Usually, we all look forward to the holidays as a time of cheer, relaxation and endless James Bond marathons on TV.
But this year, with global economies in shambles and daily reports of massive layoffs, your all-you-can-watch $50 monthly cable TV service is looking excessive. And forget upgrading to a fancier digital video recorder or a new jumbo HDTV.
Fortunately, there are now myriad ways for you to get your weekly dose of House without cable or even a TV. Just use your laptop to access online video repositories like Hulu.com, where you can watch most Fox and NBC programs for free 12 hours after they air.
You can also go directly to TV network sites. On ABC.com, you can find shows like Ugly Betty and Desperate Housewives streamed free–often in high definition. CBS (nyse: CBS - news - people ) is offering its shows with social chat features, and most other programs can be picked up a la carte from Amazon.com (nasdaq: AMZN - news - people ) or iTunes. Finally, you can also use your Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 to stream content…
Read it at Forbes
Facebook CFO Gideon Yu is still looking for funding at the $15 billion valuation Microsoft set purchasing 1.6% of the company for $240 million in the company in Fall 2007*, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told TechCrunch:
[Zuckerberg] confirmed that Facebook’s $15 billion valuation round was still open and that CFO Gideon Yu was open to new investors at that price. But he denied that Facebook was pitching for new money at a lower valuation. ‘We’re not actively going around trying to raise money from a lot of different people. It’s more just a follow on to that [previous round].’
Considering Facebook had to cancel an employee stock sale program because it couldn’t find buyers for its employees’ shares at a $4 billion valuation, Yu’s quest to keep the $15 billion round open seems ambitious if not downright quixotic as he travels to locations as remote as Dubai…
Read it at CNN
Commercial open-source CRM (customer relationship management) vendor SugarCRM said Monday it will give customers the ability to plug in feeds from third-party data sources like the business social-networking site LinkedIn.
The new “Cloud Connectors” feature is part of the vendor’s new SugarCRM 5.2 release, which will be available worldwide this month.
While users could obviously tap such third-party services separately, SugarCRM created the new integration capability because it keeps users in a CRM context, as well as makes the process more convenient and efficient, said Martin Schneider, director of product marketing.
If you’re logging into third-party sites “while you’re on the phone with someone, you’re going to be hemming and hawing and you’re not going to have it at your fingertips,” he said. “The idea is to drive adoption and keep people in one space, but also give them unfettered access to bringing content into the CRM system.”…
Read it at PCWorld
Microsoft has released an early version of an open-source content management platform that developers can use to build sophisticated blogs or large Web sites.
Called Oxite, its creators describe it as a standards-compliant and highly extensible content management platform. They built it not because there is a need for another blog engine, but because they were building the MIX Online site for Web designers and wanted to offer an example of a use for ASP.NET MVC, according to the Oxite Web site.
ASP.NET MVC lets developers use ASP.NET to build Web applications using an architecture called model-view-controller. Microsoft released a preview of the ASP.NET MVC framework, designed to make it easier for developers to test applications, late last year…
Read it at PCWorld
A new virus is spreading through Facebook. The Koobface — a worm designed specifically to spread over social-networking sites — is blasting spam messages out to Facebook members. The motive is to enable hijacking and click fraud.
The messages offer subject lines like “You look so funny on our new video” and offer a link to a video site that pretends to have a movie clip. When the user follows the link, they are redirected to one of many different compromised hosts, according to McAfee Avert Labs. Finally, the user is urged to download or open a file named flash_player.exe. That file is a new Koobface variant…
Read it at NewsFactor
Police have prohibited Cuba’s most prominent blogger from attending an independent cyber-workshop and warned that her activities ran afoul of the law, her husband said Friday.
Yoani Sanchez and husband and fellow blogger Reynaldo Escobar were summoned separately Wednesday to a police station near their apartment in Havana’s Vedado district and reprimanded, Escobar said in a telephone interview.
Authorities told the couple they could not travel to the western province of Pinar del Rio for a two-day blogger’s workshop scheduled to begin Friday night.
“We aren’t attending the inauguration of the workshop, which has not been suspended. We’ve just changed the dynamic of how we are meeting,” said Escobar, without elaborating.
An account of the reprimand appears on Sanchez’s blog, “Generacion Y.” The site was blocked to Internet users on the island Friday…
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Tough economic conditions could slow expansion at Google Inc.’s server farm in the North Carolina foothills, the company said in declining a sliver of a $260 million state incentive package.
The Silicon Valley Internet giant never finalized a deal by which it would recoup up to $4.8 million in state taxes if it met job-creation and other targets at the Lenoir facility. In a letter Thursday, a company attorney told a state incentives committee that it no longer wants the money or the commitments that would go with it.
Google never received any of the money under the 12-year Job Development Investment Grant.
While Google “remains pleased and committed to its Lenoir operations,” economic conditions make it too difficult to be sure the $600 million data center complex will expand as fast as previously thought, the letter said…
Read it at Yahoo!
The first decade of the 21st century has brought us a series of major economic and geopolitical shocks: the dot-com bust, the Sept. 11 attacks on New York, the financial crisis led by the subprime meltdown, and just last week, a fresh bout of terrorist attacks in Mumbai that threatens to destabilize the very significant and growing economy of India.
The most worrisome implication of these successive events is that the world will tailspin into a fear psychosis and all the drivers of progress and prosperity–innovation, entrepreneurship, consumer confidence and reform–will get paralyzed…
Read it at Forbes
Social networking company Facebook is delaying a previously announced plan to let employees sell part of their stocks, due to difficult global economy, the Wall Street Journal said.
In an email to employees on Thursday Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said the stock sale plan, which was proposed in August, was not proceeding as scheduled, the report said.
“After carefully considering the current environment, we’ve decided to establish an open-ended time table for an employee stock sale program,” the newspaper quoted the email as saying.
The privately-held company plans to revisit whether to go ahead based on market conditions, the Journal said citing a person familiar with the matter…
Read it at Yahoo!
The group of 20 young, fresh-faced computer programmers in jeans and polo shirts embossed with the company logo could have been with any Silicon Valley startup. But the team, lined up in New Delhi in July 2007 for a portrait taken by a news photographer, work for a Swiss company called Nivio, which employs more than 85% of its engineers and designers in India. The headline over the photo crows: “Indians invented world’s first Windows-based online desktop.”
Nivio is one of 34 companies chosen this year by the Geneva-based World Economic Forum to be among its 2009 Technology Pioneers—companies offering new technologies or business models that could advance the global economy and positively affect peoples’ lives. It’s a perfect example of how the technology business is evolving…
Read it at BusinessWeek
