Archive for the ‘WITH - Week in Tech History’ Category

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July 4th, 2008 - The company that used to be called “Ask Jeeves”, but is now Ask.com officially announced they acquired the Lexico Publishing Group. The LPG is a company that built a series of reference websites. Most notably Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com. The transaction was an all cash one, and undisclosed.

Other items in Tech history this week: Hotmail is launched, AOL buys Mapquest, the eBay Baby, in 2001 the P4 1.6 was released at $294 and a lot more in the Geekazine Quickcast

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We announce the 3rd step in the Summer of Geekazine contest

June 27th - William Gates officially hands the keys over to Steve Ballmer and goes on his retirement. Well, sort of.

Bill announced that he will be stepping down as CEO of Microsoft and letting Steve Ballmer take the reins. He will have interaction with Microsoft. After all, it is his company.

Lots of other cool historical events from Atari, Commodore, Microsoft, Apple and IBM within the podcast

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Mozilla broke free and created Firefox back in 2004. Since then, they have been growing in browser popularity. Being the major browser in Linux, but also downloadable for Windows and Mac helps a lot. The ability to install Add-ons also makes this browser very flexable.

On June 17th, 2008, Mozilla released version 3.0 of the browser (with version 1.9 of the Gecko engine). They wanted to put a big dent into the Internet Explorer market, so they created a “Download party”. The idea was to get a record number of downloads for the launch - a Guiness World record, that is. They created Download Day to promote the record.

However, the day of the launch was not good to Mozilla. They got ready to push out the browser, but a website glitch caused the download to be delayed. Within a couple hours the site was back up and running, but Twitters abroad told of other locations you could go to download the software.

Could this hamper the World record efforts? Well, since there was no world record before, the answer is No.

But what Mozilla DID do is 8 million downloads in the 24 hour period. That was more traffic than Mozilla ever has seen. The Linux community did their part in getting the new browser, but it was really the “average user” that helped bring this number so high.

The Mozilla - IE battle still goes on. Also with Safari, Opera and Chrome in the picture. But did you know that AT&T also put out a Browser? Well, you will find out all these great facts and more in the Week in Tech History.

Also, we mention the 3rd step in the Summer of Geekazine contest. #Geekazine Rocks.

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This was a pivitol week on the Yahoo Proxy battle as everything was approved to go. Carl Icahn was given the green light to lobby shareholders and possibly win control to ready for a new Yahoo. The previous week, we saw all the reports of Carl Icahn making the statement: Jerry Yang must go. This week was no different.

In the meantime, Microsoft made one more offer. This time it wasn’t for the whole company - it was only for the search engine. $35 a share for Yahoo Search. This was significant because this was the same bid Microsoft did back in February for the whole company.

Other great items in the Week in Tech History Quickcast - TI/99 restructures, Jacques Cousteau was born. We also saw Commodore, new Intel and AMD processors and the Ruputer was introduced. All this on the Geekazine Quickcast.

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It was an interesting week of poising as Yahoo and Carl Icahn butted heads over the impending proxy battle for sale of Yahoo to Microsoft. Yahoo was doing everything in it’s power while Icahn made some general statements about CEO Jerry Yang. As the week went on, the mud started to fly.

Yahoo started the volley - but not by Yahoo’s choice. A court document was unsealed in where it outlined the plans for Yahoo to create a plan to pay workers if a takeover happens. Yahoo was going to provide “100 percent equity acceleration for everyone.” A claim that Yahoo might not be able to cover, depending on how the proceedings went.

In the meantime, Carl Icahn stepped up his campaign by making public his plans for Yahoo. It included a reorganization of the Board of Directors, but up until then, it was just a general statement. This week he basically said that CEO Jerry Yang needed to step down.

Yahoo made a statement later in the day and set their Shareholders’ meeting for August 1st, 2008. This would give both parties to wheel and deal for a happy medium.

This was one of many events in the Week in Tech history. Check out all the events in the podcast.

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May 29th 2008 - Comcast had a different type of attack. This one opened the eyes to how our records in ICANN were being handled. The infamous “Comcast Hack” was where hackers did not attack the servers themselves, but they found a way into Network Solutions and changed the DNS of the webpage. Once the DNS is changed, the homepage would then redirect to servers of their choosing.

Other historical notes - The Woodstock of the web. We also heard about the first computer patent and the Dell computer fraud. This is all on the Podcast

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May 24, 2008: they claim it was meant as a joke, but people didn’t take it with a grain of salt. The couple put their baby up for auction. 1 euro was the price, which at the time was about $1.57 US.

eBay - who already had a policy of no sale of human beings - took down the listing and suspended the account. What was worse was the child was taken and the parents were investigated for child cruelty. Eventually the charges were dropped and the parents got their little bundle of “Buy it now” back on July 4th.

Other events of WITH: T. Boone Pickens puts in a ton of money into Yahoo after Carl Icahn issues a proxy battle. We also found out about the first idea of a moving sidewalk. Abbyword was released. Apple and CBS were sued over “Mighty Mouse”, AOL buys Bebe and the infamous 5 cent email tax.

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On May 15th, 2008 - Carl Icahn stepped up to the plate and officially announced his bid to proxy Yahoo so he could work with Microsoft on getting a deal out.  A couple days prior, Eric Jackson decided to pull his bid for proxy and the rumor started to fly that Carl Icahn was going to take over the fight.

Of course we saw how that went - Icahn got a seat on the Yahoo board, and Yahoo stayed with Yahoo.

Other items of note - ZDTV starts, HP and EDS acquisition and the Ethernet Standard is formed. Of course there is a lot more in the podcast.

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Torrents can be really helpful, however, they can also be used for passing of copyrighted material. MP3’s movies, programs, all plague torrent sites. Some with keygens to break the program keys. Others with malware installed to steal data from your computer.

Some say to fight this, Torrents need to be shut down. Others say that controlled torrents are needed for open source documents. It’s a big battle back and forth.

One way to combat is to go after the Torrents themselves. Pirate Bay, for example. However, if a Torrent lives in another country, the legal battle gets harder.

TorrentSpy was a bittorrent indexing service. They showed people where the .torrent files lived. the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) filed a $110 million dollar lawsuit for infringement of files. US District Court Judge Florence-Marie Cooper agreed with the MPAA and Torrentspy was ordered to pay up, along with a perminant injunction on the site.

There is a lot of good that can come from a torrent site. If we could curb the illegal action and make safe areas so you can download copyright free or Creative Commons no-deriv music, movies and documents, the torrent would be better embraced.

There is a lot more on the Week in Tech History - Check out the Podcast!

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April 28th 2003. With 200,000 songs and a eye on the music market, Apple launched the iTunes Store. At that time, the Windows version was not out yet (had to wait until October 17th of that year), but the first week alone they had over a million sales.

Other items of note - the first computer mouse and the first Windows mouse. We also saw the Sasser Worm come up and Google’s IPO.

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Apr. 25th, 1996 was the day that Yahoo started putting ads on TV. They ran a spot on David Letterman, Saturday Night Live and episodes of Star Trek asking one question - Do you Yahoo?

The successful ad campaign spawned many a version of that commercial. Ultimately they dropped the question and just had the Yodel “Yahoo!” on the commercials run.

Other items of note: Windows XP64 and Windows server 2003 were released. Dell says they’ll put on XP after the June 30th cut off date and Gateway 2000 drops the ‘2000′. Lots more on the Quickcast.