Since the Bernard Madoff scandal broke last year thousands of investors have seen their life savings and their livelihoods disappear overnight. This has sparked outrage and anger as to how Madoff was able to commit such a fraud over such a long period of time. As a result federal investigators have been looking for those people who have helped Madoff perform the different acts of fraud committed over the years. This has led to the arrest of George Perez and Jerome O’Hara last week. These two men shared the same office as Madoff and federal officials allege that the two were a major component that allowed the fraud to continue as long as it did. With their technical computer knowledge helping Madoff to create the fake statements that were sent out to investors who were a part of the scam.
What this shows is that the Madoff probe is only continuing to widen as regulators seeking out those people who helped Madoff commit the fraud for so long and are charging them as accomplices in this case. This is clearly a sign that many more arrests are likely to becoming within the next several weeks to months. As federal officials piece together how Madoff was able to conduct the fraud for so long.
The current financial crisis has caused nothing but economic ruin for millions of people.
The most common villains for what is occurring have been the big bankers and the hedge funds.
A recent example of this is the trial of two former Bear Stearns hedge fund managers Ralph Cioffi and Mathew Tannin. What happened was the government had charged the two with fraud and conspiracy as a number of different emails highlight the overall knowledge that they had as the sub prime market was collapsing.
The prosecution claimed that they were telling investors about the optimistic future of the fund while knowingly hiding the fact that they had reservations about what they were doing.
This can be seen through various email correspondence that the two men had in April 2007 with one email saying, “The sub-prime market looks pretty damn ugly.”
After a lengthy trial a jury found both men not guilty.
The main reason for their acquittal was the email exerts that the government is showing as evidence made it clear that both Cioffi and Tannin were unsure what to do at the time. Given the standard of beyond a reasonable doubt to convict the of the charges meant that the jury must acquit.
Toronto – Rogers Wireless released it’s plans to carry Google’s Android Open- Source Operating System on two of it’s phones come June.
The two phones were announced to be the HTC Dream and the HTC Magic. Both phones have a responsive touch screen, and the HTC Dream offers a slide out QWERTY keyboard. The Canadian company, Rogers Wireless, has decided against changing the names of the phones, unlike their southern counterparts in the U.S.
Google has pushed the use of it’s Android operating system to help spark popularity of it’s advanced wireless internet and other features that come exclusive with Google. The Android powered cell phones will be able to download software through the phones just like current available smart phones. This kind of cell phone has the upper hand when it comes to smart phones because it now carries the Google Android 1.5 SDK, which is known as the “Cupcake” branch of the project. This “Cupcake” upgrade is excessively more advanced than it’s current competition on the market today.
Both HTC phones are said to run twice as fast on Canada’s fastest mobile network. It is starting off exclusively in hand devices, but will eventually be placed in other consumer devices.
The Google Android is an exciting It news update for Canada and has been a much aticipated event.
As the world of online advertising continue to evolve so does the way that ads are viewed on the internet.
Over the past ten years Google Ads have created enormous competition for the lucrative pay per click advertising space.
As time has went by, many of it’s competitors such as Yahoo and other third party brokers have used cookies on your web browser to determine what ads you would be most interested in seeing based on the web sites that you have visited in addition to which sites you placed something in the shopping cart then left the without checking out. This is called behavioral ad targeting.
In a major reversal of policy Google is now going to be using behavioral ad targeting to show you only those ads that are of most interest to you.
In the past Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt has expressed concern about using this technique for ad targeting. Effective March 11th the company will now be using behavior advertising as a part of its Google Ads network.
The way it works is it will involve placing information from your web browser (minus the personal information) from 500 to 600 web sites to determine which ads would be of most interest to you.
The network will then place you into one of 600 different categories based on the different web sites that you have visited.
Over the next two weeks the company will allow 40 to 50 advertisers which have been approved by Google to start using the new program, which will be available to all of it’s advertisers before the end of the year.
The ad targeting will not include information from Google searches and is expected to bring the company a larger piece of the current pay per click market where they only hold a 2% market share.
As Susan Wojkicki, Google’s vice president of product management wrote on Google’s official blog, “This morning the (behavioral) targeting fits with the notion of Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page that ads can and should be at least as useful to people as search results and other online content.â€
What this shows is that the world of online advertising is changing at an incredible rate of speed. What was one unthinkable, Google going into behavioral ad targeting, has now become a reality. Over the short term this is unlikely to have any major effect on the company; however, over the next several years it is very possible that Google could dominate this market as well.
With the daily increase of advertisements across the internet, many internet giants try to benefit from advertising their website for advertisement revenue. This revenue can be either allocated by linking to affiliate sites or by getting commissions from any purchase done through that advertisement. Google is considered the biggest internet advertising giant with a daily net profit of $2.1 million.
Recent unnamed sources at Youtube, a major internet video sharing database, stated that big media companies will be given a cut of the advertisement revenue from Google if their videos are published, regardless of the identity of the publisher. TechCrunch, a technology blog, also reported that Google will expand its program, where it allows big media companies to advertise their videos, by the end of the first quarter. This deal came as a solver of many problems since Youtube had a long and contentious relationship with big media companies and some, like Viacom, have actually sued Youtube for letting people host unauthorized copyrighted content on its site. This deal will definitely benefit both Youtube and the big media companies as they are offered an olive branch for posting their copyrighted content like many other media companies, like CBS, that already sell advertisements for videos hosted on their channels as well as videos singled out by YouTube’s Content ID system that recognizes copyrighted content.
This advertising program is part of a larger effort done by Google to control content posted on YouTube in an attempt to turn YouTube, the web’s number 1 video site, into the “cash cow†that many once expected it would become after acknowledging that Google was struggling with difficulty to earn significant revenue from YouTube. Giving big media companies the capability of selling their own advertising, for videos that they post as well as others, on a site visited daily by millions, will surely aid them to improve profit for their produced content. And of course, this deal will also benefits Google that will be getting a share of these advertising revenues.
This program was also accompanied by the announcement made on Wednesday by YouTube which stated that it will be expanding its click-to-buy program to viewers in Spain, Germany and Netherlands after previously offering it to U.S. and U.K. only. This program uses embedded transparent overlays in the videos directly linking to its media partners in order to buy the product rather than just posting Amazon links on the bottom of the video page.
As another sign of the tough economic times this country faces in the coming year, even some of the top companies are being forced to make cutbacks.
This time the bad news comes from Google, the internet giant based out of California. Despite recent growth from the company, the decision came from corporate headquarters to lay off 70 workers company wide by closing three offices.
Two of the offices are located overseas in Lulea, Sweden and Trondheim, Norway, while domestically Google shut down its office in Austin. Most of the affected employees were engineers, and though the employees were offered jobs at other Google offices, Google does not have any other engineering plants in the Austin area, which would mean to accept any new position, employees would have to relocate.
The lay offs in Austin came as a bit of a surprise. Google had only opened the office there in October, and the city was proud to be home to a branch of the internet company. Fortunately though the lay offs sting, the overall local economy in Austin should not be too greatly impacted.
Google released a statement concerning the lay offs and explained that the company was still doing well, and that these cost cutting measures only came at engineering plants that were failing to support themselves in the tightened economy. Despite that, Google expressed no intention of reopening the plants when the recession passes.
New York -Â YouTube has added links to online stores such as Amazon and iTune on its website, an initiative to draw more money from the popular destination for video sharing.
YouTube was bought by Google in 2006 for 1.65-billion.
The search giant carefully studied the question of how monetize YouTube without alienating users, which could easily make the leap to sites like Hulu, Daily Motion or others.
The links “Click-to-buy” are discreetly placed in boxes under clips from YouTube, inviting people to visit sites such as iTunes or Amazon.com to purchase music, movies or other content related to extracts screened .
“These are just the beginning of the installation of a broad platform for electronic commerce on which to rely users and business partners on YouTube,” said a message on the website.
Links to online stores are newly integrated video artists from EMI Music Box and PC game Spore, recently launched by Electronic Arts.
Such links to retailers will be added gradually to the entire archive music videos from YouTube.
“We aim to expand the program to add content and trading partners and also for the benefit of our international users,” said YouTube.
Victoria – Apple Inc’s legal team have set their sights on a small tech school on Vancouver Island,
The computer giant has threatened to prosecute, alleging that the logos of both companies are too similar.
The Victoria School of Business and Technology denies any link between the two logos – both in the shape of an apple – and promised to fight to keep its logo.
“We are completely shocked,” said Dieter Gerhard, president of the school speaking to CTV News. “Here’s the bigger guy Goliath really coming down on little guy David.”
The logo used by Apple for some thirty years is recognizable around the world and shows a “bite” rounded cut on the right.
The apple logo in the School of Victoria has been used for three years. However, Gerhard stresses that its design incorporates a mountain and the logo “VSBT”, and has three bumps on top instead of two. Also, there is no bite on the schools logo.
“Are we now saying that nobody can now use Apple for anything?” said Gerhard.
“An apple is an apple and it should be in the public domain and be accessible to all, especially in our case where our logo has nothing to do with the trademark of Apple.”
Gerhard hopes that public support will force Apple to retreat. A poll on the website of the school has already collected over 1,000 responses, mostly in favor of the school.
In addition, VSBT is currently a major customer of Apple and a significant portion of its rooms are equipped with Macintosh computers.
Apple said the increase could force it to raise its song price of 99 cents, something they’ve refused to do even after crazy pressure from the record companies.
iTunes’ Vice President Eddy Cue has also said that Apple could shut down iTunes rather than raise its prices or absorb the higher royalty costs.
“If the [iTunes music store] was forced to absorb any increase in the … royalty rate, the result would be to significantly increase the likelihood of the store operating at a financial loss — which is no alternative at all. Apple has repeatedly made it clear that it is in this business to make money, and most likely would not continue to operate [the iTunes music store] if it were no longer possible to do so profitably,” said Cue.
The president of the National Music Publishers Association, the group pushing for the increase said, “I think we established a case for an increase in the royalties. Apple may want to sell songs cheaply to sell iPods. We don’t make a penny on the sale of an iPod.”
New York – Today, Microsoft announced a new program called Live SearchPerks
The new program requires participants to install a small application that will act as counter on Live Search. The program will calculate how many times a participant uses the search engine of Microsoft, which will assign a number of points within a limit of 25 per day. With these points, the user can claim at prices as downloading a musical (25 points), a plane ride (500 points) and may also decide to donate points to a cause of his choice .
But participation in SearchPerks is subject to a number of constraints. Registration for the program which will last until 15 April 2009, is limited to 250 000 users who have shown before 31 December 2008 and reside in the United States. Depending on the success of the operation, SearchPerks can be extended to other countries. However, the implementation relating to SearchPerks only supports Internet Explorer browser and hence only Windows users are accepted. For the promotion of a search engine …
In an interview with Reuters, Frederick Savoye, director of Live Search explained that the CashBack program has not helped to increase the market share of the company in the area of search engines, but the company recognizes that such initiatives are needed to enhance the brand: “We know we have many challenges in the development of the brand,” says Whitney Burk, head of press relations.