05.29.06
Posted in General at 3:12 pm by Christine
By now you’ve all heard about the likely deal between Google and Dell. If this should go through (besides the other 10 million things), it’s pretty much an open invitation for head to head warfare. Or a taste of the ‘ol medicine, whichever way you’d like to view it. If Google should sign with Dell - which is a pretty good strategy IMO, it will pretty much bring some old haunts back to MS. This was their strategy back in the day to overide Netscape.
Some more interesting moves in the land of search is that there are rumoured talks of MS purchasing eBay. The general feedback from the online community has been very mixed indeed, but tends to lean towards the negative.
Other MS news is that Vista may be headed for delayed launch as the beta testers keep finding integration problems, “everything from driver and app compatibility problems, to red-hot laptops.” Check out these Office and OS screenshots.
On a personal note:
Went to see Xmen 3 on the weekend. What a movie! I was just really disappointed in the twist (don’t read anymore if you have’nt seen it!) …..especially since half the original Xmen characters are killed off. But I’ll go watch the 4th one 
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05.23.06
Posted in General at 4:53 pm by Christine
Well, with pay as you go airtime, electricity and phone accounts, I guess this was the next move.
FlexGo Pay-As-You-Go PC is Microsoft’s latest attempt to make PC ownership more accessible to people in emerging markets. The pitch is that consumers pay for approximately half the PC upfront and then a certain amount per hour of use. After several hours of paid use, they would own the PC outright. The project is aimed at people that for example have perhaps worked on a really styling computer at work, but can’t afford the same quality at home. FlexGo will give them, and others like them, the opportunity to thus upgrade their systems affordably.
It seems that MS had already tested this idea Brazil and it must’ve worked as they expanding the trials to Russia, India, China and Mexico.
They aim to bring out a monthly paid for subscription of a set amount as well, which promises easier to manage budget wise.
I think their Starter program was a very admirable approach, but did not really take off. And although there are plenty of NGOs in South Africa that I know of that would love an opportunity to take a venture such as this to the community, there are not many that can even afford this option.
On a Personal Note
We ventured out to watch MI3 last night. I was fairly disappointed that the movie did not live up its hype, which does not really leave much to say about it.
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05.22.06
Posted in General at 11:46 am by Christine
How cool was today’s logo for Google? Celebrating Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s birthday it looked like this:
Although not major news, but interesting nonetheless, it seems as if MSN have upped their free Hotmail Mailbox capacity. Mine which was always overflowing and on 95% usage with constant “your mailbox is approaching its limit” warnings, am now only using 9% of my new mailbox capacity. It seems they finally let go of being stingy…Good on them. It was reported on PC World magazine that MS intended to pump it up to 250 MB. Almost two full years later, mine has finally been upgraded, but only to 25MB. Still better than the 2MB it used to be though!
And now I also know why I did not see a mail boasting this upgrade. I was wondering, cause its so unlike MSN not to flaunt it.
Perhaps they should read this article on time management
Another interesting story, which is kind of close to home, is that the domain name diamond.com has apparently been sold for a whopping $7.5 million claims TechJournal! Ths is very interesting, as in the last .com bubble that was exactly the price fetched for the highest domain sold, about six months before the internet world started to deflate!
On a Personal Note
Speaking of time, it’s getting closer and closer to the time that I take leave from my present company and take the leap into the world of Search Marketing all by myself! I have been waiting (or more like procrastinating) for so long and finally the time is here.
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