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Tuesday, October 14, 2008

The Financial Crisis in Pictures: 8 of the Best from Around the Web

october 08, Mumbai Sensex Market crashed badly

With the stock market continuing to plunge, one thing remains constant: financial news sites like to tell part of the story with images of distressed Wall Street traders and executives that are experiencing some of the worst moments of their careers. While the news of the day is indeed troubling and makes us all nervous, the emotion captured in some of these images is better than that any story could tell. Here are 8 of the best pictures we’ve spotted on the homepages of various business news hubs during the current market meltdown:

from The Motley Fool

from TheStreet.com

from Reuters

from WSJ.com

from USA Today

from Fortune - the CEO of General Electric

from BusinessWeek - the CEO of General Motors

Courtesy: Mashable

1.5 Million G1 Mobile Phones Pre-Sold

Apple may want to be keep a close eye on the sales of T-Mobile's G1 device. The G1 will be the first mobile phone to hit the market running Google's Android mobile OS. This may also be the mobile phone that puts a serious dent in Apple's iPhone sales. The G1 won't officially be available until October 22. Apparently no one wants to experience the same shortage and chaos as those who anxiously waited to get their hands on the iPhone 3G. Reports are in that up to 1.5 million G1 devices have been pre-sold and you can bet that more will be coming in.

1.5 Million Pre-Sold

The G1 is set to take the world by storm at the end of this month. It may also take Apple's iPhone down a notch or two. Early adopters and those left out of the loop with the release of the iPhone 3G are making their way to the G1. Just days after going on pre-sale the G1 sold out fast, which sent T-Mobile scrambling to place more orders. T-Mobile tripled their original number of orders to HTC for G1 devices. Since then, all of those orders have been pre-sold. The amount of units pre-sold is reported to be around 1.5 million! That figure doesn't even include the number of pre-sale orders placed in T-mobile retail stores. It is being reported that about 1 million units have been pre-ordered from T-Mobile retail stores.

Is the G1 Set to Overthrow the iPhone?

At the moment, we don't think so. However, we're excited about all that Android will offer on the G1. T-Mobile is off to a great start with the number of G1 units pre-sold. Anticipation for both the device and the Android OS is higher than initial reactions led us to believe. It will be up to the performance of Google's Android mobile OS from this point forward to determine whether it's a worthy competitor to the iPhone. Be sure to cast your prediction on Google's Android versus Apple's iPhone and check out our top 10 picks of Android apps that we can't wait to use.

Courtesy: TechCrunch

YouTube Begins Streaming Full-Length Shows from CBS

In another move towards earning more revenue from its huge audience, YouTube has started streaming full-length TV shows that will include advertising. The content, which includes Star Trek, The Young & The Restless, and Beverley Hills 90210 comes through a deal with CBS. Advertising will include familiar formats like pre, mid, and post-roll.

For YouTube, the deal certainly marks further indication that the company is not having a great deal of success in monetizing the user-generated video that dominates the site. While the current lineup of content from CBS may not be especially impressive – no offense Y&R fans – it’s likely just the first of many deals that YouTube will make to bring more professionally produced content to its site that can be more easily monetized.

For CBS, the deal might be seen as yet another sign of a lack of confidence in Joost, the professional video content site where CBS is an investor. Meanwhile, CBS already offers full-length versions of many of its popular shows like CSI on its own website. Ultimately, it would look like YouTube is simply being viewed as another place to distribute content for the media company. CBS also recently did a deal with Slide to distribute video content through Facebook applications.

Courtesy: Mashable

Get All Your Social Network Messages and Emails With NutShellMail

NutShellMail appears like just another email and social network message aggregator similar to Fuser, but there’s a critical distinction to be made. NutShellMail will not get blocked by your company’s firewall, which means you can now get emails and messages from all of your personal email accounts as well as MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn.

How does it accomplish this? Well, the secret is that it doesn’t actually require you to connect and log in to each of those sites and accounts. That’s the important aspect to this service because that requirement is what prevents you from accessing sites that your company firewall blocks according to corporate policies. NutShellMail bypasses these border patrols by logging into all of your accounts from outside the firewall and then sends an email to your company email address (if you choose) or to any personal email account if your company allows it, of course.

You control how often you get these email updates too. You can choose to receive them hourly or at noon or whenever. Since you never have to log in to any of these personal email accounts or social networking sites, you are not not breaking any company policies. Not technically anyway. Here’s what the email summary will look like:

Being in the information systems industry for many years, I think this is an excellent idea. While it might mean losing some productivity time for employees due to the fact that they will take time to read their personal emails and social networking messages, the amount of time will be dramatically reduced compared to the standard method of surfing each site and logging in.

Courtesy: Mashable