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Video clip for the song "Stained", by Ali Motu, from the 2000 EP "Are You Listening to Me?" ©2000 Ali Motu
We just unearthed this rare archival footage of The Squares playing their hit song, \"All the Wrong Reasons\" back in 1960. This video was the tidal wave with which indie music took over the pop charts.
fantastic, great luck
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Finally. As people keep noticing, now people who don't really need personal assistants can act like they do, thanks to South Asia. New offshore personal-assistant services in Bangalore are available to cater to your rinky-dink small-business needs, the Times reiterates today.
You can have them do things like "conduct research, monitor the Web, make appointments and even give [you] a wake-up call and tell [you] to get some exercise." All this can be yours for $15 an hour!
But buyer beware: sometimes this veritable army of Girl Fridays can be a little rough around the edges, as the Indians "don't always have the greatest client service skills or business acumen or accents." (That's not true! The guy who called me three times last week demanding that I pay my overdue credit-card bill had a perfect accent).
An "entrepreneur" who hired one of them to "book him a cheap trip to India, perhaps using local knowledge" was unhappy when his slacker PA simply emailed a list of prices from Travelocity. Now he's totally out 30 bucks.
What's with this trend? Oh, we know who to blame: "Like many others using the services, Ms. Levy was inspired by two books: Thomas L. Friedman's "The World is Flat" and Timothy Ferriss's "The 4-Hour Workweek." Aren't we all!
This is the video for the Vampire Killars song Bad at Video GamesWhen the financial crisis first struck, it appeared that IT shops were prepared to weather the storm and that IT spending might hold up despite the downward economy. But a lot has happened since then.
Several more banks have faltered or been acquired. The stock market has continued to ricochet around, enough to destroy the confidence of all but its wealthiest masters. And layoffs keep coming across many industries, including the technology realm -- with no end in sight.
[ Learn more about how the financial crisis is affecting IT and the high-tech industry, plus what IT can do to help, in InfoWorld's special report. ]
IT, both corporate departments and the industry itself, has survived tough economic conditions before, notably the dot-com crash of 2001. Perhaps that's why IT shops are already battening down the hatches.
Preparing for the storm
Steve Minton, vice president of worldwide IT markets at IDC, says, "Companies are in the mindset of not spending in the next 3 months and increasing only 1 or 2 percent in the next 12 months. That's quite a change from last year when it was between 7 and 8 percent."
Gartner, in a report issued earlier this month, stated that even though the bailout of banks spares IT from a worst-case scenario, they're still turning budgets downward while heading toward 2009.
The bank fallout itself is not to be overlooked. Gauging only from the hardships of Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch, Robert Iati, a partner and global head of consulting of the Tabb Group, a research and advisory firm that focuses on financial markets, sees "investment banks spending about $4.5 billion, or 20 percent, less on IT in 2009 than in 2008." That's more than just a big number. "Investment banks represent the engine of cutting-edge enterprise technologies," Iati adds.
Critical to enterprise technology advancements they may be, but Wall Street firms, banks, and other financial services organizations are not the only ones yanking dollars out of the IT spending pool -- or abandoning and mothballing projects.
"We do see people throw away even great ideas in tight times," says Mark Raskino, a Gartner fellow and vice president for emerging technologies and trends.
As gloomy as it looks, the tech sector is not returning to the days of the dot-com bust. "We're not seeing a replay of the big tech bust of 2001-2002," says Andrew Bartels, a principal analyst at Forrester Research. "But we do see a slowdown."
Innovation may take a hit
There are implications to companies spending less on IT. That reality might not hit the largest tech vendors -- the ones still reporting profits and sitting on large cash reserves -- hard enough to break any bones, but smaller companies will certainly feel the sting of less spending.
"There will be a lot of disruption to the progress of the industry because the pipeline of startups that fuels innovation will be challenged by the credit crisis," Gartner's Raskino explains.
That, in turn, inhibits the fresh new ideas that IT shops can choose to achieve their goals. "Less competition alone will harm overall IT innovation and the future of IT," says Andre Preoteasa, director of IT at Castle Brands, the alcoholic beverage producer and importer.
Andr? Gold, former head of IT security at financial services firm ING, explains that "the startup market has changed over the last five years, so it's not as sexy or profitable as it once was for new companies to come to market, IPO, and make wealthy or wealthier the VCs and entrepreneurs who seeded and founded the company."
That said, though, Gold contends that the model is not broken and remains valuable to IT shops. "I have gone to small-cap companies and startups for superior [intellectual property] at a reduced rate," Gold explains. "If the company has good [intellectual property], I have no shame in putting my checkbook behind that because they're likely to be acquired, and by a vendor I already have a relationship with."
Just don't expect IT budgets to spring back quickly. Gartner's Raskino expects this turbulence to continue through next year. "There's no chance that it will all be sorted out by Christmas and all will be well on January 1," he says.
Tabb Group's Iati looks out even further: "We're in for a period where it will probably take five years to reach the tech spend we had in 2007."
We've seen criminals use technology in their favor, but this is one of those cases where it works against them. An 18-year old kid in Wales had his friends film him as he swiped a pair of glasses off a charity worker on the street. He then posted the video on YouTube and got busted by the cops, which let him get away with a "caution." We woulda fried him and posted that on YouTube. Video after the jump.
YouTube Video Leads to Arrest [via News.com via via Sun Online]
If you're perusing the UK gossip pages, and there happens to be some breaking news about 62-year-old Rod "Captain Relevant" Stewart, which of the following headlines is going to actually grab your attention?
A) Rod Stewart and current wife in domestic dispute; relationship on the rocks
B) Singer Stewart, 62, arrested for DUI
C) Do ya think I'm sexy now? Rod's latest model isn't tall and blonde - it's a railway set
D) Rod Stewart does anything other than randomly and inexplicably constructing a model train set
The answer, obviously, is C - Rod Stewart constructed a complete model replica of New York's Grand Central Station. How is this sentence real?? Did some SNL sketch called "Model Trains with Rod Stewart" that Mike Myers wrote in 1993 and aired at 12:55 suddenly come to life?
"I'm a great model railway enthusiast and I'm building a huge layout over there in California so that takes up a little bit of time and football takes up a little bit of time," he said. "And then there's the children and I like to go out with the lads two or three times a week and go completely mad and sometimes I get my barnet done. It's still all my own hair, you know."Glad to see Rod's got his priorities in order: Model Railroads > Football > His Kids > Hair. Isn't this story so much better than, say, "Aging Rocker throws whiskey bottle at children?" Maybe British gossip is heading in a new direction? Needless to say, I can't wait to read about Elton John's weekly D&D Games.
Filed under: OpEd, The Office, Episode Reviews
(S04E05) There were a lot of complaints last week that The Office was moving in an unwanted dramatic direction. Whereas I thought last week's episode was brilliant and moving, a lot of the comments asked "What happened to the funny!? I thought this show was supposed to be a comedy!" The writers of those comments then threw their laptops against the wall in anger like the viking from that Snickers' commercial.Continue reading The Office: Local Ad
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