Online sites are launched every day by hundreds, new ideas of online products are being seen everywhere and the latest is called Supermanket.

The name looks funny but when you take a closer look you realize what it is about, a website where women of the world are the clients and the products are simply men, in another term, a dating site.

The service started in Chile two months ago, and has so far acquired 5,000 users. There have been 2,116 purchases by women, with 45% rate of acceptance — where the “product” wrote back. A U.S. version of the service launched last week.

This does not mean you are buying a man to become your slave, as the FAQ of the site is saying, they just want to open of line of communication between men and women

In my opinion, the idea has lots of traction and it should move on smoothly among single women as they are launching the initial communication/contact with the product/man they buy and are not harassed by unwanted people unlike other dating sites, in the meantime, most men will be thinking twice before sharing themselves as a product on a shelf, sorry this is not me typing, excuse my ego!

Below are screenshots of the websites of major Lebanese supermarkets. Unfortunately there are lots of work to be done on their online presence compared to European and American retail distribution chains.
Monoprix will be back in town soon & Carrefour will open its 1st store in 2012, hopefully their websites will be more attractive.





Click on photos to see in full size

Blogging company Six Apart has acquired micro-blogging startup Pownce for undisclosed financial terms. It looks like one of those acquisitions where the buyer was more interested in the people than the product — the Pownce service will shut down in two weeks.

Yesterday Leah Culver (co-founder) posted on the official Pownce blog: “We will be closing the service and Mike and I, along with the Pownce technology, have joined Six Apart, the company behind such great blogging software as Movable Type, TypePad and Vox.

We’ll be closing down the main Pownce website two weeks from today, December 15th.”

Mena Grabowski Trott, born Mena Grabowski on September 16, 1977 (age 31), is a co-founder of Six Apart, creator of Movable Type and TypePad. The company name originates from the fact that Trott and co-founder/husband Benjamin Trott were born six days apart.

Trott is president of Six Apart. She helps lead management and business efforts, and makes the company products aesthetically pleasing and functionally intuitive. She made her first efforts in weblogging at dollarshort.org in 2001.

Movable Type was originally developed by Mena Trott and Benjamin Trott during a period of unemployment in late 2001 for Mena’s personal blogging use.

Trott was named one of the People of the Year by PC Magazine in 2004. That same year, she was named a member of the “TR 100,” (now known as the TR35), an annual award given to leading technology advocates by Technology Review magazine.

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Business networking site LinkedIn is joining the long list of companies that have announced cuts in the last few weeks — it has laid off 36 employees, or about 10 percent of its total staff.

Last month, it announced $22.7 million in new funding, bringing its total backing to $100 million.

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Since yesterday Emirates.com is down, for whom not familiar with the site, this is the Dubai based Airline and the sponsor of Arsenal football team.
Yesterday their url was pointing to Network Solutions site and the Whois was showing an expired date, today you get the below error.

Maybe they were very busy renewing their domain, as 2 days ago they received their first A380 Airbus, but for sure the guy who is handling their domains will be terminated soon.

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The Great Skype Outage
Anyone using Skype will remember this one. Back in August, to the great frustration of its millions of users, Skype stopped working for almost two days. The culprit? Windows Update, apparently.

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RackSpace truck incident
In November, a truck rammed into a power transformer and cut power to RackSpace’s Dallas data center. When their backup power kicked in, the chillers failed to start, and lots of customer servers had to be shut down. Among the affected were GigaOM, 37 Signals, Webmaster World and Laughing Squid.

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Google Analytics takes a break
Easily the most popular website traffic monitoring service on the web, Google Analytics can’t have problems without a lot of people noticing. And they did

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365 Main data center power outage
This major San Francisco data center outage back in July may have affected more big-name websites and services than any other incident in 2007: Craigslist, Technorati, LiveJournal, TypePad, AdBrite, the 1Up gaming network, Second Life and Yelp were among the affected. Let’s just say that backup power won’t do you much good if your generators fail to start, which is what happened here.

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Twitter Troubles
Twitter seems to be the service that can do no wrong in the eyes of its users. Not even a total of six days of downtime has stopped the service from becoming one of the big successes in 2007. A recent move to a new data center will hopefully help their performance in 2008.

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Ubuntu.com crashed by eager downloaders
When the 7.04 release of the popular Linux distribution was released in April, the Ubuntu.com website drowned in traffic to the extent that the site stopped working, and later had to use a simplified landing page to handle the load.

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Shaky Blogger service
Google’s mega-popular Blogger service has had several hiccups in 2007. That, and Google also managed to remove their own blog by accident.

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NaviSite data center migration goes wrong
When more than 175,000 websites are left stranded for several days, you just know that someone will notice

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T-Mobile data center flooded
Their main data center in Seattle was flooded after a torrent of more than four inches of rain early in December. The T-Mobile website, their activation portals and several other services stopped working.

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Black Friday too much for e-stores?
People love a good deal. So much, in fact, that several large e-commerce websites couldn’t handle the pressure on Black Friday, including Sears.com and Macys.com.

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Media Temple grid grinding
This web host has had a tough year after introducing their much-hyped grid hosting service late in 2006. In December, Media Temple gave their grid-service customers two months of credited hosting fees and apologized for recent performance problems.

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The Registerfly drama
Major customer dissatisfaction with failing domain name renewals that struck this company early in 2007 wasn’t exactly helped by the significant amounts of downtime clocked by the RegisterFly website.

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Cisco trouble
They may be responsible for a large part of the internet backbone, but they are definitely not immune to website trouble.

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Aodhan Cullen calls himself a born entrepreneur. He has been running businesses since the age of 12, when he set up his own résumé-typing business. As a young teen, he dabbled in Web site design, and it was this experience that gave him the idea to launch StatCounter, the company he founded in 1999 when he was 16.

When Cullen started designing Web pages, his clients repeatedly asked him whether anyone was visiting their Web sites. So, Cullen formed StatCounter and came up with a way to measure the number of hits on Web sites, the geographical location of visitors to sites, the various pages a visitor views on a site, and the keywords they use to find a site. StatCounter currently has more than 1.5 million members and tracks more than 9 billion page views per month across its network of more than 2.2 million Web sites.
The company, which is profitable, claims to be signing up 1,500 new members per day.

Cullen is 24 and from Dublin, Ireland.