Finance Geek

We’re two days into Apple v. Samsung litigation, and it’s been a doozy of a trial thus far. Friday shouldn’t be disappointing either: It promises to provide never-before-seen looks into Apple’s creative process as the legal crew from Cupertino calls heavyweight witnesses to the stand.

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Google’s daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.

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Just a day after Microsoft announced that the final build of Windows 8 had been released to manufacturers, screenshots of built-in apps have surfaced. And they look good.

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The President of Finland visited Google’s data center at edge of the Baltic Sea on Thursday, joining the web giant in announcing it will spend an additional 150 million euros to building a second computing facility in southern Finland as part of an effort to meet increased demand for its web services.

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Apple’s component suppliers seem almost eager to stoke iPhone rumor fires, and all the hot, hot consumer anticipation surrounding them. On Thursday, Sharp’s new president, Takashi Okuda, said that his company will begin shipping iPhone displays starting this month.

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! The Tax Policy Center took a close look at Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s proposed tax and economic plan and concluded that it would cut taxes for the richest Americans and actually raise them on the poor. Romney has proposed cutting all tax rates by 20% and eliminating tax deductions, [...]

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! The Facebook (FB) stock sell-off continues. Shares of the social networking site fell nearly 4 percent on Wednesday to close below $21 a share. The stock has dropped 28 percent in the last five days and is down almost 33 percent in one month. Facebook’s market capitalization - once [...]

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! The next big event that economists and markets are watching is Friday’s nonfarm payrolls report. The majority of economists say the U.S. economy added 100,000 jobs in July and that the national unemployment rate remained steady at 8.2 percent. Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy [...]

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We test out the new iPics2go photo, slide and negative scanner from Ion, a gizmo that you slot your iPhone into which allows you to take digital photos of your old printed photos and slides/negatives.

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It’s funny that back in the day, the monster-fighting sleuths on Buffy the Vampire Slayer liked to refer to themselves as “the Scooby gang,” because the current incarnation of the seminal talking-dog-and-teenagers-solving-mysteries animated series has more in common Joss Whedon’s great geek drama than just two degrees of separation via Sarah Michelle Gellar.

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Last week, iHome released the newest addition to its line of Apple products: the iHome iP76 color changing speaker tower. The system comes complete with Bluetooth capability, remote, and a wide range of color changing choices to play with. I was given the opportunity to receive a review sample, the day before they were released into stores.

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! The Federal Reserve downgraded its assessment of the economy and declared it “will provide additional accommodation as needed” but announced no new policy action at its policy meeting this week. (Italics added.) After last week’s stories about the Fed preparing to move sooner vs. later, some were disappointed the [...]

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I’m a big admirer of Amazon’s cloud offering. They’ve done a great job of building a service that it seems just about every startup wants to use, and I like the way they repeatedly drive down prices.

What I don’t like, however, is that they are just about the only game in town. Competition provides a great incentive for companies to improve their services and whilst there is much to like about Amazon there is always room for improvement.

So, I was pleased to read this morning that Rackspace Cloud is coming on strong, and expected to account for $250-300m of their $1.2bn revenue this year. Their positioning is to compete on performance and service rather than price, and I think that will be attractive to lots of companies. Website speed is an increasingly important to delivering a good user experience and a good percentage of our companies are currently running projects to reduce page load times, many of them hoping to get down to the 200-500ms range.

Equally pleasing is that Microsoft and Google are also stepping up their efforts to compete with Amazon’s cloud services.

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Well, CIA: Operation Ajax has just been launched on the iPhone and iPod Touch. It will be interesting to see how it goes on the smaller screen size, but at the $2.99 release price it is worth finding out if you haven’t yet read this one.

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For nearly a year Once put out a monthly issue of high-quality photojournalism paired with text and interactive features that was well received by photographers and thousands of readers. But after a host of technical glitches and lack of funding, the team called it quits last weekend.

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