Recently in E-Business Category

There's a rather frightening article in the Washington Post today about how often the average person is tracked, recorded, identified and photographed during the average day. It shouldn't be scary...after all, we all know these technologies exist, and where those data go, but when you put them all together, it forms a picture better suited to the kind of dystopia portrayed in "1984" or "Blade Runner".

My only real solace is that, after dealing with consumer companies and the government for so long, I suspect that few of the organizations that keep this information are competent enough to actually use it properly.

I hope.

Here's the article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/15/AR2007011501304.html

TES

Did you read about the resignation of Home Depot's CEO, Robert Nardelli today? It appears that activist shareholders are being pesky and want to know why Home Depot sends all its profits home in ridiculous levels of executive pay while stock prices are flagging. So...to quell those ludicrous executive pay accusations, the company is letting Nardelli walk with essentially $210 million dollars. The New York Times reports that, "Under an agreement with the company, Mr. Nardelli will receive a severance payment of about $210 million, an amount that includes cash, the acceleration of unvested stock awards and options, bonus payments and incentive awards and various benefit programs. In return, Mr. Nardelli has agreed not to compete with the company for at least a year."

So he can't work in the home improvement field for at least a year! Oh no! What will he do for grocery money when the $210 million runs out??

TES

Here's an article from Canada's Globe & Mail about online buying behavior in Canada, which lags behind U.S. online purchasing. The article points out the "chicken and egg" conundrum that many Canadian retailers don't offer good online purchasing services because Canadians aren't buying. But of course...Canadians won't buy if services are not being offered.

One comment on the article posits that in the U.S., no tax is charged on most Internet purchases, which makes paying shipping costs more palatable, but that Canadians must pay both tax and shipping on online purchases.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20061221.wretaill1221/BNStory/Technology/home

TES

It seems that Google would like to do for space what it has done for maps. Who does a company turn to as a partner when it wants to make all manner of space information available to the general public? NASA, of course.

The Financial Times (and many other media outlets) have reported that, "Nasa’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley on Monday announced a “Space Act Agreement” with Google that would include collaboration on large-scale data management and massively distributed computing as well as focusing on making the most useful of Nasa’s information available over the Internet."

What kind of information would be available? Only the coolest stuff in the world (said she, a life-long science fiction geek). There are apparently plans afoot for, among things, real-time weather visualization and forecasting, high-resolution 3-D maps of the moon and Mars and real-time tracking of the International Space Station and the space shuttle.

The full article is here.

TES

A U.S. government-commissioned study had claimed to have discovered that, based on search engine indexing, the Internet is comprised of one percent porn. As the conventional wisdom is that the Internet is 99 percent junk and one percent useful content (news sites, TMCnet, newspapers, retail Web sites, scholarly research, etc.) what's the other 98 percent of drivel? Teenagers' MySpace pages? Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan fiction? Canadian drug sites for Viagra (or should that be V!@GRA!!!) and snake oil pills? Tell-all sites devoted to celebrity airheads like Paris Hilton? And with regards to the latter, why do we need tell-all tabloid journalism to tell all about people who are clearly desperate to tell all about themselves to anyone who will listen anyway?

View the full article here: http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/internet/11/15/internet.blocking.ap/index.html

MSNBC's Bob Sullivan reports today that phishing is starting to change from a profitable cottage industry into a big business. Perhaps the credit card companies should start putting easy-to-read inserts into consumers' bills explaining what phishing is and how not to fall prey to it?

http://redtape.msnbc.com/

TES

Investors waiting for good news are going to have to wait a little longer, the company revealed today in a press conference. Instead of a boost, says the company, 3Q results are going to look like more of a slump: http://www.fool.com/News/mft/2006/mft06091923.htm

Between coups and riots in foreign countries, I think the general weather forecast for the next few days, market-wise, is going to be mostly cloudy with a chance of rain.

TES

How many misfortunes of its own making can a company reasonably sort through per quarter? We'll soon find out, since Dell is in the news again today in a negative light. The business news this Monday is highlighting new troubles the PC company is having with the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC). Dell is putting off releasing its second quarter reports after the SEC has raised questions about, among other things, Dell's accruals, reserves and other balance sheet items. According to statements made by Dell, these "questions" may ultimately end up affecting previously reported results.

Dell has also been in the news lately after over four million laptop batteries were recalled because of incidences of the batteries actually bursting into flames. Additionally, the company has of late been all but christened the Poster Child for bad customer service, an unsavory distinction usually reserved for cable and wireless companies.

The SEC probe was, in fact, launched over a year ago, but Dell has only recently made the issue public, perhaps unwilling to bring yet another negative issue to the forefront.

TES

As a follow-up to Rich Tehrani's celebrity-enhanced blog about hot laptops, I thought I'd post a celebrity-enhanced blog about cool laptops.

Did you know that actor Dean Haglund of "X-Files" fame (he played Richard Langly, one of the trio of "Lone Gunmen") invented a gadget called the ChillPak, an item designed to rest under a laptop to keep both the computer and the user cool? (Chilling the processor allows it to work faster than cooling from its less-efficient fan.)

And though it's not mentioned on the Web site, some medical studies have indicated that the heat from a laptop does no favors to a man's...err...reproduction equipment.

Haglund has a company called "Geek Chic" to market the invention.

Cool, huh?

TES

If you're fans of the artists involved and you have an iPod, you already know who they are: the Beatles, Radiohead, Led Zeppelin and many others.

They are holdouts who refuse to allow their music onto Apple's wildly popular iTunes Web site for fan downloads at .99 cents per song. While I agree with many who say they cannot hold out forever if they don't want to be left behind by the reality that is digital music delivery today, I can sympathize with their reasons.

Pop music has always been taken one sip at a time (that's all most people over 18 can frankly tolerate, I think). But serious Rock n' Roll, particularly the 1970s variety, belongs to the genre called "album" rock. Remember when albums were works of art meant to be taken as a unit? (And remember when the cover art was big enough to see?) Think Pink Floyd's "Dark Side Of The Moon" or Rush's "Moving Pictures" or pretty much any album ever put forth by Emerson, Lake and Palmer. "Prog" rock albums were more than a series of songs...they were musical sagas. I understand that the artists wish the songs weren't plucked singly off iTunes and played just after "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" and just before the "Spongebob Squarepants" theme on somebody's "family car" CD collection, but let's face it...that's been happening for decades on FM radio anyway.

Some musicians, such as Bob Seger, are making whole albums available on download sites, with a caveat...the album must be bought in its entirety.

While I wish such artists well, I wonder if they aren't needlessly shackling themselves today only to find they have to give in down the road. I'm glad they don't need the money, but what if I really, really need Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" at the last minute for the next road trip I take? It's one of the best "driving songs" ever written.

TES