CitiBank decided to go with the direct model and compete heads-to-heads with Emigrant Direct, ING Direct and HSBC Direct. CitiBank Direct offers 4.50% APY FDIC-insured savings accounts for those who already have Citibank EZ Checking, Citibank Account, Citibank Everything Counts Account or CitiGold Account. That’s right, the new deal is not for everyone, and if you weren’t happy with Citibank customer services or practices before, you cannot get online savings account from, CitiBank Direct. Meanwhile the Federal Reserve rate reached 4.75% yesterday, and with HSBC’s 4.80% APY and ING’s 4.75% APY on new money it doesn’t look like Citibank is creating much of a competition there. If they really expect money flowing in, they should go above and beyond 4.80% that HSBC Direct is currently running.
GIGRIB Uptime service from IPWalk seems to be pretty useful for many Webmasters out there. Modeled after SETI@Home and Distributed.net the service requires the user to download a client (Windows only), which will automatically check the uptime of other URLs entered into the system. It also means the client will be generating quite a few HTTP requests, although it won’t download the sites - it will only check for a valid header telling it that the document requested is available. The client can be configured to check the URL every minute. For each hour that the client stays alive and checks others’ sites, you earn 5 hours for your own sites.
The beauty of the distributed approach is that you can suddenly find out your sites are extremely slow (or unavailable) in New Zealand or Morocco. Some frequently asked questions are answered here.
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Sarpino’s has good value for the money
- Review of: Sarpino’s Pizzeria
- By: Alex Moskalyuk
- Rating: 4
- Read review on Judy’s Book.
We’ve decided to try Sarpino’s over a weekend, since the menu looked good, and the prices were quite competitive. They also have a weekly mailer with coupons inside, which just happened to arrive a few days, so the decision-making process, as far as choosing the pizza place to call, was quick.
The person on the phone was very friendly and spoke good English (a rare find for pizza places), and quite quickly the order was accompanied by free chicken wings and two salads, courtesy of some coupon in their weekly mailing that she pointed me to. Estimated delivery time was 30-45 minutes, the driver arrived in about 35 minutes.
The pizza was hot, tasted great, the chicken wings were not as hot. Salads comprised of thinly cut vegetables in plastic containers with dressing brought in a smaller container. The menu selection at Sarpino’s is pretty good, and their gourmet pizzas sound interesting enough to give Sarpino’s a try next time we need hot food delivered quickly.
Keeping multiple tabs in Firefox open for more than a day is never a good idea, since one starts fearing to ever look at Windows Task Manager or open another site for the fear that Firefox will show that Error Collector window. Some good reading for the weekend:
- Web Publishing Blog interviews Marcus Frind to find out the secrets of making a few dimes off Google AdSense. Frind has apparently found a way to earn a little cash by running PlentyOfFish - a free dating site that brings in about $10,000 of ad money, primarily from AdSense. Frind is also a promoter for quick functional designs that load fast.
- Caterina Fake of Flickr (and now Yahoo!) writes how it’s a bad time to start a company and the team from 37 Signals disagrees.
- Stories of how MicroCenter, Fry’s, CompUSA and Borders run their operations on Linux.
Jeremy’s post on Google Finance vs. Yahoo! Finance seems to have generated some good discussion, but people seemed to have exaggerated the battle. With Henry Blodget calling Jeremy’s post a “depressing take”. All of a sudden a call for improvements is interpreted as “yes, we suck” statement. All of a sudden Google Finance is the gift from up above, while Yahoo! Finance is a useless Web 1.0 app used only by people who don’t know any better.
But come on! Even before working at Yahoo!, the finance.yahoo.com property struck me as information goldmine. Finance has been around almost foreever, yet every time I am doing some financial research I come across some features that I haven’t seen before. I blogged about company-specific RSS feeds and upcoming IPOs list. There’s also stuff like 2005 tax law changes, historical prices and historical dividends, analyst opinion overviews and tons of other stuff.
Admittedly, the stock charts don’t offer too many options, as cookie-cutter timespans are rarely useful to a serious investor. However, I don’t buy the Flash-enabled charts. High on the coolness factor, they are rarely useful, when you need to use the picture on your Web site or paste it into e-mail to your financial advisor, nothing beats a simple GIF. Addition of the blogs to the financial coverage doesn’t seem that useful to me either. Blogs are great for covering stuff like new gadgets, latest political developments and Tom Cruise’s visits, but when I research my financial decisions, I don’t want to read some random opinions from people who might have some personal agendas. If anything, allow me to choose blogs that I want to include, like Stalwart and others. Blogs who have coverage on MSFT, GOOG, WMT or HAL always seem to have more noise than signal anyway. Yahoo! Finance might be considered lacking on the interface part, but it’s lacking as much as Craigslist lacks pretty colors. And guess what - those of us who have been Finance users for many years are used to it and are efficient in using it.
Google Finance is important for Google, as approximately one-fifth of all the Internet ad money goes towards financial sites, since people will always be looking for ideas to invest in, current tax rate and tax savings tips as well as loans and credit cards. Plus getting into the top ten finance sites is not that hard - just generate more than a million visitors a week and kick Bankrate out of #10 spot.
Michael Robertson (of MP3.com, Linspire, SIPPhone, GizmoProject and MP3Tunes.com fame) is launching a Web-only competitor to Microsoft Office by creating a suite of applications replicating Microsoft Office look and feel. From the posting:
But ajaxWrite is just the start. We have a library of applications we have been working on to replace most of the standard PC software titles. Every week we will launch a new sophisticated program on Wednesday at 12:00 PST on ajaxlaunch.com. These programs will push the boundaries of what people believe is possible today with web-delivered software. These programs look and operate much like their traditional software cousins, but are cross-platform, loaded dynamically, and are available to users at no charge. I’m convinced if you try a few of these products you will understand how the software business will fundamentally change.
ajaxWrite is the first launched product. Overall it looks pretty good, with menu options and icons replicating MS Word exactly.
Using Blingo as my default Firefox search engine paid off today, as I got a movie ticket from Blingo. It’s just a movie ticket, but hey, it was pretty exciting to see that “You’ve won” form.
Yahoo! Messenger with Voice 7.0 will allow the user to attach a US phone number to it for $2.99. Outgoing calls to regular US phone numbers will cost 2c, PC-to-PC calls will be free, while incoming calls to the phone number associated with Yahoo! Messenger will be free as well, USA Today says. It doesn’t look like Mac and Linux versions are supporting the telephone service right now. Om Malik says Yahoo! is starting a price war with Skype by undercutting their prices. According to the press release from Yahoo!, free voicemail is bundled into new messenger as well.
The Economist magazine takes a look at open source software development models and the companies currently gaining benefits from it - Google, Amazon, Yahoo! and others. They take a look at several popular open source projects and how they are currently coded.
First, there’s a limited contribution model by Firefox team.
First, there are around 400 contributors trusted to offer code into the source tree, usually after a two-stage review. Farther out, thousands of people submit software patches to be sized up (a useful way to establish yourself as new programming talent). An even larger ring includes the tens of thousands of people who download the full source code each week to scrutinise bits of it.
Then there’s a company model, where no outsiders are allowed, employed by MySQL AB:
It rarely accepts code from outside developers (the complexity of database software makes it less amenable to being independently cobbled together). Instead, MySQL employs 60 developers, based in 25 countries, of whom 70% work from home.
Third, Wikipedia contributing model is analyzed, where anyone who feels like it can contribute.
Gary Krakow from MSNBC is impressed with Motorola’s C116 phone only to find out that that the phone is not available in the US. The reason? “A very, very basic GSM handset that handles incoming and outgoing calls as well as SMS messages, the C116 is sold all over the world — except for the United States. It’s not sold here because it’s too cheap!” The phone is targeted for emerging markets, where people don’t like to tie themselves into monthly contracts, and with little value proposition presents little interest to US wireless operators.
What’s more interesting, is how simplicity in the cell phone combined with the clarity of voice is supposedly the only featureset that interests an experienced reviewer. Everybody seems to like the concept of convergence, but few people ever mastered operating 4-in-1 copier-scanner-fax-printer, let alone phone-PDA-photostorage-music player.