businessweek

Bad PDF formatting reveals Google Voice numbers

Google Voice may not have made it onto the iPhone yet, but the service has still managed to attract more than 1.4 million users.

In a story posted Friday, BusinessWeek is reporting that Google Voice has grown to 1.419 million users, 40 percent--fully 570,000--of whom use the service every day. The information comes from documents in which Google responded to questions from U.S. regulators interested in whether the search giant is improperly blocking calls to phone numbers in specific rural areas of the country.

But while the information about the number of users of the service … Read more

'BusinessWeek' names the Web's top 25

Thank goodness. BusinessWeek's new 25 Most Influential People on the Web list is refreshingly free of blowhard bloggers, busty video babes, and those wacky people who don't seem to do anything except speak at conference after conference.

Most of the list, rather, consists of the really big guys: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, and News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, whose company acquired MySpace. Then there are legit Web pioneers like Digg founder Kevin Rose, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and Craigslist founder Craig Newmark.

Because of the dominance of big names, it's a pretty unsurprising … Read more

CNET News Daily Podcast: What's Yahoo up to post-Icahn?

Yahoo got through the Carl Icahn crisis, but now it's tackling perhaps a more formidable challenge: How to make good on a promise to develop a next-generation, socially networked user experience. CNET News' Stephen Shankland, who spent major quality time with Yahoo executives last week, offers his insight.

There's a developing whodunit, but this much is known: Russian hackers suspected of ties to organized crime have targeted a popular BusinessWeek site with malware--possibly putting visitors to the site at risk.

Since we're in the final stages of Major League Baseball's pennant race--not to mention the start … Read more

Listen up, 'New York Times': German papers thrive with tech

Newspapers are doomed because of the Internet.

That's the conventional wisdom one hears in the U.S., but according to a story last week in BusinessWeek, some German newspapers are defying the odds and are using technology to boost sales.

Some of Germany's biggest papers are seeing growth, even double-digit growth, at a time when some of this country's biggest daily papers, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, are posting declining earnings.

So the U.S. could learn a thing or two from the Germans, right?

"It's too … Read more

What Sun money buys MySQL

I'm sure there are many benefits for MySQL being a part of a large IT vendor like Sun Microsystems, but the advertising budget probably doesn't hurt. Reading Businessweek today at lunch, I bumped into this MySQL advertisement in a super-prime location (right next to Wildstrom's Tech and You column).

I would hazard a guess that MySQL spent close to $0.00 on advertising when it was a standalone company. I doubt Marten, Zack, and crew are complaining. :-)

It will be interesting to see if this top-down approach will help to drive more MySQL sales. Open source … Read more

Widgets! Widgets! Widgets! Aren't these just video games?

Today's BusinessWeek Technology home page has six (6) pieces (!) on Widgets and why they may or may not matter. After reading the articles and avoiding the podcast and videos I came away with one thing: video games still rule.

All of the successful widgets and widget makers profiled in BW get adoption and traffic because they are essentially very small video games. And people love video games. I myself wasted 20 minutes playing BurgerTime over on the Widgetbox website.

Case in point, this guy at Berkeley is the king of Facebook quizzes.

Between July and September, Nagpal created four … Read more

'BusinessWeek': Don't link to us

BusinessWeek apparently doesn't need anyone to help it boost its Web traffic.

According to a blog post on Gawker, BusinessWeek not only asks people not to link to its site, it specifically directs them to its user agreement that prohibits the practice of "deep linking."

Gawker points to the example of SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill, who writes in his blog that after being interviewed for a feature story in BusinessWeek, he was expressly told not to link to the story. "Yes, that's right, an ad-driven publication doesn't want us to drive traffic to them,&… Read more

Design (thinker) hubris?

In an article for In These Times magazine, Alix Rule injects some fresh thinking into the realm of "design thinking," which has traditionally been mainly affiliated with parties like Bruce Nussbaum, associate editor of BusinessWeek, and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (also known as the d-school). Rule is skeptical about design thinkers' self-acclaimed world-changing mandate: "As we look beyond housing solutions to urban poverty, good design is enjoying a second coming as the cure for what ails us." She feels that designers overburden themselves with these universal goals, and she asks for realism … Read more

Report: Apple close to winning over studios

Apparently, Apple is willing to make concessions to the film industry to bolster iTunes' lackluster movie offerings.

BusinessWeek is reporting that Apple is close to signing distribution deals with most of the top movie studios that would give Apple access to newly released films.

The Financial Times reported last month that Apple has already signed an agreement with Twentieth Century Fox. BusinessWeek now says the company is nearing deals with Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, and Lionsgate. The magazine suggested that some of the deals may be announced at the Macworld conference, which starts January 14.

While Apple has dominated music, … Read more