OVERHEARD
”Flat is almost the new up.”
--Tiffani Bova, vice president of research at Gartner Inc., referring to the forecast for IT/telecom spend for 2009 during her industry address, kicking off the Channel Partners Conference & Expo.
Seeds of Change
Anyone can fight global warming. A new iPhone app, “A Real Tree” by Mokugift and available on the iTunes AppStore for 99 cents, makes tree-planting as easy as buying your favorite song. Each time the app is purchased, a tree is planted by partners in one of 12 participating countries fighting deforestation. Trees such as orange, banana, coffee, cocoa and cedar are chosen based on the climate and what food or resources they provide for a particular community. Could it make a difference? According to maker, if each of the more than 13 million iPhone owners planted a tree, the environmental impact would be equivalent to taking 500,000 cars off the road.
She Speaks
Despite their later migration to the Web, women ages 40 to 49 represent a dynamic force online. SheSpeaks, a social network for women’s insights and word-of-mouth marketing, announced a recent study that found 40-something women are highly involved in social networking. Nearly half ( 45 percent) of 40-something women respondents have profiles on popular social networking sites; and a majority of these users indicated frequent activity, logging in several times per week. "These women have started to use the Web and social networks in ways that mirror the rest of their lives — from finding out about a product to shopping or monitoring their children’s activities — while the online focus for women 30 or under is primarily social," said Aliza Freud, founder and CEO of SheSpeaks.
