- The board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, better known as ICANN, picked as the nonprofit group’s chief executive Rod Beckstrom, who until earlier this year served as cyber-security czar at the US Department of Homeland Security. Like his predecessors, Mr Beckstrom didn’t accomplish much there, but it later emerged he had a skeleton staff and equivalent funding. ICANN is as close to a governing body as the internet gets, but its core mission is minding the process by which Website names and numeric addresses are assigned.
- Some early buyers of Windows 7 will get it for the knock-down price of $49.99. Rob Enderle thought the limited-time special offer was a direct response to the $29 Apple is charging for an upgrade to Snow Leopard. Michael Gartenberg called it a “missed opportunity” to give all Vista users the chance to move beyond the much-maligned operating system.
- Palm’s revenues may have tumbled 71 per cent in its most recent quarter and the iPhone 3G S may have drowned out the launch of the Pre, but Wall Street still found a bright side to the company’s latest earnings. The shares jumped 13 per cent as Palm shed less red ink than expected and claimed “strong and growing” demand for the Pre.
- The publisher of the The Wall Street Journal called Google a “digital vampire” sucking the blood out of the news business. At a conference in New York earlier this week, Les Hinton said that newspapers had brought this on themselves by giving their content away free on the Web: “The charitable view of Google is that the news business itself fed Google’s taste for this sort of blood.”
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