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Glitch Drops Google Stock Price $US200 in Four Minutes, Wiping Out $62 Billion
Posted by Matt Buchanan at 9:40 AM on October 1, 2008
At probably like the worst time ever for your stock to plummet harder than a meteor on a collision course with Bruce Willis, a glitch knocked $US200 off of Google's stock price—that's half—in the span of four minutes as the markets were closing today. $US62 billion. Erased. In four minutes. The glitch has been fixed, bringing it back to the correct price of $US407, but some trades actually did go through at the bargain basement price. While they'll be repealed, it shows you that it's so crazy out there even computers are going nuts right now. [TechCrunch]
A man and his daughter thought something was up when their terminally ill grandmother was losing money from her house, so they wrote down the serial numbers of the money in her purse and set up a DIY camera inside a teddy bear. It only took one day for the grandmother's caregiver to go and take 40 pounds out of the old lady's purse, which were easily identified by the serials and the evidence from the teddycam. In compensation, the thief will pay 60 pounds and was fired from the place that hired her out. This falls in line with our motto: always have a hidden camera detector when you go into old people's homes. You'll thank us later. [
Digital content makes a lot money--over US$130 billion in sales a year--but most of that actually isn't taxed. Yet! Realising they're leaving vast streams of green untapped, 
Nintendo engineers are busily preparing new hardware, while trying not to break the concentration of Mario-in-Chief Satoru Iwata while he counts the US$3.9 billion in sales and US$992 million in profits they have made this quarter. "We are always preparing for the next hardware. We are under development," he declared. However, according to 
Things'd have to be pretty desperate in your love life if you needed one of these Ikemenbank, or "handsome men banks" from Bandai. For each 500 yen coin you drop in the heart-shaped gadget, you're rewarded with the next step of a virtual love affair with a Tamagotchi-like digital chap inside. He speaks to you with emotionally supportive phrases, but needs constant attention. Not dropping a coin in for five days results in him leaving you, with nothing but a digital love letter to remind you of his pixels. Fill it up with 100 coins, however, and you get the romantic conclusion—it can be happy or sad—but I'm not clear exactly how pornographic it would be... Anyhow, if you're lovelorn, and in Japan it will be out for around US$46 in September. [
Hot on the heels of the BlackBerry 
Starting May 9th, Sprint will begin a massive, US$100 million marketing campaign aimed straight at the iPhone's nether regions. Stacking its 3G Instinct against the iPhone, Sprint hopes to show that EVDO and GPS make their product way better than anything coming out of Cupertino.
To be honest, I can't say that I am surprised to hear that the government has allocated US$1.5 billion to inform 17 million citizens about the digital TV transition. After all, those uninformed few would undoubtedly take up arms if they missed out on sports broadcasts and NBC's Thursday lineup. However, I was a little surprised to hear that the total proposed budged for literacy education in 2009 stands at a paltry US$574.6 million. Once again it seems that our government does not have its priorities in order. That having been said, does this represent a proper allocation of taxpayer money in your opinion? How does broadband access fit into the mix?
Here are the meaty bits in the cold platter of numbers that is Microsoft's quarterly earnings report. Windows sales are way down (the client division, which makes Windows, saw sales drop by 24 percent vs. last year). Office is doing alright, but they're losing their arse on online services. The entertainment division (Zune and Xbox) is balling, with revenue up 68 percent, making Xbox and Zune profitable for almost a year now. But bottom line, Microsoft's income was down 11 percent from last year. [
