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February 11, 2008

Grammy winners list -- and Woody Guthrie's on it; 'Natural' Pepsi launches in U.K.; Useful Firefox extensions; Google, Yahoo & Microsoft

Here's AP's List of Grammy winners

Woody Guthrie's rediscovered and reclaimed 1949 wire recording, which I blogged Saturday in depth, with audio links (Woody Guthrie live -- in 1949 -- is up for a Grammy), won Best Historical Album. Woody died in 1967.

Realer thing: This Is London reports, Pepsi launches 'healthy' option made from all natural ingredients... but only in the U.K.

Pepsi Raw is said to be made from natural ingredients and contains no artificial preservatives, colours, flavourings or sweeteners.

Traditional Pepsi contains fructose corn syrup, sugar, artificial colourings, phosphoric acid, caffeine, citric acid and natural flavours.

In comparison, Pepsi Raw has only natural ingredients including apple extract, plain caramel colouring, coffee leaf, tantaric acid from grapes, gum arabic from acacia trees, cane sugar and sparkling water. It is paler in colour and less fizzy than other cola brands.

By replacing corn syrup with cane sugar, Pepsi claims it has managed to reduce the calorie content of a 300ml bottle by 20 per cent, from around 120 calories per serving to around 90 calories....

If it takes off there, maybe we'll see it here. Soda did seem to taste better with real sugar in it.

Your way: 25 Firefox Extensions to Make You More Productive at LifeDev. The Firefox browser lets you customize it with add-ons that you find useful. I post these from time to time because everybody uses the Web in a different way.

I find these two essential -- they aren't on LifeDev's list:

Restart Firefox. If you work with 50-plus open tabs as I often do, things can slow down. Pull down File-> Restart Firefox and the browser closes and reopens, asking in conjunction with Session Manager if I want to restore all 50 tabs. I usually do, but now the zip is back in my browser.

Image Zoom: (link fixed) Enlarge any photo right there in the page with a quick right click-left click.

Defying Goliath: Saturday, Yahoo announced that the board decided Friday to reject Microsoft's $44.6 billion offer. From Kara Swisher's Wall Street Journal blog, If Yahoo Only Had the Nerve -- But Will It Be a Happy Ending?:

...there is a very scary downside to this plucky show of courage.

That’s because Microsoft–well known for its pathological aggression–has already shown in its initial hostile move last week that it is more than willing to play hardball. In fact, very, very, very hard.

And this slap, most especially because Microsoft thinks that Google is standing right behind Yahoo in the fight, will surely send Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer into a corporate rage, if not a real one.

It is made worse because Microsoft’s paranoia is quite legitimate. Google’s top brass has actually been meeting with Yahoo execs this past week to help formulate a plan to help Yahoo and, of course, itself, by figuring out a lucrative outsourcing deal that will not attract too much ire of regulators due to Google’s dominance of the search market.

But Yahoo is going to need a lot more than Google if it really wants to stay independent, as I believe it actually does.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 4:24 AM | Permalink

Comments

Posted by: suzy on February 12, 2008 11:46 AM