Quark, the company behind the page layout software QuarkXPress, mailed out a marketing pack to potential and current customers in March of this year. The effort seems likely to go down in history as one of the most ill-thought out campaigns in the history of technology advertising. For a company that’s product is styling images and paper, the postcards not only lack fizz but also sport downright untrue comparisons between Quark’s software and that of its leading competitor, Adobe.
What came across most clearly is that it’s not just that Adobe’s InDesign is, contrary to Quark’s claims, the better software, but that the bad attitude Quark displayed is reminiscent of the bad old days of tech attitude. When the company has to resort to bad-mouthing a stunningly brilliant competitor to score points, rather than demonstrating the strengths of their own software, something has gone badly wrong.
Quark VS InDesign: Quark’s Postcards from the Edge
Popularity: unranked [?]
mis·chie·vous (mĭs’chə-vəs)
adj.
1. Causing mischief.
2. Playful in a naughty or teasing way.
3. Troublesome; irritating: a mischievous prank.
4. Causing harm, injury, or damage: mischievous rumors and falsehoods.
[Middle English mischevous, from mischef, mischief.]
Popularity: unranked [?]
I was looking at the webcam of a news radio station here in the UK and was surprised to see the way that the presenters had been staying interested in the cricket game being covered that day; a bottle of wine for company.
I’d thought that drinking was banned for BBC employees while on-air but apparently this wasn’t the case today!
Popularity: 1% [?]
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more, day by day,
You tell me of our future that you plann’d:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
It’s two weeks since 56 people died in terrorist bombings in London.
Popularity: 2% [?]
MySpace, is one of the fastest-growing sites on the web, currently ranked fifth in terms of page views, and the cash deal is expected to more than double the number of unique users visiting News Corp site, especially the number of advertiser-friendly 16-34-year-olds.
The acquisition, the first internet-based deal the company has struck since 2000, comes just three months after Mr Murdoch warned a meeting of American editors they would be “relegated to the status of also-rans” if they ignored the internet.”Intermix’s brands, such as MySpace.com, are some of the web’s hottest properties and resonate with the same audiences that are most attracted to Fox’s news, sports and entertainment offerings,” Mr Murdoch said in statement.
Guardian: Murdoch nets Intermix for $580m
Popularity: unranked [?]
The nondenominational Lakewood Church in Texas, the nation’s largest congregation, moved into the Compaq Center, once the home of the Houston Rockets, over the weekend. After $95 million in renovations, including two waterfalls and enough carpeting to cover nine football fields, the arena now belongs to a charismatic church with a congregation of 30,000, revenues of $55 million last year and a television audience in the millions. Like many new evangelical churches, the building has no cross, no stained glass, no other religious iconography. Instead, it has a cafe with wireless Internet access, 32 video game kiosks and a vault to store the offering.
On Saturday evening, at the first service in the arena, Joel Osteen, the pastor, exhorted a packed house of black, white and Latino worshipers, some of whom arrived three hours early. “What a sight this is. You guys look like victors, not victims,” he said, to a round of applause. “We’re just going to have a great time and celebrate the goodness of God tonight.”
NY Times: A Church That Packs Them In, 16,000 at a Time
A floorplan of the stadium church helps show the scale of the enormous space in which approximately 25,000 will come to worship every Sunday.
Lakewood Church Official Site
Last month [October 2004] in New York City, Osteen sold out Madison Square Garden two nights in a row — something New Yorkers say the NBA’s Knicks can’t even do. One woman from Florida asked him if he’s the next Billy Graham.
“I don’t know. I don’t think of it like that because I think Billy Graham served his purpose. I don’t think anybody is ever going to take over for Billy Graham. He was so great,” Osteen said.”That little man is so powerful. He’s just a mighty man of God,” said Nell Kendrick, who drives from Austin to see Osteen preach.
The Compaq Center, the former home of the Houson Rockets, is transforming from a sports and entertainment complex to the new Lakewood International Church. The same designers who work the Grammy Awards are building a stage with a huge jumbotron and waterfalls on each side of the choir. The renovation will cost $85 million.
We asked why the money isn’t being used to help people. “What I would say is, when we have this facility, we’ll have a bigger base, so we can help more people,” Osteen said.
Channel3000.com
Popularity: 1% [?]
Imagine eating food that was cooked using natural gas generated from your own human waste. Thousands of prisoners in Rwanda don’t have to imagine it — they live it. Prisoners’ feces is converted into combustible “biogas,” or methane gas that can be used for cooking. It has reduced by 60 percent the annual wood-fuel costs which would otherwise reach near $1 million, according to Silas Lwakabamba, rector of the Kigali Institute of Science, Technology and Management, where the technology was developed.
Last month, the Rwandan prison biogas facilities received an Ashden Award for sustainable energy. The award, which comes with a prize worth nearly $50,000, is given by the Ashden Trust, a British charity organization that promotes green technologies.
Human Feces Powers Rwandan Prison
Popularity: unranked [?]
London Attack
People on their way home after the London bomb attacks on 7th July 2005. Tube and bus transport was stopped in London that day after four bombs exploded killing over 50 and injuring 700 people. This stretch of road is usually very busy with buses and cars. Notice how its pretty much devoid of transport.
The shot is taken by cameraphone and is looking south from the north end of London Bridge. Originally uploaded by bozoduck.
“Within minutes of the first blast we had received images from the public,” says Boaden. “We had 50 images within an hour. Now there are thousands. We had a gallery of still photographs from the public online, and they were incredibly powerful.”
The BBC’s Ten O’Clock News used two mobile phone sequences shot by members of the public, and the main picture used on its online news service on Thursday was taken by a passer-by. “People are very media-savvy. We saw the use of what we call ‘user-generated material’ in the tsunami and at the floods in Boscastle. But as people get used to creating pictures and videos on their phones in normal life, they increasingly think of sending them to us when major incidents occur.”
Ben Rayner, the editor of the ITV News channel, says ITN was sent more than a dozen video clips from mobile phones on Thursday, and the clips – some so graphic as to render them unusable – played an important role in getting across to viewers the nature of the story. “It’s the way forward for instant newsgathering, especially when it involves an attack on the public,” he believes.
Mobile phone video clips and stills were posted on to internet sites alongside first-hand accounts of people’s experiences, building up a vast catalogue of DIY coverage more comprehensive and wide-ranging than anything available through the mainstream media.
Guardian: ‘We had 50 images within an hour’
Popularity: unranked [?]
An article in the Guardian today details how the BBC is planning to introduce two new technologies; an Interactive Media Player (iMP) for downloading or streaming recently aired television or radio programming and the Creative Archive for sharing ‘classic’ programmes that have been removed from current BBC schedules.
The interesting aspect of thise report is not that the BBC plans to take part in digital distribution of content, but that they are considering tailoring access according to location worldwide. With almost half of BBC Online’s users coming from overseas, the corporation is looking for ways to reimburse UK based license payers for their current subsidy of outside users. By introducing advertising on web sites such as BBC News of BBC.co.uk and charging for programming the corporate could even make a slim profit.
The director of new media and technology, Ashley Highfield, confirmed that plans to bring in extra money by selling downloads of popular programmes such as Doctor Who, Little Britain and the Blue Planet over the internet were “coming up the agenda. It’s something we’ve been mandated to do by our charter. It’s now become possible because we have internet rights that we could charge for, and we now have the technology,” he said.
New technology makes it possible for the BBC, which operates the UK’s most popular website, to identify exactly where its internet users are coming from. During the Athens Olympics last year, when the BBC provided hundreds of hours of live coverage to broadband internet users, it successfully tested software allowing it to restrict transmission to UK licence fee payers.
Mr Highfield said that in the future the “flip side” was that the BBC could also acquire the international internet rights to big events and charge overseas users to watch them. Any such move would have to be handled through the corporation’s BBC Worldwide commercial subsidiary.
Guardian: BBC may sell programmes abroad over internet
Popularity: unranked [?]
