Thanksgiving week here in the USA, we see record sales, US Navy suffers data breach, Scotland’s unicorn sold to China, Oracle buys a DNS company, Twitter laying off over 300 people, a battery that lasts for weeks from a charge in seconds, and how swearing can show your intelligence.
- US Navy suffers data breach with 130,000 names out in the open
Another data breach story to tell, however this one is a little more unique considering it is the military data of current and in-active personnel that was hacked, from a consultant at HP when their laptop was stolen.
One has to naturally ask why an external consultant was hosting this data on their laptop in the first place? That exhibits very poor development processes. Shame on you HP.
- Scotland’s unicorn, Skyscanner, is sold to a Chinese company for £1.4B
A company based in Edinburgh founded in 2003 offering cheap deals on air travel and hotels sold to a Chinese company this week. What is interesting about this story is that illustrates that ignoring China may be a mistake; they only opened an office there in 2012 and then acquired a Chinese rival. A risky move at the time I am sure, but it has paid off now.
Incidentally, speaking of unicorns, did you know that the unicorn is the official animal of Scotland? I just made your next dinner party more interesting – thank you.
- Dyn, the DNS company, sells to Oracle for $600M
Another healthy purchase, is that of the start-up come good, Dyn, who provide DNS resolution services for many of the big properties of the Internet. Oracle has snapped them up to further cement their move into the cloud industry. Dyn are a great company, so let us hope Oracle, doesn’t get all Oracle on them and leave them to do their thing.
If the name Dyn sounds familiar then you are right, they were taken down as part of a massive DoS attack on the Internet a few weeks ago.
- An overzealous salesman offers cloud services to Amazon’s CTO
This one is just one of those legendary tales that illustrates just how bad cold emailing from a list can be. One salesman emailed Werner Vogels, the considered father of cloud computing, asking if Amazon had made the transition to the cloud yet. Oops.
Vogels shamed them on Twitter – which is a shame; I would have strung the sales guy on a little more to see at what point some research kicked in humility struck the poor guy.
- Twitter is planning on laying off 350 employees
The media’s best loved channel is struggling despite record numbers of eyeballs on its product. The problem is of course, turning those eyeballs into paying customers. This week in their earnings call they said this move was a way to make the company more efficient.
Some companies are just not intended to make money; Twitter is a feature, not a product, and should just be bought by a large media company and integrated.
- Battery that charges in seconds, but lasts for weeks?
The news that researchers at the University of Central Florida have developed a supercapacitor that can last 20 times longer than the current battery technology has people dreaming of real cord-cutting! Not only that, but it only takes a few seconds to bring it back to full charge.
This is truly science fiction stuff and if they can pull this off and commercialize it they may have solved one of man’s biggest problems – how do I make my phone last a full day!?
- Black Friday is set to break all records; $1B purchased on smartphones alone
This is Thanksgiving week in the USA, and that means only one thing, bargains galore! This year retailers are saying their tills are ringing louder than before even though a lot of have purposely closed on Black Friday as a mark of anti-consumerism.
What is interesting, more people are using their phones for grabbing bargains, with over $1B in sales originating from handsets. I will confess to doing this – I was in BestBuy and bought the same LG headset on Amazon as I was standing with the box in my hand; $20 cheaper and same day delivery!
- People who swear are more intelligent, so science says
You know how it goes, you drop the off ‘fuck’ and people think it’s a lack of vocabulary (though Billy Connolly famously said, he knows lots of words, but still prefers fuck). Apparently researchers have found, that those that swear often actually have a higher number of words overall. There you go!
And if you need some help to add some colour into your language then let me help you with the excellent online FOAAS Fuck Off As A Service. You’ll be firing them out in no time.
… and this week’s soundtrack is brought to you from the gentleman of American country, Tim McGraw.
alan williamson 