Google’s YouTube Signs Up Everyone But TV for New Paid Service | Bloomberg Business

July 21, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Google Inc.’s YouTube, which has signed up partners for a new paid video service, may find out by early next year whether its own Internet stars really are as valuable as those in Hollywood.

Partners accounting for more than 90 percent of YouTube viewing have signed on to the paid service, the company said in a statement. While the lineup incudes home-grown celebrities and music videos, YouTube so far doesn’t have TV networks such as Fox, NBC and CBS, according to people with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be identified discussing the project.

TV staples like Fox’s “Futurama,” NBC’s “Parks & Recreation” and CBS’s “Under the Dome” are a featured part of competing products from Netflix Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. Without shows like those, YouTube’s commercial-free service will have to attract paying viewers with original series, music videos and thousands of its channels already available for free.

Economic storms hit U.S. – 6 biggest threats to the stock market | CNNMoney

July 20, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ 1 Comment

The American stock market is heating up again.

The Greek bailout and strong earnings from tech companies like Google (GOOG) and Netflix (NFLX, Tech30) have carried the Dow and S&P 500 near record highs. The Nasdaq is on track for a third-straight record close.

But that doesn’t mean the bull market in U.S. stocks is bulletproof. The biggest threat: a slowdown in the American economy.

Just look at how retail sales unexpectedly declined in June.

If people continue to hold back on spending, it will throw cold water on investors who are betting that economic growth will accelerate during the second half of 2015 following a weather-fueled contraction in the first quarter.

Customer Service Tips | Business Tips

July 16, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

I travel quite a bit, for both business and personal reasons, so I am exposed to many kinds of businesses across the U.S. I frequent small businesses but use large companies, as well.

With rising prices of goods and services, I expect the level of customer service to be high, as well. And it has become increasingly important to me.

In the past few weeks, I have experienced the worst customer service that I have in years— and it was from both small and large companies.

Do you have protocols for answering your phone, for greeting visitors, for trouble calls? If you don’t, you should. Some things don’t need to be left up in the air.

Whoever a potential customer interacts with first, establishes the impression of your company in that person’s mind.

Flash. Must. Die. | WIRED

July 16, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

ADOBE FLASH—THAT INSECURE, ubiquitous resource hog everyone hates to need—is under siege, again, and hopefully for the last time. The latest calls for its retirement come from some of the Internet’s most powerful players, but if the combined clattering of Facebook, Firefox, and a legion of unsatisfied users isn’t enough finally to put it in the ground, scroll down to see how to axe it from your devices yourself.

Why would you want to?

Because Flash is a closed, proprietary system on a web that deserves open standards. It’s a popular punching bag for hackers, which puts users at risk over and over again. And it’s a resource-heavy battery suck that at this point mostly finds its purchase in pop-up ads you didn’t want to see anyway.

Inside Internet of Garbage: What When Wrong On Reddit | Forbes

July 15, 2015July 20, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Contract workers in San Francisco, processing thousands of complaints a day. Sweatshops in the Philippines, where outsourced labor decides what’s obscene and what’s permissible in a matter of seconds. Teams of anti-spam engineers in Mountain View, adapting to the latest wave of bots. An unpaid moderator on Reddit, picking out submissions that violate guidelines.

So much of the Internet is garbage, and much of its infrastructure and many man-hours are devoted to taking out the garbage. For the most part, this labor is hidden from plain sight. But in recent years, the garbage disposal has broken down. The social media companies have a harassment problem, the pundits have declared.

However, large-scale harassment campaigns are hardly new, and the barrage of crude and cruel messages and undesirable content is only a small part of what makes a targeted campaign a frightening experience for the victim. Yet this part of the equation—the part that is seemingly under the control of Silicon Valley—has received the most attention from the media, because it is the most public, visible and archivable. And as tech companies repeatedly fail to address the problem to everyone’s liking, the problem looms ever larger in the public imagination.

Weekly Economic Update | LAEDC

July 14, 2015July 13, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

v.19 n. 29 – Released July 13, 2015

This Week’s Headlines:

Consumers Ease Up on Borrowing in May
Events of Interest
- September 30: LAEDC Fall Economic Forecast

Drug could help slow half of breast cancers, study suggests | BBC News

July 10, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

A cheap and safe drug could help half of women with breast cancer to live longer, scientists suggest.

Their study, published in Nature, is in its early stages, but hints that the hormone progesterone could be used to slow the growth of some tumours.

The UK and Australian researchers say the findings are “very significant” and they are planning clinical trials.

Cancer Research UK said the study was “highly significant” and could help thousands of women.

Hormones play a huge role in breast cancer.

They can make a cancerous cell divide by hooking up with “hormone receptors” on the surface of a cancer.

One of the most successful breast cancer drugs, tamoxifen, bungs up the oestrogen receptor.

Driverless, Electric Taxis Could Reduce Emissions By 94% | Fastco.Exist

July 10, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Human drivers are woefully inefficient, stabbing the gas and the brakes all the time instead of grooving into a smooth cruise. Efficiency improves further when the cars route themselves as a group, like human drivers can do today with services like Waze, which give directions based on road and traffic conditions to avoid congestion.

Add to that cutting emissions by going electric, and you can see how a new study from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory would find that robot cars, powered from a central grid, could reduce taxi emissions by 94% compared to today’s gas-powered, human-steered cabs.

Time Warner Cable Ordered to Pay Texas Woman Nearly $230,000 for ‘Egregious’ Robocalling | Entrepreneur

July 9, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Time Warner Cable is giving Comcast — which once changed a customer’s billing moniker to ‘Asshole Brown’ and berated another user for simply wanting to disconnect — a run for its money in the belligerent customer service department.

A federal judge just ordered that Time Warner must pay Texas resident Araceli King $229,500 for harassing her with 153 robocalls over the course of a year, ABC News reports.

In her original suit, King only sought statutory damages of $81,500. But given that the calls persisted even after King complained that Time Warner was calling the wrong number, and even after she filed suit, the judge called the company’s behavior “particularly egregious.” He found Time Warner in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which states that companies can’t robocall personal cell phones without consent, and awarded King the maximum fine of precisely $1,500 per call.

via Read More.

California Farms Are Using Drilling Wastewater to Grow Crops | Bloomberg Business

July 9, 2015July 13, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

California’s epic drought is pushing Big Oil to solve a problem it’s struggled with for decades: what to do with the billions of gallons of wastewater that gush out of wells every year.

Golden State drillers have pumped much of that liquid back underground into disposal wells. Now, amid a four-year dry spell, more companies are looking to recycle their water or sell it to parched farms as the industry tries to get ahead of environmental lawsuits and new regulations.

The trend could have implications for oil patches across the country. With fracking boosting the industry’s thirst for water, companies have run into conflicts from Texas to Colorado to Pennsylvania. California could be an incubator for conservation efforts that have so far failed to gain traction elsewhere in the U.S.