IT consulting company SAP has been engaged with 25-30 contract attorneys and is spending millions of dollars in order to defend themselves in a very lengthy lawsuit with Waste Management. Waste Management has been accusing SAP of a flawed ERP implementation system.
SAP has paid over $1 million to an e-discovery software vendor and hired outside counsel to review documents and interview over 100 SAP employees. Waste Management decided to sue SAP in March 2008 for over $100 million in damages linked to their ERP software. SAP claimed that their ERP was an “out of the box” solution to Waste Management’s inefficient processes, but there was not much of a change.
However SAP is claiming that they are not at fault because Waste Management failed to deliver “timely and accurately define its business requirements” or provide “sufficient, knowledgeable, decision-empowered users and managers” for the ERP project.
The trial is set for this October, but SAP wants to push it until 2010. SAP is also dealing with another lawsuit revolving around I.P. with rival Oracle.
Indian IT company Wipro Technologies is looking to enter the cloud market over the next three to six months. Wipro directly competes with companies such as IBM and Accenture. In an interview with InformationWeek, WiPro CTO Vijaya Kumar stated that the company is planning four services around cloud computing: public cloud services, private clouds, hybrid clouds, and implementing software as a service.
When asked how Wipro could compete with Amazon, Google, Salesforce, etc., the CTO stated that they plan to focus on vertical industries such as retail and health care. Amazon.com, Google, Salesforce etc. seem to be more for general use rather than focusing on specific industries.
You may have noticed there tended to be some wild Alexa ranking fluctuations lately. For example, Techmeme went from being close to 100,000 Alexa to about 10,000 instantly. While many people don’t appreciate Alexa much anymore given the increase in other competitive services that assign a ranking to websites such as Technorati, Compete, Quantcast, etc. But I still prefer to use Alexa as a good way to determine the valuation of blogs and other websites. For example if I see a website that is over 20,000 on Alexa I can only assume it gets lots of hits and could make quite a bit of money based on its traffic.
Now Alexa has overhauled their system to give more advanced analytical information regarding the websites they track. For example on top of the countries that most users come from, there is contact info, related links, keywords, clickstream, and demographics. This is impressive considering that Alexa does not need websites to install a piece of code to track the analytics.
Other information provided by Alexa’s analytics system include daily traffic rank, reach, average pageviews per visitor, bounce %, average time spent on the site per visitor, and the % of users that arrive on the website through a search engine. All things considered, I still heavily judge how important a website is by its Alexa ranking. Alexa is owned by Amazon.com.
iZumi Bio is a biotechnology company that focuses on cellular reprogramming and stem cell research. iZumi is based in the Bay Area of California and started in 2007 with backing from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers along with Highland Capital Partners. Now the company has signed an agreement with Kyoto University’s Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CIRA). CIRA will exchange part of their pluripotent stem cell lines with iZumi as part of the agreement. iZumi and CIRA will then determine which methods of cell lines are appropriate for drug screening and development.
Pluripotent stem cells tend to be embryonic which is different from adult stem cells. Inducing embryonic stem cells to perform certain functions is crucial for the advancement of stem cell research as a whole, but anti-abortion activists believes that this is a violation of human life. Induced pluripotent stem cells are made from adult stem cells, but have embryonic pluripotent characteristics so this would enable researchers to further conduct studies while avoiding ethical issues with anti-abortionists.
“The partnership between these two leading organizations is a critical step in furthering this research and turning stem cell research into therapeutic realities sooner,” stated former Vice President and Kleiner Perkins partner Al Gore.
Remember Microsoft Laptop Hunters Giampaolo and Lauren? They were the stars of Microsoft’s new line of advertisements. Being a big company with massive marketing budgets, you should expect independent video enthusiasts to make parodies of your commercials. Above is one of the latest parodies of the Laptop Hunters Microsoft commercial.
The commercial features Frank the homeless guy that is given $1,000 to buy a laptop. He can’t afford a Mac and doesn’t want the PC. He’d rather have the money but he is forced to buy a PC anyway. The parody was put together by LandlineTV.com.
In late February, Defamer.com was rolled into Gawker.com. This put Seth Abramovitch, Kyle Buchanan and S.T. VanAirsdale out of a job. However they were given another opportunity in the form of blogging once again for Movieline.com. Movieline was originally a magazine that started in 1989 and was stringing along for a couple of years. Jane Fonda was on the first cover of the magazine. Jay Penske, the son of automobile racing team and Penske Corporation founder Roger Penske set-up the revamping of Movieline. Movieline will be part of Mail.com, the company that was relaunched by Penske and raised $35 million in funding last year.
Dave Arneson, the co-founder of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons passed away last week. The news of his passing caused the Dungeons & Dragons Internet community to mourn through blog posts and Twitter. On the Wizards of the Coast, there was a message about Arneson that stated: “Whether you’re a lifelong D&D player or a newcomer to RPGs, a traditional paper-and-pencil gamer or an online role-player, we all owe a great debt of thanks to Dave Arneson and his groundbreaking Blackmoor game.”
Below are several Twitter posts regarding Arneson’s passing:
- @pomorev: Putting kids to bed. Blogged about the passing of Dave Arneson. I’ll roll some d20s in his honour this Friday. Freedompastor.blogspot.com
- @flazter: Blizzard Dedicates WoW Patch 3.1 To Dave Arneson, http://htxt.it/PCRc
- @SethHorn: Aw crap. Dave Arneson died too. This sucks. http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/4news/20090409
- @ThomAllen: Jimmy Fallon monolog, “D&D creator Dave Arneson buried in 12 sided coffin.” said only geeks would get that.
- @Will_Belegon: Just discovered Dave Arneson, who helped invent RPG’s, passed away April 7th. Godspeed Dave, and thank you for hours of fun.
Arneson and the other Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax partnered in the 1970s to create a naval war game which was called Don’t Give Up The Ship. After that they created an idea to adventure into dungeons in the game Blackmoor. From that idea came the idea Dungeons & Dragons which was released by Tactical Studies Rules in 1974. About 20 million people became Dungeons & Dragons fans. Gygax died last year. Before both of the co-creators deaths, Arneson sued Gygax and Tactical over royalty issues. The lawsuit had been resolved and both co-creators are being acknowledged on the packaging of Dungeons & Dragons.
A couple of MIT geniuses have put together a gesture-based project at the Media Lab. The Fluid Interfaces Group within the Media Labs developed a wearable computing device that feeds you information based on what you are looking at. For example, the above video shows a student looking at a book and it automatically pulls up the reviews. The project is called the Sixth Sense and it was built with about $350 worth of goods.
The team used a web cam, a battery-powered projector with a small mirror. There is also a necklace that communicates with a cell phone to pull the information for the goods that are looked at. The Sixth Sense gadget was put together by Fluid Interfaces Group founder and MIT associate professor Pattie Maes along with MIT grad student Pranav Mistry.
There are many everyday uses for the Sixth Sense. Using the gadget you can make phone calls by projecting a keypad on your hand. Maps can be called up on a wall and you can zoom in and zoom out as well as pan around. By gesturing a square, you can take a picture and project them onto other surfaces. Reading experiences can be enhanced by calling related videos to an article or book that you are reading. Flight status updates and gate change announcements can be called up by having the system recognize your airline boarding pass. The limits are endless with the Sixth Sense.
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