The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is Alan Jackson's nicely understated gospel album "Precious Memories":

 

Tel Aviv-based Meezoog.com (Beta) will be launched this week as what company officials are calling "the first trust network for dating."

 

The idea, according to the Meezoogers, is to let singles "find their matches in a safer environment, with some help from their family and friends." Yes, the global online village yenta will be listening in, so make nice.

 

Meezoog uses technology which company officials say "reflects real-life connections on the Net and to measure social trust between people." Sort of like Facebook's "Mutual Friends" and "People You May Know" features mashed up to a whole new level.  

 

The company also claims to be "the first social network to employ a profound technology to address the usage of fake identities and profiles. Unlike prevailing approaches, it claims to imitate the societal way people build their trust with other people." Company officials explain that this means Meezoog's "social trust," or "social proximity," reflects "people's relationships in the real world and the ways in which they are connected to each other."

 

The nut seems to be that while Meezoog aims at single individuals, it also includes family and friends that act as "introducers" and vouch for their dear ones. Singles looking for matches get the search results organized in order of "social proximity," where people who are more socially trusted appear first: "In every profile, a social proximity gauge indicates the trust rank between the two people as well as the best human paths that link them," company officials say.

 

First Coffee supposes you have to see this in action to appreciate it, but the overall concept sure sounds an awful lot like your friends setting you up, with your family getting their two cents in.

 

Today Meezoog's Social Layer includes Facebook and Meezoog.com, and will soon include additional platforms and social sites such as OpenSocial, according to the Meezoogers, and others. Moreover, instead of referring to all connections as "friends," in a bit of welcome clarity Meezoog specifies and embeds the nature of relationship: "teacher," "close friend," "uncle," and specifies both how long you've known the person and how often you're in communication.

 

Meezoog was founded in 2007 with a grant from the Israeli Chief Scientist Office, and raised over $300,000 from private investors. Among the company founders are Hannan Shulman, formerly from the CTO office of SAP.

...

 

Almost 130 million Americans plan to rely on loyalty programs for rewards and discounts when shopping for gifts this Christmas season, according to a recent Ipsos Public Affairs/SoundBite Communications poll.

 

The survey, conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs and SoundBite Communications, was a telephone survey with a random sample of 1,000 Americans ages 18 and older, and has a margin of error of +/- 3.1 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.

 

And for "Americans," read "women." The poll found that "many men will not take advantage of sales, deals and other ways to curb spending," while 12 million Americans would spend more on Christmas-related expenses if they had more credit.

 

Sixty-two percent of respondents, about 130 million Americans, plan to shop with particular retailers to take advantage of their loyalty programs, such as frequent shopper rewards, coupons or discounts, the poll found: "Twenty-three percent plan to do all or most of their Christmas shopping where they can take advantage of these programs."

 

Loyalty programs are found to be more popular with parents with children under 18 and adults under 55, and the study found, unsurprisingly to anyone who is one, that "parents are the top bargain hunters."

 

But when it comes to coupons and deals, nearly 35 percent of men, after making the necessary and appropriate time-cost tradeoffs, say they do not plan to look for deals more than they did last Christmas shopping season. Men do not pay attention to deals like women do, with women being much more likely than men to look for more deals and coupons prior to making a purchase this year (77 percent vs. 65 percent), the study found.

 

First Coffee invites you to posit whatever reasons you want for this discrepancy, but don't overlook the fact that men are known to regard time spent/wasted shopping as time which could have been put to more productive use, as they do not value the shopping experience itself as much as women tend to do.

 

And hey - be grateful we went shopping at all. I mean, there was a game on TV, y'know.

...

 

Now for some local news, as First Coffee is currently living in northern Aotearoa: New Zealand-based meat processor and exporter Alliance Group has expanded its 30-year relationship with Unisys to become, according to the Alliancers, "the first organization in the world to install Unisys's recently-released ES7000 Model 7405R Enterprise Server."

 

Under the terms of the agreement, Unisys will supply and install two ES7000 Model 7405R servers and two EMC CX3 Storage Area Networks, and the new servers will be used to replicate the Microsoft applications hosted at Alliance Group's production site to its disaster recovery site.

 

The Alliancers say this will "help create business continuity for the company's Microsoft Windows and Novell Netware environments."

"The Unisys ES7000 Model 7405R servers will support mission-critical applications, including our e-mail, file and printer servers, along with Web servers that manage customer access to company information," said Kevin McCrone, chief information officer, Alliance Group.

 

Alliance Group is a farmer-owned co-operative based in New Zealand that operates nine processing centers nationally and exports to approximately 65 countries. The company produces high-quality meat products from lamb, sheep, cattle and deer, raised by its shareholders using free-range farming practices.

 

It is also one of New Zealand's largest exporters of wool, pelts, hides, casings, meal and tallow.

The new servers complement the Unisys ClearPath mainframes on which Alliance Group runs enterprise-class solutions. The ES7000 Model 7405R can support multiple operating environments, including Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and 2003 Datacentre, Enterprise and Standard Editions; Microsoft Virtual Server; Red Hat Enterprise Linux; SUSE Linux Enterprise Server; and Sun Microsystems Solaris 10.

...

 

Always nice to learn a new wordoid: A recent national survey commissioned by Verizon of 1,026 adults found that 57 percent  plan to "spend more time at home," turning to their television instead of events outside the home.

 

Evidently we have an ersatz word nowadays for staying in to watch TV: Enterstayment. No, that's not getting added to the SpellCheck dictionary.

 

Granted digital all-fiber-optic networks have, as Verizon officials are quick to point out, broadened the options available to those staying in. Why, nowadays families can argue about whether the kids get to play Xbox or the parents get to watch TV, and there are far more TV channels to argue about watching as well.

 

"Staying at home no longer means your entertainment options are limited," said Shruti Joshi, director of marketing for Verizon, noting that "over the last two months, we see strong growth in FiOS TV video-on-demand sales."

 

FiOS TV allows consumers to select from more than 400 total channels - think of the arguments possible just there alone! - and a video-on-demand library with more than 11,000 titles per month, including 1,000 high-definition titles. In addition, FiOS TV offers interactive features such as one-touch access to news headlines and - First Coffee swears he is not making this up, this is a direct quote - "sports action like fantasy football."

 

Verizon's Home Media DVR allows consumers to view up to three separately recorded programs simultaneously on different sets; pause recorded programming on one set then continue watching it on another; and remotely program and manage the DVR from the Web, to provide ahead of time for any lacunae in entertainment options at a future date.

 

Take that, cable TV. Why, those poor families with just cable TV at home might have to actually play games and talk with each other, or suffer some other gruesome fate.

 

Verizon officials say retailers are expected to announce deep price cuts in high-end, HD television sets this Christmas season. While according to the Verizon-commissioned survey 62 percent of adults say they currently own an HD TV, 16 percent of this group say they would "definitely" or "probably" purchase another before the end of the year.

 

"Whether consumers have an HD TV or not, Verizon's FiOS TV allows families to have a great TV-watching experience every night," Joshi said. "FiOS brings stunning picture-and-sound quality, more and more high-definition channels and video-on-demand choices, and exciting interactive features into a consumer's living room -- and for less than it costs to take the family to the movies a couple of times each month."

 

Factoring in the cost of the HDTV itself, however, it takes... let's see, carry the five... Train A going west at 150 miles per hour... "a long time" to make back what one would pay to take the family to the movies - popcorn included.

 

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