Ask Jeeves, acquired by InterActive Corp. last year killed off the butler mascot today.
More noteworthy is that the Teoma search brand, which once along with WiseNut was said to be able to take on Google, is now called Expert Rank.
Moreover, the site also gives walking instructions, and not merely driving instructions… just think that this is pretty cool
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WatchMojo NewsletterInterview with ROO’s CEO, Rob Petty, on TheStreet.com’s Street Watch.
(Note that Street Watch is powered by ETV Media… )
He sees benefits of Intel alliance but raises an excellent point about spinning off iPod business. Problem is that much of iPod’s success comes from Apple connection, so without that, would it be able to fend off the impending attack from Sandisk, Microsoft and company?
Americans work more, seem to accomplish less: study
Most U.S. workers say they feel rushed on the job, but they are getting less accomplished than a decade ago, according to newly released research.
The biggest culprit is the technology that was supposed to make work quicker and easier, experts say.
“Technology has sped everything up and, by speeding everything up, it’s slowed everything down, paradoxically,” said John Challenger, chief executive of Chicago-based outplacement consultants Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc.
“We never concentrate on one task anymore. You take a little chip out of it, and then you’re on to the next thing,” Challenger said on Wednesday. “It’s harder to feel like you’re accomplishing something.”
Unlike a decade ago, U.S. workers are bombarded with e-mail, computer messages, cell phone calls, voice mails and the like, research showed.
The average time spent on a computer at work was almost 16 hours a week last year, compared with 9.5 hours a decade ago, according to the Day-Timer research released this week.
Workers typically get 46 e-mails a day, nearly half of which are unsolicited, it said.
Sixty percent of workers say they always or frequently feel rushed, but those who feel extremely or very productive dropped to 51 percent from 83 percent in 1994, the research showed.
Put another way, in 1994, 82 percent said they accomplished at least half their daily planned work but that number fell to 50 percent last year. A decade ago, 40 percent of workers called themselves very or extremely successful, but that number fell to just 28 percent.
“We think we’re faster, smarter, better with all this technology at our side and in the end, we still feel rushed and our feeling of productivity is down,” said Maria Woytek, marketing communications manager for Day-Timers, a unit of ACCO Brands, which is part of General Binding Corp.
The latest study was conducted among a random sample of about 1,000 people who work at least part time. The earlier study surveyed some 1,300 workers.
Expectations that technology would save time and money largely haven’t been borne out in the workplace, said Ronald Downey, professor of psychology who specializes in industrial organization at Kansas State University.
“It just increases the expectations that people have for your production,” Downey said.
Even if productivity increases, it’s constantly outpaced by those expectations, said Don Grimme of GHR Training Solutions, a workplace training company based in Coral Springs, Florida.
“The irony is the very expectation of getting more done is getting in the way of getting more done,” he said. “People are stressed out.”
Companies that are flexible with workers’ time and give workers the most control over their tasks tend to fare better against the sea of rising expectations, experts said.
Businesses that have moved to 24-hour operations, bosses who micro-manage and longer commutes all add to the problem, they said, while downsizing leaves fewer workers doing the work of those who left.
Finally, there’s a trend among companies to measure job performance like never before, said Challenger. “There’s a sense that no matter how much I do, it’s never enough,” he said.
Search companies - and online advertisers and publishers in general - record a lot of information in a general way. However, as they strive to extend their edge vis-a-vis one another, many want to record specific searching patterns, to offer personalized search. Of course, a lot of people would be uncomfortable with that…
That is actually good news to [excuse the shameless plug] a few new search players, like MetaMojo.com - which is part of the Mojo Supreme network.
Most Americans are uncomfortable with the fact that Internet search engines record their users’ queries, according to a survey released Wednesday that examined perceptions about federal authorities’ demands for such records.
Search engine companies recently sparked the debate by responding differently to the Justice Department’s subpoena for records on what their users had been looking up.
Google Inc. refused to comply, citing privacy along with a desire to protect its trade secrets. But Yahoo Inc. and other rivals have handed over their data, which the government says will be useful in an online pornography crackdown.
Equally contentious, however, is whether the search engine providers even should be storing such records.
In the new survey of 800 Americans by the University of Connecticut, 60 percent said they opposed the storage of users’ search queries. Just 32 percent supported the practice, which the companies say is necessary to improve the performance of their services.
This could have some interesting after-effects.
I could be wrong, but Google sends a lot of traffic to websites whose images it indexes.
Here is a test, line up a bunch of Perfect 10’s competitors and ask them if they would mind having their images indexed by Google… the conversation would end there, methinks.
In an interview to be published on Thursday in the German weekly WirtschaftsWoche, Deutsche Telekom states that Internet content providers such as Google should pay for using their new super-fast Internet access…
I am not against this rationale entirely, but DT should be careful about what it is wishing for… after all, over the past few years Google has been buying up miles and miles of fibre optic networks which could serve up as its own infrastructure in DT’s place.
Extend Google’s online dominance and over time, DT could be wishing to have Google and other content providers using its infrastructure.
Ironically, DT and its ilk do serve Google and others a form of distribution… note that online especially, there was a time when content providers actually paid distribution partners to access their users (slotting fees that some publishers paid portals for example)…
We shall see…
You have to give Google credit.
Google was a late entry (as they were in search, email, news, and everything else - there goes the first mover advantage, I guess) in instant messenging, but Google Talk has the opportunity to grow pretty fast. Obvioulsy not fast enough to dislodge AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger or Yahoo IM, but fast enough to cause more headaches to the folks in Seattle, Sunnyvale and Dulles…
The company this week a) allowed / offered Gmail users OR b) plowed into Gmail’s inbox users by slipping a “enable Google Talk in your Inbox” intermediate page to Gmail users as they signed in to their inbox.
I did not really even notice what I was allowing when I pressed Yes, but once I got into my inbox and what I inadvertantly allowed, I must say, I was happy I did…
Google gets credit for leveraging its search to enter email, and now leverage Gmail’s appeal to enter IM.
Time will tell whether or not these late entries will make a material impact on the Web landscape… but I can tell you that increasingly, despite the firm still getting nearly 99.96969696969% (little Googol humor for ya there) of its revenue from online advertising, it has moved away from a search only player better than many critics and pundits would have expected them to.
I am all for corporations trying to defend their trademarks, but what if the man they are suing is [also] named Dell?
Sony might experience some delays with the launch of the PS3.
The video game industry - despite all of its swagger - has experienced a few setbacks recently, and this one is no exception.
