Meet Evernote’s New CEO Chris O’Neill:

Today, Evernote has 150 million users worldwide. Each of these individuals is raising their hand, looking for a different way to get work done. The need is massive. Evernote’s potential is enormous. We’ve proven the potential. Now we have to fulfill it.

Kudos to Phil and the Evernote team, this is a big step. I’m a huge Evernote user, most everything in my life goes in there in some form, work, receipts, documents, photography… the whole thing. Evernote feels like it’s stagnated lately though, not that the apps are bad, but I’d love to see more. I’m sure that Mr. O’Neill will take the great system it is now and make it even better.

Written about photography, but definitely applicable to many other types of business. 5 Reasons Not to Use Groupon Marketing for Your Photography Business is a good read, and mostly centers around the sort of clients you attract with the groupon model, the type you want to attract, and knowing and valuing the time you use to do your craft (be it photography, web design, plumbing, etc).

That breaks down to under $6 per hour for those clients who didn’t choose to purchase any additional products and I spent over 285 hours laboring to earn 5 repeat clients whose current session/product purchases cumulatively totalled 2 of my average session’s sales.

Yup, they’re up as NASDAQ:FB and are at (as of noon PST) 40.03.

Saving this for later: How to Tell if Your Tech Salary is Fair.

Great profile of the awesome company Evernote in Inc Magazine for their Company of the Year. If you know evernote you probably love it, if you don't run out and get this app and start using it now. Seriously, it's awesome, cross platform, and their podcast is hilarious. The article has some nice detail about how the company almost died, what they do, and a nice look at the team and tech behind it all.

[...] Today, the company is swimming in tens of millions of dollars in cash from both VCs and profits. Evernote is buying companies, tripling in size each year, and drawing 40,000 new users a day. If you live in Silicon Valley or Tokyo, where Evernote has reached cult status, none of this probably surprises you. Otherwise, you must be wondering: What the hell is Evernote?

Via the Evernote blog.

You probably heard this morning that Microsoft bought Skype for over 8 Billion (with a b B-B-Billion) dollars. Some might wonder why, after it was bought by eBay a few years ago for $4 Billion (and most considered that an insane cost even then). Well now we get some explanation.

Ballmer And Bates Sell The Skype Deal: We Think We "Can Reach Everyone On The Planet"

The mac fans have interpreted this to mean that MS is going to try to fight back against Apple's FaceTime (though to be honest, I don't think I've seen anyone using facetime "in the wild" ever). A universal video calling client built into the OS is something I can get behind though, the more common and easy it is to video call anyone from anywhere, the better for us all (except those who like to work from home naked of course).

Sorry about that! Canada reverses metered Internet decision.

Yay.

Thanks Aryk for the link.

Yahoo to Close Del.icio.us. Ouch :( Looks like things like "yahoo notepad" are however being made feature. Twitter source though, so take it with a grain of salt. Sucks to be yahoo though. Wonder where Flickr fits in there, as there's no mention of it on that screenshot. Thomas Hawk just wrote an open letter to Yahoo! basically asking them not to screw up potentially the best thing they have going for them.

Not really a reflection of the Samsung Tab itself I think, but this story of really screwed pricing and policy with the Tab is more a reflection of what costs you're going to have to go through with any wireless carrier buying something "cheap".

First off, if you purchase from Verizon Wireless and decide that the Tab is not for you, you will be hit with a $70 restocking fee. If that's not bad enough, if you return it after three days of having purchased it, you will not be credited back your $35 activation fee either. Oh, did I forget to tell you about that fee? Yeah, in addition to the price of acquisition, Verizon also throws a $35 activation fee onto your first bill.

After you read the article maybe you wont' scoff so much when you hear that Apple or whoever says they've got some great amazing magical deal with a wireless carrier (or you'll grok why you're paying $800 for an unlocked iPhone or $700 for a tablet (or more).

I know I'm a bit late to the party (been a long last few days) but it sounds like the excellent service drop.io is shutting down. According to the Drop.io Blog they were bought by Facebook and are shutting their doors in a staged way:

As of this week, people will no longer be able to create new free drops, but you'll be able to download content from existing drops until Dec. 15. Paid user accounts will still be available through Dec. 15 and paid users will be able to continue using the service normally. After Dec. 15, paid accounts will be discontinued as well.

While I'm happy for the guys over there for selling the company, I'm sad that the service will be gone. I heard on today's TWiT podcast that they were basically bought for one guy, and this means that the group of people that filled the niche so well aren't going to be innovating anymore on this project. Hopefully though they'll continue on to new and interesting projects!

Must plug my good buddy Dana and his company Scorpion Software's premier episode of a podcast called "Five by 5".

I am pleased to announce that we are launching a new webisodic series called "Five by 5" to do just that. It will be a weekly to bi-weekly web based show covering the tips, tricks and tactics to use when considering how to secure remote access to information.

First of all, I welcome my US neighbors to the south to 2008 as they are finally going to get tethering from AT&T. Other stuff in the story includes other AT&T service changes, both good and bad.

Guess they found a buyer.... HP to Acquire Palm for $1.2 Billion. Best comment on this so far has been from @goudswaard :)

Interesting for any freelancers out there: How to Kill Your Business: 30 Day Payment Terms.

I hear that VMware has announced their plan to acquire Zimbra:

VMWare announced on Tuesday that they are acquiring Zimbra from Yahoo! Inc. The maker of the popular VMWare Fusion virtualization software for Mac OS X, VMWare has been moving in the direction of providing cloud solutions, and the acquisition of Zimbra fits those plans perfectly.

Interesting. The two aren't a perfect match, but if VMware is looking at doing cloud services of some sort, it is (IMVHO) a good match.

In case you had any doubt that paying $40+ on "computer optimization" when you get a system at Best Buy, Future Shop, or any of a host of similar stores was a complete and total rip off and/or scam, read no further than the Best Buy Optimization Is A Big Stupid Annoying Waste Of Money article over at The Consumerist.

I once bought a system at one of these places for my mother-in-law for the simple case of not wanting to have to build it myself and just wanted something already setup and ready to go for the user so that I wasn't forced to work on things. Several hours later I realized I should have just bought the components and installed the OS fresh myself.

Slashdot has a link to the list of great dumb tech moments from this decade.

Boing boing brings us the latest from the Techcrunch / Fusion Garage debacle. Seems that Fusion Garage registered JooJoo domain weeks before ditching TechCrunch, misrepresented production costs Boing Boing. All completely shocking to me, that this would turn into some sort of a clusterfk was completely not a given from the start. No, really.

Rebates: RebateStatus.com Files For Chapter 11, Your Rebate May Be Affected