News Corp to Purchase Photobucket 78
DJCacophony writes "Reuters is reporting that Newscorp, having already purchased Myspace, is purchasing the image hosting site Photobucket for between 250 and 300 million dollars. The story details how Photobucket and Myspace, which have previously had disputes over advertising on each others' sites, will now be integrated with each other. The deal is still very much on the table, apparently, and may yet fall through. 'While hardly known outside the youthful world of social network sites, Photobucket has become wildly popular with users for providing free, online storage tools for multimedia self-expression, from photos to videos to digital slideshows. Site builders turn to it for images to decorate their sites. The four-year-old startup, based in Palo Alto, California, has signed up 41 million registered users, up from 32 million at the end of last year and 2 million in 2004. It now hosts nearly 2.8 billion images on the site.'"
Spore Delayed Until Q2 2008 107
georgewilliamherbert writes "CNet has the news that EA is reporting a slight loss for the quarter. It expects profits for the year to fall short about ten cents, hitting a high of $1.20 as opposed to the expected $1.31. The company's share price was down 3% in extended trading yesterday. The reason for these adjustments? EA reluctantly announced that Spore has been delayed until Q2 2008. ' Redwood City, Calif.-based Electronic Arts said it taken out Spore, a game where players build organisms from scratch, from its financial projections for the fiscal year ending in March 2008, adding that the game could be delayed until fiscal 2009. In the fourth quarter ended March 31, the company said its net loss widened to $25 million, or 8 cents per share, from $16 million, or 5 cents, in the year-earlier period. Excluding items, the company earned 6 cents per share versus 14 cents in the year-earlier period.'" From a technology perspective, this thing seems at least as complicated as some Massive games; makes perfect sense it would take about as long to build this title as a game in that genre.
Feed Patent envisions landline phones displaying targeted ads (engadget.com)
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
A patent application has recently been approved by the USPTO which details a landline phone that would feature a GUI capable of displaying controls, targeted ads, and various infoswag. Inventor Rich Loen seems especially keen on the advertising potential of his so-called Internet protocol telephone system, which would allow businesses like hotels and spas to stream different ads depending on room price, or consumers to receive offers based on location, time of day, and type of residence, among many other possible criteria. Sounds like a good idea for service industries looking to squeeze a few more bucks out of their facilities, but maybe not ideal for the average landline user, who's gonna require more than just in-phone stock quotes or sports scores to convince him / her to let Google ads onto yet another screen. Now dangle some sweet subsidized calling plans in front of us, and we just might bite.
[Via textually]
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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Think Tank Report On the State of Open Source 110
AlexGr writes to recommend an account of a meeting a couple of months back of representatives from more than 100 software companies discussing the state of open source software. The outcome is outlined in a 16-page report, 2007 Open Source Think Tank: The Future of Commercial Open Source (PDF). Among the surprising conclusions: participants noted a growing similarity in methods between open source and proprietary software development. They predicted some kind of convergence, where the best of both approaches gets adopted in each camp.
Comment automating this (Score 4, Interesting) 375
For the image ones, couldn't you create 5 bots each with a different account and each one picks a different image and one picks None of these? One of them would be approved and you'd get paid, right?
Also if they are having humans approve your image selection before you get paid, isn't that as much effort as you making your original choice?
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New crypt. See /usr/news/crypt.
