TechJournal

Well, there's not much drama here.  Mark Cuban will be letting the justice system take its own course.  The recent filing of the Securities and Exchange Commission against the dot com billionaire and entrepreneur on the charge of Insider Trading has made headlines today and Cuban simply writes his statement in his blog.

I wish I could say more, but I will have to leave it to this, and let the judicial process do its job.
November 17, 2008
RE: SEC Civil Action in the United States District

for the Northern District of Texas, Dallas Division ...more

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The Securities and Exchange Commission has finally officially filed a case against dot com billionaire Mark Cuban on Insider Trading charges. The incident for which Cuban is being charged happened in 2004 with the stocks of search engine Mamma.com.

Allegedly, Mamma.com Inc. invited Cuban to participate in the stock offering after he agreed to keep the information confidential. However, after the meeting, Cuban used the information he learned and sold all his shares in the company to avoid losses of at least $750,000.

Scott W. Friestad, Deputy Director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement, said, "As we allege in the complaint, Mamma.com entrusted Mr. Cuban with nonpublic information after he promised to keep the information confidential. Less than four hours later, Mr. Cuban betrayed that trust by placing an order to sell all of his shares. It is fundamentally unfair for someone to use access to nonpublic information to improperly gain an edge on the market." ...more

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Murder Suspect Jing Hua Wu

A shocking incident has occured in Silicon Valley that's rattled the tech companies to its core.  A man, Jing Hua Wu, who was recently laid off from semiconductor manufacturing company SiPort in Santa Clara shot and killed 3 of the company's executives last saturday.  Apparently, Wu who was fired last week went back to the SiPort office last Friday and killed three people, CEO Sid Agrawal; Brian Pugh, VP of operations; and Marilyn Lewis, who was the human resources manager.

There was no indication that Jing Hua Wu posed any danger when he walked into the offices of his Santa Clara employer Friday, a few hours after he'd been fired. So there was no reason for three top company officials to refuse his request for a meeting.

But some time after Wu and the three executives went into a room to talk, police say, the 47-year-old engineer pulled a 9 mm handgun and shot all three dead. ...more

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President-Elect Barack Obama is probably the first president to extensively use the internet as a medium for his campaign.  Obviously, during the campaign Obama has amassed millions of followers using social media, and lots and lots of videos.  Now that he will be the next president, Obama is likely to continue using the web to reach out to his constituents.

The weekly radio address by the President has been an American tradition since the time of President Franklin Roosevelt.  In fact Obama's transition site Change.gov will be posting archives of the speeches on the site as well as on Youtube.

Moreover, the Washington Post also reports that the Obama administration will be launching a Youtube channel to broadcast  the president's weekly speeches.  This will be the first time that a US president will be using a third party platform to host these speeches.  President Bush's weekly speeches were privately hosted on WhiteHouse.Gov's servers. ...more

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Shopping on the internet for anything is actually the trend today.  I remember a survey once that said that people would rather shop from their homes during the holiday season to avoid long queues and the rush.  So that's another point to e-commerce.  Today, Microsoft joins the bandwagon (again) by launching their online store in the US.  The Microsoft Store (previously opened internationally in the UK and Korea) will be selling hardware and software Microsoft products.

Trevin Chow, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft announces in his blog, "With this launch, our customers in the U.S. are able to buy first-party software and hardware directly from Microsoft offered in a comprehensive online catalog. On our store, you’ll find products from many categories, ranging from Office 2007 Home and Student and Zoo Tycoon 2 to Xbox 360 Wireless Controllers and the new Zune with that cool Buy from FM feature."

Software products bought from the MicrosofStore can be delivered in two ways package door to door delivery or digitally.  The digital delivery of the software means that after payment, the customer can simply download the software package and install it immediately.  Basically, digital delivery is exactly the same as Electronic Software Distribution (ESD)  This saves everybody delivery charges and waiting time.  ...more

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One of the largest technology companies in the world is hit hard by the economic crisis and is forced to let go of a couple of thousand of its employees and reorganize the whole company. Sun Microsystems, the company behind many software products such as MySQL, Open Storage and Open Office, as well as many other networking hardware and software products, announced today that they will be restructuring the company to save them $700-$800 million a year.

"Today, we have taken decisive actions to align Sun's business with global economic realities and accelerate our delivery of key open source platform innovations - from MySQLTM to Sun's latest Open Storage offerings," said Jonathan Schwartz, CEO, Sun Microsystems. 

The decisive actions of course include the laying off of about 15 to 18 percent of their global workforce. This will affect about 5000 to 6000 employees. ...more

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Silicon Valley-based Mojo Mobility Inc. is a Startup Venture focused on developing new technologies for mobile solutions.  One of their inventions is the Near Field Power technology.  NFP (Near Field Power) is a way to transmit electrical power between two devices wirelessly.    This kind of technology is very useful for charging mobile devices.

The NFP system of Mojo Mobility comes into two modules, one for transmission and one for reception.  The two modules are able to transmit power by simple electromagnetic induction.  Electromagnetic induction is simply the generation of an electric current by moving a magnet through a coil of wire (and vice versa).  The trick for Mojo Mobility then is to fit that electromagnetic technology into the ever-shrinking mobile devices on the market today. 

So, with the NFP system already shrunk down to fit mobile devices, Mojo Mobility is now seeking collaboration projects with mobile device manufacturers. The company has already prototyped a sheet type charging station (includes the NFP transmitter) and some mobile devices equipped with the receiving module of the NFP system. The charging sheet produces 2.5W to 4W of power, ideal for mobile devices such as mobile phones and digital media players. ...more

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Windows Live, Microsoft's portal into the web just got a revamp today introducing an integration of email, storage, instant messaging, photos, social networking, etc. Microsoft is calling this the Wave 3 of the Windows Live road map.

The new portal now accepts third party applications from more than 50 web companies including Flickr, LinkedIn, Pandora, Photobucket, Twitter, WordPress and Yelp, among others. Also, to share all these features without leaving Windows Live, they made into a Facebook-like social network where users sign into their accounts and access everything from there.

"Think of Windows Live as the single place where people using our e-mail, messaging and photo-sharing services can stay connected," said Chris Jones, corporate vice president of Windows Live Experience Program Management at Microsoft. "Our customers have friends across the Web. They communicate through many unconnected Web services and want access to it all from a single location - without worrying about how it's done. Now, Windows Live takes care of that, with an integrated personal communication service that works across the Web with optimized experiences on the PC and mobile phone." [Press Release] ...more

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Youtube is the largest repository of online videos on the web.  It's so big in fact that having its own search engine really means it has its own "web" to search.  So since Youtube is owned by Google, and Google is the most successful in monetizing its search engine by selling keywords and rankings sites, hence the Youtube search engine can be monetized in the same way.   Youtube is now selling its search results to the highest bidder.

The idea is simple, have publishers promote their videos by selling them the keywords they wish to produce their videos.  So if I was a baker, I'd buy search terms such as 'bread' or 'cake'.  Of course it works for other things as well, anybody with enough cash would buy the search results for the best keywords regardless if it meant anything to their video (I wonder how much 'sex' sold for).

By the way, as with usual search engines, you just don't buy the keywords over the counter, instead you sign up with Youtube and pay them on a pay-per-click basis.   ...more

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