ratings

Facebook is the world's top social network, and now it's the best place to work, a study from career community site Glassdoor.com has found.

According to the site, Facebook earned a company rating of 4.6, besting last year's top employer, Southwest Airlines, which earned a 4.4 rating this year. Those businesses were followed by, in order, Bain & Co., General Mills, and Edelman. Facebook wasn't even on the list last year.

When it comes to the technology industry, it seems Web sites make employees happier than their offline counterparts. Overstock took the ninth … Read more

We recently looked at gaming service OnLive and its MicroConsole device, which streams cloud-based PC games to your TV. Today, the company is announcing a flat-rate plan, which bundles some of its games together in an all-you-can-eat package for $9.99 per month.

Available to users of both the MicroConsole and OnLive's PC/Mac client software, the flat-rate package is called the PlayPack, and a free beta version is live right now for MicroConsole owners. The full version will be available January 15 with about 40 games.

We checked out the beta version last night, and there are a … Read more

Google still owns the market for paid search results, but the newly formed Bing-Yahoo team could "capture significant market share in the near term," according to a new report from SearchIgnite.

Among all search engines, Google's third-quarter share of the pay-per-click search market stood at 80.2 percent. That represented a gain of 7.9 percent in ad spending from the year-ago quarter and Google's "most dominant" market share since SearchIgnite started tracking companies three years ago, according to the market researcher's report released today.

In the same quarter, Bing's market share … Read more

It's all over the Internet.

That's the phrase that is increasingly being used to describe when a matter has become one of importance.

This week, the matter of importance concerns a Duke University graduate who decided to create a compendium of her sexual experiences with various men while at Duke.

Who knows why she decided to do it in PowerPoint? Perhaps she thought that one day she might present it to a symposium of intellectuals. It was, indeed, entitled: "An Education Beyond the Classroom: Excelling in the Realm of Horizontal Academics."

Within it, she described her … Read more

Nielsen is working on a new way to track online ads that it promises will be more accurate and quicker than today's methods.

Currently in development, the company's Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings will combine a couple different ways of showing advertisers how well their ads are doing.

First, Nielsen will tap into responses from an online panel of users, similar to the way it collects TV ratings from selected viewers. Second, it will set up a tracking method to collect anonymous, aggregated data from Web users who opt in and view an online ad.

Through this approach, Nielsen … Read more

In a perfect world, all 100-watt-per-channel amplifiers would be equally powerful. If we were talking about cars instead of amplifiers, you might suppose all cars with 300 horsepower are equally fast. But the weight of the car, gearing, and suspension tuning all play their parts, so performance expectations have to be based on more than just a single specification or number.

Before we go any further, I'd like to point out that the power spec's prime relevance lies in determining how loud a given set of speakers can play. Assuming the speakers can handle power, feeding them more power will produce louder sound levels. Sound quality is another matter, and isn't always associated with power, so the more powerful amp isn't necessarily the better-sounding amp. A few months ago I wrote a rave review of a 3.5-watt amplifier that sounded wonderful with my Zu Essence tower speakers. So just a couple of watts can sound amazing, and play louder than you'd think. Amplifier-speaker matching is more than a numbers game; knowledge of what works with what is a valuable commodity, so if you're lucky enough to have access to a top-notch hi-fi dealer or an experienced audiophile buddy, don't be afraid to ask for advice. … Read more

As chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski is playing a key role in what could turn out to be sweeping changes in the way the Internet reaches children in schools and libraries. He's also the point man in a national debate on Net neutrality as some Internet service providers square off against activists who demand that the federal government ensure that companies not be able to prioritize network traffic.

Prior to his appointment as FCC chairman by President Obama in 2009, Genachowski spent more than a decade in the private sector as co-founder of LaunchBox, a managing … Read more

Hundreds of Netflix users have been awfully busy rating movies and television shows, The Atlantic has found.

According to the publication, which claims to have viewed internal Netflix documents, "several hundred" Netflix users have rated 50,000 or more movies and television shows on the service. A little over 10,000 users have rated more than 20,000 items in Netflix's catalog. Just 1 percent of the company's user base--about 150,000 people--have rated more than 5,000 films and shows.

Those folks are extremely active compared with the vast majority of Netflix users. According to … Read more

Spotify, the European music service that drops the jaws of all who try it, is at risk of blowing another self-imposed deadline for launching in the United States.

While CEO Daniel Ek has promised that Spotify will finally launch before the end of 2010, the company has yet to sign a single licensing agreement with any of the top four record companies, multiple music industry sources told CNET. Sure, Spotify can claim many admirers at the top labels and some progress in the negotiations, but time is running out.

Music licensing deals are complex and typically can't be slapped … Read more