geek evaluation

Today social networking sites are doing really well. But in the latest news Yahoo has announced the closing of its Yahoo 360 social networking service. Yahoo 360, opened in the year 2005,and they hoped to pose a threat to the other networking sites like Facebook and Myspace, but it never happened. First they had announced the closure of the site in 2007, but then pushed it several times and now its finally closing this year in July.

Users will be transitioned to the new Yahoo Profiles service. The Yahoo Profile service , incorporates  basic social-networking functions, giving people the ability to publish information about their lives, create a list of friends, broadcast status updates and keep a blog with text entries, photos, videos and Web links. However, it still doesn’t match the features of 360, something Yahoo acknowledges.

Yahoo’s search engine has already been dominated by Google for a long time now and the failure of Yahoo 360 has been an another setback for Yahoo.

Only time will tell if the Yahoo Profile service does well.. Lets just wish them all the best..

In the latest statistics announced by StatCounter Global Stats Microsoft’s search engine Bing overtook Yahoo as the number two search engine in the United States. Microsoft’s revamped search engine Bing, which they choose to call a “Decision Engine”, is designed to empower people to gain insight and knowledge from the web and making quick and important decisions.

To gain the number two spot Bing was able to grab the market share from Google. Google was and is the leader in the U.S search engine market on Thursday with 71.47%. Yahoo! moved into third place with 10.22% while Microsoft’s Bing was able to grab 16.28%.

Globally Bing was also able to move up to the second spot, but with a narrow margin the global results were:

Google – 87.62%
Bing -  5.62%
Yahoo – 5.13%

Currently Microsoft must be celebrating their success , with their launch of Bing.. But only time will tell if Bing is still able to hold on to their spot after a few months.

Meanwhile do check out their search engine or must i say decision engine!

Due to the recession, it is no surprise that  amongst many other companies ,Dell  the computer manufacturer declared that its profits were down compared to last year. Thankfully they were not losses like Sony and Palm.

Dell reported a a 63% drop in profit but still managed a net income of $290 million, compared to $794 million during the same quarter last year. One major reason for the decline is that the business and government sector  makes up three quarters of its business. Due to the recession and also the possibility of Windows 7 coming up, many business and government sectors are not buying computers now..

Another reason is also because of its competitor Acer. Acer is able to sell their computers for much less than Dell in consumer sales. Though for Dell the consumer market is secondary , but it is important if Dell wants to continue the way it is.

But Dell is optimistic about the year, since the release of Windows 7 might end up increase the sales of the computers as many people would like to upgrade to the new OS.

Lets hope Dell is right!:)

In my earlier blog I was mentioning about the growing popularity of social networking sites. Among all these social networking sites Twitter is gaining importance. The people who are on Twitter will agree with me that Twitter’s search engine,is not one of the best.

To solve this problem comes Topsy. Before you get any ideas, Topsy is a search engine that only searches tweets. Unlike Twitter’s search , Topsy doesnt just show you what everyone has been retweeting or just repeating about a topic.

It searches the links posted by Twitter users, and how often they were retweeted. By counting the links and how often they’re retweeted, Topsy also grades users. Those who get retweeted often have more influence over the search results than those who retweet more often,Topsy can even break down what’s happening in the search result by the hour, day, week, month or all them.

Topsy listens to the conversations taking place all the time on the living, social web. In the world of Twitter, Blogs, Flickr, Digg and many such communities people use them to share reviews, opinions , messages and have discussions about many things. Topsy indexes those things . Topsy results are the things people link to, when they’re talking about your search terms.

Topsy is not a threat to Google, but it is definitely a very useful search engine for Twitter. The founders of Topsy are Vipul Ved Prakash, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh,Gary Iwatani and Justin Foutts.

Take a look at the demo Topsy

Finally some optimistic news, in the gloom that we are currently going through. At Microsoft’s 13th annual CEO summit,which was attended by more than 100 top business leaders.

Microsoft’s chairman Bill gates and its CEO Steve Ballmer said that tech sector will be able to recover from the current global recession and bringing new business and challenges which would be rewarding like never before.

Gates went one to say that “The drug companies will get back in high productivity mode” he also mentioned that the we are just at the start of the software, IT revolution.

Steve Ballmer also expressed faith in the Internet and its power to drive the business he said “”Some people probably think the Internet revolution is in the second half of the game. But I tell you, we are coming into halftime. The degree of change that will continue to come as essentially businesses and IT departments embrace the Internet, it’s unbelievable.”

Due to global recession Microsoft was also hit and last month it indicated a drop in sales figures. To cut its cost they laid off almost 5,000 employees worldwide.

Microsoft is optimistic and looking at a bright future since they have a lot of products lined up for release end of this year and next year, some of which are Windows 8, Office 2010, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Microsoft Exchange 2010..

Lets wish Microsoft all the best!!

Today, Social Networking and instant messaging, are becoming more and more popular. It has started replacing the standard business call and the client handshake.

While e-mail is still the leading technology tool . The usage of text messaging, instant messaging and social networking are becoming very popular with white collar workers under 35 years of age.

According to a recent survey by Directions Research Inc, in the United States,in the 21st century,because of the leap in new technology and with shifting demographics of workforce the traditional way of business would rapidly change and more business will be conducted using emerging communications technologies and social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin.

The technologies that people preferred to use in their private lives will become the technologies people want to use at work. The survey found that nearly one in three such employees report that they use these technologies at work daily.

So what are u waiting for ?? get yourself onto one of the Social Networking sites and network away..:)

Skype the popular VOIP , just released its new beta version for Windows and this version includes Skype’s screen sharing feature. Skype’s screen sharing features are pretty basic and allow users to either share the full screen or select a part of the screen they want to share. The image of the screen is great.But in order to share a screen, a voice call has to be initiated, which might not always be what you really want to do.

Skype’s new version has also added additional support for visually impaired users who use screen reading software, as well as birthday reminders that will alert you when it’s one of your contacts’ birthdays.

Screen Sharing via Skype was already there in the Mac version a long time ago. Now with this facility even in Windows, Skype will be able to allow screen sharing between Mac and Windows users as long as they are using Skype.

Hiring!! The first thing you would do would be to go onto a Job Board. But Job Board’s might just become a thing of the past, as one company is using Twitter to recruit people for Jobs.

In February 2009, Twitter had about 7.1 million users. It was a big growth from the last year. Some of the companies found this growth rate a great opportunity to recruit people for jobs.

In the recent news, we saw that two people from a digital advertising agency Organic said that they were using Twitter for their Job posting. He went on to say that “Once we have an opening that might be a fit for a Twitter friend, rather than making a cold call to a stranger, we can make a “warm tweet.”

Another important benefit is that there are no time constraints,and thus you can tweet a candidate at any point of time without disturbing their busy schedule.Thus making it very convenient.

To add to this Twitter is free unlike many Job Boards.:)

So lets “Tweet” away, and find the right candidate….

Most of the people are not very clear from our product geekevaluation , if it can be used for non technical tests. In fact , we have mentioned very clearly that we have a set of topics for pre-employment test , so that users can customize a test from those topics.  But they can also add their own questions.

In fact we are coming out with another product where companies would be able to hire the people with relevant skill to create test questions for them. The  job screening and pre-employment test test can be customized as per users needs.