Technology News

The world’s leading video iWear® manufacturer for consumer, medical and defense markets ranks #3346 in the 2008 Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Private Companies in America. See the press release below for more information.

Rochester, NY – August 21, 2008 – Vuzix Corporation is proud to announce being named to the prestigious Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies in America, ranking #3346. The list is designed to celebrate the achievements of the best and brightest entrepreneurs America has to offer. 2008 marks the 27th year the list has been published, culminating in the Inc. 500 / Inc. 5000 Conference & Awards Ceremony in Washington, D.C.

This achievement adds Vuzix to an elite group of companies who have appeared on the list, including Microsoft, Timberland, Go Daddy, Oracle, UnderArmour and many more.

“This list truly represents the best of the best in American privately-held business,” said Vuzix CEO & Founder Paul Travers. “Our phenomenal growth can be attributed to the hard work and dedication of our employees and partners who work tirelessly everyday to create revolutionary video eyewear technology,” added Travers.

The 5000 companies that made the list reported aggregate revenue of $185 billion and median three-year growth of 147 percent. Most important, the 2008 Inc. 5000 companies were engines of job growth, having created more than 826,033 jobs since those companies were founded. Complete results of the Inc. 5000, including company profiles and a list of the fastest-growing companies that can be sorted by industry and region can be found at www.inc5000.com.

Ranking Methodology – The 2008 Inc. 5000 list measures revenue growth from 2004 through 2007. To qualify, companies must be U.S.-based and privately held, for profit, independent – not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies – as of December 31, 2007, and have had at least $200,000 in revenue in 2004, and $2 million in 2007.

The latest news which first appeared in Computerworld’s print edition where Exxon Mobile made its way to Twitter unwittingly is very interesting indeed, well for some anyway.

Someone claiming the be an Exxon Mobil Corp employee and user of Twitter microblogging site decided to create a page on Twitter on July 28 with the firm’s name and part of its logo and even photos of the an Exxon gas station, this page had over 400 users sign up to this group that was created to receive messages being posted on the Janet at ExxonMobil.

Well apparently and according to Computer World “Exxon Mobil” did not authorize these activities on Twitter and doe’s not know who Janet is or even if she or he really does work at the company.

Alan Jeffers, Exxon Mobil spokesman said:

Whoever is posting the messages “is not an authorized person to speak on behalf of the company,” he also added Exxon Mobil hasn’t officially started using any social networking sites to communicate with customers.

Jeffers said that after he became aware of this page was created on Twitter by Janet, Exxon Mobil contacted officials at Twitter Inc and asked them if they could reserve this for company use and any potential account names associated with its various business brands, of course Twitter agreed to this.

The unauthorized page was still live on Friday and Janet started to post new messages after being absent for two days. Analyst Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester Research Inc said that companies need to keep track on Twitter and other Web 2.0 sites to make sure they do not get brand-jacked.

Read the full article here.

Verizon has managed to avert a strike with union workers after agreeing a new three-year deal. In the new deal workers will get a 10.5 percent wage increase over the next three years.

This new pay deal has come to the relief of thousands of phone customers in Long Island, as the strike could have disrupted their service.

Verizon and the Communications Workers of America were working hard to avert this strike for two days, as talks between the two sides had stalled. The two sides could not agree on subcontracting jobs and organizing nonunion workers.

Bob Morrow, executive vice president of CWA local 1108 had said “There definitely would have been service interruptions, but thank God it didn’t get to that.”

Verizon executive Marc Reed had said that this new deal will allow the company to compete for customers while they are still able to continue to provide their employees with a package of competitive wages and benefits.

Morrow has now praised the work of the negotiators for brokering this pay deal. The deal will also, reclassify hundreds of temporary workers as full-time employees. Hundreds more nonunion workers will now become part of the Communications Workers of America.

The new deal will also allow workers to keep their fully paid health benefits for both active and retired worker of Verizon. However; workers hired after August 2 will have to contribute to their retirement health care.

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Just months after Google had purchased DoubleClick; the search engine giant has already started the integration process. Those that will benefit from the technology will be Google’s AdSense content network; frequency capping and view-through conversion reporting will be the first step.

Once DoubleClick has been fully integrated into AdSense, users will then have the option to opt-out of ad serving from DoubleClick and their content network.

Google have a long road ahead of them as they are planning a huge number of improvements, all designed to give the user more functionality. Some of Google’s other planned additions are frequency capping, view-through conversion measurement capabilities as well as frequency reporting.

None of this advancements are available yet and do not expect them within the next few months. One thing is certain though, Google are showing publishers and advertisers that they are now working at incorporating DoubleClick into its ad operation.

Google has been changing a number of features on AdSense, both for publishers and advertisers. Google hope that they are improving AdSense, but only time will tell if this is true or not.

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Today Alan reported the news about the all new Google Music Onebox service that is free and legal for downloading music in mainland China that are also supported by advertising, but our question is “When is Google Music Onebox coming to other countries?

Now we know this will never come to any other country for the simple fact China has no copyright laws, Music Onebox will route users to Top100.cn which is a website that already has licensing agreements with about 100 music labels and allows Chinese wibblers to download or stream tunes free of charge. Yes you know what are about to say now, all internet users outside China will indeed be blocked from accessing Top100.cn

Google come on, you have the money and the resources to give all other countries what they need and yes you know that you will earn all the money you desire through advertisements.

Read Alan’s full article here.

Toyota Motor Corp. has seen a huge drop in their profit, the biggest in five years. The world’s second-largest carmaker has blamed poor sales of sport-utility vehicles and trucks, due to high fuel prices.

Toyota has reported that their net income has fallen by 28 percent to 353.7 billion yen or $3.2 billion, shares are now just 112.28 yen a share. The year earlier net income was 491.5 billion yen, or 153.89 yen per share.

According to Bloomberg, Toyota’s operating profit in North America feel by 57 percent, as we mentioned it is the sale of larger vehicles that have seen the biggest drop. Katsuaki Watanabe, President of Toyota Motor Corp. has had to halt the production of Tundra pickups and Sequoia SUVs for three months as a result of high oil prices.

Toyota has always been known for their larger vehicles, where Honda seems to produce smaller and fuel-efficient cars. This has seen an 8.1 percent gain for the automaker.

It is not just Toyota who is being hit with huge profit losses; Ford and GM are two more to add to that list. Automakers are now facing a fork in the road; they now have some tough decisions to make. One thing is certain; they will all have to think about producing smaller fuel-efficient cars.

Google has confirmed all the recent speculation by stating that on Wednesday it had launched a music search feature on its Chinese website with contributing partner Top100.cn

From a rumour that first surfaced in early February in The Wall Street Journal, this has now confirmed that Top100 had signed a deal with Google. Top100.cn is a start up which was founded by Chinese NBA star Yao Ming, along with businessman Ge Chen.

This partnership between Google and Top100 hopes to become a more competitive search engine, as Baidu remains the dominant search in China. This looks like to be an interesting rivalry as Baidu currently has around two-thirds of the search traffic in the country, with Google only managing 26 percent. Another interesting fact is that 30 percent of Baidu’s traffic comes from its music search engine alone, it appears that Google has done their homework and are ready to mount a challenge for the top spot.

It’s not all sun and glory for Baidu however as their music search engine contains unlicensed content and that has angered the music industry. Google has another tactic to conquer this as they and Top100 plan to sweeten the labels by giving them a portion of the revenue from displaying various adverts on the service’s pages.

They also plan to give tracks out for free, and without DRM, in MP3 format. There is also talk of a partnership with China Mobile to sell ‘ringback tones’ to customers through the service. Sounds like this could be a successful venture for Google, stay tuned to hear more news on this story as we hear it.

Source: Read

Time Warner Inc. has announced that they will be running AOL’s access and audience businesses separately from next year; the main reason for this is a drop in their profits. When Warner has managed to get the units operating separately from each other, then they will be able to work out if the cash flow is better.

Once the access is a stand alone, Time Warner will then have the flexibility to spin the business around or even sell it if it comes to it. Time Warner said that second quarter net income had fallen by 26 percent from their AOL and publishing units.

During the second quarter AOL’s shares fell to $1.1 billion, most of that loss has been from the loss of dial-up subscribers. This is a direct result of AOL trying to make the transition from an Internet-access provider to a business primarily driven by advertising revenue from AOL.com.

The growth in advertising in the second quarter for AOL saw a 1 percent increase from the first quarter. To give you an idea at just how bad this is, Ad growth in the fourth quarter of 2007 was 10 percent, it was 13 percent in the third quarter of 2007. So there is a pattern that things have been falling for some time.

For a detailed report on this visit Market Watch

Sprint Nextel Corp. has reported a decline in earnings in the second quarter, a result from the 901,000 wireless subscribers who have left the company. This news did not take long to have a reaction in Wall Street, as shares of Sprint Nextel Corp. fell by 79 cents.

Shares started on Wednesday at $7.76, as of noon they were at $7.71. Before the market had opened on Wednesday, the wireless carrier had reported revenue of $9.06 billion for the second quarter. This is down 10.9 percent from $10.2 billion in 2007.

Sprint has said that their customers for the second quarter are 51.9 million, that’s down 3.9 percent on last year figure of 54 million.

It seems that Sprints CEO Dan Hesse has taken a positive view on this; he said “We are seeing signs of progress from our efforts to improve the customer experience, rebuild the Sprint brand and increase our profitability.”

It is thought by many that Sprint Nextel subscribers will fall even more in the third quarter of 2008.

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Popular site Twitter has become the latest website to be targeted by a group of cyber criminals who have found ways to exploit social networking websites. The suspect activity was spotted by security firm Kaspersky, and found a fake Twitter profile containing a malicious payload.

This latest news is sure to worry other networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, as it appears the hackers are quite sophisticated and are still able to target these websites even when security measures are put into place.

One of the techniques used by the hackers is trying to trick users into downloading a fake version of Adobe Flash which then installs other programs instead capable of stealing personal data.

Kaspersky claims that this attack on Twitter first originated in Brazil, due to the language used at the time, the email addresses used, and servers for downloading Trojans. Kaspersky have also said that there are a number of dangerous ‘worms’ on the internet that are trying to target MySpace and Facebook.

With all these news of hackers I think it’s safe to say, just be careful when you are logging onto to your facebook or similar sites, and be warned the next time a message telling you to install Adobe flash pops up!

Source: Read