Oct. 19, 2007
Microsoft hopes to dunk Google one day
The Tech Chronicles
When Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer walks on-stage at a tech conference, anything is possible.
”He’s famously known for once jumping around at an event like a madman with a microphone yelling, “Developers! Developers! Developers!” At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today, Ballmer gladly let his outsized personality loose following a question from moderator John Batelle about whether he’s upset about Microsoft’s search engine lagging far behind Google’s in popularity – or more precisely, whether Microsoft’s search was a child that he would smack on the back of it’s head.”
Five things Facebook should do to be useful
Tech Web
Alexander Wolfe says Mark Zuckerberg was telling the audience at the Web 2.0 Summit the other day how he’s going to double Facebook’s workforce, presumably to broaden its appeal beyond its 47-million current users.
“(What, all those students and on-the-job time-wasters aren’t enough?) Here’s an idea for you, Mark: Make Facebook into a truly useful tool, one where you can do more than just post pictures and ping people you’re already in contact with anyway.”
NFL Patriots spying on ticket holders
Tech dirt
We’ve heard plenty of stories about organizations trying to ban the resale of tickets to events.
”It seems a bit silly to tell someone who bought a ticket to a concert or a sporting event that they’re not allowed to resell it, but apparently some event organizers feel differently — especially when the tickets are sold at greater than face value. The New England Patriots apparently are so adamant that people shouldn’t be reselling their tickets for profit that they’ve convinced a court to force ticket resale marketplace StubHub to hand over the names of everyone who resold Patriots tickets for above face value. This seems like a rather large privacy violation — and it clearly violates Stubhub’s own terms of service (which is why the company fought it in court). You could understand being forced to turn over such information in a criminal lawsuit, but this is the New England Patriots requesting and getting the private info of sellers. For a team that just got into some trouble for spying on opposing teams, spying on their fans’ private transactions doesn’t seem like a step forward.“
