08 and pollution was worse than you could imagine. Remember one day on the highway visibility was maybe 3 meters. Most days when looking out of my apartment couldn't see a building maybe 200 meters away. However, I did notice an increase in air quality over the years primarily due to moving the heavy industry outside of the city to clean things up for the Olympics. Also they had a unique driving system put in place that allowed alternating days for odd/even number license plates to be on the roads. It's amazing what you can accomplish in a short amount of time if you have total control over the population. Things change at warp speed in China.
Dj's and electronic music are the major increase of vinyl sales, there's a whole new generation with different music tastes. Nothing to do with the quality of sound, more of a generally accepted standard where DJ's come to clubs spinning records, and there's many youth that want to be the next big DJ (just as rock was back in the 60s, disco in the 70s, etc).
On the other hand this article says nothing about the total quantity of vinyl/CD sold. I'm sure over all CD outsell vinyl by multiples. There's no doubt that CD is on the same path as cassettes, but the next format is digital... not records or CD.
Re: Facebook Is Down
on
Facebook Is Down
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· Score: 5, Insightful
With the amount of personal/business information stored in Google servers I wonder if Google did enough by just firing the guy? Googles internal system is built on trusting those with access to the information and most Google employees don't want to dig into their databases... but some do. Google replied that this isn't the first time it happened. So what is Google going to do differently in the future? Probably nothing since it has already happened before. It's amazing the amount of damage that can be done through reading personal emails. Google should of stepped it up a bit and sent this guy off to jail to set an example.
.xxx if it's approved will be run by a private for profit corporation. Many porn sites would have no reason to move over to this new domain because.com and.net are their bread and butter with massive marketing seo campaigns already pointing to their current domain. Forcing all porn sites to move to.xxx would essentially create a private monopoly and would be fought tooth and nail.
Lived in Beijing for 5 years and noticed many companies planning on moving out of China in search for lower costs... hot spots seem to be Vietnam and India. Every year it becomes more expensive to do business in China but the big shift was around the Olympics with new labor laws. It takes time to build and transfer manufacturing to another location... lots of companies have already started this process but it will take time. With the new Honda, Foxcon raising of wages you're going to see mass protests and more companies looking to get into cheaper markets.
First look at importing parts (warehouse drop ship from China and assembling in the US (also tax benefits use free trade zones). Human labor is cheap but why not use it for building machines and robots to replace humans? Where is all the automation in manufacturing? Why can't we build machine run manufacturing plants that require %80 less people to run? If Japan can do it I'm sure with a bit of ingenuity somebody in the US can get the ball rolling...
Could be a risky proposition for the Office crowd with Google/Open docs competitors trying to grab market share. At least with XP MS still has market share... if they force a massive upgrade during a recession many customers may opt for the cheap open source version with less features. Not a smart move for MS at the moment.
You could always just delete all your photos, bio info, etc and essentially turn Facebook into an address book to store old contact information. Conduct messaging through other channels such as email, text, twitter, flickr, etc... nothing lost.
There will be a new social network coming online that will kick Facebook to the dust bin, just as Geocities and Myspace had done to them before. Think mobile + geo + social + gaming elements...
It's only a distraction if kids do not get taught how to effectively manage all of this information. Can't figure out why most classes in school revolve around memorizing repetitive mind numbing facts instead of getting into the theory. In todays world it's about knowing how to research and analyze information from the internet and other data sources.
Dear government: Please allow competition into the Canadian market because the cartel of Rogers, Bell and Telus are getting away with murder. American companies come on up, we could use you... even ATT would do a better job.
Remember trying to go on the internet last year while on vacation, Rogers had been redirecting some 404 pages (and other pages) to their own landing pages where they had advertising... is this legal? Plus they forced people to use their own 'homepage' (which got funneled through results pages similar to ads on proxy sites. Tried getting the computer to use another homepage but no luck....Talk about vendor lock in.
Lets have a quick look at their pricing history: Cell phone charges by the same cartel are already some of the highest in the world . Paying a few hundred a month for some extra channels on cable. Finally convinced everyone to switch over to online media (streaming, downloading, netflix, etc) and now the prices go through the roof with tiered pricing... Wish these cartels would stop pushing back time and grow with the market. It is time to invest in giving customers what they want. Customers want unfiltered, unlimited internet.
Agreed. I'm in the industry, and everyone I've ever spoken to has agreed completely that we have all the ideas we will ever need, and that is not at all a thing the games industry is needing or wanting to spend money on. I'm sorry, but your geek dreams aren't worth gold. We get thousands of ridiculous fan emails a day with game ideas that are mostly laughable, but even the good ones, who cares? The "idea" boils down to a story/setting, and some gameplay. If the gameplay can be done, it probably already is, and otherwise if it can't be done, then the idea is worthless. And if you think you have the best story around, who cares? Write a book. The challenge in making good games is not finding good stories, its organizing development teams and trying to produce "fun" which is unquantifiable and subjective.
All you have to do is create a market for your product. There's a few ways to do this:
1) Get everyone together (coder, artist, management) and throw together a serious business/marketing plan. This includes lawyer fees for copyright, etc. if you are confident in your idea then investing some money is necessary.
2) After you have the full story line then analyze your target market and hand pick clips to use in a demo reel (think movie trailer)
3) Create viral marketing campaign to create interest in your product. Some basic examples are press release, videos, attending conferences, etc. You want people to get interested in what you're doing and wanting to know more. This step takes some serious skill to do properly. Send interested parties to your website that signs people up for the beta/newsletter list. On the website you will also want a media kit and contact form to filter potential leads.
4) If you have the traction then design and code a sample of the game that people can test out online. Keep building up your user base on your website.
5) If you still see substantial interest in your game after all of this then take it to the next level and start pitching your idea to the big game companies (or build it out yourself).
Ideas on their own are worth very little, it's what you do with them and how far you can build them up that counts.
Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo owns 39% of Alibaba which is said by some to be worth around $11B. This is a significant stake of the online market in China and includes stakes in Taobao and Alipay which helps to props up Yahoo share price. Yahoo portal on its own is on life support.
Yes in the beginning users had options, now Google has massive market share and not many alternatives out there. Users are locked in and Google is expanding into new verticals highlighted by recent moves into Fashion, and Travel (amongst others). When growth in display ads are not meeting quotas, Google has to look into taking over new markets and easy to reach search verticals. Makes it very dangerous for freedom of information if Google is also plugging its own products.
Characteristics of the engineering and technology companies started in the U.S. from 1995 to 2005. 25.3% of these companies, at least one key founder was foreign-born. Duke/Berkley report.
Immigration and visa nightmares are a large and growing problem for high-skill employers in the U.S.. Wall Street and Silicon Valley tend to complain the loudest about such things, but they happen everywhere — right now celebrated Colombian journalist Hollman Morris looks as though he won’t be able to take up his Nieman fellowship at Harvard, since the State Department has denied him a visa for reasons that no one can understand. Between dealing with capricious decisions and navigating the insanity that is the USCIS bureaucracy, it’s little surprise that many employers choose to simply set up shop abroad.
No different from .tv or any other new top level domain. It is currently possible to open up any tld you want now (.city .dog .etc) if you have around $100,000 and the capabilities to manage a registrar through Icaan. However, .com, .net .org and country tld will always be king in people minds. .travel has been around forever and nobody uses it. Expect more of the same with all these new domains coming on the market.
Don't you think black hat SEO could game such a system even worse than the current results? Also the cost of employees manually reviewing search results is a little cost prohibitive. Who checks the checker?
Sounds like an official government endorsement for Chinese companies to produce their own counterfeit version of unlocked Ipads.
China needs pirated software to help local business grow. Lived there for a while and couldn't find any person, company, or government organization that paid for licensing. All off the street corner for 10 kuai.
If the government in US, Ireland, Netherlands, etc did not receive this 20% tax... then who did it get paid to? Does this mean 100% of Google profit was taxed at 20% overall... i doubt it. Think the article was saying that Google pays the US 2.4%.
Lived in China for a while and it's just a routine PR stunt (same as currency)... US gets angry and China takes a couple examples then it's back to business as usual. Seriously why would the Chinese government care if the middle class has fake Louis Vuitton purses, or watches Hollywood movies? There is little incentive for the government to stop pirates.
This is a signal that if WinCE 7 (or whatever) doesn't sell well, they're going to go after Android and iPhone handsets with patent claims. Switch to WinCE 7, or something bad might happen to your platform.
If corporations want personal privacy maybe shareholders and management should face personal legal ramifications for breaking the law. Instead corporations (banks) just got bailed out for ruining millions of lives and causing this great recession.... unbelievable. What's next? Why not just let corporations take over the government...
China lacks the restrictive legal framework far more than the USA does. Showcase of what's wrong with the free market and innovation in the US.
Find it interesting that the term 'Google Sucks' is also not on instant. What happened to unbiased search results?
Lived in Beijing from 03-08 and pollution was worse than you could imagine. Remember one day on the highway visibility was maybe 3 meters. Most days when looking out of my apartment couldn't see a building maybe 200 meters away. However, I did notice an increase in air quality over the years primarily due to moving the heavy industry outside of the city to clean things up for the Olympics. Also they had a unique driving system put in place that allowed alternating days for odd/even number license plates to be on the roads. It's amazing what you can accomplish in a short amount of time if you have total control over the population. Things change at warp speed in China.
Dj's and electronic music are the major increase of vinyl sales, there's a whole new generation with different music tastes. Nothing to do with the quality of sound, more of a generally accepted standard where DJ's come to clubs spinning records, and there's many youth that want to be the next big DJ (just as rock was back in the 60s, disco in the 70s, etc). On the other hand this article says nothing about the total quantity of vinyl/CD sold. I'm sure over all CD outsell vinyl by multiples. There's no doubt that CD is on the same path as cassettes, but the next format is digital... not records or CD.
In other news worker productivity shot up by 150%
With the amount of personal/business information stored in Google servers I wonder if Google did enough by just firing the guy? Googles internal system is built on trusting those with access to the information and most Google employees don't want to dig into their databases... but some do. Google replied that this isn't the first time it happened. So what is Google going to do differently in the future? Probably nothing since it has already happened before. It's amazing the amount of damage that can be done through reading personal emails. Google should of stepped it up a bit and sent this guy off to jail to set an example.
.xxx if it's approved will be run by a private for profit corporation. Many porn sites would have no reason to move over to this new domain because .com and .net are their bread and butter with massive marketing seo campaigns already pointing to their current domain. Forcing all porn sites to move to .xxx would essentially create a private monopoly and would be fought tooth and nail.
Lived in Beijing for 5 years and noticed many companies planning on moving out of China in search for lower costs... hot spots seem to be Vietnam and India. Every year it becomes more expensive to do business in China but the big shift was around the Olympics with new labor laws. It takes time to build and transfer manufacturing to another location... lots of companies have already started this process but it will take time. With the new Honda, Foxcon raising of wages you're going to see mass protests and more companies looking to get into cheaper markets.
First look at importing parts (warehouse drop ship from China and assembling in the US (also tax benefits use free trade zones). Human labor is cheap but why not use it for building machines and robots to replace humans? Where is all the automation in manufacturing? Why can't we build machine run manufacturing plants that require %80 less people to run? If Japan can do it I'm sure with a bit of ingenuity somebody in the US can get the ball rolling...
Could be a risky proposition for the Office crowd with Google/Open docs competitors trying to grab market share. At least with XP MS still has market share... if they force a massive upgrade during a recession many customers may opt for the cheap open source version with less features. Not a smart move for MS at the moment.
You could always just delete all your photos, bio info, etc and essentially turn Facebook into an address book to store old contact information. Conduct messaging through other channels such as email, text, twitter, flickr, etc... nothing lost.
There will be a new social network coming online that will kick Facebook to the dust bin, just as Geocities and Myspace had done to them before. Think mobile + geo + social + gaming elements...
It's only a distraction if kids do not get taught how to effectively manage all of this information. Can't figure out why most classes in school revolve around memorizing repetitive mind numbing facts instead of getting into the theory. In todays world it's about knowing how to research and analyze information from the internet and other data sources.
Dear government: Please allow competition into the Canadian market because the cartel of Rogers, Bell and Telus are getting away with murder. American companies come on up, we could use you... even ATT would do a better job.
Remember trying to go on the internet last year while on vacation, Rogers had been redirecting some 404 pages (and other pages) to their own landing pages where they had advertising... is this legal? Plus they forced people to use their own 'homepage' (which got funneled through results pages similar to ads on proxy sites. Tried getting the computer to use another homepage but no luck....Talk about vendor lock in.
Lets have a quick look at their pricing history: Cell phone charges by the same cartel are already some of the highest in the world . Paying a few hundred a month for some extra channels on cable. Finally convinced everyone to switch over to online media (streaming, downloading, netflix, etc) and now the prices go through the roof with tiered pricing... Wish these cartels would stop pushing back time and grow with the market. It is time to invest in giving customers what they want. Customers want unfiltered, unlimited internet.
Agreed. I'm in the industry, and everyone I've ever spoken to has agreed completely that we have all the ideas we will ever need, and that is not at all a thing the games industry is needing or wanting to spend money on. I'm sorry, but your geek dreams aren't worth gold. We get thousands of ridiculous fan emails a day with game ideas that are mostly laughable, but even the good ones, who cares? The "idea" boils down to a story/setting, and some gameplay. If the gameplay can be done, it probably already is, and otherwise if it can't be done, then the idea is worthless. And if you think you have the best story around, who cares? Write a book. The challenge in making good games is not finding good stories, its organizing development teams and trying to produce "fun" which is unquantifiable and subjective.
All you have to do is create a market for your product. There's a few ways to do this:
1) Get everyone together (coder, artist, management) and throw together a serious business/marketing plan. This includes lawyer fees for copyright, etc. if you are confident in your idea then investing some money is necessary.
2) After you have the full story line then analyze your target market and hand pick clips to use in a demo reel (think movie trailer)
3) Create viral marketing campaign to create interest in your product. Some basic examples are press release, videos, attending conferences, etc. You want people to get interested in what you're doing and wanting to know more. This step takes some serious skill to do properly. Send interested parties to your website that signs people up for the beta/newsletter list. On the website you will also want a media kit and contact form to filter potential leads.
4) If you have the traction then design and code a sample of the game that people can test out online. Keep building up your user base on your website.
5) If you still see substantial interest in your game after all of this then take it to the next level and start pitching your idea to the big game companies (or build it out yourself).
Ideas on their own are worth very little, it's what you do with them and how far you can build them up that counts.