The stairway to the Hall in Hertford College, Oxford.
Obama est arrivé
Spotted in Oxford today.
Prius to be built in the US
From yesterday’s press release…
July 10, 2008 – Erlanger, KY – Toyota is responding to changes in consumer demand and improving the production efficiency and stability of its North American operations by adjusting production mix at three plants. The changes include the addition of the Prius hybrid sedan to its North American lineup.
The changes are as follows:
– Prius will be built at a plant under construction in Blue Springs, Miss. Production is scheduled to begin in late 2010. Prius, which will join the Kentucky-built Camry Hybrid as the second Toyota hybrid built in North America, enables Toyota to better respond to increased consumer demand for hybrid vehicles…
If you promote our stuff, we’ll punish you
Apropos the Viacom/Google lawsuit.
How to make money on Flickr
From The Register…
Flickr fanciers will soon be able to make cash out of the photos they post online following a secret deal inked with the world’s leading photo agency, Getty Images.
The two firms agreed yesterday that high-quality images posted on Yahoo!’s Flickr service could be cherry-picked by Getty editors searching for interesting photographs.
If Getty spots an image it likes the relevant photographer will receive an email inviting them to join a Flickr-branded photo group on gettyimages.com and become a paid contributor to the company’s library.
Under the deal, which will be rolled out in the next few months, selected Flickr users will be paid the same rate as Getty’s paid contract-holding photographers.
“We believe that Flickr will be an important addition to the mix that we have,” said Getty co-founder and chief executive Jonathan Klein.
He added that Flickr’s contribution will increase the depth of the firm’s photo catalogue and bring an element that he reckoned professional photography often lacks, according to the Wall Street Journal: “Because the imagery is not shot for commercial services, there is more authenticity. Advertisers are looking for authenticity.”
Flickr claimed it gets 54 million worldwide visitors each month and stores more than two billion photos for 27 million members.
Getty’s partnership with Flickr is the first of its kind for the company, which was bought by private equity firm Hellman & Friedman for $2.4bn in February this year.
Interesting to see these symbiotic relationships develop.
Vista woes fuel Mac sales surge?
Interesting Register Hardware report.
According to US investment house BMO Capital Markets, cited by AppleInsider, Apple will have shipped up to 2.5m Macs between April and June inclusive – enough for a 39 per cent year-on-year growth rate.
More to the point, that rate of increase is more than three times the industry average of 12.2 per cent.
BMO analyst Keith Bachman told investors that it’s largely the result of Windows Vista: “Thus far, user satisfaction ratings for Vista have been weak, and start-up times for Vista have been known to be much slower than the Mac OS X. Thus, more than 50 per cent of recent customers buying Macs in Apple retail stores are first-time buyers.”
Why golf is broken
Fascinating FT interview with Jack Nicklaus, for my money the greatest golfer ever.
Nicklaus’s real gripe with the modern game and its decline is the role of technology and, in particular, golf balls. The technological advance of golf ball manufacturing is enabling big hitters to propel them such distances that courses are being rendered obsolete.
As a result, designers are lengthening courses for the benefit of professionals at the cost of millions of dollars, leaving the poor amateur wondering whether a four-hour slog round a demanding course that used to take three hours is worth it.
Nicklaus argued this point with the governing bodies in the US and the UK, the PGA and the Royal & Ancient respectively, 30 years ago. “They just laughed at me,” he says. Still, he remains passionate about the issue, leaning forward and arguing his point in earnest. Golf, a game played in order to bring man together with nature was fine 20 years ago, he says. It had pretty much stayed as it was for 60 years, and you could play it in a reasonable amount of time. Now, he believes, “the game’s been broken because of equipment. It’s a problem.”
It hasn’t stopped him running a $300m course-design business, though.
Bit.ly — even tinier URLs
From Webmonkey…
New York-based Betaworks today launched a useful–and cute–URL shortener, Bit.ly. The user-facing features, such as tracking clicks and cookie-based history of recent shortened URLs, are nice. Where Bit.ly really shines is the data it makes available via its simple API.
Without registering for an API key, developers can shorten URLs, expand previously-shortened URLs, and get data about a Bit.ly URL. The information Bit.ly makes available includes the number of clicks, the referring sources of those clicks, and three sizes of thumbnails of the resulting web page.
Bit.ly is a model platform, a great example of how to launch a service with an API.
Yep.
Er, shome mishtake here
From the Telegraph. This would never had got through in Bill Deedes’s day.
Daily Mail loses personal data on employees
Well, well. According to this report, the Voice of Middle England isn’t too careful about keeping sensitive data secure.
Northcliffe Media, owner of the Daily Mail, is the latest company to lose a laptop load of sensitive staff information.
A laptop containing names, addresses, bank accounts and sort codes of Mail and General Trust staff has been stolen, it emerged last week. The company told staff that the laptop was password protected – and so, presumably, not encrypted.
The company confirmed to The Register that the theft had occurred and that staff had been informed. Police and the Information Commissioner were also informed.
According to the letter from Northcliffe Media sent to staff, and seen by the Reg, staff were advised to contact their bank to warn them of potential problems.
The letter, signed by group finance director M J Hindley, said:
The likelihood is that this theft was carried out in an opportunistic manner by a thief who will not realise that there is any personal data on the laptop and who may just erase what is on the hard disk in order to disguise the fact that the laptop is stolen.
I can assure you that we take security of personal data very seriously and have, since this incident, which was inadvertently caused by a technical issue, already further strengthened procedures.
The company apologised for any inconvenience or annoyance caused by the theft.
I bet this won’t stop the Mail castigating the government for its casual attitude towards data security.