Some Fin to watch! There’s a great alternative to #Big Brother at the moment … four guys living in earth diggers in a last man standing contest to win the vehicle. Finland is glued to the event which has so far been going for THREE MONTHS. Competitors are allowed only 30 minutes a day out of the mini-excavator and must constantly stream live video from the cabin and interact with their online audience. Contestant Arto Kojonen, 18, said: “It’s quite strange - in a cool sort of way - to become famous just for sitting in an earth digger. “I’m having lots of fun doing this – and it’s a great way to meet women.” Fellow contestant Kimmo Frisk, 21, is equally determined to take home his earth digger, pledging to stay until Christmas. “The weirdest thing so far was this drunk guy who kept coming and saying ‘hello, good luck’,” he said. But most people would probably think this was weirder. He added: “Another guy contacted me through the Internet and suggested I come to his house and have fun with a naked cow and a chicken.” Kimmo declined the invitation because he’d rather have an earth mover, obviously. See for yourself: http://bambuser.com/channel/kaivuriskaba/broadcast/1680758
News International now discriminating against freelance workers at the #notw by offering them half of what they are offering staff in redundancy terms, ie 1.5 weeks per year instead of 3 weeks or one month per year. Many of the so-called casuals have worked there for more than two years and so should be treated as staff.
STATEMENT BY COLIN MYLER AND TOM CRONE Just by way of clarification relating to Tuesday’s CMS Select Committee hearing, we would like to point out that James Murdoch’s recollection of what he was told when agreeing to settle the Gordon Taylor litigation was mistaken.
In fact, we did inform him of the “for Neville” email which had been produced to us by Gordon Taylor’s lawyers.
Rebekah just said every single person who has lost their job on NotW will be offered another job. Yet at my HR meeting just this afternoon the best editorial job on offer seemed to be an oil reporter in Barcelona for £xxk a year… and I was told it would be unlikely I would be offered a job with the same level of pay I am currently on - and that’s if I am offered a job at all… I am so angry … an innocent highly skilled NOTW worker
[video]
[video]
[video]
Expected to do very well during half term on Kinect apparently. It’s what happens when there’s a total lack of controls.
People seem too quick to dismiss the Nokia-Microsoft smartphone partnership as some kind of desperate last-ditch corporate survival bid.
But there must be far more to the deal than than meets the eye. Microsoft revealed at CES that it was about to dedicate 90 per cent of it’s 40,000-strong development force to cloud technology.
And when you consider the success of Windows 7, selling 300 million licences and representing 20 per cent of all PCs connected to the Internet, that’s a lot of potential connectivity.
Add Windows Live Messenger to the equation, which was attracting 330 million active users a month in 2009, and we see even more customers to bring to the table.
Microsoft have started doing well since they started listening to their users and they are investing millions into studying our habits.
One of the ways forward they have identified is to offer seamless connectivity between home and mobile devices.
Another seems to be to enable users to create their own connected networks and communities, from families to work groups.
Microsoft is also looking at ways of offering push notifications and services based on “user context” via devices that record our behaviour.
All of these functions can be stored and processed in the cloud and activated the moment you wake up your device … or the moment your device wakes you up.
And that can be any device running Microsoft Windows 7. It’s almost as if the cloud will store a virtual version of each Windows 7 customer in the cloud and use it to service the user in the real world.
For example, you are watching a TV show on your Xbox. A text appears on your Windows 7 Nokia telling you the cab is outside waiting to take you to the Starbucks next to the cinema.
One touch and the show continues playing on your phone so you can watch the rest of it in the cab on the way.
You step out of the cab and your Starbucks loyalty points pop up in a window, redeemable through the bar code in it.
Half way through your coffee your friends walk in as a window pops up showing movies, times and prices because Windows 7 knows that habitually, you usually go to see a film after visiting this coffee house.
You book your tickets and head to the cinema, after the film another window pops up with suggestions for a restaurant, and so on.
As you stroll to Nandos, friends and family start messaging you, asking what you thought of the movie, having been informed via your social network what you went to see.
Microsoft don’t just want to integrate with the social curve, it seems. They want to own it.
They can’t do that without mobile devices.
And Nokia is still the Number One smartphone maker in the world.
Now that they have a potentially very high functioning device on their hands, thanks to the Microsoft software injection, it’s just a matter of pricing.
After all, pricing is the main reason Android has 53 per cent of the market, because phone companies are supplying more competitively priced Android handsets than Apple or Blackberry.
So if Nokia and Microsoft have deep enough pockets to win a price war with a cheaper, yet more sophisticated software package than Android, they stand a good chance of dominating the mass market.