By Ben Haber
Before his first official day on the job, President-elect Barack Obama was already able to help out the struggling newspaper industry by boosting their sales – in some cases – through the roof.
The New York Times saw a huge increase in demand, and their front page paper is already being auctioned off on eBay for upwards of $100. People have been standing in line for hours at their main office just to get their hands on a copy of Wednesday’s paper, which was sold out and needed to be re-printed.
The Silicon Alley Insider posted a list of the top eBay bids for some newspapers around the country (updated as of this morning):
- $122.50 for the New York Times
- $100.00 for the Chicago Tribune
- $51.00 for the Chicago Sun-Times
- $51.00 for the Los Angeles Times
- $41.00 for the New York Post
- $28.76 for the Chicago Daily Herald
- $26.00 for the Chicago Northwest Herald
- $16.50 for the Rockford Register Star (IL)
- $14.49 for the New York Daily News
- $12.50 for USA Today
- $9.49 for the Indianapolis Star
At least the newspapers can enjoy one day of high demand before everyone goes back online.
November 6th, 2008
By Guest Author
One of the recurring themes being discussed at the Web 2.0 Summit this week is the opportunities to extend social networking into the enterprise. Yesterday, I blogged about SocialText, a developer of enterprise wikis and social networking applications, and this morning, Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini shared two new offerings in development that will further efforts to bring Web 2.0 tools into the business market. The first is what Otellini called “professional networking,” a social networking-based application that will enable employees of a corporation to quickly identify and search for critical information that will speed that employee’s productivity and engagement. Through a custom dashboard, an employee will be able to visually identify key contacts within her organization, secure information about learning and development courses that are specific to her job level, access project files and collaboration groups that she will be involved in and use email, IM and video all integrated into one easy to use interface.
The second offering is what Otellini calls the “personal Internet” which aims to use the power of computing to bring relevant information to a user when and where its needed via a mobile Internet device. A demo was shown to the audience higlighting the technology, which Intel envisions as being critical in aiding corporations with a growing, global workforce. By using a mobile device, a person traveling abroad in China for example, would be able to simply point her device viewer at a sign and automatically see the sign translated into English. By shifting the device’s viewer to a restaurant sign, she can connect to information about the restaurant, menu options, the restaurant’s Web page or video blog with instant translation. Another handy feature is a speech recognition recording capability that will translate a uses’s voice into that country’s local language. All pretty amazing technology that Otellini says will be here quicker than we think – a mere 3-4 years. In fact, Otellini stated that advanced chip techology that will bring the power of the desktop to mobile handsets will be available by 2011.
November 6th, 2008
