Archive for August 2006
Google CEO Dr. Eric Schmidt Joins Apple�s Board of Directors
CUPERTINO, California
�August 29, 2006 �Apple® today announced that Dr. Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google, was elected to Apple�s board of directors at their meeting today. Eric also sits on Google�s board of directors and Princeton University�s board of trustees.
Illegal IPod Market Booms in India
It’s not easy to buy an Apple music player in India legally. But the trade in smuggled iPods is going gangbusters.
read more | digg story
After a bit of research, as I was planning to gift an iPod (30gb video) to my beloved, I came across different range of prices from different sources (also, realized that laser engraving is impossible in india)
My first destination was Official Apple store in Mumbai (First Apple Store at the Atria Mall, Worli) – Rs 19800/- (with official apple warranty), which was way too expensive, comes to more than $400.
Then, I came across JJ Metha (well known camera dealers at dadar) – they sell for 14250 (Approx $300) with one year dealers warranty
Then, finally I got an unbelievable price Rs 13000 (approx $270) from the grey markets in mumbai, which is 30$ cheaper than the official US price.
Official iPod Video (30gb) US price – $299
New Legal Problems For orkut
In case you didn’t know, Google has a social network called orkut. 72 percent of its 16 million users* are from Brazil. The rest are Google employees, their friends and some early adopters. MySpace has 100 million members, so orkut is not that far.
There are a lot of nice people on orkut, some of them promote racism, others like to spam the community. There are even some people who love kids there. But the Brazilian prosecutors don’t understand that and ask Google to pay a $61 million fine as orkut has been used “to organize criminal activity and promote child pornography”. They also want information about the users. But Google protects the user information. “We have obeyed all the judicial orders that requested we remove undue content. Some orders demanded that we turn over user information for investigation and we complied,” said Nicole Wong about a previous request.
It’s very sad to see a closed-circle community like orkut closed by a Government. And it’s also very sad to see kids on social networks like orkut, instead of building their education and trying to become better persons. This way, when they’ll get older, they won’t promote child pornography.
* information from the Reuters article. Wikipedia claims there are 26 million users and 66% are from Brazil.
