India has become the next big battle ground for global mobile giants. Vodafone is said to be mulling a $15 billion bid for local mobile carrier, Hutch Essar. Not quite “3” of Europe, but still a big player in the local market. Hutchinson Whampoa, the corporate parent of “3” owns 67% of Hutch Essar, the number four mobile carrier in India.

Filed under: Design, Internet, Utilities, Productivity, Commercial, Freeware

By Brady Forrest

Amazon's Mechanical Turk is great as artificial, artificial intelligence. It is perfectly designed to facilitate humans (or Turkers) transcribing podcasts, fixing MP3 metadata, and picking the best picture of a storefront. I am now beginning to think that it is also a method for bootstrapping community on a website. It was Amazon's release of UnSpun that got me thinking along this way.

Technorati Tags: ugc, user generated content, video, viral marketing, viral videos, youtube...

For some time now I have been impressed with the analysis of Philip Howard of Bloor, and today he came out with another well-written article that is long overdue:

http://www.it-director.com/technology/applications/content.php?cid=9087

Getting ready to hit the road for holiday break. Wanted to get an update out before everyone is home for the holiday. We've 3 days left, so keep an eye out over the weekend...   So for Friday, the 9th day of Christmas, we're going to address monitoring of SQL query performance. I'm not talking about jobs running for 2 or 3 minutes, I am talking about monitoring SQL queries where performance issues can be measured in seconds. In N-tier e-commerce environments, I've seen some huge SQL databases where most of the activity boils down to a small number (less than 5-10) of high traffic tables. So it's really all about measuring performance in high traffic areas to ensure contention isn't impacting customer activity.   And it's not always MS SQL on the back end, so it would be nice to query other RDBMS as well. Here's a script we use to measure and alert on query latency for MS SQL databases, and by changing the query string, on other database platforms (we currently use a modified version of this for measuring query performance on a Progress database hosted on Unix - another fine example of MOM extensibility).   DESCRIPTION: This script will execute 1) query against a remote database server, 2) raise an alert when query response exceeds a user 3) charts query performance in a MOM performance object

PARAMETERS:

It seems that in other parts of the world, where IP communications basically is creating new markets and driving economic growth that Video Communications is growing.

I was chatting with fellow ESG'er and avid HDS proponent Tony Asaro about an unrelated matter - how HDS has really been one of the few to take advantage of the V word - they use it as a differentiator on their big Tagma USP gear and it's getting them deals.  People aren't buying it just for the virtualization - but with all (perceived) things being equal, folks would rather have the next next thing than not.  Makes sense.

This will likely be the last news post until after Christmas. Here’s what’s caught my attention today.

Avinash Kaushik discusses the merits of javascript analytics over web log files. Robert Scoble has re-discovered banner ads. He explains how Texas Instruments’ banner ads managed to catch his attention.Mashable is reporting LinkedIn has secured new funding which suggests the company has a $250 million value.Social media expert, Neil Patel, explains why some SEO web sites are being banned by Digg. Digg just doesn’t like SEO. Maybe the social bookmark site is receiving cash incentives from Did-It.Is MSN inflating the conversion data at adCenter? Search Engine Roundtable takes a look.Wengo is offering an embedded flash player for bloggers wishing to share their good looks via their web cam.Local search is evolving. The WSJ reveals how new search start-ups allow you to search stock inventory of local stores via your cell phone.

Pilgrim Partners: Recover Lost Files - Recover files & partitions accidentally deleted on Windows XP/2000

The technical world in which we actually work is relatively free of contest and struggle: you don't have to arm-wrestle anyone to load up your copy of Word or argue for the right to check your email (though our partners — no, the other kind — if we have them, might prove me wrong). But beneath this serene "desktop" there's continual conflict.

Richard Kugele of Needham & Company, issued his end of year/forward view of the Storage Industry this AM. I thought I would share it around.Disk Drive Industry Update: Volume 372006 Review and 2007 Outlook The HDD industry entered 2006 full of optimism following Seagate’s announcement that it would acquire Maxtor.

EMC needs to fire thousands of folks. I think maybe 5,000 or more. I realize this isn't a nice holiday thought, but it is true. They have too many, which is natural due to all the acquisitions, but it has...

Steve Yegge is a great writer. The latestfrom Stevie's Blog Rants proves it. Take 15 minutes and readit.

Tags: programming

Andrew Goodman with the best year-end recap so far: a month-by-month survey of the most surpising web milestones of 2006.

Fred Wilson experiments with RSS ad distribution in feeds.

I note, via Jackie, that Mohamed Al Fayed, owner of Harrods, has a blog. I'm surprised that it took such a relentless self-publicist so long to get on the bandwagon. (And no, I still haven't forgiven him for zombifying Punch). Technorati Tags: blogging, blogs, harrods, mohammed Al Fayed...

By now you’re probably aware of a press release earlier this month proclaiming “Holiday Decorations Can Crate Major Wi-Wi Disturbances.”

I tend to agree with others that have stated “Airmagnet's ploy in all of this is to draw attention to the company as a developer of WiFi analysis tools, and to be honest, we find it pretty humorous.”  I must admit that it was pretty effective as news alert after news alert filled my inbox.  Is end-of-year news that hard to come by?

A few months back I released a post on where I think anti-botnets technology is heading. Now it’s time for what happened in 2006, and what we can expect from here on.I am not a believer in such retrospective looks, as often, they are completely biased and based on what we have seen and what [...]