Infotrade

LinkedIn is ready to  hit the public markets tomorrow , raising $274 million. So, what exactly is LinkedIn's business? Last year it generated $243 million in revenue through the first nine months of the year from three categories: recruiting, advertising, and subscriptions. The bulk of the revenue comes from recruiting, or in LinkedIn's phrasing, "hiring solutions."

With regard to their cloud music offering, it looks like Apple is now just about ready to rock and roll. It would seem that this is now coming together even faster than they anticipated. And that may be thanks to two unlikely sources: Google and Amazon. CNet’s Greg Sandoval is reporting  tonight that Apple has signed an agreement with music label EMI to offer its music through Apple’s upcoming new cloud music service. This means that Apple now has agreements in place with two of the four major labels (Warner signed last month). And Sandoval believes that deals with the remaining two, Sony and Universal, could be wrapped up as early as next week. Again, rock and roll. With those deals in place, it means that Apple will be free to launch their cloud service anytime they please. And while  we had heard the initial plan  was to do so at their annual music event in the early fall, Apple could indeed move the launch up to WWDC in early June (just a few weeks from now). We have...

I’m not big on terms like “tipping point” but it’s a moment worth noting: Amazon ( NSDQ: AMZN ) is selling more e-books than print or hardback combined, a marker that probably could have been hit much sooner if its digital books could be read outside the Kindle platform. Then again, if that were the case, Amazon might not also be talking up the success of its $114 ad-supported Kindle, now the best-selling of the homegrown e-readers. It took Amazon less than four years from the launch of Kindle in November 2007 to reach this point, a moment of much glee for CEO Jeff Bezos. In his statement, Bezos said: “Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books.  We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly—we’ve been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four years.” Amazon is big on releasing big aggregate numbers and very tight on the specifics that might actually tell us something abou...

Three tech companies seem to come up over and over again. They’ve become the trinity of tech, at least as far as most IT consumers are concerned. They are  Microsoft , its long-time rival  Apple , and  Google . Both Apple and Microsoft are veterans, having started their operations in the 1970s and gone public in the 1980s. In IT, that’s a very long time ago. Just think about it, these two companies were part of the birth of personal computing! We thought it would be interesting to see how their fortunes (as in “business success”) have changed through the years, and how Google, a much later arrival, compares. We didn’t look at stock prices or anything that has a measure of speculation to it. No, we looked at cold, hard numbers:  Revenue and Profit . Yearly revenue and profit over time To get a feel for the momentum of history we collected numbers as far back as we could. The charts we’ve made for you go all the way back into the 1980s. First let’s look at revenue, ho...

Finding a job might be tough these days, but finding work is a snap if you know where to look. A number of websites now let workers choose when and where they’d like to work. If you’ve got a spare hour, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk or CloudCrowd will give you tasks such as checking websites for information or translation. Pay for general tasks may be only a few dollars per hour, but rates rise for specialized skills. Experts with industry-specific knowledge can sign up for consulting gigs with 10EQS or Maven Research. At Maven, experts can set their own rates and many charge $250 to $500 per hour. Creative types can make videos at Tongal or design logos at 99designs. There are no upfront fees for workers to participate in these sites. Some sites do take a small percentage of the fee that's charged for the work done. While most of these websites aren’t geared for full-time work, the income can sure help pay the bills. And then some. 10EQS www.10eqs.com This virtual consulting firm st...

Zynga  is continuing its shopping spree today with the acquisition of social game developer  DNA Games , marking its 14th acquisition in the past 12 months. It’s important to note that this is an actual acquisition of both the talent and company, as opposed to the recent ‘acq-hires’ Zynga has been making in the past few months. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. DNA Games was  founded  in 2009 by a trio of former execs from SEM firm Bazaar Advertising (including Jon Lee and Shaun Haase), which was  acquired by AzoogleAds  in 2007. Since 2009, the gaming startup has developed a number of hit social games on Facebook, including Casino City, Slot City and Bar World. Casino City has been  steadily growing  in monthly usage on Facebook. In total, DNA reaches 2.4 million monthly active users on Facebook. Currently Casino City  has  1.5 million monthly active users, Slot City has 438K users, and Bar World has 382K active monthly u...

The founder of  Microsoft  said that he “was a strong proponent at the board level for the deal being done”. Skype, the internet video calling service, was bought by Microsoft last week. The deal is the largest acquisition Microsoft has ever made. Some analysts have questioned whether Microsoft overpaid but Mr Gates insisted that they did not. He told the BBC: “I think it’s a great, great deal for Skype. I think it’s a great deal for Microsoft.” He added: “It’ll be fascinating to see how the brilliant ideas out of Microsoft research, coming together with Skype, what they can make of that.” Mr Gates is still chairman of Microsoft but he stepped back from his full-time role at the company in 2008 to focus on charity work. Asked whether the PC age was coming to an end, Mr Gates said: “The PC is the tablet, all these digital devices are going to work together so the importance of software is higher today than ever. “And Microsoft write to everything that software runs on, so you...

Amazon's  prolonged outage of cloud services  has the potential to set back cloud adoption by giving businesses -- especially those already on the fence -- a strong reason to go slow. Amazon Cloud Outage Staggers Into Day 2 And for those companies that sell cloud services, it means they now have to sell against a new benchmark in unreliability. Amazon is suffering a partial outage, now in its second day, that is affecting what may be a large number of sites,  as well as some prominent ones  . Thanks to Amazon, supporters are going to have a tough time arguing that the uptime delivered by  cloud  services is superior to anything corporate IT can deliver. That's a problem compounded by Amazon itself. Its users aren't certain just what the problem is or when it'll be fixed. One person who knows about the problems ahead is Tref Laplante, the CEO WorkXpress, who says the Amazon outage "is going to be devastating." WorkXpress is a platform as a service. It has c...

Just copy and paste the text below into a  google  search text area and replace the “artist or song” with an actual artist or song. -inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(wma|mp3) “artist or song”

Researchers at MIT have found a way to make significant improvements to the power-conversion efficiency of solar cells by enlisting the services of tiny viruses to perform detailed assembly work at the microscopic level. In a solar cell, sunlight hits a light-harvesting material, causing it to release electrons that can be harnessed to produce an electric current. The new MIT research,  published online this week  in the journal  Nature Nanotechnology , is based on findings that carbon nanotubes — microscopic, hollow cylinders of pure carbon — can enhance the efficiency of electron collection from a solar cell's surface. Previous attempts to use the nanotubes, however, had been thwarted by two problems. First, the making of carbon nanotubes generally produces a mix of two types, some of which act as semiconductors (sometimes allowing an electric current to flow, sometimes not) or metals (which act like wires, allowing current to flow easily). The new research, for the...

The technology is made possible by commercially available sensors for recording electroencephalograms (EEGs), which are basically the electrical outputs your brain produces while it thinks. Scientists then trained a computer program to distinguish the particular electrical patterns that are produced when a person thinks certain commands, such as "left," "right," "accelerate" or "brake." Of course, this training couldn't have been done while out on the open road without being a hazard, so the scientists also created a virtual computer program more appropriate for the task. In this program, a person hooked up to the EEG sensors learned to maneauver a virtual cube around a screen using mental commands like those he or she might use when controlling a car. Once the training was complete, it was time to take it out for a spin in the real world. Aside from being equipped with the brain-reading technology, the "Knight Rider"-esque car ...

Let there be no doubt; there is an information war taking place on the Web between corporations and their industry associations and activist groups who want legislative changes or government policies changed. For decades, corporations were the ones who could afford to fight the perception battle in traditional media; they had the financial resources. With the advent of social media, that has shifted. And  activists  have learned to use social technologies very well. In our research of multiple industry sectors, from extractive resources to consumer products and to public policy research for governments around the world, we have come to find this pitched battle raging in every country we’ve conducted research. Who’s winning on the social web? For now, the activists. Whether it be environmental groups, health related or political, activist groups move faster are more nimble and less intimidated by engaging with the general public. Here’s a broad look at our findings; Activists ...