JenSense is reporting (with image) about the new vertical AdSense ad units that have images in them, or rather one image that seems to be added based on keyword to be related to the ads themselves. We did that ages ago when still working at Ligatus. Good move.
Technorati Tags: AdSense, Google, Ligatus
Monthly Archives: June 2006
Images in AdSense Ads
Billions Given to Charity by Buffett
Warren Buffett is giving away his money and stock! In this Fortune interview he goes into a bit of detail about his decision. 80% of his money, which comes in at 80% of 37 billion USD at the time of this writing, will go to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which seems to be moving in the direction of one of the richest foundations out there.
What about his children you ask? “I still believe in the philosophy – FORTUNE quoted me saying this 20 years ago – that a very rich person should leave his kids enough to do anything but not enough to do nothing.” Very wise idea I have to say.
Update: here are the letters of Warren Buffet in relation to his donations. The interesting thing is that each of his kids has a foundation who will be getting $50 million a year in donations, roughly. The cool thing is that this really makes his above quote true already, because the Tax Office will make sure that they are still doing charitable work and the pledge by Buffett only holds so long as they are charities. With that alone, the kids will survive very well but they will quasi have to do good. Very cool.
Technorati Tags: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet
FON gets upgrade
There we go. As I was told on Thursday, today is the great day of the FON Upgrade and Redesign. I still have to upgrade my own router when I am back at home, but things are looking promising. So what is new?
- FON will quasi give away 1 Million nocat routers for 5 EURs plus Taxes and shipping. The routers normally cost 60 EURs. They already have 54.000 Foneros but they really want to push this to another level.
- They want to have 50k active Hotspots this fall, and 1 million by end of 2007.
- The Bill-Modell is launched. You can now select to be a Bill, getting money for all those that use your hotspot and giving up your right to use the other hotspots for Free. The money is managed through a PayPal account
- “You are the # 13095 member of the FON Community, and you’re a linus” – that means that I share my bandwidth for free and can use the others routers for free too. How cool is that?
- You can look at your Travel Log, in which you see where you logged on and how long you used the router and how much bandwidth you consumed.
- You can see who is using your FON router.
- You can edit the start page, allowing for two urls to be surfed for free, and giving some personal information.
- You can managed your router remotely (with the new firmware which I still need to install, 0.6.6).
Sounds good enough? Check out the re-designed fon.com, log in and play around. congratulations for the relaunch people of FON! Looks great! Update: There seems to be a problem with the firmware in connection with the new updates to fon.com. I, and several others, can’t use the Wifi anymore. You can follow the discussion here. I’ll update when it is solved.
Update 2: Check the general Forums for some information that changing the MTU on a host computer will solve the problem. It by now seems that FON is working on the problem. Monday the 3rd FON support had told me that the tech people are looking into it. Now the community seems to have found the cause. I still presume they changed the server config of login.fon.com. But we will see how long it takes until fon finds the solution.
Technorati Tags: FON, Fonero, nocat
Where the Hell is Matt?
There you go:
Also see wherethehellismatt.com
Fusemail starts to Rock
We recently chose Fusemail as our email solution and it is really starting to rock. I searched for a long time for a hosted email solution as I really don’t want to have to think about it and I was very happy to find Fusemail. We now have 1GB IMAP mail boxes with them. Spam filtering seems to work great and if something like spam ends up in my inbox I simply drag it to the spam folder and the system learns.
Above that I just synchronized my Contacts and Calendar via SyncML from my Nokia N70 to Fusemail and now my Contacts are shared with the rest of the team. iCal Remote integration still has a few problems but I am sure that these will be solved soon. The Webmail interface is nice for on the road and all in all I am starting to be a really happy guy here.
If you are looking for a reliable email solution, take a look. There is an Outlook Sync client for those in the windows world, but due to SyncML it also works well with non-Windows people. Here at Ormigo we now have two Windows systems, two Macs and one Linux machine, meaning that we want it to work everywhere. Fusemail does that.
Thanks also to our reseller GID mbH. I can be a pain sometimes, I know 
Technorati Tags: email, Fusemail, SyncML
Yahoo! Matchcast
I am starting to become a fan of Yahoo! Matchcast. Now that Heiko posted about it I finally need to post too. I have used it for a few days now and while it sometimes does not update correctly and still tells me there are 24 days to go until the first match (online until it finally connected), once it runs it runs well. the cool thing is that it also tells me who won previous matches of a future game. If you need a german ticker of what is happening in a game, go to tagesschau.de with your phone and select the live ticker. Best one out there. But to check general game statistics, see how the groups are performing, who is playing next and so on, simple get Matchcast for your Symbian mobile phone.
Technorati Tags: Fifaworldcup.com, Yahoo!, Yahoo! Matchcast
eBay Kills JotSpot
eBay, arguably the original Web 2.0 company, is sure latching onto the newfangled 2.0 stuff. Today, it announced eBay Wiki, with service hosted by JotSpot.
eBay Dives into Web 2.0
Ah well. Our own JotSpot installations just dropped dead, so is ebaywiki.com and jot.com. I presume they just folded under the load, which should not happen. We will see when they are back up.
Congratulations to the JotSpot team though!
Update: Back up already. After a few minutes. Good luck to all of us for the rest of the day. 
Technorati Tags: eBay, ebaywiki, jotspot, slashdotted
Yahoo! Maps API and Google Maps updates
Jeremy just posted that the Yahoo! Maps API is now available for commercial use, which rocks. But sadly, they don’t have any good data for Germany yet. Did they have that, it would be a lot more usably for somebody needing something like this for Germany. I really like their Ajax API but the best API is worth nothing without data.
Google Maps at the same time announced better data and the introduction of the geocoding that people asked about. It’s street level, not house level but still. Very nice to know. But they also offer Google Maps for Enterprise for commercial use. Kick ass. Checking out Geocoding now.
Technorati Tags: API, Geocoding, Google, Google Maps, Mapping, Yahoo!, Yahoo! Maps
WM Streaming
Ok, we got it. Due to only having one TV Card at the moment, we needed a workaround. We now have EyeTV running on a mac, together with CyTV. CyTV then streams whatever comes in via EyeTV to the Network and in the meeting room the old G4 has VLC and shows the stream coming from the MacBook. Other users internally can obviously also tune in.
