Jun
12
2008
PBL have returned MyHome.com.au to Shane Dale, purportedly netting him a $6.2m profit, after sinking over $20m into the venture but failing to gain any penetration into the Online Real Estate market.
Favourite quote from The Australian’s write up with the obligatory beat up on NineMSN and Tony Faure:
One source said Myhome had been “a major failure due to a spectacular lack of understanding of competitive strategy in the online real estate market”.
News (The Australian’s publisher) own a majority stake in RealEstate.com.au, the leading online real estate website.
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Jun
05
2008
From Shortlist on Tuesday (subscription required):
MyCareer traffic down sharply, SEEK and CareerOne rising
SEEK and CareerOne grew their candidate traffic during March, while MyCareer posted a large drop, according to the latest Nielsen Online data.
SEEK tracked 206,803 average unique daily browsers during the month, up 2.7%.
CareerOne moved back into the number-two spot, rising 0.8% to 64,204 average daily browsers.
Fairfax Digital - which includes MyCareer and the IT site IT2 - fell 12.6% to 57,498 daily browsers for the month.
I wouldn’t call 0.8% much of a rise, more like treading water and CareerOne have actually lost 0.6% RMS (Relative Market Share). However, the real news here is this represents a fall of nearly 5% RMS for MyCareer.
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Apr
26
2008
UPDATE: Further fiddling confirms the FAIL (below).
UPDATE: Reported bug and found a workaround for VMWare (below).
The upgrade from 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) to 8.04 (Hardy Heron) has not been smooth for me:
- Auto-detect sound did not work initially. I installed the i386 kernel modules which broke networking. Reverting to generic kernel modules seems to have fixed both networking as well as sound. Very odd. UPDATE: Hold that. It fixed it for a short while. Its broken again on the generic kernel. Setting the sound settings to ALSA instead of Autodetect works around the issue. Symptom is when you try to play any sound, you get the message “audiotestsrc wave=sine freq=512 ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! gconfaudiosink profile=music: Failed to connect stream: Invalid argument”. I’ll be opening a bug report about this later in the weekend.
UPDATE 2: Looks like its a common bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/191027
- Firefox 3.0b5 is installed by default, breaking all of my add ons. Will have to try to downgrade back to Firefox 2.0. UPDATE: Rolling back to firefox-2 wasn’t very smooth either. Stuck with 3.0b5 for now, waiting for the add ons to catch up.
- Looks like compiz-fusion was uninstalled, breaking my theme (bye bye Aero look). Will have to investigate. UPDATE: Turns out that only ‘emerald –replace’ was dropped out of Sessions. Added that back in and presto! Aero look back. Happy again.
- The Awm dock is buggered, with the launcher icons floating well above the dock. UPDATE: Still buggered.
- And worst for last…VMWare no longer works as it depends on vmware-server-kernel-modules and libssl0.9.7 which I can’t get to install. Will also have to investigate. UPDATE: The instructions to get this working are here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=4357442&postcount=10
So far, not too impressed…
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Apr
15
2008
TechCrunch has picked up on the “Don’t Be Evil” thread I posted on earlier:
Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto, first uttered by Googler Paul Buchheit (now founder of FriendFeed) in 2001, has long been the pillar of their self-imposed code of conduct.
…
[The] core motto is still displayed prominently on the Google Investor Relations site, and the company appears to be supporting it up 100%.
Not so, apparently. Last week, however, Google’s Marissa Mayer said “It really wasn’t like an elected, ordained motto” during an interview in Australia, adding “I think that ‘Don’t Be Evil’ is a very easy thing to point at when you see Google doing something that you personally don’t like; it’s a very easy thing to point out so it does get targeted a lot.”
…
This is most likely not a precursor to an official move away from the motto. I imagine it’s little more than a venting of a frustration that Google continues to be held to a promise made six years ago, when they were under significantly less scrutiny than they are today. Google can’t ditch the motto (the press would eat that up), and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to live up to it. What can they do? Not much. They made this bed. It’s too bad they couldn’t get Buchheit to take it with him when he left to found FriendFeed.
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Apr
12
2008
For me, this report confirms that Google’s famous “Don’t be Evil” philosophy is complete B.S.
Here’s the news from ValleyWag:
A recently departed DoubleClicker tells us that Google managers asked employees at the online ad company it acquired last month to sign one-year noncompete agreements. Most agreed, thinking that it would spare their jobs — but then layoffs came a week later. They were “pretty pissed” over the bait-and-switch and were forced to find jobs outside their industry.
Read the text of the noncompete clause here on ValleyWag.
Looks like Google needs to add another “full disclosure” to the bottom of their philosophy:
* Full-disclosure update #2: When we first wrote these “10 things” four years ago, we included the phrase “You can make money without doing evil.” Over time we’ve learned that you can in fact make much more money by doing evil. In that time, we’ve expanded our company by gobbling up others and actions that then seemed unlikely are now key aspects of our philosophy (such as screwing employees of companies that we acquire). This doesn’t mean we’ve changed our core mission (total domination); just that the farther we travel toward achieving it, the more blurry those once lofty ethics have become.
Have you signed any employment contracts recently with non-competes?
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Mar
29
2008
That’s the best way I can think of to describe this video….FAIL!!!
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Oct
07
2007
What a horrible weekend for Autralasian Rugby. In a shocking upset, France defeat New Zealand to dump The No. 1 Ranked All Blacks from the World Cup. Thanks to some ill-advised/ill-timed NZ substitutions and to an uncalled French forward pass leading to a try, France were able to get 2 points ahead and hang on under considerable pressure from the NZ attack.
Go Fiji!
UPDATE: Rugby Heaven has coverage here.
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Oct
07
2007
In a scrappy match where England played above their Pool match performances, the English forward pack and the boot of Johnny Wilkinson wins the day and dumps Australia from the World Cup.
UPDATE: Rugby Heaven has coverage here.
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