Prosecutors in Michigan have filed fraud charges against an iPod repairman who allegedly received over 9000 replacement iPod Shuffle devices by entering serial numbers into Apple’s online web site. He then flipped the devices for full profit.
The man, Nicholas Woodhams, age 23, sold mostly all of the stolen iPods for $49 USD each, making over $400,000 USD profit.
“We’ve been cooperating with the government and are in the process of negotiating a resolution,” said Woodhams’ lawyer, Randall Levine. “He is one of those guys who is computer-savvy. This is a very bright man who did not fully appreciate the seriousness of the situation.”
The government is currently looking to seize all of Woodhams’ assets, including two cars, a motorcycle, seven Mac computers and an undisclosed amount of cash, supposedly in the hundreds of thousands.
Being an independent iPod repairman, Woodhams had full knowledge that he could get free replacements if Shuffle devices were having problems.
“Through trial and error, the defendant determined that he could guess valid, warrantied serial numbers and enter them into Apple’s Web site for ‘replacement’ units without ever in fact purchasing or possessing the ‘original’ units,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Nils Kessler added.
Result for: placements
SanDisk Corp. has shown off speedy solid-state hard drives at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. The company’s new G3 series of SSDs will go on sale later this year with capacities of 60GB, 120GB and 240GB, with the 240GB model costing $499. The SSDs are designed specifically for notebooks, as replacements for traditional HDDs. SSDs are popular for notebook use because they consume less power.
SSD technology is coming along, and is expected to be the next major step for the industry. SSDs contain no motors or moving parts, consume less power and have the potential to offer significant performance advantages. Granted, the prices are still higher, and performance in the current SSD models falls short of traditional hard drives in many areas, but as the technology advances the prices will fall.
SanDisk claims that the G3 models are more than 5 times faster than the fastest HDDs now on the market, and twice as fast as SSDs that shipped in 2008.
Result for: placements
Google-owned Youtube has introduced a new ad platform to turn the heads of advertisers. In addition to traditional text ads YouTube now allows search term based adverts that are displayed on the top of the search results. Like the ones on Google search the YouTube search term ads are separated from the actual results by their background color.
Costing Google a hefty $1.76 billion YouTube has not yet turned into a money making machine. However, the integration of the new ad platform was not as an easy task as one could’ve thought.
“In hindsight, it is a natural transition for YouTube to make. We’ve been working on this for months. The key was, we wanted to make sure we got it right. There are a lot of intricacies involved. YouTube is a video discovery platform. We’ve been integrating with Google AdWords for some time, and now we’re at a place where it can be win and win,” said YouTube product manager Matthew Liu to CNET News.
There are no limitations regarding who can buy the ads but due to the formula used to determine ad placements - combining popularity of the video and money paid - companies will most likely buy off the most popular search terms. There will be however a chance to buy yourself the 15 seconds - or minutes in this case - of fame.
Search ads are currently used only in the U.S. but will be expanded to other countries and regions in the future as well.
