In his prepared testimony, Fred Roitz, executive vice president of contracts and chief sales officer for Xe (a.k.a. Blackwater), disclosed that his company, through its subsidiary Presidential Airways, evacuated a congressman from Niger during a recent military coup.
That caught the eye of Mother Jones reporter Daniel Schulman, who decided to figure out who, exactly, the congressman in distress was.
Turns out it was none other than Rep. Alan Grayson, the Florida Democrat who has made his reputation by going after military contractors.
New Relic's RPM, an application performance monitoring and reporting system, has today announced it has added full support for Sinatra and Rack-based Ruby applications to its traditionally Rails-centric service. It's been possible to hack in support for non-Rails apps into New Relic before, but this move brings them officially into the fold with all of the features only Rails apps used to be able to take advantage of. via rubyinside.
What is Plainview?
Plainview is a full-screen web browser. That’s it?
Well, it does a few other things – but yeah, basically that’s it. via barbariangroup.com
What's the role of a social media representative - to repeat the press releases on Twitter? Or to engage with customers who have unpleasant feedback to share? Something in the middle?
I don't think one answer suits all companies - every culture is different - but I have to imagine that any company employing an "online customer presence," using social media, should be ready to accommodate and engage negative feedback - even from the social media rep.
Google has just announced via tweet that it’s integrating Facebook Page updates into its real-time search results. Google first revealed that this was coming back in December, when it first started including real-time data in its search results. Other data sources for Google’s real-time results include MySpace and Twitter. via techcrunch.com
In the first seconds and minutes after the quake, anyone tapping "earthquake Mountain View" (or the name of any other nearby municipality) into Google's search field found that the only hits pertaining to the new quake were ... tweets. While the Google results page included direct information feeds from the USGS and a slick Google Maps display of recent temblors, none reflected the latest event. Official USGS-confirmed data on the quake wouldn't show up until 10:20 a.
A five-year-old boy has put professional bodybuilders to shame by breaking the world record for "air push-ups". Guiliano Stroe, a five-year-old who has been called the world’s strongest boy, caused a sensation when he performed 20 air press-ups live on Romanian television. The physically demanding exercises, which involve raising the body from a horizontal position into a handstand with the feet never touching the ground, are more commonly performed by adult bodybuilders.
If there's one universal constant in human society, it has to be alcohol. Rare indeed is the culture that hasn't worked out the tricksy process of fermenting and/or distilling some type of vegetable matter -- be it malted barley, potatoes, honey or grape juice -- into a brew containing a significant percentage, as the dictionary puts it, of an "organic compound in which a hydroxyl group is bound to a carbon atom of an alkyl or substituted alkyl group.
But two decades later, New York's experience offers a cautionary tale: Making isolated changes to the complex medical insurance system can have unwelcome consequences.
Premiums in New York are now the highest in the nation by some measures, with individual health coverage costing about $9,000 a year on average. And nearly one in seven New Yorkers still lacks health coverage, a greater proportion than before the law was passed.
And the Premier addressed with his usual frankness his decision to go to the U.S. instead of having the procedure done in Canada. “I was warned by my staff that this could be an issue,” he told Mr. Hutton. “But from my own perspective I said look, here’s our communications plan. It’s quite simple. This is my heart. It’s my health and it’s my choice,” he said.
via theglobeandmail.