The Associated Press 9/8/2007: WASHINGTON (AP) — Wholesale prices fell in August by the largest amount in 10 months, reflecting a plunge in the price of gasoline and other energy products and the fourth straight month of falling food costs.

The Labor Department said Tuesday that wholesale prices fell by 1.4 percent last month, the best showing since a 1.5 percent fall last October. It was a much bigger decline than the 0.3 percent drop that had been expected and was led by a 6.6 percent plunge in energy costs, the biggest drop in more than four years.

Core inflation, which excludes food and energy, was also well under control, rising by just 0.2 percent. The good price performance should further ease concerns about inflation and give the Federal Reserve the leeway to cut interest rates to guard against the possibility of a recession.

Fed policymakers were expected to cut a key interest rate on Tuesday for the first time in four years as they try to make sure that a steep slump in housing and widening credit market problems do not derail the overall economy.

August 28 2007 Duncan Riley: CNN.com and Google have announced an agreement that will see Google’s AdSense become the exclusive text link advertising provider on CNN.com.

The deal will also open up the extensive inventory on CNN.com to Adwords’ advertisers.

Senior VP and GM of CNN.com David Payne said the deal would help deliver relevant ads to CNN users, “enhancing their overall experience on CNN.com.”

Although the deal might not initially sound all that exciting, CNN.com is a top 100 site online according to Alexa, making it one of the most popular media destinations online. That’s a lot of pages and ad inventory for Google to sell ads on, inventory that should pay handsomely for all involved.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, including the length of the agreement, which was described only as “multi-year.”

By KEVIN J. DELANEY
July 25, 2007; Page B11

Facebook Inc. hired Gideon Yu as chief financial officer, adding YouTube Inc.’s former finance chief to further bolster the social-networking company’s executive ranks.

Mr. Yu, 36 years old, succeeds Mike Sheridan. Mr. Sheridan is leaving the company after joining in September. Facebook said he wasn’t available for comment.

Mr. Yu joins from Google Inc., where he stayed after the company bought YouTube, a video-sharing site, last year. He abandoned prior plans to leave Google to become a partner at Silicon Valley venture firm Sequoia Capital.

“My heart is first and foremost with venture-stage companies and consumer Internet companies,” Mr. Yu said. He said he will leave Google this quarter.

“I consider it kind of a coup that we were able to recruit him here,” Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said. “He’s just excellent.”

Facebook’s recent record for attracting prominent executives reflects both its current status as perhaps Silicon Valley’s most-watched startup and speculation that the firm’s employees stand to gain financially through any eventual deal or initial public offering.

Mr. Yu’s appointment follows the hiring this month of Chamath Palihapitiya, an investor for the Mayfield Fund LP venture-capital firm, as vice president of product marketing and operations. Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, co-founders of open-source Web browser Mozilla Firefox, are joining Facebook as part of its acquisition of their Parakey startup.

The executive shuffle comes as the Palo Alto, Calif., company hones its strategy for generating more revenue from the high volume of user traffic on its site. Having rejected several acquisition approaches, Facebook is expected to start preparing for an IPO within the next two years, if it doesn’t succumb to a sweeter deal proposal.

“We’re not looking to sell the company, and we’re really not looking to IPO any time soon,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “Our board and we believe it’s probably best to push some of these things off as long as possible.”

The move caps a whirlwind year for Mr. Yu, who joined YouTube in September from Yahoo Inc., where he had been the treasurer. After playing a role in negotiating helping both to negotiate YouTube’s more than $1.7 billion acquisition by Google and to integrate the online video company into its buyer, he accepted an offer to join Sequoia. “I’m hoping this is my last job for a long time,” Mr. Yu said.

A Sequoia spokesman couldn’t be reached for comment. A YouTube spokeswoman wasn’t able to comment.

Amazon uses Linux. eBay uses Windows. But what OSs and webservers run Web 2.0? We tested 17 of our favorites and found out. The script is included below to check for yourself.

Site	Webserver	Operating System
	Apache httpd	Linux
	Apache httpd	Linux
	Apache httpd 1.3.33	Linux
	lighttpd 1.4.13	Linux
	lighttpd 1.4.11	Linux
	Unknown	Linux
	Apache httpd 2.0.52 ((Red Hat))	Linux
	Apache httpd	Linux
	Unknown	Linux
	Apache httpd 2.0.52	Linux
	Microsoft IIS webserver 6.0	Windows (although OS responding is Linux, this is a caching service).
	lighttpd 1.4.15	Linux
	Apache httpd	Linux
	Apache httpd 2.0.55 ((Ubuntu) DAV/2 PHP/5.1.2)	Linux
	Mongrel 201.0.1	Linux
	Apache httpd	Linux
	Squid webproxy 2.6.STABLE12	Unknown (while OS responding is Linux, this is likely a caching service).

Linux is pretty much it for Web 2.0 startups. Which Linux? Digg tell us they run Debian, it seems MobiTV run Red Hat, but we’re not sure about the rest. Comment below if you know.

For the web server, Apache’s still massive but surprisingly LigHTTPd is as popular amongst Web 2.0 startups as it is hard to spell. If you’re wondering, Mongrel is a web server built for Ruby.

Social networking giant MySpace runs Windows, but FaceBook - with better growth, users that are more attractive to advertisers, and a popular Open API anyone can code against (we like Facebook) - runs Linux.

Both Wikipedia and MySpace’s entries are caching services - think Akamai. These proxies show us as Linux boxes in our results, but could be any browser on any OS. Microsoft have put Squid webservers in front of microsoft.com before, giving the same ‘IIS on Linux‘ result we see with MySpace.

To check for yourself, click Applications → Accessories → Terminal and paste the following:

FILE=results.csv
for SITE in www.digg.com www.blip.tv www.trumors.com www.reddit.com www.popsugar.com www.twitter.com www.mobitv.com www.technorati.com del.icio.us www.flickr.com www.myspace.com www.techcrunch.com www.youtube.com www.revver.com www.scribd.com www.photobucket.com www.wikipedia.org
do
echo -n “$SITE,” >> $FILE
# Check port 79 and 80 (one closed, one open) cut out the application and OS
# results and create a nice, comma separated version to show mom
sudo nmap -A -O -P0 -p 79-80 $SITE | grep -Eo ‘^80.*|OS guesses.*’ | sed ’s/,/ or /g’ \
| tr ‘\n’ ‘,’ | sed -e ’s/80\/tcp open *http *//’ -e ’s/OS guesses: //’ >> $FILE
echo >> $FILE
done

When complete, open results.csv in your favorite spreadsheet app.

If you’ve ever wondered why a site called VentureCake has so much Linux content, you now have your answer.

At least partially.

The initial take on news that business.com is on the block for between $300 and $400 million, reported in today’s Wall Street Journal, makes for a great headline. And the quick reaction is, Wow, I thought domain prices were crazy in the ’90s. But hold on. Yes, the name is powerful. But my guess is business.com — just as a name — would fetch, dunno, $7 to $10 million. That’s because it’s a powerful, generic name — but not just one that people will type directly into their browsers, but one that could so easily be built into a business. The name does the marketing — just like sex.com markets, well, you get the idea — but Jake Winebaum and Sky Dayton have in fact built business.com into a business — a well run, lean and mean Internet business that capitalizes on paid search advertising (something barely in existence when they bought the name in 1999).

The Journal says Business.com had 2007 “earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of about $15 million,” which means the price tag is super rich. But that valuation isn’t for the name. It’s for the directory, the search capabilities, the lucrative business market. Om Malik, my former colleague, has a smart take on the business on his blog, as does ValleyWag, which explains how the valuation says more about the economics of the search economy, thanks to Google (GOOG) than about domain names themselves. On the other hand, as top domainer Frank Schilling points out on his blog, what business.com has done is really easy to duplicate — so, he argues, the price is steep.

Meantime, if a deal goes down, Marc Ostrofsky, the guy who sold the name in 1999 and ended up with an undisclosed amount of stock in business.com, is one happy man. He won’t say how much he’ll get but it’ll be a heck of a lot more than had he stuck with $7.5 million in cash. “I just learned about this this morning the Journal,” Ostrofsky told me. “Needless to say, I’m going to make a lot of money if this happens. I’m having one great day.” (An entertaining aside: My employer, Business2.0, had a chance to buy the name back in 1999, but wouldn’t pay what Ostrofsky wanted.)