Month: May 2010

Posted on

What is Foursquare, and should I care?

What is Foursquare?
Primarily a “location-based social networking service” for smartphones and mobile users. Users “check in” to places they’re at so that their friends know where they are. The most frequent visitor of a place (bar, restaurant, venue) can become the “mayor”, and users can also earn badges for completing special tasks.

The point of all this? The service posits that the world will really care about knowing the most popular, “hottest” places to be right now. Companies of course will hope their venue is just such a place and can advertise to the hordes.

One new service aggregates a group of services: http://socialgreat.com/

It gives a gestalt view from: Foursquare, Twitter, Brightkite, and graffitiGeo.

Posted on

When your sales staff is compensated based on deal size, not profit

Interesting if not obvious-in-hindsight complaint about Sun Microsystems by Oracle head:

More infuriating, says Ellison, is that Sun routinely sold equipment at a loss because it was more focused on boosting revenue than generating profits. The sales staff was compensated based on deal size, not profit. So the commission on a $1 million sale that generated $500,000 in profit was the same as one that cost the company $100,000, he said. “The sales force could care less if they sold things that lost money because the commission was the same in either case,” he said.

See Reuters article.

Posted on

Why HTML5 can’t replace Flash

The best analysis for why HTML5 can’t replace Flash – Apple is being “disruptive” in the worst way.

HTML5 Vs. Flash. What You Haven’t Heard — a guest post by Carlos Nazareno, an interactive media artist… in sum, “HTML5 is just as bad, if not worse than Flash.”

And besides, just use CloudBrowse, an app for your smartphone that browses for you.

Posted on

Beware Tabnabbing Phishing Attacks

Beware Tabnabbing, a New Type of Phishing Attack
Wow. The number of ways you can be fooled into giving up your private logins through a web browser keeps growing.

Adam Engst at Tidbits.com describes the attack using your browser history (you do purge it often, right)? See a demo at StartPanic.com and read more at Krebson Security.

The lesson: keep your browser history clean, do not sign into any secure site from a tab left open, and block as many 3rd-party ads as you can with AdBlock for FireFox. And wait for Firefox to fix this bug in accessing global history.