Weather.com for sale

 

Weather.com for sale

According to Landmark Communications, the weather.com domain name is now for sale, and as you can image just by reading the domain, it is valued pretty high - maybe up to $5 billion. Besides the domain itself, the buyers also get The Weather Channel - software and more.

Here are some realistic numbers so you can see why it costs that much:

• leader of the market on December 2007, with 36,7% of the share. Other competitors include weather.yahoo.com, weather.msn.com, and accuweather.com
• during December 2007, from all the visitors, 74% were repeat visitors
• still on the past month of December, weather.com came in second place for the “News & Media” section

Sysadmin goes to prison - all because of sabotage

A computer sysadmin (aka system administrator) has received the longest prison term related to damages made to a computer. What do you think is the the reason to sabotage his own company? Maybe to get revenge on a co-worker? Not really. In this case, the person in question - Yung-Hsun Lin - was afraid to lose his job.

Since we don’t want to go into technical terms, lets just say he modified and added codes, in order to create a bomb, that was suppose to blow all the servers of the company. Fortunately, not all the code worked Ok, and that is why the main attack failed. While this happened around 2003, the malicious code was only found in 2005 by another sysdamin.

Sources: HitWise and Reuters

Guest post by Tiago of Gadgetizer

Latest Tech News - 9 January

Nokia Eco Sensor Concept

 

Everything this year seems to be all about being “eco-friendly” and “green”. Well, in the mobile electronics industry, this trend is nothing new.

Nokia had announced their Eco Sensor Concept phone a while back, and at this year’s CES, they have a non-working prototype on display. From the official website:

The concept consists of two parts – a wearable sensor unit which can sense and analyze your environment, health, and local weather conditions, and a dedicated mobile phone.

The sensor unit will be worn on a wrist or neck strap made from solar cells that provide power to the sensors. NFC (near field communication) technology will relay information by touch from the sensors to the phone or to or to other devices that support NFC technology.

Both the phone and the sensor unit will be as compact as possible to minimize material use, and those materials used in the design will be renewable and/or reclaimed. Technologies used inside the phone and sensor unit will also help save energy.

The neck strap of the sensor unit is also made of solar cells, which will provide all the power the sensor needs in order to operate. Another cool feature is that you will be able to choose which sensors you would like to have inside the sensing device, thereby customizing the device to your needs and desires. For example, you could use the device as a “personal trainee” if you were to choose a heart-rate monitor and motion detector (for measuring your walking pace). Personally, that would be quite cool to have.

The Nokia Eco Sensor Concept is built upon the three underlying principles of waste reduction: reduce, reuse and recycle. To complete the Nokia Eco Sensor Concept, the phone and detector units will be optimized for lower energy consumption in both the manufacturing process and use.

Check out the pictures of the prototype over at Ubergizmo.

[Nokia]

CES: Nokia Eco Sensor Concept