http://www.techmacro.com (un)Official Daily Tech News Thu, 18 Dec 2008 13:09:08 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en When Apple announced to stop attending MacWorld after the last show early next year, questions also rise seriously over the future of trade shows in general. There were many comments about the ROI a company gains at a trade show and it appears not efficient enough for Apple, according to the ... http://www.techmacro.com/2008/12/dull-future-waiting-for-trade-shows/ Apple Inc has been known for long of its premium-price strategy. "We don't know how to make a $500 computer that's not a piece of junk," Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, said in October implying the wave of affordable, reduced-size notebooks, often called netbooks, flooding the market this year. The strategy proves ... http://www.techmacro.com/2008/12/will-apple-premium-price-strategy-still-work-in-2009/ [TimeOnline UK] - According to a TimeOnline's article, Amazon's employees will be fired if they take more than five days off sick even if they have legitimate doctor's note. In addition, they are forced to work a 10.5 hour overnight shift at the end of a five-day week that means ... http://www.techmacro.com/2008/12/amazon-employees-do-not-get-ill-or-being-fired/ Google announced to release Chrome version 1.0 today saying "to take off the "beta" label" from its browser -- a big jump from the latest version 0.4.x released just a week ago. Like Mozilla's Firefox, Chrome is an open source browser but it makes use of Apple's WebKit HTML-rendering engine instead ... http://www.techmacro.com/2008/12/google-chrome-takes-off-beta-label/ Today Yahoo began laying off 1,500 employees, about 10 percent of its workforce, as a plan announced in October. However, this may not the last bad news to Yahoo's staff yet. After months in trouble with many changes and mistakes, Yahoo is now hit badly by the worse economic climate. "Cut costs, ... http://www.techmacro.com/2008/12/yahoo-layoffs-begins-but-what-next/ Boston-Power Inc, a Massachusetts-based company which has 6 Sigma-level mass manufacturing operations in China, today announced HP as first customer to offer its next generation notebook computer battery in a company's press release. The Boston-Power's next-generation Lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery cell, named Sonata, will be able to keep 80 percent of their ... http://www.techmacro.com/2008/12/hp-to-offer-next-generation-laptop-batteries/ [comScore] -- According to the latest stats by comScore, U.S. Internet users watched 13.5 billion online videos in October 2008, which was a 45 percent year-over-year increase. The average duration of videos watched was also up, 3 minutes per video in comparison with September's stats of the average duration of 2.7 ... http://www.techmacro.com/2008/12/us-video-views-up-45-percent/ Five winners of fbFund, who were picked from a pool of 25 finalists, have been announced. Each of them will receive $250,000 non-recourse grants, mentorship from Facebook on development and a lot of marketing benefits. They are (in alphabetical order): GroupCard: Digital greeting card service that lets ... http://www.techmacro.com/2008/12/facebook-fbfund-winners-announced/ [Google] - Google today announced "an initiative to help bring more magazine archives and current magazines online," in partnerships with publishers to digitize millions of articles from titles as diverse as New York Magazine, Popular Mechanics, and Ebony. More info from a company blog post:   You can search for magazines through Google ... http://www.techmacro.com/2008/12/google-digitalizes-magazines/ [GigaOM] -- The web giant Yahoo is planning to turn its email offering, which is serving over 200 million users at the moment, into into a platform for applications, much in the same way Facebook does. The program will be launched in beta fairly soon with half a dozen small applications ... http://www.techmacro.com/2008/12/yahoo-inbox-20-email-as-social-platform/