Vimeo?s Lodwick Leaves In a Puff of Smoke
November 30, 2007
I have been writing about Vimeo on joostteam.com during the past month. Mashable is publishing the following news about the departure of Jakob Lodwich from Vimeo:
Founder of and public face on Vimeo Jakob Lodwick has announced on his blog that he’s leaving IAC/Connected Ventures/College Humor. The announcement, which was accompanied by what can only be described as what looks like a heroic hit from a bong, was:
“As of an hour ago, I am no longer affiliated with IAC/InterActiveCorp/Connected Ventures/Vimeo. No hard feelings! Goodbye to everyone at CV; you are wonderful and I will miss you.”
This comes after recent news that Vimeo co-founder Zach Klein has also left the company. Klein recently made headlines as he was being publicly courted by MySpace to give the place a good sprucing up. Lodwick’s leaving of the company is abrupt and unexpected given his very public love adulation of the company at his personal tumblog.
Vimeo is an embedded video website, much like YouTube, with a much nicer look and feel and support for HD video. Vimeo and the related ventures also have close ties to the organization built up around Tumblr.
Valley Wag is propagating a rumor that Lodwick might have been fired, although there are no public confirmations from either Vimeo nor Lodwick to affirm or discredit this. As of present, Lodwick could not be reached for comment, as he’s “turned off [his] cell phone for the evening and catch up with everyone later!”
Xbox 360 Fall Update includes FOF social networking features
November 27, 2007
The Xbox 360 Fall Dashboard Update will be upon us on December 4, and Microsoft has started releasing details about what we can expect from the patch. Since Xbox Live has always been about the social experience of online play, the newest feature is another step in that direction: the update will allow you to browse the friends list of your friends, so you can see if you need to play with any friends of your friends. Very MySpace.
The update will make your friends list available on the default setting, but you can change it to allow the following options for people looking at your friends:
- Everyone (only available to members 18 and older)
- Friends only (available to members 13 and older)
- Blocked (available to all members, and automatic for anyone under the age of 13)
I try to keep a low profile online, and I’m already creeped out by people watching what I play and for how long, so having people look me up and scan my friends is an odd idea. I hope the word gets out about how to disable this feature; I have a feeling a lot of people will have their friends list remain public without realizing it.
This is an interesting move for Microsoft and could turn Xbox Live into more of a social networking site. It would also be nice if Microsoft upped the friend limit while they’re tinkering; 100 people may sound like enough people, but if you have a regular gaming habit, you can hit the limit quite easily.
Microsoft will face online fight on core software
November 22, 2007
The co-founder of Hotmail, the web-based e-mail service bought by Microsoft for $400 million a decade ago, is challenging the American software giant’s core $20 billion (£9.7 billion) office desktop business.
Yesterday Sabeer Bhatia released a free online rival to the bestselling Office suite of applications that will allow users to view, share and edit documents from any computer.
The Indian-born Stanford graduate said that Live Documents would pose a “significant” challenge to Microsoft’s propriety software business, which eventually would be made redundant by the evolving internet applications industry. Office, bundling the Word word-processing, Excel spreadsheet and PowerPoint presentation tools, accounted for a third of Microsoft’s total revenues last year. By 2010, people will not be buying software,” Mr Bhatia said. “This is a significant challenge to a proportion of Microsoft’s revenues.”
Designed to help consumers avoid expensive upgrades and to foster collaboration on a secure internet platform, Live Documents matches features found in Office 2007, the most recent version. Microsoft itself was instrumental in setting the precedent. Most of Office’s sales are to companies buying licences in volume; about 40 per cent come from the sale of packaged software.
Source timesonline.co.uk
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Intel jabs bruised AMD with 12 new Xeons and desktop dynamo
November 11, 2007
Normally, Intel tries to keep the launch date of a new chip or chip family secret for as long as possible. Intel’s pride around the Penryn chips stems from a number of factors, but it’s particularly pleased with one item - the new materials used to construct transistor gates. Even the mainstream press has latched onto Intel’s work. Beyond the materials change, Intel is pumping out the Penryn chips on a 45nm manufacturing process, beating its major rivals to this milestone by quite a margin.
As of Nov. 12, Intel will have 12 new quad-core versions of its Xeon server chip available in the Penryn family, which will ship as the Xeon 5400 Series products. Next month, Intel will ship three new dual-core versions of Xeon under the 5200 Series brand.
During the first quarter of 2008, Intel plans to roll out more dual- and quad-core desktop chips along with Core 2 Extreme and Core 2 Duo parts for notebooks.
The fresh 45nm chips shipping in Nov. range in price from $177 to $1,279 in volume. The Core 2 Extreme QX9650 will cost $999 in volume.
Next year, Intel will begin rolling out more 45nm chips - "Nehalem" - that rely on a revamped microarchitecture that includes integrated memory controllers and high-speed interconnect.
Source TheRegister
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