Roundup: The financial crisis explained, land line usage still dropping, and more

September 21, 2008 | Eric Eldon | Comments |

Still don’t understand the financial crisis? — Neither does anybody else, it seems, but The New York Times has a good write-up of various issues, in brief question-and-answer format.

Telephone land lines continue to get unplugged — More people are switching to just using cell phones. See screenshot.

Conservative commenter Bill O’Reilly’s site hacked — Hackers took over billoreilly.com after his comments on the earlier Sarah Palin email hack. The full report on Wikileaks.

Google has closed its Phoenix branch — Employees will be moved to other locations.

YouTube agrees to pull videos of local school fights — Vallejo, Calif. students had been taping fights using their cell phones and uploading them to the internet.

GamerDNA says that 500,000 gamers have taken its quiz for categorizing game fans – The company uses this information to do things like recommend related games to its users.

 EA loosens access to Spore software — Players of the new world-creator game (pictured) will now be able to install Spore software on up to five computers versus a single computer, among other changes.

Ex-Google salesman David Hirsch joins Metamorphic Ventures – More about the move here.

Oddpost cofounder launches Bandcamp, a web site publishing platform for musicians – Features include transcoding music into different formats, streaming audio, analytics and payment processing.

Conference company DEMO shutters editorial blog — The company decided that creating online news content was outside its organizational scope.

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • Yes, it seems silly to have a land line these days for a lot of people. As long as you have a solid cell phone plan, good coverage, and you know how to contact your local emergency personel in your area, there should be no reason to keep your landline. Not to mention, in an emergency situation such as a hurricane, your cell phone is probably a better option anyway since landlines usually go out in big storms . . . just my two cents . . . oh, and I do not have a landline . . . oh, and Spore rocks my socks off!