The Associated Press writes that “[w]e think a lot about getting new gadgets, but not so much about getting rid of old ones. The result: old cell phones, defunct laser printers and Pentium III computers gathering dust. A couple companies want to help us clear out those old gadgets, while feeding our upgrade habit, helping the environment and making a buck for themselves. Instead of being hit up for an extended warranty next time you buy a gadget, you may find yourself hearing a pitch from TechForward Inc., a Los Angeles-based company selling a ‘guaranteed’ buyback plan for electronics. For a fee paid when you buy a device — $9 for an iPod, for instance — you get the right to sell it to TechForward at a predetermined price that depends on how long you keep it. If you sell an iPod after a year, for example, you would get $40; after another year, $20.”
Yahoo!News reports that “Time Warner Cable Inc said on Wednesday it is planning a trial to bill high-speed Internet subscribers based on their amount of usage rather than a flat fee, the standard industry practice. The second largest U.S. cable operator said it will test consumption-based billing with subscribers in Beaumont, Texas later this year as a part of a strategy to help reduce congestion of its network by a minority of consumers who pay the same monthly fee as light users. The company believes the billing system will impact only heavy users, who account for around 5 percent of all customers but typically use more than half of the total network bandwidth, according to a company spokesman.”
Internetnews.com points out that “[l]ast month Microsoft helped form an industry association focused on helping developers make hardware and software more accessible. On Thursday, Microsoft announced more tangible steps to help that effort along. The Accessibility Interoperability Alliance (AIA), formed in December, includes such Microsoft rivals as Adobe, Novell and Oracle. Specifically, Microsoft said it would grant a royalty-free license for any Microsoft patents necessary to implement required portions of the AIA’s UI (User Interface) Automation Specification still in development. ‘We decided to donate the API (define) we developed to make it open source and allow the AIA to take and port it to any platform they wanted to, Windows, Linux or Mac, to get consistency and accessibility,’ Norm Hodne, Microsoft’s Windows accessibility lead, told InternetNews.com. Hodne said Microsoft is already leveraging its alliance with Novell to get the UI Automation Spec over to the Linux platform. ‘We think it’s important this technology gets out there and companies don’t see assistive technology as a competitive thing they have to control or do better than another company,’ said Hodne.”
In a different article, Internetnews.com reports that “the leading online tracking firms are split over which Web property garners the most traffic” – Yahoo or Google? “According to comScore, Yahoo — perennially ranked as the most visited destination on the Web — held onto its lead in December, staving off surging Google for at least another month. Yahoo sites pulled in 136.6 million unique visitors in December, beating out Google, whose Web properties came up just shy of 133 million unique, comScore reported. But look at the figures from Nielsen Online, and it’s a different story. Google tops Nielsen’s lists of the top 10 Web sites both by parent company and by brand.”
The International Herald Tribune has a really interesting article today about entrepreneurship taking off in Ireland.