we profile existing companies that are making an impact (commercial and/or cultural) on the new web space. - TechCrunch

We know Techcrunch has gone way beyond that over the years. Thanks to our dear Michael Arrington who has his own philosophical ways of adapting quotes and tread a fine line between 'ethical' and 'unethical' with his own chalk. Anyway, our viewers will decide that. The story is, this time a hacker has hacked into Twitter accounts and extracted sensitive details and sent it to Techcrunch. And they, after being in a cooked up and made up dilemma, have decided to publish some of the confidential documents that can really embarrass organizations and twitter itself.

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For a week now, there was much noise over Microsoft Office 2010 that was finally announced today at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans. What's most interesting in this conte is the blow-by-blow game between the tech-giants. It's not been a week since Google released its chrome OS. In the  heat of events, Microsoft has announced that Office would include a free, online version of its four major software, a direct face off with Google’s suite of web-based office applications.

Things had already soured between the two technology superpowers, especially with Microsoft launching its new search engine Bing backed by massive ad campaign aimed at gobbling up greater pie of search market share, especially Google's share. In a bid to take Google head-on Micosoft has adopted the three screen strategy that allows its products to synchronize across the phone, browser, and desktop. Well, the Office 2010 is clearly a reminder of Microsoft's dominance over the Office productivity suite market.  Microsoft has also announced that it would streamline the number of Office editions from eight to five. I'm sure lots of questions about the latest Office suite are boiling in your mind, let's find out the answers straightaway.     Full article (1308 words) »

Well this news is significant. Simple Thoughts today started featuring in Guy Kawsaki's ( the guy with over 100, 000 followers in Twitter and Founder of Garage.com and an accomplished VC) latest venture Alltop. To put it simply, in tech.alltop.com all the big name blogs are listed starting from Readwriteweb, Techcrunch to Mashable, Arstechnica (what a name!), OSNews etc. So, to join the party was a pretty big thing. And that is not it though. We are perhaps the only Indian technology blog registered there. Whoa! Congratulations every body.

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Simple Thoughts has 2,460 posts and 10,012 comments as of writing this post, an average of over 4 comments per post. Simple Thoughts was never intended to be a commercial venture like TechCrunch or Mashable, for instance. While we use advertising at present to defray the costs associated with this blog, it still remains a non-commercial venture. Until about a month back, Simple Thoughts was a one-man-show, that man being me. Maintaining a blog over the years is hard work, often unappreciated. However it is your comments and words of appreciation that keeps me going.

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As you know, Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo, fired 10% of his staff and then wrote an emotional email to his private mailing list, stating specifically, "Please feel free to forward this to folks you think it would help, but please don’t republish this on the web.". The copyrighted content was published in its entirety by Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch. Jason was obviously not very pleased about this and throughout the day tried to get TechCrunch to remove the post without success. Some of his twitter messages on this context are illuminating: Full article (614 words) »

This might come as a surprise to you in light of their recent Q3 results in which they beat forecasts by 31% increase in revenue. However let's look at the clear and omnious signs that even Google is not recession proof and may be in more trouble than you realize. Full article (820 words) »

We are incrementally adding changes to our site, replacing portions of our old theme with a new one.

Upgrading a theme is harder than it looks. Initially we almost completed designing a theme with blue motif. In our internal feedback (and from Google) our existing theme fared better than our new theme. So we went back to drawing board. We decided to incrementally add changes to the existing theme.

We added a menu bar and a footer to start with. A much improved headline section is coming next following by a full CSS design. The sidebars will also be changed to incorporate more modern looks and the now popular TechCrunch like ad boxes.

We also upgraded our LightCache plugin (WordPress plugin with intelligent caching which offers more than 200% better performance than wp-cache 2 or wp super cache in heavily loaded sites) to use both disk-cache and memcached (when available). The memcached enhancement appears to have reduced the load to much lower level. Much more testing needs to be done. We are using the blog for live testing at this moment, without constant monitoring to prevent unexpected downtime. So far there has been none.

So, how do you like our new theme? Any suggestions?

MySpace was awarded $234 million in statutory damages, the largest ever anti-spam verdict made under CAN-SPAM and apparently under any law. This is also the first time damages have been awarded under the California Anti Phishing Act.

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Pete Cashmore of Mashable interviews Robert Scoble. I liked it. Blogging is continuing to gain more traction, despite the naysaying gurus, while traditional media is suffering a rapid decline, at least in USA.

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Digg is down. It comes up with an amusing message directing you to several sites like TechCrunch, PaidContent, BBC News & others.

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