Marro.ws

So Belle de Jour was real after all. The Internet’s most famous anonymous sex blogger – turned best-selling author – turned internationally successful TV series – has finally outed herself in the UK’s Sunday Times. And it turns out she’s a character straight from the pages of XKCD. From her interview with the Times’ India Knight, we learn that Belle is in fact Dr Brooke Magnanti a specialist in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology who ran out of money during the final stages of her PhD thesis and decided to become an escort to make ends meet. So to speak. Add in the fact that Magnanti was already a reasonably well known science blogger and ‘The Secret Diary of a London Call Girl‘ was born. Despite Belle’s growing fame, and the determined efforts of journalists around the world to out her, Belle’s anonymity remained intact – mainly thanks to a complex series of agents and shell companies that allowed her to receive payment for her work without compromising her... - Marro.ws

When Americans think of the Indian technology sector, they still perceive a nation of call center workers and low-level computer programmers administering databases and updating websites. But while the West was sleeping, Indian IT morphed into a giant R&D machine. Indian companies that started out doing call center and low-level IT work have climbed the value chain to become outsourced providers of critical R&D in sophisticated areas such as semiconductor design, aerospace, automotive, network equipment and medical devices. This is happening as multi-nationals set up their own R&D operations in India and partner with local shops. Both the Palm Pre smart phone and the Amazon Kindle, two of the hottest consumer electronics devices on the market, have key components designed in India. Intel designed its six-core Xeon processor in India. IBM has over 100,000 employees in India. A large number of these are building Big Blue’s most sophisticated software products. Cisco is developing... - Marro.ws

Over the past few months there’s been a bit of a stink over Twitter’s “Suggested Users” list. That was probably to be expected because it’s helping people on that list gain massive amounts of followers, while everyone else has to gain them the old-fashioned way: Good old self-promotion. But there were allegations people on the list were paying Twitter for the privilege — unfounded allegations that were pretty ridiculous. And more recently people started talking about pay-to-be-featured being a business model. So Twitter felt the need to clarify exactly how the list works. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone at first compares it to a “staff’s pick” group at a local bookstore but then reveals it’s quite a bit more complicated than that. The Suggested User list is first populated by an algorithm concocted by Twitter’s chief scientist. From there, Stone himself and some members of Twitter’s product team take a look at the list and filter anyone out who shouldn’t be on it. Then the list goes... - Marro.ws

Why is so much business-to-business marketing dreadfully boring? I think it's because the marketers involved think "business" as in "I am marketing to a business" and this results in an overly serious tone. After all, if you are marketing to, say, technology companies that’s different than consumer marketing, right? Wrong. B2B marketers seem to forget that what all marketers need to do is communicate to people. People want to do business with people and the companies that understand that in the B2B world develop a following. National Instruments is a B2B supplier of measurement and automation equipment used by engineers and scientists. The tried-and-true marketing from companies like National Instruments is to focus on feeds-and-speeds, technical data sheets, specs, and so on. After all its the engineering community, right? While National Instruments does provide product specs, they also realize that their buyers are human. "We've always had the motto, both internally and externally,... - Marro.ws

International music star Shakira is taking a new approach to releasing her latest music video: she’s doing it through a live stream on Ustream, which will be emedded on her Facebook Page. According to Sony, this is the first time an artist has used the platform to debut a music video (Updated, see below). Shakira (and her managers) are keen on the idea because it allows her and her fans to interact with each other in real time — something that’s not practical on TV, where these videos have been making their debuts for decades. The stream will start here on Monday at noon, PT. The Ustream/Facebook combo is quickly gaining steam for artists looking to connect with their fans — we’ve recently seen the Foo Fighters stream a live concert, and earlier this week Jason Mraz held a couple live chat session with fans as well. Other sites that have also recently streamed live concerts include MySpace, YouTube, and Hulu. Update: It looks like Chamillionaire may have also used Ustream to debut the... - Marro.ws

[UK] Microsoft is shedding the beta tag for its custom Bing search engine that caters to users in the United Kingdom with a localized offering. At the same time, the company is releasing Bing Maps UK and thus no longer redirecting users to Multimap.com. The daily Bing homepage will now be featuring UK-specific imagery and hotspots, and Microsoft claims the localized search engine will boast better ‘instant answers’ (e.g. “how is Liverpool doing in the Premiership?”). Other Bing features like Visual Search and Bing Twitter Search are integrated, but the company has also set up a partnership with Ciao UK to deliver a custom, localized shopping experience. Microsoft is going to redirect visitors of Bing.com/maps to a specific Bing Maps UK service now instead of opening Multimap.com, and visitors of the latter site will get asked to switch to the newly launched site as well in the next couple of weeks. There are a slew of new features that were added to Bing Maps for the UK site, so for a... - Marro.ws

Son Bir Kez Denedim, Günler geçmiyor aynı senedeyim, İşin kötüsü.. Hayalin peşimde, gitarım elimde bitap bir haldeyim. Bir sonbahar sabahı yağmur öncesi, ayrılık sonrası, Onbeş gün oldu sevgili gideli ve sevgili ağustos böcekleri. Aşkın sonu, binbir soru işareti, Belki bütün cevapları içimizde. Son bir kez gir içeri, kapat kitle tüm kapıları, Ki gitme ihtimalin bile olmasın. Son bir kez bırak alev alsın, aşkın yongası bedenler, Bu kış şafaklar dalında kalsın. Bu sabah bir martının kanadındayım, yanımda gitarım, Bir kaç şarkının sözleri aklımda, bir kaçını hiç yazmayacağım. Değişmeyen bir döngü halbuki gün ve gece, Olağanüstü hiçbir şey yok, aşk bitti onbeş gün önce. Aşkın sonu, binbir soru işareti, Belki bütün cevapları ikimizde. Son bir kez gir içeri, kapat kitle tüm kapıları, Ki gitme ihtimalin bile olmasın. Son bir kez bırak alev alsın, aşkın yongası bedenler, Bu kış yapraklar dalında kalsın. Son bir kez gir içeri, kapat kitle tüm kapıları, Ki gitme ihtimalin bile kalmasın, Son bir... - Marro.ws