Sock and Awe Website Sells For More than £5000

Ever since the high voltage shoe incident broke out, a large number of online games appeared over the web that enables users to virtually fling a shoe at President George W. Bush.

Out of the large number of such games available online, ‘Sock and Awe’, developed by Alex Tew, is among the favourites, as within few days of the incident a whopping 45 million shoes had been thrown by some 4.5 million users across the world, via the website.

Alex, a 24-year-old from London, has sold the game to an auction website for £5,215, a good deal for less than 4-days effort.

The game was purchased by the company called Fubra, which has reportedly put adverts on the website, and claiming to recover their amount within a couple of days.

In its auction page, amazed by the popularity of SockandAwe.com, Tew asserted that he had developed the website just for fun.

Describing the reasons for its auctioning, Tew wrote, “So, now we are selling it because a) we don't really know what to do with it, b) we can recover some of the hosting costs (plus pizza and beer costs!), and c) the money will be useful for our little four-man start-up”.

Figures have revealed that people from the United States have thrown the maximum number of shoes through the platform, followed by residents from France, Australia, and the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

Go Daddy Ranks on 'Best Place to Work' List...yet Again!

The Phoenix Business Journal has ranked GoDaddy.com on its list of "Best Places to Work" for the fifth consecutive year. The world's largest domain name provider ranked 19 in the category for large Valley companies.

"The Best Places to Work" ranking is based on employee surveys which measure retention rate, manager effectiveness, team effectiveness, employee alignment with company goals, trust in senior leadership and trust in fellow coworkers, among other performance categories. The data is compiled by Quantum Market Research and finalists are put into categories based on company size.

The Scottsdale-based company employs more than 18-hundred people in Arizona. Go Daddy prides itself on its competitive salaries, exceptional benefits and creative perks, including the company's legendary holiday parties where CEO and Founder Bob Parsons has a reputation for giving away thousands of dollars and other prizes, such as cars, motorcycles and trips for which the company also foots the tax bill.

"It's important for us to make Go Daddy a fun and rewarding place to work," said GoDaddy.com CEO and Founder Bob Parsons. "I learned a long time ago that happy employees, who are excited about what they're doing, they perform at a higher level, which in turn allows us to deliver the best customer service in the industry."

"Our employees are the heart and soul of our operation and it's nice to be recognized," said Go Daddy Human Resources Vice-President Lane Jarvis. "We strive to create a positive, healthy environment for our employees, where successes and contributions are celebrated."

Go Daddy has received many honors as a top employer, including five consecutive years on the Best Places list and recognition from the CNN Money list of Best Perks. GoDaddy.com was also named the 2007 Arizona Business Leader of the Year and was awarded a 2008 honorable mention for the Alfred P. Sloan Awards for Business Excellence in Workplace Flexibility.

Go Daddy is also generous to local and national charities. In 2007, Go Daddy's philanthropic works totaled $1.4 million in donations and this year the company is on track to donate more than $1.65 million to charities, many of which help with women, children, education and health-related causes.

Go Daddy is on track for its best revenue year in the company's history. To celebrate, Parsons is hosting a spectacular holiday party for all the employees at Chase Field Saturday. Go Daddy is even flying in its out-of-state employees and their guests for the night and putting them up in a nearby hotel. Live entertainment at the big bash includes two legendary rock bands, an internationally renowned comedian, a laser show, random cash drawings, plus gifts for every one of the near 4,000 guests.

Go Daddy is headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona and also has offices in Phoenix, Mesa, Gilbert, and Tempe, as well as Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Denver, Colorado and Washington, D.C. Go Daddy is always looking for highly talented, motivated professionals to join its dynamic team and now has more than 70 open positions.

To learn more about the wide variety of job opportunities with GoDaddy.com, visit: www.GoDaddy.com/Jobs.

About The Go Daddy Group, Inc.

Go Daddy is a leading provider of services that enable individuals and businesses to establish, maintain and evolve an online presence. Go Daddy provides a variety of domain name registration plans and Web site design and hosting packages, as well as a broad array of on-demand services. These include products such as SSL Certificates, Domains by Proxy private registration, ecommerce Web site hosting, blog templates and blog software, podcast packages and online photo hosting. The Go Daddy Group, Inc. has more than 32 million domain names under management. Go Daddy registers, renews or transfers a domain name every second. GoDaddy.com is the world's No. 1 domain name registrar according to Name Intelligence, Inc. GoDaddy.com is also rated the world's largest hostname provider according to Netcraft Ltd. During 2007, The Go Daddy Group registered more than one-third of all domain names registered in the top six generic top-level domains, or gTLDs, including .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz and .mobi. To view Go Daddy CEO and Founder Bob Parsons' blog, visit www.BobParsons.tv.

Hosted VoIP in the Enterprise

By: Richard “Zippy” Grigonis

Hosted solutions are attracting scads of new business customers. You don’t have to buy new equipment or pay IT staff to install, configure and maintain it. And new, flexible technologies allow services to interoperate with any legacy premise equipment you may have. Furthermore, many services can be offered with high “granularity” – you can buy them on a per-line basis, and your maintenance contract is generally based on per-seat licenses.

M5 provides IP Telephony and PBX (News - Alert) telephone key systems using VoIP in the greater New York and New Jersey area. Dan Hoffman, CEO of M5, says, “The good news for the field is that everyone is acknowledging that this is a good idea, and our prediction, along with some other analysts, is that in 5 or 10 years the mid-size enterprise will stop buying its own systems entirely. All signs of the economics of customer satisfaction point in that direction, and there has been a growth in the resiliency of the network to make hosting possible. Within that broad landscape, we see the end customer splitting the industry into two directions. First, there’s a group that wants to see that costs continue to be driven down, and get basic dial tone over the network. Second, there’s a group that views the technology as a way to drive costs down and drive service levels up.”

“So there’s this group of businesses that are very voice-connected to their customers,” says Hoffman (News - Alert), “and they consider this voice delivery model as a way to finally get some major impact from all of the R&D and all of the rich features that are going into the telephony world, and they want it hosted because feel these things are simply too complicated to deploy by themselves. Just about everybody likes the service model, and customers are gobbling it up as soon as they can find providers who can deliver the services well and reliably. But there are people who are increasingly using it as a way to deploy the advanced features, and that’s where we’re getting some really exciting stories.”

Sun Startup Essentials: An Interesting Deal For Start-Ups

Posted by Steve Kennedy on 2 December 2008 at 8:00 am | Tagged as: Services, Business, Shift to Web delivery, UK

It’s possible that some people reading this won’t have heard of Sun. They’re a big computer company that has gone through many iterations (during the dotcom boon their moto was “The computer is the network”).

We’ve covered a background below to get you up to speed on Sun, but before that, we’ve got an overview on the Sun Startup Essentials, which is aimed at start-ups.


Sun Startup Essentials explained
Sun have been running their Start-up Essentials program in the US for a while and it’s now been introduced in the UK and Ireland.

It’s free to join, but the company must be a start-up and in operation for less than 6 years.

Once accepted, companies get access to help from Sun (could be an engineer to sort out a tricky issue or free training) and discounts on hardware - which can be significant.

They can also offer discounted hosting and have agreements with various hosting providers.

There are limits - a start-up is only allowed to purchased £75,000 worth of hardware a year - but that buys quite a lot of CPU.

Of course their aim is that you’ll continue to use Sun hardware and software as the company grows, so they’re taking some risk initially to help you succeed. If the start-up works, hopefully it will work for Sun too.

It’s really a no-brainer if you’re a start-up.

So, to the background on Sun …

Sun: A brief recap
When they started, they designed really cool workstations and they ran a cool operating system - SunOS - which was based on a BSD kernel and architecture.

They also developed their own CPUs (Main computer chips) known as Sparc which were RISC (Reduced Instruction Set), fast and came out with lots of software (NFS or Network File System for example which they gave away, making it adopted in virtually every other operating system).

They then moved to an operating system, Solaris, which many people criticised as being slow and it got the moniker of Slowlaris (though in reality it’s pretty fast whether it’s running on Sparc or PC x86).

Other goodies Sun have come out with are Java and other cool things like ZFS and DTRACE which we won’t go into, but take it from us, they are very cool bits of software.

Sun Hardware
Sun still make a range of hardware both workstations and servers. These come in many flavours supporting Sparc and x86 (both Intel and AMD CPUs). Sun want to sell hardware and are now being pragmatic and don’t care what you run on it. So if you buy an x86 server, yes they’d prefer it to run Solaris, but they’ll happily support it with Linux or even Windows.

Sun hardware used to be expensive and the really big servers still are (but then a system with 256 CPUs is never cheap), but the lower and medium end systems are competitive when pitched against servers from other vendors.

Sparc-based servers (and they come with CPUs with 4, 6 or 8 cores and run Cool Threads) can be much better at running certain applications than x86 CPUs, and Web servers fit into this category. Sparc servers aren’t necessarily more expensive than x86 servers.

Sun’s software stack
Many systems run on LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP [or Perl or Python]) and that’s been a standard configuration for a while.

In the past it’s been incredibly hard to implement AMP on Solaris (it was painful in fact).

Now that’s changed, as Sun recently bought the open source database, MySQL, which is now shipping with Solaris.

Solaris also comes with new versions of Apache/PHP/etc. so it’s easy to migrate from a LAMP environment to a SAMP (Solaris/Apache/MySQL/PHP) environment, and Sun are encouraging people to do so.

Utilising Solaris (especially with ZFS) means highly scalable systems can be designed and operated which can be small at first and grow as the requirements do, with minimal intervention and redesigning everything from scratch.