Target Groups?

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will return.

In business, a target group of
people can be seniors citizens,
teens and/or toddlers, for
example.

The target groups are people
an organization directs its
advertising message to, and
these people are likely to
purchase the organization's
product or service.

Target groups help with an
organization's mission, use of
resources and long-term
goals. It's a matter of survival
for an organization to figure-out
its target group/ market.

If an organization pin-points the
wrong target groups than it can't
make a profit or fulfill its
business mission.

Source: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_are_target_groups_used&updated=1&waNoAnsSet=2

Twitter Purchases Tweetdeck

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will return.

Twitter purchased TweetDeck,
an application for organizing
the display of tweets, for more
than $40 million using cash
and stock, per sources.

Twitter's PR account tweeted,
"For all those who might be
curious, we continue to not
comment on rumors."

Betaworks, a key investor in
TweetDeck, was not available
for comment.

A management stir-up, with
co-founder Ev Williams out
and Jack Dorsey back as head
of product, the company is
focusing on building/owning
Twitter's most compelling
features and interfaces.

In February, reports of
UberMedia, the leading
developer of apps and Web-
based services for Twitter
users and other social media
platforms, was in talks to
purchase Tweetdeck.

The deal didn't happen.

Around times of the deal chats
with UberMedia, Twitter
suspended UberMedia's
UberTwitter and twidroyd,
two popular apps used for
mobile Twitter access,
citing policy violations.

Twitter has been improving
its own main site as TweetDeck,
and many "Twitter clients"
began to surface over the
past two years.

Source: http://newsblaze.com/story/20110524095924writ.nb/topstory.html

Wikileaks Secret Documents on Guantanamo Detainees

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will return.

The classified U.S. military
secret documents, about 800,
obtained by WikiLeaks give
details about the alleged
terrorist activities of al
Qaeda operatives captured
and housed at the U.S. Navy's
detention facility in Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba.

The secret documents were
shared with several news
organizations, including the
New York Times and the Washington
Post. Some have been published by
WikiLeaks, an organization that
shares secret information.

The secret documents spot-light how
detainees behaved while at Guantanamo,
and what level of danger to the
United States. They are intelligence
assessments of almost 779 individuals
who have been held at Guantanamo
since 2002, per the Post.

The classified files described some
of the detainees as being compliant
while others threatened violence
against guards. One stated he would
fly planes into houses.

The secret documents explain al Qaeda
as it grew stronger in Afghanistan
during the 1990s, prepared for the
9/11 attacks and scattered after.

According to the New York Times, the
secret documents show most of the 172
prisoners still held at Guantanamo have
been rated as a "high risk" of posing
a threat to the United States and its
allies if released without adequate
rehabilitation. They show that many
others who have been released or
transferred to other countries were
also designated "high risk," the
newspaper explains.

Detainees are assessed "high," "medium"
or "low" in regard to their intelligence
value, threat they pose while in
detention and continued threat they
could pose to the United States if
released.

Cell Phones Watch Your Every Move

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will return.

Malte Spitz, German Green party
politician, found out that we
are always being tracked even
if we don't volunteer to be.

Cell phone companies don't
usually tell how much
information they collect,
so Spitz went to court to
find out exactly what his
cell phone company,
Deutsche Telekom, knew
about his location.

Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28,
2010, Deutsche Telekom
recorded and saved his
longitude and latitude
coordinates more than
35,000 times. It traced
him from a train to
Erlangen from the start
until his last night,
at home in Berlin.

Spitz gave a look at of
what is being collected
as we walk around with
our phones, per privacy
experts. Unlike many online
services and web sites that
must send "cookies" to a
user's computer to link its
traffic to a specific person,
cell phone companies just
sit back and hit "record."

"We are all walking around
with little tags, and our
tag has a phone number
associated with it, who we
called and what we do with
the phone," Sarah E. Williams,
expert on graphic information
at Columbia University's
architecture school. "We don't
even know we are giving up
that data."

"At any given instant, a cell
phone company has to know where
you are. It's constantly
registering with the tower,
strongest signal," Matthew Blaze,
a professor of computer and
information science at the
University of Pennsylvania who
has testified before Congress
on the issue.

Source: http://newsblaze.com/story/20110330120057writ.nb/topstory.html

Supreme Court Case Could Effect Most Businesses With Employees

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will return.

It's an issue involving whether
the justices should permit
certification of the largest
class action employment lawsuit
in United States history. The
dispute is against Wal-Mart
Stores Inc. over alleged gender
bias in pay and promotions.
Arguments in the case are
scheduled Tuesday morning and
ruling can be expected by late
June.

If the class action passes,
hundreds of thousands of women
could join in the largest
discrimination claim of its
kind. Tens of billions of
dollars or more in damages.

The court case is among the
biggest of the current term,
and could establish binding
standards over liability
involving companies large
and small.
It started with six women
from California, unknown
to each other, initially.

"I'm a fighter if nothing
else, and so are all the
other women that are
involved," Christine
Kwapnoski, one of the
original plaintiffs.

Kwapnoski, 46, started at
Sam's Club retail warehouse,
part of the Wal-Mart brand,
in 1986, relocated to a store
in Concord, California.
When 2000 rolled-around, she
was the longest tenured hourly
employee at the store, but
claims she was being paid
"virtually the same" as male
associates with half her
experience. She was promoted
in 2001, two weeks after the
lawsuit was filed, and is
still at the company.

The plaintiff's lawyer, Joseph
Sellers, explains that there's
a "corporate culture" at Wal-Mart,
where female associates are
treated as second class
employees, and that the company's
"strong, centralized structure
fosters or facilitates gender
stereotyping and discrimination,"
which flows down to individual stores.

Source: http://newsblaze.com/story/20110328091100writ.nb/topstory.html

Openleaks To Rival WikiLeaks

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will return.

Former WikiLeaks deputy, Daniel
Domscheit-Bergto, plans to start
a rival web site, Openleaks. The
web site has no content on it except
a logo and the message "Coming soon!"

In an interview with the OWNI technology
web site, Domscheit-Berg didn't go into
reasons for his disagreement with WikiLeaks
but suggested it strayed from its mission.

"In these last months, the organization has
not been open any more, it lost its open-source
promise," he explained, adding that Openleaks
plans to provide the means for leaked
information to be published, without itself
being a publisher.

Domscheit-Berg, had been involved with
German hacker group the Chaos Computer Club.

Openleaks would begin trials in early 2011 and
turn to bigger media later, Domscheit-Berg
confirmed. It currently has 10 members.

Hackers And Activists Gear-Up For War on "Wikileaks Phenomena"

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will return.

Fighting lines between supporters
of the whistle blowing web site
WikiLeaks and its critics began
to form on Sunday. Supporters
raised numerous copies of the
site on the Internet. The United
States put pressure on Switzerland
not to offer a haven to the site's
founder, Julian Assange.

Major Internet companies stopped
services to WikiLeaks. Activists
created hundreds of like sites that
host exact copies of another site's
content, making censorship difficult.

An informal group of hackers and
activists declared war on Sunday
against enemies of Mr. Assange. They
called on supporters to attack
sites/companies that don't support
WikiLeaks and to spread the leaked
material online.

The American ambassador to Switzerland,
Donald S. Beyer Jr., responded in the
weekly magazine NZZ am Sonntag that the
Swiss should carefully consider whether
to provide shelter to someone who is on
the run from the law.

On Friday, WikiLeaks looked for refuge in
a diffuse web of financial and Internet
infrastructure spread across Europe
especially in Switzerland.

Source: http://newsblaze.com/story/20101206100112writ.nb/topstory.html