Business

Bit.ly Builds Business on Libya Domain

The URL shortening service Bit.ly just secured $2 million in financing from investors including O'Reilly's AlphaTech Ventures. Though URL shorteners have been around for years, Bit.ly believes there's money in offering Twitter-friendly short links along with web analytics to track how the links are used. The company reports that its links were clicked 20 million times last month. So far, the news coverage I've read about Bit.ly has neglected an unusual aspect of the startup: It's one of the ... (read more)

2009/03/31

ScottsMoneyBlog.Com's Get-Rich-Click Scheme

The 11-day-old web site ScottsMoneyBlog.Com is selling an amazing money-making work-at-home business opportunity for only $1.98. "Would you like to make $5,000 a month posting a link on Google?" asks Scott Hunter in an ad I spotted today on the Drudge Report. "Get paid $5 to $30 for every website link that you post on Google. No one needs to buy anything from you or Google in order to get paid." I'm not clear on what Scott means by posting links "on Google," but he's wearing a tuxedo, so he ... (read more)

2009/03/28

Newspapers Have Been Dying Since the '50s

Debra J. Saunders has an impassioned rant in today's San Francisco Chronicle about how we'll all be sorry when newspapers are dead: News stories do not sprout up like Jack's bean stalk on the Internet. To produce news, you need professionals who understand the standards needed to research, report and write on what happened. If newspapers die, reliable information dries up. ... I wonder who will be around in five years to cover stories. Or what talk radio will talk about when hosts can't ... (read more)

2009/02/26

TechCrunch Runs Bogus Last.fm Rumor

Late Friday, TechCrunch ran a single-sourced allegation that the CBS-owned music-recommendation service Last.fm had handed over user data to the RIAA for use in illegal file-sharing lawsuits: ... word is going around that the RIAA asked social music service Last.fm for data about its user's listening habits to find people with unreleased tracks on their computers. And Last.fm, which is owned by CBS, actually handed the data over to the RIAA. According to a tip we received: I heard from an irate ... (read more)

2009/02/23

User-Generated Content Event Offers Super Speaker

There's a User-Generated Content Expo being held in San Jose, Calif., next month. Keynote speakers include Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and CafePress founder Fred Durham. While browsing the list of speakers to see if they invited any actual content-generating users, I found one of the greatest speaker bios I've ever read. Meet Dawn Clark, founder of DawnClark.Net: A pioneer in the field of Cyberenergetics, Dawn Clark is a sensitive who stands at the nexus of science and spirituality. Fields ... (read more)

2009/01/13

Streamline Your Consolidated Resources

I love the thick coat of BS that Wizards of the Coast President Greg Leeds laid down to justify the layoffs this week of around 20 employees, including longtime Dungeons & Dragons game designers Jonathan Tweet and Dave Noonan: Consolidating internal resources coupled with improved outsourcing allows us to gain efficiencies in executing against our major digital initiatives Magic Online and D&D Insider. Wizards of the Coast is well positioned to maximize future opportunities, including further ... (read more)

2008/12/05

Web Hosting Provider Alpha Red Files for Bankruptcy

While looking through some records in a bankruptcy database, I found an item that hasn't hit the news yet: The web hosting provider Alpha Red Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Wednesday in the Southern District of Texas, claiming more than $10 million in liabilities. ... (read more)

2008/12/05

Banking CEOs Deserve a Christmas Malus

I was scrounging through old bookmarks recently when I rediscovered World Wide Words, Michael Quinlan's online newsletter of unusual words. His current edition features "malus," a word that ought to be more common in American business given the disastrous mismanagement of many companies: Though malus isn't in any general dictionary that I've consulted, it's also a fairly common term in the world of banking, insurance and contracts. A malus is the opposite of a bonus -- you might call it a ... (read more)

2008/11/29

Sanders: Socialism for Rich, Free Enterprise for Poor

Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont, makes a point I haven't heard anywhere else in his response to the bailout plan: We must end the danger posed by companies that are "too big too fail," that is, companies whose failure would cause systemic harm to the U.S. economy. If a company is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. We need to determine which companies fall in this category and then break them up. Right now, for example, the Bank of America, the nation's largest ... (read more)

2008/09/22

No Temporary Checks, No Peace

I had a weird thing happen at my bank this week: I ran out of checks because I didn't reorder them in time, but when I needed temporary checks so I could pay some bills, my request was refused. The bank, which has locations across several Southern states, doesn't give its customers temporary checks. My first impulse is to quit the bank over this hassle. There's a bank on every corner these days, and the services they offer are utterly interchangeable. To get my bills paid, I ended up buying the ... (read more)

2008/05/08

Read More Entries