Computer Support Blog

Demand Media had a pretty rough 2011, though its Fourth Quarter earnings were actually better than expected.  A provider of videos, blogs, and other media over the Internet, Demand Media has been working to transform the way people use the Internet for education and entertainment.  While the company has been growing, Demand Media’s Board has been buying back its stock and the company is not quite where the executives and analysts thought it would be.  Dave Panos is the man who will change the direction of Demand Media!

Dave Panos is the Chief Strategy Officer of Demand Media and his plans for the company are ambitious.  Because Demand Media is known for delivering original Internet video content the company is in competition with many distribution channels, like YouTube.  Panos organized a strategic partnership with competitor CoverItLive.  By pairing Demand Media and CoverItLive, Panos helped increase the video base of Demand Media dramatically, which allows Demand Media to reach a much wider audience.  Having the vision to partner with potentially vulnerable competitors is part of what makes Panos a truly great Chief Strategy Officer.

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The Internet has given rise to many phenomena in American culture.  Arguably the most significant lasting social change of the Internet comes in the form of people making statements.  In the inorganic medium of the Internet, anyone can rant about anything anytime they want to.  Between Tweets on Twitter, Facebook status updates and any number of message boards on any of a million websites, for the first time in the history of humanity, anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can feel like they have a voice that is being heard.

Not everything said on the Internet is a gem of human wisdom.

Just as in real life, where once you say something you cannot take it back, Internet users – thanks to things like the Facebook Timeline – are discovering that what they say lingers online, even for years.  But with all of the people posting very publicly about everything in the world, the Internet is now giving users the equivalent of leaving the room where you can hang out with a bunch of friends you actually like!  These new, limited, social networks, have the potential to restore actual family and friend interactions amid all of the noise of more popular Internet social networks.

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In the midst of the worldwide recession, as companies like Facebook prepare to make billions of dollars overnight, there are still some websites devoted to giving on the Internet.  The giving sites are attempts to remind people who have Internet access that they live in a land of (comparative) plenty and that no matter how bad your problems are, there is someone, somewhere in the world, who has it much worse than you do.  You have the ability to help others at minimal cost to you.  That is the philosophy behind Philanthroper.com, which is arguably the coolest giving site on the Internet!

Philanthroper.com is a website that challenges visitors to donate to worthy nonprofits – 501(c)3 groups – each and every day (if at all possible).  The site has a very simple design and exists, not to make money for itself, but to raise money for charities most people have never heard of.  In order to encourage donations on a regular basis, Philanthroper.com only allows donations from $1 – $10.  The site’s founder hope that by limiting the amount of the donations, you will be encouraged to come back each day because giving was not that difficult the day before!  On the other end of the equation, founder Mark Wilson hopes to conclusively illustrate that many people doing a little bit each day adds up to a lot.  By having many people pooling a fraction of their resources, they may still do a great deal of good.

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Corporate executives of major companies have a lot on their plates; that is the nature of the position.  Because of the burdens of the industry, technology companies have additional stresses and responsibilities that add to the CEO’s responsibilities.  As a result, the very best CEOs in the technology sector tend to hire a close cadre of people whom they can trust absolutely.  The CEO relies upon these close corporate officers to oversee the minutiae while they focus on the big picture for a company.  Usually, one of the key hires to make a tech sector CEO successful is the hiring of a head of human resources.  Mark Pincus of Zynga certainly qualifies as successful and part of his success comes from his reliance upon Colleen McCreary.

Colleen McCreary is the Chief People Officer of Zynga.  In that role, McCreary frees up CEO Mark Pincus to worry about things other than the staff of Zynga.  As Chief People Officer, Colleen McCreary is the woman to see about applying for jobs and all other human resource issues at Zynga.  McCreary has been with Zynga since 2009 and helped the company staff up as the Facebook games Zynga produces became more popular.

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Zappos, an Amazon retailer that sells shoes, announced recently that hackers breached their website and stole confidential client information. The stolen information included email addresses, the last four digits of credit card numbers, phone numbers, encrypted passwords and physical addresses. Using this information, the hackers might be able to determine a client’s other passwords. For many people, their email password is also the password they use for many other websites. This dangerous practice can compromise your Internet security.

Internet security is a vital issue in this age of online-everything. When we have online banking, important private emails, online shopping, and other important private information kept online, it is essential to know that your information is safe.

It is very important to make sure that your online banking passwords, email passwords, and passwords for other websites that contain sensitive information are not passwords you use for less important websites. If remembering passwords is an issue, do not hesitate to make use of the forgotten password feature of most websites or set up a master password. Your Internet security may depend on the difficulty and variety of passwords that you use. As the lesson of Zappos should teach you, low Internet security could mean hackers get your information or even plant malware and viruses on your computer.

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Apple Computers, employs an elegantly simple strategy to dominate the mobile computing marketplace.  Apple’s strategy is built largely on a hope that you will buy their entire product line, not just one or two of their devices.  That is to say, products from Apple, more than any other company in the technology sector, are designed to interact easily with one another.  For example, Apple makes it very easy to connect an iPad to an iTV or a MacBook Pro.  But, as many people have discovered, there are more affordable high definition televisions with more options than the iTV.  But why should you be inconvenienced for wanting a great HDTV and an iPhone and wanting them to interact?  Scosche does not think you should be inconvenienced!  That is why Scosche made the sneakPEAK HD Cable!

Scosche’s sneakPEAK High Definition Audio/Video Cable for iPad, iPhone & iPod is a fairly simple cable that allows you to connect virtually any Apple i-product that has a screen on it to a high definition television.  By connecting your Apple products’ output port to the HDTV’s input ports, you are transforming your Apple product into a media player, like a DVD or Blu-Ray player.  This will allow you to play media from your iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad on your high definition television, even if you are streaming it from the Cloud!

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If you check out the technical news sites regularly, you might well be baffled at the updates they frequently have about Legos.  Legos, for those not in the know, are small plastic building toys used to create buildings, vehicles and other structures and devices using standardized plugs and sockets.  Legos first hit the market in 1949 and have grown steadily over the decades since.  They are a children’s toy, one that many adults may not have considered for years.

Why, then, are Legos so prominently featured on so many of the technical sites?

In recent years, Legos have exploded with popularity again.  During the brand’s last major lull, the Lego Company expanded their influence by licensing Legos with major niche franchises.  As a result, Lego capitalized on the popularity of other brands, like Star Wars, Pirates Of The Caribbean, and Spider-man, by creating corresponding Lego sets of places, vehicles and characters from those franchises.  That gambit worked for the business model, but it also gave an entire subculture – the AFOLs – the opportunity to “come out.”  AFOLs are Adult Fans Of Legos and the largest AFOL site on the Internet has four thousand members!

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Over the past few years, online social networking sites have caused more and more of our social interactions to happen online. They have also changed the way we interact with our friends, even changing the definition of the word ‘friend’, but they have not changed basic human nature.

There have always been people who do not understand that their friends and acquaintances have no interest in all the tiny things they do in a day. There have also always been people who never share huge life events with their friends. Both of these types of people are still present on the Internet. Look at your Facebook feed sometime and you will notice exactly that – some people over-share and others never share. Thankfully, there are also plenty of people in the middle range who know what and how much their friends really want to know.

Soon, Facebook will allow those over-sharing people to post everything they do on other websites onto their profiles. This new release is not as widely supported as Facebook might wish. Pandora, the hugely popular Internet radio website, is one of the sites that are hesitating to allow Facebook to automatically publish every song a user listens to, onto the user’s profile. Pandora is reacting the same way that the majority of people would react: “My friends do not need to know every song I hear.” Pandora does publish on Facebook already, but the site does not want to publish everything automatically.

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Have you ever watched a television show and thought an actor or actress looked familiar, but could not quite place them?  Have you ever watched an amazing movie and instantly wanted to watch everything else that director had ever filmed?  Have you ever needed to settle a bet involving the identity of an obscure character actor?  On the Internet, there is a single source for answers to all questions involving television and movies and that is the Internet Movie Database.

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is the world’s most comprehensive site for all things pertaining to film, television and (increasingly) video games, at least as it pertains to work done by legitimate actors, directors, producers and writers.  The IMDb is a powerful tool that contains both the latest legitimate news about all things in the filmed arts as well as massive archives of the body of work of everyone who has ever worked in film in the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom.  The IMDb has extensive reservoirs of information for Japanese, Chinese and Indian works as well.

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As the Internet has evolved, one of the ongoing challenges users have had is with the speed at which they are able to send and receive data.  Internet transfer speeds have increased, usually to keep up with the growing file sizes of new programs and applications.  Just as the first modems would take days to transmit and receive over the phone lines the complicated files you use today, greater bandwidth for data transfers provided by fiber optic cabling will someday be entirely obsolete.  Many scientists and engineers are deep at work on creating faster, more efficient means of data transfers.

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology, Florida International University, CERN, and the Universities of Michigan and Victoria, among other partners, have set the newest record in data transfer speeds.  In a controlled experiment, the researchers have effectively achieved a data transfer speed of 186 gigabits per second.

While this news is setting the geek world ablaze, you may wonder what it means to you.  The most prominent example the scientists are using to express what this transfer rate means is that a network with a 186 Gbps transfer rate would be able to exchange the equivalent amount of data as one hundred thousand Blu-Ray discs.  Still not impressed?  Consider the 4G networks for smartphones that have been highly-touted this year.  To be considered a 4G network, the network must run at 100Mbps to 1 Gbps.  That means that the experiment performed at the Seattle conference was 186 times as fast as the standard 4G smartphone network.  The service you get at peak times on your 4G network . . . the technology developed by the research team is 1860 times as fast as that!

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