Martin Nisenholtz, the SVP of Digital Operations at The New York Times Company was speaking at the OMMA Global conference in New York City. Nisenholtz revealed that Twitter drives 10% of The New York Times’ traffic. The New York Times Twitter account has 1.8 million followers thus far and the number is growing at a rapid pace. This is “up from 0 a year ago,” according to Nisenholtz.

The interesting part about the traffic that The New York Times is getting from Twitter is that the micro-blogging company is not getting any money out of it. Twitter doesn’t have a revenue model as of right now. But given how much major news agencies are relying on the micro-blogging service, the company could eventually take advantage of their situation. Dave Morgan of Simul Media revealed the quote from Nisenholtz as shown in the above screen shot.

When Facebook launched Beacon in 2007, there was a lot of controversy. There were a good number of class action privacy lawsuits. This lead to the recent shutting down of Beacon. The settlement cost Facebook quite a bit of money too. Facebook plans to donate $9.5 million to an organization that advocates online privacy.

Facebook Director of Policy Communications Barry Schnitt said that the situation around Beacon “underscored how critical it is to provide extensive user control over how information is shared.”

“We look forward to the creation of the foundation and its work to educate Internet users on how best to control their privacy; engage in safe social networking practices; and, generally, enjoy themselves more online by having knowledge that gives them a greater sense of control,” added Schnitt.

Facebook Beacon started in November 2007 as a marketing campaign for advertisers. Beacon would find out what types of items and services you are buying on e-commerce websites and report it to the Facebook homepage. The service was opt-out rather than opt-in which made it even more controversial. Mark Zuckerberg personally wrote an apology letter to the users in order to calm the mob. But it was too late. Now Facebook is really paying for it.

Elon Musk and Martin Eberhard are both co-founders of Tesla Motors. About five to six years after starting the company, the two had a falling out. Eberhard accused Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk and the company of slander, mismanagement, and for delivering a damaged Roadster vehicle. Eberhard left the company in 2007 and it was rumored that Musk forced him out. However Eberhard was promised a first edition $109,000 Roadster, but it was delivered with a dent.

The media even reported that Musk accused Eberhard of Tesla’s financial problems which led to delayed products. Eberhard filed a lawsuit against Tesla for costs and damages as a result. Now it sounds like Musk and Eberhard wants what is best for the company. The lawsuit has been dropped and the company can now focus stronger on product development and delivery.

Financial settlements were undisclosed, but it is safe to assume that the company was hardly affected. Tesla Motors has a fat wallet after receiving a major investment by Daimler and the government.

Two students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have partnered up to conduct a study in determining one’s sexual orientation. The basis is that those that tend to have many homosexual friends will end up homosexual themselves. The two students even designed software using specific algorithms to predict sexual orientations. The software worked only for men, but not for women.

“When they first did it, it was absolutely striking – we said, ‘Oh my God – you can actually put some computation behind that,’ ” stated MIT computer science professor Hal Abelson in an interview with Boston.com. “That pulls the rug out from a whole policy and technology perspective that the point is to give you control over your information – because you don’t have control over your information.” The two students involved are Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree.

Based on the concept, the computer software algorithm could technically make assumptions about a person’s political preferences and emotions. As a matter of fact, Professor Murat Kantarcioglu at the University of Texas-Dallas used a similar concept to predict political preferences. Kantarcioglu and a student used 167,000 profiles to make 3 million links.

In the case of the Gaydar project, the students used a sample size of 1,544 straight men, 21 bisexual men, and 33 gay men. The 33 gay men had a great proportion of gay friends than the straight men.

The USB 3.0 logo became official earlier this month and now the first certified USB 3.0 powered device has become official. The first USB 3.0 powered device was developed by NEC and is called the xHCI host controller. The host controller is being used for a USB 3.0 1080p camera capable of 60 raw, uncompressed fps.

The Sony camera is 3 megapixel with a CMOS sensor by Point Grey. The device will be presented at the Intel Developers Forum. The Sony camera is expected to be released by the beginning of 2010.

Sharon Nguyen, SVP over at MySpace made an announcement that MySpace can now sync with Twitter. Facebook had this feature available a long time ago through the use of an application, then TweetDeck came along and made that feature available months ago. The most recent update of TweetDeck made the MySpace-update feature possible too.

Some of the key features about the MySpace announcement include:
- Status updates synced back and forth between MySpace and Twitter
- MySpace updates can update Twitter
- When updates are sent from MySpace to Twitter, your MySpace status update is linked so people on MySpace can leave comments
- MySpace/Twitter sync is mobile using MySpace Mobile and WAP
- Open authenthication technology used for making data secure

To sync your MySpace and Twitter accounts, visit http://www.myspace.com/sync.

Henry Ross Perot started a company called Electronic Data Systems in 1962 and then sold it to General Motors. EDS was responsible for General Motor’s IT services. Then EDS was bought out by Hewlett Packard for $13.9 billion in May 2008. Another one of Ross Perot’s company has been acquired today called Perot Systems. Perot Systems was founded in 1988 and has been sold to Dell Inc. for $3.9 billion.

All of the biggest PC manufacturing companies has a strong branch of consulting arms. IBM Global Services makes about $58.9 billion. Between HP and EDS’ collective business services, they made about $38 billion as of 2007. And Dell’s Perot Systems made about $2.8 billion in 2008 revenues.

Based on how many shares Perot Systems has on the market, Dell will be buying them each at $30 per share. This is a 67% premium based on Perot Systems’ stock price on Friday of $17.91. The deal is expected to close during Q4 of Dell’s fiscal year. Perot Systems will continue to operate in Plano, Texas. Dell itself is based in Round Rock, Texas which is less than 250 miles away.

Rumor has it that China Telecom and Access are in the midst of developing a new phone called the CPhone. The CPhone has a custom version of Google Android 1.5 running the phone. Pictured above is a leaked screenshot of what the phone is expected to look like. The screen appears to be a 3.5″ incher. There is also support for China CMMB TV using the China Telecom networking technology.