Our favourite web(ish) stories from the week…
Adam:
“HP have decided that they are not now going to sell their PC business (after making a loss with a firesale on a load of TouchPads). New boss Meg Whitman is picking up the pieces after Leo Apotheker’s rule of terror cost the firm 40% of it’s value and £7bn buying Autonomy ‘focusing the strategy on software and cloud services’.”
Dave:
“‘I’ve finally cracked it!’ Steven P. Jobs, co-founder of Apple, told his biographer, Walter Isaacson.Hot on the heels of the 4S launch, Nick Bilton of the New York Times ponders a Siri enabled television set for late 2012.
Mike:
“Apart from Stallman’s hilarious ‘rider’ demands which did the rounds earlier in the week, the story which stood out for me was this one about paid (or not?) tweets. I can’t even work out any more whether this was deliberate, paid, not-paid, satire, serious…but nonetheless it’s an interesting little story.”
Liam:
“My news is more of a totally cool thing this week. Vitamin T have produced a rather sexy infographic showing a brief history of web standards that’s a really interesting read – complete with fonts for each year stamp which were produced in that year. It’s cool to see how far we’ve come since 1962, and where we’ll be in another 50 years!”
“A great example of the power of social news networks emerged this week when Reddit user zambuka42 posted his positive experience with Amazon customer service and decided to share it on a sub forum of the popular social news site. The story eventually hit the front page and has since recieved hundreds of thousands of views from around the internet.
After ordering merchandise to be delivered to his parent’s house, it was subsequently lost by the postal service and so the Reddit user contacted Amazon customer support to try and find out if he was able to re-order the items without having to manually add everything again.
A screenshot of the conversation is here http://i.imgur.com/aDVuC.jpg
After hearing the user’s predicament, the customer service rep chose to offer to refund the full cost of the lost order, despite the fact that it was the USPS that lost the order.
It is interesting to wonder whether Amazon’s customer service division are purposefully instructed to offer such brilliant service in the hopes of priceless positive advertising such as this going viral, and if not they surely soon will be!”
