XcellaSave Inc. is seeking a jury trial and unspecified damages from Chicago-based Groupon and Washington-based LivingSocial, according to two lawsuits filed yesterday in federal court in Delaware.
via Groupon Sued With LivingSocial Over Mobile Ad Patent – Bloomberg.
As if Groupon doesn’t have enough problems.
Update: I missed this on August 1 from Techcrunch.
Facebook is back in the spotlight today after raising $500 million from Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) and a Russian investor. With all the hype that Facebook may go public in the near future, now is a great time to take a look at whether Facebook users are particularly valuable when compared to the competition:
This story dated 1/5/2011. I have not looked at how they tabulated these numbers but statistics can favour whoever wrote the mathematical formula. Interesting nonetheless.
Certainly, according to the Winter Corporation’s 2005 survey, the largest OLTP (On-Line Transaction Processing) databases in the world are hosted on DB2. The volume prize goes to the Land Registry at 23.1 TB and the prize for the number of rows goes to UPS – 89.6 billion; both run on DB2.
via DB2 – the secret database • The Register.
DB2 has always ruled in the mainframe environment: on that platform it has no peer. In 1996 (ten years ago!) IBM made all the right technical moves to expand the use of DB2 down to the mini and even the PC markets. DB2 was produced in three versions. These have had various names over the years – UDB (Universal DataBase) was often used but it now being gently dropped by IBM. The most useful names I’ve come across are:
• DB2 for z/OS (Mainframe)
• DB2 for iSeries (AS400 as was)
• DB2 for LUW (Linux, UNIX and Windows)
Dated 18 January 2006.
Hosted VOIP provider M5 Networks announced on Nov. 3 that it has acquired Chicago-based Geckotech for $8 million.The combined companies will handle what company officials describe as the “exploding demand” for business-grade hosted VOIP services.
Dated Nov. 3, 2010
With the poor economic climate and companies slashing IT budgets, demand has grown for hosted VOIP services. Organizations, whether they are large enterprises, midsized or small businesses, looked at hosted telephony to cut costs without giving up critical communications applications.
Geckotech offered customers a Cisco-powered hosted VOIP platform as well as additional services, including phone service installation, system management and in-house customer support. The company offered free maintenance, and unlimited system and feature upgrades.
Geckotech was evaluating ways to overhaul its technology to obtain an enhanced phone experience and robust applications “without the use of licensing arrangements,” said M5 Networks. Geckotech did not specify its reasons for not wanting to license the technology.
Geckotech selected M5 Networks’ Call Conductor platform and rolled it out to some existing customers, M5 Networks said. With the acquisition, the remaining Geckotech customers will be “seamlessly” integrated to M5 Networks’ systems throughout the next year, said M5 Networks.
In an attempt to avoid these issues, SPDY uses a single SSL-encrypted session between a browser and a client, and then compresses all the request/response overhead. The requests, responses, and data are all put into frames that are multiplexed over the one connection. This makes it possible to send a higher-priority small file without waiting for the transfer of a large file that’s already in progress to terminate.
via SPDY: Google wants to speed up the web by ditching HTTP.
This article is two years old.
We assume that the preferred stockholders here are Groupon’s founders; usually it’s venture capital investors who have “preferred stock”, but we’ve never heard of a respectable VC asking for dividends of a money-losing startup.
via The Biggest Red Flag In The Groupon IPO Isn’t The Sea Of Red Ink – Business Insider.
Published on June 2, 2011.
An awkward silence ensued. The blue suits did not even confer among themselves. They just sat there, stonelike. Finally, the chief suit responded. “OK,” he said, “maybe you don’t infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?”
After a modest bit of negotiation, Sun cut IBM a check, and the blue suits went to the next company on their hit list.
via Patently Absurd – Forbes.com.
Incredible. Article from 2002.
SSL made its debut in 1994 as a way to cryptographically secure e-commerce and other sensitive internet communications. A private key at the heart of the system allows website operators to prove that they are the rightful owners of the domains visitors are accessing, rather than impostors who have hacked the users’ connections. Countless websites also use SSL to encrypt passwords, emails and other data to thwart anyone who may be monitoring the traffic passing between the two parties.
It’s hard to overstate the reliance that websites operated by Google, PayPal, Microsoft, Bank of America and millions of other companies place in SSL. And yet, the repeated failures suggest that the system in its current state is hopelessly broken.
via How is SSL hopelessly broken? Let us count the ways • The Register.