Version 2.5.1 of wordpress has been released. I shall check with Tarun to see if he has upgraded to 2.5.1. This version contains one serious security fix.
| Topics: News, Wordpress |  Email This
|
 |
In the first trading session after microsoft withdrawing its offer, yahoo stock is down more than 15%. At 24.3$ it is significantly higher than the price before microsoft made the offer though. Most of the leading bloggers are predicting a number of shareholder lawsuits against yahoo board.
| Topics: News | Email This
|
|
Microsoft has withdrawn its bid for yahoo. Yahoo killed the deal by not accepting microsoft’s offer even after they increased the bid by additional $5 billion. See the press release here. Contrary to popular belief, microsoft decided not to go the hostile way as that would have led to serious value erosion in yahoo.
In a letter to microsoft employees, steve ballmer has outlined microsoft’s strategy going forward. It basically involves 3 components
· Deliver on the basics. We will continue to improve search relevance and build out our ad platform.
· Change the game through innovation. We will expand investments in engineering and deliver transformative tools and Web experiences.
· Expand our global scale and focus. We will pursue partnerships and investments to realize the competitive advantages that come with scale.
There was a significant increase in yahoo’s share price in anticipation of the acquisition. There will be blood on the street on monday, once the trading resumes.
| Topics: News | Email This
|
|
There has been a pagerank update by google recently. Unfortunately binaryday.com has suffered a drop in pagerank from 4 to 3. Couple of other blogs i.e abhisays.com and bishtblogs.net have undergone a similar drop in the pagerank. I am not sure if google has decreased the pagerank of blogs across the board or there is something wrong with binaryday itself.
| Topics: News, SEO | Email This
|
|
 |
There is an unprecedented outrage in India over the IPL Cheerleaders. The outrage has been created by both the players and politicians. Shahid afridi said that the skimpily dressed cheerleaders are distracting the batsmen. Afridi went on to say that cricket does not need cheerleders as cricket is an entertainment itself. Fair point there. |
| Next Rahul Dravid said that IPL cricket should be called bikini cricket because of the cheerleaders present in IPL. | |
| On the political front the moral brigade are saying that the cheerleaders are against our culture. The issue was first discussed in the assmebly of maharastra and then in bengal. However right now it looks more like talk only. I doubt if any substantial action shall be taken against the cheerleaders despite claims to the contrary. | |
| While we claim to be more respectful to the women folk, our actions speak otherwise. The cheerleaders who have performed all over the world feel thretened by the nature and magnitude of the comments people pass here. Recently, in a match played in Jaipur, the spectators passed some lewd comments on cheerleaders. A cheerleader from Uzbekistan told a national newspaper, “Wherever we go, we do expect people to pass lewd remarks, but I’m shocked by the nature and magnitude of the comments people pass here. Be it a 70 year old man or a 15 year old boy, they all ogle us and make amorous advances. I feel very threatened. We are here to entertain them, to add a bit of glamour to the game, but we are living in constant fear.” | |
May be it is time that we learnt to behave in a more mature manner and accept that we live in an age where there is no dearth of sources of vulgar content for anyone who may want to watch it. Be it internet or simple porn videos, even school kids have access to them. And politicians will do well to remeber that the voters have already realized this. So no amount of hard talk will not result in any gain in the vote bank.
| Topics: News | Email This
|
|
Inspite of the disappointing start to IPL yesterday, I have decided to cover the IPL series on this blog. Following is the final scorecard of the match between Kolkata Knight Riders and Bangalore Royal Challengers.
Scoreboard
Kolkata Knight Riders:
Sourav Ganguly c Kallis b Khan 10
Brendan McCullum not out 158
Ricky Ponting c Kumar b Kallis 20
David Hussey c White b Noffke 12
Mohammed Hafeez not out 5
Extras: (b 4, lb 4, w 9) 17
Total: (for 3 wickets in 20 overs) 222
Bowling:
Praveen Kumar 4 0 38 0 (1w)
Zaheer Khan 4 0 38 1
Ashley Noffke 4 0 40 1 (1w)
Jacques Kallis 4 0 48 1 (1w)
Sunil Joshi 3 0 26 0
Cameron White 1 0 24 0 (1w)
Bangalore Royal Challengers:
Rahul Dravid b Sharma 2
Wasim Jaffer c Ponting b Dinda 6
Virat Kohli b Dinda 1
Jacques Kallis c Kartik b Agarkar 8
Cameron White c Saha b Agarkar 6
Mark Boucher c Kartik b Ganguly 7
Balachandra Akhil c Ponting b Agarkar 0
Ashley Noffke run out (Agarkar/Saha) 9
Praveen Kumar not out 18
Zaheer Khan b Ganguly 3
Sunil Joshi c McCullum b Shukla 3
Extras: (lb 8, w 11) 19
Total: (all out in 15.1 overs) 82
Bowling:
Ashok Dinda 3 0 9 2 (2w)
Ishant Sharma 3 0 7 1 (1w)
Ajit Agarkar 4 0 25 3 (4w)
Sourav Ganguly 4 0 21 2 (1w)
Laxmi Ratan Shukla 1.1 0 12 1
| Topics: News | Email This
|
|
Hitwise has released the latest numbers for the search engine market. Google reaches an all time high with 67.25% market share. Microsoft and yahoo continue their downward movement. Ask.com was the only other major search engine to gain market share.
Domain Mar.-08 Feb.-08 Mar.-07
www.google.com 67.25% 66.44% 64.13%
search.yahoo.com 20.29% 20.59% 21.26%
search.msn.com 6.65% 6.95% 9.01%
www.ask.com 4.09% 4.16% 3.48%
The traffic data for video sites showed that youtube dominates the video makrte completely with 73% market share. If you add 4% market share enjoyed by google video then google has a 77% market share in video.
| Topics: Internet, News | Email This
|
|
After almost 6 months of work by the entire wordpress community and some delayed release deadlines, wordpress 2.5 got released. you can download it here
Some important features of wordpress 2.5 are
Table layout has not been changed in this release, so many plugins are expected to work fine with 2.5.
Few-click plugin upgrades — if the plugins you use are part of the plugin directory then wordpress automatically downloads and installs the upgrade for you.
Friendlier visual post editor — The editor doesn’t mess with your code anymore. version 3.0 of TinyMCE is used, which means better compatibility with Safari, and we’ve paid particular attention this release to its integration and interaction with complex HTML.
Concurrent editing protection if you use a multi-author blogs, you might have been frustrated if you ever tried to edit a post while someone was already editing it, and your auto-saves kept overwriting each other. Now if you open a post that someone else is editing, WordPress magically locks it and prevents you from saving until the other person is done.
Read more about the features here
| Topics: News, Tips and Tricks, Wordpress | Email This
|
|
Google Summer of Code 2008 is on! Google Summer of Code is a program that offers students stipends to write code for various open source projects. The programme which aims to Get more open source code created and released and Inspire young developers to begin participating in open source development, is in its fourth year.
Even though this is not a recruitment programme, Google will use the results of the program to help identify potential recruits.
To be eligible to apply to the programme you must be enrolled as a full-time or part-time student. You must also be eligible to work in the country in which you’ll reside throughout the duration of the program, e.g. if you are in the United States on an F-1 visa, you are welcome to apply to Google Summer of Code as long as you have U.S. work authorization.
The student application period begins Monday, March 24, 2008, and ends Monday, March 31st. You can find more details at Google’s faq page
| Topics: News | Email This
|
|
Have you ever felt that you have a killer idea, but you are not able to work on it due to lack of funding. And you think that writing business plans is not worth your time. Well here is a good news. You do NOT need a business plan to get funded.
Y Combinator is now accepting applications for the summer 2008 funding cycle. Here is what they say about their way of evaluating investment ideas.
How do we choose who to fund? The people in your group are what matter most to us. We look for brains, motivation, and a sense of design. Experience is helpful but not critical.
Your idea is important too, but mainly as evidence that you can have good ideas. Most successful startups change their idea substantially.
The best part comes towards the end.
We don’t expect you to have a formal business plan yet. All you have to do is fill out our application.
To know why I am so excited about this, look at the past companies they have funded.
Reddit, Loopt, ClickFacts, TextPayMe, Snipshot, Inkling, Flagr, Wufoo, YouOS, LikeBetter, Thinkature, JamGlue, Shoutfit, Scribd, Weebly, Virtualmin, Buxfer, Octopart, Heysan, Justin.TV, I’m In Like With You, SocialMoth, Xobni, Versionate, Adpinion, Anywhere.FM, Fuzzwich, Bountii, Auctomatic, Disqus, Draftmix, Webmynd, RescueTime, Reble, Heroku, Tipjoy, AddHer, and 8AWeek. It can not get better than this.
| Topics: Entrepreneurship, Make Money, News, VC | Email This
|
|
A consortium of six international companies that includes Google and Bharti have executed agreements to build a high–bandwidth subsea fiber optic cable linking the United States and Japan. The construction of the new Trans–Pacific infrastructure will cost an estimated US$300 million.
The initial capacity is targeted to be available in the first quarter of 2010. It is expected to address broadband demand by providing much needed capacity to sustain the unprecedented growth in data and Internet traffic between Asia and the United States.
I find the news significant for 3 reasons
| Topics: News | Email This
|
|
Pakistan’s government has banned access to the video-clip website YouTube because of anti-Islamic movies posted on the site, an official said yesterday.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority told the country’s 70 internet service providers that the popular website would be blocked until further notice.
However The News was speculating that the youtube.com blackout was connected to some other videos that had been uploaded to the site on Thursday. These videos implicated a certain political party in “election rigging” and showed party activists stamping ballot papers en masse.
Results from Google News Here
| Topics: News | Email This
|
|
Yahoo’s board and users may not like microsoft. But yahoo’s shareholders love microsoft for sure. Since yahoo’s board has rejected microsoft’s offer, shareholders are starting to file case against yahoo.
Why are the shareholders so upset?
Before microsoft made the offer, yahoo’s shares were trading at 19$. So the 31$ offer by microsoft is almost 60% premium on the market price. More importantly yahoo has lot of cash on its balance sheet. The cash is equivalent to 12$ per share.
Now the market price of a share (19$) = cash on balance sheet (12$) + value of its operations. So the value of yahoo’s operations was only 7$. Since no one pays a premium for cash, you can safely assume that microsoft is offering 19$ per share for yahoo’s operations. That is almost 200% premium over the last market price. Is it any wonder that yahoo’s shareholders are so upset?
| Topics: News | Email This
|
|
First of all I was thinking of a name for the MS Yahoo deal. Micro-ahoo doesn’t sound too good. Please suggest some creative names…Will be fun.
Anyways the Question is where does the deal lead us? How’s it gonna effect the today’s win-win situation of the Internet? Some say that MS has in a way accepted that it can’t beat Google on its own that’s why it needs Yahoo’s support. Now the question arises …even if MS accepts it’s defeat from Google, will it be able to defeat Google after the merger?
Experts say that the deal will be harmful for MS itself. Most of the employees at Yahoo and MS also are not happy with the deal. Another thing is that Yahoo’s servers mostly run on Linux…(need I say more?)
We have all seen that in recent times MS has been a failure in most of the things. Vista is a failure. Zune is a failure. MS Office 2007 is a failure. MSN live is a failure. Surface was a hype when launched and is just lost now somewhere in News archives. Also Bill Gates is no more the CEO. All this suggests that
MS is going to do something wrong again.
But I have great faith in Steve Ballmer’s abilities. Is he playing some unthinkable game?
Read the post above by Sita Sir. You will also believe in Ballmer’s abilities.
Fingers crossed…that’s all I can say.
| Topics: Entrepreneurship, Internet, News, Uncategorized | Email This
|
|
Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux Operating System, thinks that OS X Leopard is worse than Windows Vista in some aspects.
Geek enough to be interested?
| Topics: Blogs, Entrepreneurship, News | Email This
|
|
