Profy

Finally someone is ready to combat those endless winning notifications that we all get in dozens in our email inboxes (most often sorted out as spam with some still pretending to be valid emails). For quite a while I myself hoped that at least one of these notification of yet another million dollars I win in a lottery organized by Yahoo Mail (most often) or some other organization will actually be real but now that I know I should not even hope to win anything in a lottery based on one of my numerous free email accounts, I do believe there must be companies working to help other people stop hoping and falling for the fraudulent schemes as well.

So absolutely appropriately today Microsoft, Yahoo!, Western Union, and African Development Bank announce a coalition destined to fight internet lottery scams...

There's an interesting study released today by JupiterResearch that the research company conducted for BuzzLogic to find out the influence and importance of blogs nowadays. You may remember BuzzLogic as a recently launched advertising network selling ads on blogs exclusively. The primary business of BuzzLogic is in identifying where influence is in various conversations online and offering their customers the solutions to target the audience of the influential online publications with their branding messages or advertising...

Earlier today at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) Microsoft has provided details on what we should expect from its promised cloud operating system.

The offer that was revealed today was initially referred to as Red Dog or Windows Strata or Windows Cloud at different times. Today we know the real name and it is Azure. The community technology preview of the new platform is already available to developers while the commercial version of the new operating system will not be available at least until late 2009...

Honestly, I have been surprised to find out from a Yahoo newsletter I am subscribed to that there actually exists a world championship in Rock Paper Scissors. And while it may be difficult to figure out how it could be viewed as technology or internet news that we tend to cover here on Profy, I'll tell you: the championship is officially sponsored by Yahoo. Yes, the company that will lay off 10% of employees this week to cut costs. From the newsletter it looks like Yahoo is still trying to help make some lives happier by sponsoring contests like this one...

To me the most fascinating meme of the past weekend was that about Twitter and how it could potentially be used by terrorists. The meme started on Friday after Wired contributing editor Noah Shachtman published a story on his national security blog Danger Room about a report on the potential dangers of Twitter and various new mobile technologies to the society...

I think the most intriguing article I've read over the last week was the one where Wired magazine told the world that blogs were so old-fashioned that no one should expect to launch and grow a new blog big enough to be noticed at all any more...

Today I have seen a blog post (in Russian) by a former Ukraine citizen living in the US now. In the post he described how he bought the first ever Android-powered phone - T-Mobile G1 - for his wife.

She herself initially thought she did not really need such a complex toy as it seemed to be full of things she would never even need. But still the author of the post managed to persuade his wife that there were truly useful things among the applications already available for download - and for free...

Fortunately for Profy we have had one of my posts about T-Mobile G1 phone indexed quite well so it makes its appearance on the first page in Google's results when people search for a few terms related to the very first phone powered with Google's mobile operating system Android.

But of course this post is not meant to brag about how good it is in terms of traffic to be positioned like this when people search for a trendy gadget (as they are now heavily doing for the T-Mobile G1), instead I wanted to draw attention of our readers to the comments on that post...

Last weekend we spoke here about a few services that have introduced various new revenue models and switched from ad-supported to some models where they can actually generate some predictable revenue based on the value they provide to users.

Now it looks like yet another service is following their steps with Ma.gnolia announcing in the recent newsletter their transition from a completely free and ad-supported model to freemium model where for a fee users get rid of advertising.

Ma...