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Computer News Headlines Biz Break: Apple's iPad vs. Amazon's Kindle, the first skirmish 2-1-2010 According to The Associated Press, Bloomberg News and other outlets, Amazon over the weekend stopped selling books from publishing giant Macmillan. Amazon had sought to price new titles at $9.99, but Macmillan insisted on selling e-books for the Kindle for as much as $14.99. (Oddly enough, under Macmillan's plan, Amazon makes more for each e-book sold.) Sunday, though, Amazon said that, even though Macmillan has a "monopoly" on its titles, the retailer would sell the e-books at the higher prices, saying it wants to offer them to Kindle owners. Apple last week reached a deal with publishers to sell e-books for the iPad at publishers' desired $12.99 to $14.99 prices. "The balance of power shifted slightly away from Amazon to the publisher," Benchmark analyst Fred Moran told Bloomberg News. "If Amazon can't price its e-books where it wants, it means that competition from emerging e-readers like the Apple tablet will have a better chance of stealing market share from Amazon." Read more  Facebook Now Has Yahoo In Its Sites, Already Bigger In Pageviews (ComScore) 2-1-2010 Facebook is well on its way to taking Yahoo’s spot as the third largest Web property in the world. (Google and Microsoft are No. 1 and No. 2, respectively). Last summer Facebook took the No. 4 spot globally, displacing AOL, but according to comScore there was still an estimated 241 million unique visitors a month separating it from the No. 3 site, Yahoo. In December, 2009, that gap narrowed to 125 million unique visitors globally. (That was also the same month Facebook passed AOL in the U.S. to take the No. 4 spot domestically). In December, 2009, Facebook attracted 469 million unique visitors, up an incredible 31 million visitors from the month before. To put that in perspective, in a single month Facebook gained as many new visitors as Yahoo did all year. That one-month gain was also the equivalent of adding as many people as all of Digg or half of Twitter.com. Meanwhile, Yahoo lost 7 million unique visitors from November to December to end the year at 594 million unique visitors. (In the U.S., Yahoo is a stronger No. 2 after Google, with 161 million uniques in December, compared to 173 million for Google, 138 million for Microsoft, and 112 Million for Facebook). These numbers are different than the 350 million registered users Facebook itself counts, half of which come every day. ComScore estimates total traffic, which is larger than the number of reported registered users (you don’t have to be a Facebook member to visit a public page). And these are estimates, remember that. And they don’t include the 60 million people a month who log into other sites via Facebook Connect. Read more Network attacks on Facebook, Twitter tripled in 2009 2-1-2010 A report released today by Sophos entitled "Social Security" reveals some startling information about the number of attacks by viruses and spammers on popular social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. 57% of users reported that they had received spam messages via social networking websites, and 36% said that they had been sent malware, an increase of 70.6% and 69.8% from last year, respectively. Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos says that, "Computer users are spending more time on social networks, sharing sensitive and valuable personal information, and hackers have sniffed out where the money is to be made. The dramatic rise in attacks in the last year tells us that social networks and their millions of users have to do more to protect themselves from organized cyber-crime, or risk falling prey to identity theft schemes, scams, and malware attacks." Survey respondents were also asked which social network they believed posed the biggest security risk, with 60% naming Facebook as the biggest threat. Furthermore, Sophos surveyed over 500 organizations, and discovered that 72% are concerned that employee behavior on social networking sites exposes their businesses to dangerous threats. Read more |
