Last week we finished up the 30 Days to 3,000 Fans program and while some people may or may not have reached the 3,000 fan target, the real question is: does the number of fans really matter? Last night I was watching a video of Seth Godin where he says “it’s worthless to have lots and lots of friends on Facebook.” With so many people selling the importance of having fans, followers, and friends though, how could Seth Godin, a thought leader in marketing, make such an assertion?

It’s Relationship Marketing
Seth has a valid point. If you don’t build…

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This past weekend, Berlin played host to Music Hack Day – an event where attendants built and tested hacks, contraptions, and software all dealing with sound, music, or the distribution thereof. Some of the hacks are simply mind blowing to see built in only a day or two. Like the location based CitySounds.fm or Tracks on a Map – mapping out where your music is from. Or the music based games and composition tools, iLoveAcid squencer and MaschineFighter – adding some crazy fun to MIDI.
Oh, we almost forgot, we can’t go an entire post without mentioning something Arduino;…

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A merger occurred between two North American manufacturing companies. They were able to unite forces to bring unique value to the construction, transportation, materials handling, and agricultural industries in Canada and the United States.
This new multinational company had undergone mergers and acquisitions in the past and had several different IT systems. There were looking for ways to enable access to consolidated information to better serve customers across the globe.
Numerous mergers and acquisitions stimulated an urgent need to reconcile disparate sales and distribution models and to gain a clearer picture of business activity. Its existing systems caused redundant work…

Cotton crop in Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan, which together account for around 24% of the country’s total cotton production, is under threat from low rainfall in the earlier part of the season followed by sudden increase in showers witnessed in the last few weeks. Experts believe that if weather conditions do not improve in the next few days, cotton crop in the region could be around 10% less this year and its quality could also be impacted because uneven rains have made the standing crop prone to pest attack. Already, diseases like Bronze Wilt and boll weevil, which causes loss…

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Hackers have programmed a Trojan that uses Google Groups newsgroups to distribute commands. Trojan distribution via newsgroups has existed for more than a decade, but using newsgroups as a command and control channel is a new innovation.
The Grups Trojan itself is quite simple and is only noteworthy for the command and control structure it deploys. The malware is programmed to log into a Chinese language newsgroup to receive commands, Symantec security researcher Gavin O’Gorman writes.
When successfully logged in, the Trojan requests a page from a private newsgroup, escape2sun. The page contains commands for the Trojan to carry out.…

After a brief, summer-long stretch of rising demand, steel prices are starting to decline, indicating that moves to increase production may have been too much too soon. Hot-rolled steel, a benchmark grade that typically is processed into cars, building structures or appliances, cost about $600 to $620 a metric ton in August. Now it can be had for about $550-$570 a ton, a drop of about 8%, according to World Steel Dynamics, a steel research firm. Steelmakers, with their exposure to a wide variety of end markets, from consumers to industrial users, are generally a leading indicator of economic…

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Today Slide is announcing the launch of season two of KatalystHQ within their FunSpace Facebook application and with it, a $500,000+ sponsorship by NESTLÉ® HOT POCKETS®. Recently the company claimed that they has laid off a large portion of their sales staff in order to focus “its attention on building a team that will focus on higher-end campaigns, ones in the $500,000 category range.” (Source: GigaOm) Many large developers that I spoke with laughed at the concept, asking “Are there really that many $500,000 plus sponsorships?” Apparently so.

This is the first big sponsorship deal that we’ve heard of from…

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The alpha version of Lubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala is now publicly availabile. The project brings together Ubuntu and LXDE, the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment. This combination makes for a lighter version of the most popular Linux distribution. Both Xubuntu (which utilizes the Xfce desktop) and Lubuntu are meant to run well on lower resource computers such as netbooks. With the ISO smaller than 400mb and using quite a bit less system resources Lubuntu looks promising.
Right now it looks like the original backup ISO link is down.  If you can’t wait, try this torrent.
[via Softpedia]

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