I’ll have eggs with that
When the founders of the ICT analyst industry, Ovum, came up with a name for their
company we reckon they thought their role would be to alert customers to “embryonic” developments in the industry – Ovum being Latin for “egg”.
Well, maybe, maybe not. But one of our E-talers, who regularly receives mail from the company, was amused to find when he received an Ovum item last week that it was the only genuine email among a bunch of four or five unsolicited messages.
We’re sure there are Monty Python fans out there who can remember the line
from the original sketch that has a waitress reading from a café menu: “Well,
there’s spam, spam, spam, egg and spam, etcetera, etcetera…”
Save the ihugs
There is a certain amount of excitement about the recent sale of ihug to Vodafone, but E-tales thinks the whole tale hasn’t been told. While there isn’t the space here to tell the whole story, a quick squiz at the West Australiannewspaper’s story about the $41 million sale of ihug — by Perth-based parent iiNet — casts an interesting light on the sale.
The sale coincides with Aussie competition watchdog the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) issuing a ruling that Aussie telco incumbent Telstra must cut the monthly tariff it charges iiNet for line-sharing from A$9 to A$3.20 a month. iiNet uses line-sharing to deliver its high-speed broadband service to homes and businesses.
With 115,000 such customers and the support of a proactive regulator — the like of which we certainly do not have here in NZ — we reckon we can see why iiNet was quite happy to get out of the much more difficult and less profitable Kiwi market.
We’re not sure the $41 million Vodafone paid was such a “premium” price either (as has been reported), especially when one considers the US$1.65 billion Google has just paid for the yet-to-turn-a-profit YouTube video-sharing site. Or that when iiNet bought ihug from founders Nick and Tim Wood in 2003, it paid A$71 million.
A billion Google wishes
On the subject of YouTube, and the stunning price paid for the site by Google, Pop Candy, USA Today newspaper’s blog, has come up with a list of real things one could buy for US$1.65 billion (NZ$2.5 billion). They include:
- Approximately 1.65 billion small Frostys from Wendy's - 2,864 78-inch models of the U.S.S. Enterprise (like the one sold for US$576,000 in the recent Star Trekauction) - 1,650 nights with Demi Moore (according to Indecent Proposal)
- Nine days of the Iraq war. Maybe they could get the Sunnis and Shiites to bond over lonelygirl15
- 41,250,000 Intro to Pole Dancing classes — at $40 a pop
- 9,705,8823 trips to the movies for two, based on a ticket price of US$8.50 - 52,132,701 The Office season 2 DVD sets
- the entire iTunes library for 471 of your closest friends
- 8,250 suborbital space flights on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo. Zoom-Zoom!
Getting ahead of the cool game
Just something nice and quirky, and imaginative... The picture above comes courtesy of the coolhunter website, which has reproduced some imaginative ads featuring girls with hats (and clothes) on (for once).
The cute and clever pole ad campaign is for milliner Fiona Bennet’s hats and they grace the streets of Germany. The variety of poles lend themselves to the creation of a range of hats. Check ’em out at the site, along with other cool things, and enhance your cool rating heaps — if such is important to you.
Only on Slashdot — you'd hope.
Slashdot (slashdot.org) is many things to many people. News for nerds and stuff that matters, is the byline, and usually that’s quite right.
Many a sysadmin around town has been gobsmacked by the sudden surge in traffic following a posting to the news aggregation site.
When hundreds of thousands of geeks want to see something, they want to see it now, damn the torpedoes! Being slashdotted has become something of a badge of honour and no doubt there are t-shirts being printed even as we type.
However, Slashdot is also home to the world’s supply of one-eyed readers and some of the comments posted would make the typical “letters to the editor” page read like well-reasoned, hi-brow, intellectualism.
A new low, surely, has been reached however with the news that Hans Reiser has been arrested by Californian police in relation to the disappearance and possible murder of his wife.
“If Reiser is found guilty, will Novell or IBM pick up the pieces and finish up Reiser 4 for inclusion in the kernel or is this the end of the Reiser filesystem project? Will there be any future for the Reiser filesystem?” asks one reader.
Yes, that was our first thought too.