- Latest News
- Comment & Metrics
- Magazine Articles
- Jason Stamper's Blog
- Open Source Blog
- Newsletter Sign-Up
Jason Stamper's Blog: April 2007 Archives
Bra-size revelations putting consumers at risk: PayPal
April 26, 2007
A new survey by PayPal into Brits’ preponderance to divulge personal details to complete strangers found that a quarter of all women surveyed were prepared to divulge their bra size to people they don’t know. This finding is causing me a great deal of angst.
I hardly know where to begin, there are so many unanswered questions. How can such a large number of women – it equates to 6 million in the UK alone – have found themselves being asked their bra size by a complete stranger? Have I been missing out on some new craze, because it’s not a question that I have found tripping off my tongue either in the company of complete strangers or even amongst friends and colleagues (or would this be considered less, rather than more unusual?)
Who are these people who go around asking women they don’t know what their bra size is, because even if they have a particular admiration for a woman’s breasts, surely there is no more gratification from knowing their cup size than, say, admiring a sports car but only if one knows precisely the cubic capacity of its owners’ garage?
Did Google Over-pay for DoubleClick?
April 16, 2007
There’s a great truism about mergers and acquisitions, that a company is worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it. So is Google’s news that it intends to splash around $3.1bn in cash to acquire DoubleClick, the great granddaddy of the banner ad industry, yet more evidence of over-exuberance in this space or is it a fair premium?
Certainly the asking price, widely believed to have been pushed up by competing bids from Microsoft, gives over a 200% return to the financiers who took DoubleClick private in a $1.1bn deal two years ago.
Correction: dotMobi blogger not so anonymous
April 13, 2007
I wrote a blog the other day about dotMobi, the top level domain name aimed at mobile users, rebutting their rebuttal of a story Kevin Murphy, a colleague of mine, wrote about them.
In that blog I said it was a shame that we don’t know who the dotMobi blogger was who criticized Kevin’s piece. That assertion was plain wrong – it turns out the blogger is Alexa Raad, a very switched-on blogger who I just got off the phone with (as opposed to ‘got off’ on the phone with, which would presumably have been the case if she was a .XXX rather than .mobi spokesperson!)
Alexa pointed out that her name appears on her blog down at the bottom. So there is no mystery there, and I was wrong to say they were hiding behind any kind of anonymity. I deleted my original post some while back but with the way of the Internet, I needed to write a follow-up too because that old post is no doubt hanging around in the Ether somewhere.
Alexa has had the grace not to write a critical follow-up on her own blog pointing out my egregious error, but she will be more than justified in linking to this particular post from her latest blog, so that all her own readers can see my retraction for themselves.
All of that said, Kevin does still stand by his original article that started the furor in the first place. Not the bit about Alexa being anonymous, the bit in which Alexa questions his fact checking. Kevin’s blog post is still here and is still open to comments.
However rather than continue that debate here, I simply suggest that you keep an eye on Alexa’s blog here.
Of course, there will be more news stories from our sister publication ComputerWire for which Kevin Murphy writes, as well as from CBR itself, covering the goings-on at dotMobi as developments unfold. As I noted in my recent post, we have nothing against dotMobi and a quick search of CBRonline will give you various results reporting their early success.
As Alexa pointed out, dotMobi is a fully-fledged company offering free tools, certification and online training for anyone wanting to do .mobi domains optimized for mobile users. .XXX, on the other hand, is none of the above, because it was blocked by the US Department of Commerce.
As always, your comments are most welcome.
Lawyers plan blogosphere invasion
April 10, 2007
You may be of the opinion that lawyers are those that even accountants avoid at parties, but we’re going to be hearing a lot more from the legal community in the blogosphere in the weeks and months to come.
back to top