Posts Tagged ‘com’
How College Students Have Become Online Beggars
There’s only one thing I know about students. There are too many of them.
The dominance of online practices over the traditional analog methods has meant that, truly, we need fewer people to make the commercial world spin around.
Machines can now do the work of thousands of interns. We therefore need fewer students to emerge from the college system, students who believe that they have talents given by God, when in fact they’re not even all that good at beer pong.
These thoughts enter my head because of the existence of a site called SponsorMyDegree.com. This worthy enterprise has been created in order to bring together those who wish to gain degrees and those who have actually earned, inherited, or stolen money.
Perhaps you are familiar with some of these student types. They seem to delight in boasting about how many shots they can down before entering a coma. They seem to care little about most things, save for some vaguely self-centered notion about the Earth needing to be saved.
And yet SponsorMyDegree.com declares on its home page that it “makes it possible for students to get free money for college.”
This seems so fundamentally un-American. I was not educated in the American college system, but I had always assumed that the very purpose of American education was to put as many people as possible into debt, so that they become servile corporate functionaries in order to finally break even on their lives.
A profile from SponsorMyDegree.com
Screenshot: Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)
If students are suddenly to be offered free money by strangers, is this not the equivalent of giving your money to a street person who you know will only go and spend it on tequila?
SponsorMyDegree.com was started in 2008 by a man called Henner Mohr and his wife, Lilac. He admitted to the Daily Camera: “We haven’t gotten any crazy donations.”
Which is surely a relief to all of those who believe that every lunch must be payed for. The largest donation, indeed, has reportedly been $150.
However, there is something strangely fascinating about wading through some of the profiles on this site and wondering just how similar an experience this might be to, say, online dating. So many of the people posting their profiles seem endearing human beings who, for one reason or another, need money.
Take Gregoire, from Augusta, Ga., who writes: ” I hate not having the things I want, but it’s even worse when I don’t even get the things I need. I need help for college. I’m in this all alone, please help me.”
Gregoire’s whole profile is a litany of sadness. How could one not give him some money?
And yet, there’s that authenticity gap that the Web has created. Are these people real? Are they for real?
Curiously, the Mohrs make the whole thing sound like Facebook. You know, marketing under the guise of humanity.
Take this from their site: “Henner and Lilac believe that the SponsorMyDegree.com website will change the targeted online marketing industry by allowing companies to strike a deal with students where the students receive micro-sponsorships towards their educations in exchange for paying attention to the advertiser’s message.”
So this is just another advertising play? But wait, there is some essence of order in this cyberbegging.
“An important differentiating factor for SponsorMyDegree.com is the fact that students can not withdraw any money until their enrollment in a higher education institution is verified,” says the Web site.
And yet, as one wanders through the site, one finds Cassidi, who admits that she applying to “insanely expensive schools” because she wants to study musical theater. She declares that she has an income of “$30-60K.” And she describes herself as “HARDWORKING, RUNNING, JOGGING, CHARISMATIC, VIRGIN.”
You did, indeed, read that right.
I am sure that SponsorMyDegree.com fulfills some kind of vast societal need. It’s just that the more one reads these stories, the more one wonders whether sadness, desperation, despair, and sympathy for virginity are the best emotions to elicit money from people these days.
There are tales of students who are in debt, without medical insurance and concerned that their wisdom teeth are coming through. There are tales of students who come from large families and “somehow fell short when it comes to affording my education.” These may well be very, very real.
But there’s this tiny pine needle in my sock. I waded through quite a few profiles. Not one offered, should the student achieve great and wondrous things, to pay any of the donated money back.
Microsoft Files Uncommon Patent Lawsuit In Opposition To Salesforce.com
On Tuesday, Microsoft filed a federal lawsuit against software-as-a-service company Salesforce.com, claiming that the online CRM software company infringes on nine Microsoft patents.
Redmond claims that it first notified Salesforce.com of its infringement more than a year ago, and Salesforce.com’s January SEC filing warned that the company had been approached by a “large technology company” with allegations that it was infringing on patents.
The nine patents were awarded to Microsoft between 1997 and 2007, and span a range of technology, from “method and system for stacking toolbars in a computer display” to “system and method for controlling access to data entities in a computer network.”
The complaint seeks temporary and permanent injunctions, and monetary damages. It also asserts that the infringement is willful, a claim that would entitle the company to triple damages.
The suit comes as the two companies are becoming increasingly competitive with each other. Microsoft has its own CRM software, Dynamics, and offers many products, including Dynamics, Exchange, and SharePoint, as online services. This is set to expand further with the Office Web Apps, which provide software-as-a-service versions of the productivity suite. Both companies also offer cloud platforms; Microsoft with Azure, Salesforce.com with Force.com.
The move is an unusual one for Microsoft, a company that more often finds itself on the receiving end of patent lawsuits. Microsoft sued peripheral company Belkin in 2006, mouse maker Primax Electronics in 2008, and GPS company TomTom in 2009.
Each suit resulted in a settlement being reached before the cases made it to trial. Traditionally, the company has sought to create a licensing agreement with those corporations believed to be infringing on its patents in preference to getting the courts involved.
25 Years Of .com Domain Names
On March 15, 1985, a Massachusetts computer systems firm registered the first .com Internet domain name.
Although Symbolics.com didn’t spark an instant gold rush, the event planted the first seed of a transformation that has changed the world into a Web-fueled digital river of news, commerce and social interaction.
Today, exactly 25 years later, life B.C – Before .Com – is already a distant memory, especially in the tech-centric Bay Area.
“Can you remember what it was like before the Internet, before .com?” said Mark McLaughlin, president and chief executive officer of VeriSign Inc. of Mountain View. “What about the next 25 years? Who can imagine that?”
VeriSign, the Internet security vendor that administers the .com registry, is hosting an event in Washington on Tuesday celebrating the milestone, with former President Bill Clinton scheduled to deliver a keynote address. And on May 26 in San Francisco City Hall, VeriSign will honor Internet innovators at a “25 Years of .com Gala” hosted by comedian Dana Carvey.
In a relatively short time, the dot-com revolution has “woven itself into every nook and cranny of the commercial world,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, a Washington think tank that studies the social impacts of the Internet. “It usually takes technologies a lot longer to insinuate themselves into the basic rhythms of people’s lives.”
But there was hardly a ripple when Symbolics Inc., a Cambridge, Mass., maker of computer systems and software based on research done at MIT, signed up the first .com with Network Solutions, the domain registration firm that was acquired by VeriSign in 2000.
Symbolics founders who were contacted for this story didn’t even remember the event. The assets and intellectual property of the original publicly traded Symbolics Inc. have been taken over by a privately held firm of the same name. The Symbolics.com Web site still exists, but was purchased in 2009 by XF.com, an Internet domain investment firm.
In 1985, only six entities registered a .com, one of six top-level domain names created a year earlier in a reorganization of the early Internet’s naming bureaucracy. At the time, .cor (short for corporate) almost beat .com as the designation for commercial Internet addresses.
Rainie said Symbolics.com signaled the entry of an entrepreneurial spirit to a nascent online world dominated by a “libertarian leftist” class that saw the Internet as a way to “democratize power” and circumvent big powerful institutions like government and big business.
Internet historians believe the Internet would have evolved “very differently if commercial interests had not asserted themselves, particularly at the dawn of the Web, but even in the pre-Web period,” Rainie said.
By 1992, fewer than 15,000 .com domains were registered, but the number would flourish after Web browsers brought mainstream consumers into the World Wide Web and “made it so convenient to navigate,” McLaughlin said.
Since then, .coms have defined the Internet. Now there are 84 million domain names, including 11.9 million e-commerce and online business sites, 4.3 million entertainment sites, 3.1 million finance-related sites and 1.8 million sports sites.
According to a study released today by the Information Technology & Information Foundation, the annual economic benefits of the commercial Internet equal $1.5 trillion, which is “more than the global sales of medicine, investment in renewable energy and government investment in R&D (research and development) combined.”
The Internet should add $3.8 trillion to the global economy by 2020, which would exceed the gross domestic product of Germany, the report said. An estimated 1.7 billion people, 25.6 percent of the world’s population, now use the Internet.
“One can rightly describe the commercial Internet as a general-purpose technology, one whose significance to society should be viewed as on par with the advent of inexpensive steel, the telephone, the internal combustion engine or electricity,” according to the report, “The Internet Economy 25 Years After .Com.”
VeriSign logs 53 billion Web site lookups every day, about the same number handled for all of 1995, McLaughlin said. “We expect that to grow in 2020 to somewhere between 3 and 4 quadrillion,” he said.
First 10 .com domains
Symbolics.com – March 15, 1985
BBN.com – April 24, 1985
Think.com – May 24, 1985
MCC.com – July 11, 1985
DEC.com – Sept. 30, 1985
Northrop.com – Nov. 7, 1985
Serox.com – Jan. 9, 1986
SRI.com – Jan. 17, 1986
HP.com – March 3, 1986
Bellcore.com – March 5, 1986
Most .com domains by ZIP Code
10001 (Manhattan): 9,611
95814 (Sacramento): 8,998
90210 (Beverly Hills): 7,239
94025 (Menlo Park): 6,674
E-mail Benny Evangelista at bevangelista@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page DC – 1 of the SanFranciscoChronicle
Source: www.sfgate.com