Technology
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This Bloomberg story heads up the no-surprise surprise financial file:Amazon Says Holiday Sales Set Record on IPods and Video Games Dec. 26 (Bloomberg) -- Amazon.com Inc., the world's biggest online retailer, said holiday sales worldwide set a record this year...
Has anyone been able to get MobilePlay to work yet? The beta from the Rustic Canyon-backed firm has launched, and it has solid Treo support -- as well as integrated readings apps for a one-off list of Nick Denton's blogs...
Who or what is Jeny Elkind? According to BlogPulse's list of the most popular ... well, everything in the blog-o-sphere in 2005, this was the most popular blog post of the year:LJ | service "10 last readers" suspended eng :...
From an article at BusinessWeek on how Amazon copes with the Christmas rush for finding and shipping books -- it isn't via the Dewey Decimal system:[Amazon's Reno warehouse] is a book browser's dream, but a librarian's nightmare: The books in...
Folks, am testing ajchat. While Mike tried it a few days ago and liked it, it also blew up umpteen times forcing him to give up quicly on the app. Let's see if I have any more luck. Anyone out...
Mark Cuban is on a roll today: I have zero doubt that in the future there will be sliders or some equivalent that represent “the flavor” of search that users will look for. Looking for information about the war in...
A question I was pondering this morning: What percentage of domain names remain unregistered by length? In other words, I'm assuming that there are no unregistered all-alpha three-letter dot-com domains, but I see there are quite a few unregistered four-letter...
Google has posted an interesting position on its emerging Google Scholar team. While you’ll be right in the copyright crossfire, it could also be a lot of fun in a group within Google that has a huge and open playing...
There’s nothing quite like being mobbed by Wall Street investors clustering around the current consensus. That is what satellite radio providers re-discovered at the recent UBS Media conference, according to this article in the Hollywood Reporter. XM was overrun by investors,...
Hey, how come Om got to be the "potshots" guy and I was stuck with the "tiresome" label in this anti-anti-Flock missive? I generally think of myself as more of a potshots guy, and I'll leave it to Om to...
As a huge fan of the Discovery Channel show Mythbusters (how I loved the episode where they tried to use medical tubing to slingshot a dummy across the Canadian border), this interview at Slashdot with the program's co-hosts was catnip....
Google Earth CTO Michael Jones was at UC San Diego on November 222, and he gave a lengthy and interesting speech on mapping technology, large datasets at Google, earth observation, UFOs, and so on. A Quicktime video of the talk...
We are endlessly distracted in this world of continuous partial attention. While most of us have become more adept at dealing with all these technology distractions — IM! email! blogs! phones! iTunes! live weather! — we are mostly kidding ourselves....
There are two ways to look at the issues Google is apparently having with managing its giant data stores: This is a uniqely Google-ish problem, one that only a company with its hyperbolic data stores could have. It’s a leading...
Every time I visit tech.memeorandum.com I am amazed at the clustering of people around the topic du jour. A few days it was the “startups 101” thing, and before that it was Riya’s non-purchase by Google, and today’s it is...
The Gmap Pedometer mashup has added a nifty new feature. In addition to being able to map running/biking/walking routes on a live map, you can now get elevation data for your route. While the data is USGS-provided and therefore U.S.-only,...
Large growth companies like Microsoft are always in denial when the high-growth phase of their trajectory ends. They continue to wrongly pour money into new initiatives, acquisitions, and other fruitless forays as they try to return to their go-go days....
Angel Mehta has up an interesting interview/profile of venture guy Bill Tsai of Charles River Ventures. Bill's a skilled venture investor, and he has some solid comments on thematic investing (not his bag), the role of good luck in venture...
A new agreement has been reached among top companies and universities on the commercialization of research related to open source software. This issue is a big deal inside of such schools, as there is a tension between the IP side...
Various people are alternately scolding or feeling scolded about the falseness of month-ago rumors that not-yet-launched photo recognition service Riya is being acquired by Google. Relax, people. Fine, Riya wasn't bought. And fine, the initial accounts that an acquisition was...
There is a silly discussion underway out in the blog-o-sphere, one that purports to be rational noodling about how best to set up your startup company to be flipped to Google/Yahoo/Microsoft. The nut is this paragraph from Dare Obasanjo's original...
Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.Mayor: What do you mean, biblical?Ray: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor... real Wrath-of-God-type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies.Venkman: Rivers and seas boiling!Egon:...
Anyone out there with some insight on vast.com? I have had a few people tell me that I should know about about them, but I know next to diddly. A small-ish group of smart folks with some interesting ideas &...
The following is from a new study on the prevalance of pings (called “spings”) from spam blogs (called “splogs”): Clearly almost 3 out of 4 pings are spings! Going back further to the source of these spings, we observed that...
I almost missed this in all the recent nattering about revenue-less companies, but in non-bubble technology finance news PriceGrabber.com was purchased yesterday by GUS plc., a U.K.-based financial conglomerate that also owns credit profiler Experian. The comparison shopping engine --...
Darn it all, techno utopians are so cute. Nevertheless, structured blogging — the over-ballyhooed idea that people will post to their blogs using different forms depending on what they’re posting — is going to be a flop. It’s the usual three...
In passing, Dave Hornik at August Capital made the following comment yesterday in an otherwise unrelated post: Saying "Long Tail" is like saying "viral" or "search engine optimization" -- the concept is part of the standard parlance for VCs and...
This is, indirectly, such a fascinating, cautionary, and ironic story about how difficult it is to do early-stage investing (read: incubation) that I’d suggest people read the whole thing: The high-profile investors in the infamous and short-lived incubator 12 Entrepreneuring are...
A few people have pointed out to me today that Google long ago planned to do at least part of what Amazon has announced with Alexa. Here’s the relevant para from the “backrub” paper at Stanford: Our final design goal...
From Mark Anderson, of SNS fame, as cited at BusinessWeek: "The Net is for news. TV is for entertainment. Fox is for propoganda." Discuss....
Say what you will, but mall carts and kiosks are a clever idea — using interstitial retail white space to flog products and services — and it has turned into a $10-billion business. Granted, in one mall here in La Jolla...
The financial community is increasingly fretting over Microsoft’s Bill Gates’ surprising comment last week about paying people to use MSN’s search tool: “We’ll actually go to users and say instead of us keeping all that ad revenue, we’ll actually share...
Folks are acting like there’s big news out from Amazon/Alexa about opening up Alexa’s search engine to third parties. While that’s great, it’s not clear to me why this is news. I posted about Alexa’s plans back in October, right...
Two Google-ish people who should know (or should at least know better) are telling me late today that Google Calendar will launch tomorrow, complete with Gmail and Google Maps integration. Why do I care? Good question. Mostly because I keep...
From CBS Marketwatch tonight:USA Today print, e-newsrooms mergeBy Ruth Mantell, MarketWatch Last Update: 11:18 PM ET Dec. 12, 2005 SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- USA Today is combining its print and online newsrooms in a move that the newspaper hopes will...
I've turned a number of people onto Meebo (an aesthetically-pleasing web-based instant messaging client) since posting about it here a while back. I see that the service is seeing fairly dramatic growth, with Michael Arrington saying that Meebo's founder tells...
There is a thoughtful ongoing discussion of the Yahoo acquisition of del.icio.us still underway at my “sno.oker.ed” post....
A reader sent me a link to this mashup: Live Xbox 360 availability at Best Buy stores by geography. I’m no gamer, but it’s an interesting idea....
After twenty years of using personal computers, I finally decided to start backing things up. I bought a 300 Gb Maxtor OneTouch II Firewire/USB drive, which, with included software, I found via PriceGrabber for around $240 (shipped). While I contemplated...
Here is the best quote in a story today in the L.A. Times about Craigslist-induced classified troubles at the San Francisco Chronicle (which, coming from the circulation-challenged LAT, is a fine irony). It comes from the paper's publisher, Frank Vega:"I...
Okay, I have to say this, despite my self-imposed hiatus. There is only word for Yahoo's purchase of social bookmarking service del.icio.us: sno.ooker.ed. While Yahoo apparently didn't pay as much as it did for Flickr, it also bought... ...technology that...
The usual privacy paranoids won't like this, but I already like the just-launched Gmail feature where the service automatically detects structured information in emails, like FedEx/UPS/etc tracking numbers, or addresses, and then offers to track the package, or map the...
From a comment by Pete Cashmore on Michael Arrington's Techcrunch:...I’m launching Email Harvester Beta - a simple way to harvest email addresses from the unsuspecting early adopter crowd. It’s in closed beta right now, but you can enter your email...
Gawker Media has launched a new blog, Consumerist, which has the following puckish mission: The Consumerist. Capitalism is broken. We’ll help you fix it. An economics fix-it site? A monetary policy version of Digg? (Do you Digg a quarter-point increase,...
I missed the following from Jason Calacanis a week or two back. You have to love it: I want to be able to run three--yes three--24inch monitors off of [my new computer]. Right now I'm kicking two Dell 2405's and...
Does Google actually allow AlternateURL to replace public service ads on Adsense with paying ads? And assuming Google allows it, where does the company draw the line on ad substitution?...
Here are five reason why blogging software Movable Type is broken: Its anti-spam support is dreadful. Yes, there are better anti-spam features in the current version than in prior version. That, however, is like saying the prior version leaked like...
From a letter to the editor in today’s Financial Times, an argument that I hear very regularly these days: As a matter of public policy, surely patent protection for drugs that treat deadly diseases such HIV/Aids should not be handled...
The offline real estate boom may be slowing, but the online boom continues, as a John Cook survey piece in today’s Seattle P-I demonstrates in passing by mentioning many of the companies, from Redfin, to iGenHome, to Zillow. Most of...
To summarize the survey I put up this Sunday morning on Internet domain ownership, around 110 readers responded, with the result being that most of you own domains. More than 80% of respondents own at least one Internet domain. Granted,...
The evolving people search tool Zoominfo has taken people search up a level, with the folks there launching this morning some very useful new features. One interesting addition has to do with RSS, whereby you can subscribe to search results,...
FON is a neat idea that I’d love to see succeed — creating a grassroots Boingo by sharing WiFi in urban areas — but there are some nagging issues. For starters, there will be immense holes in coverage, which will likely...
Here is the money sentence from Adam Lashinsky's useful update on Craiglist's ongoing low-cost adventure into paying itself nothing while destroying the newspaper classifieds business:Online disruptors like Monster.com and Yahoo's HotJobs divert money from papers into their own pockets; Craigslist...
Yet another love-note to MySpace is making the rounds, this time in a cover BusinessWeek article. Not to put it too neatly, but I increasingly feel like the main lessons for would-be consumer-centric venture investors from MySpace is a) that...
-1) { // tell the user alert("You've already voted on this question. Thank you for your interest!"); // doesn't count as a choice ChoiceMade_gb = false; // otherwise if they haven't made a choice yet } else if (ChoiceMade_gb...
Okay, Pandora may not be evil, but it is truly a trap. I thought I had lost interest in music, and I've just discovered that I haven't. I had simply lost interest in the music other people were playing, and...
Blogoscoped has a list of fifteen annoying things about Google, from interface issues all over as the site has grown like ponzi, to the mere existence of Orkut. Fun -- and mostly accurate:3) I am shown the number of e-mails...
When a comment spammer spams, but there is nothing being sold in their spam message, and their hyperlinks don't lead anywhere, what are they spamming? This zen question has been bothering me over the last twenty-four hours after an outbreak...
Okay, it's 1:06am, and I'm up reading Xooglers, a blog written by and for ex-Google employees. It is, in two words, absorbing reading, an unholy byte-sized cross between Rivethead and The Soul of a New Machine:It became a running joke...
The drop-day for Google Calendar is imminent, or so I've been told now by so many people that it's begun to get silly. People used to say that Apple was a ship that leaked from the top, but I'm beginning...
I added Evernote to my repertoire of software tools some time ago, not really thinking I would continue to use it. But I have. Matter of fact, it has become indispensable. It is a toolbar-resident infinitely scolling “page” onto which...
Jorn "Robot Wisdom" Barger has an interesting "meta" post up about the nature of blogging. As the creator of the term "weblog", he is claiming it back again for its original definition ("log your websurfing with public annotations") and asking...
It used to be that to do anything useful with communications and computing technology -- access printers, faxes, PCs, databases, and other services -- you had to go into the office. As Richard Waters of the FT points out in...
Mike Arrington wants to know what web 2.0 services people are currently paying for. As becomes clear, there aren't many -- not that that's necessarily a problem, if people can get sufficient scale (which is admittedly rare) -- and the...
There is a piece in BusinessWeek about the networked life of a 21-year-old. Like the session with five teenagers at the Web 2.0 conference back in October, I'm learning things that I didn't know that I didn't know. While I...
There is a mildly entertaining video out of venture guy John Doerr explaining the dimensions of the Web 2.0 bubble boom to ZDNet Editor Dan Farber. Doerr is a very smart and savvy guy, someone who could buy me one...
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has out its 2005 annual report, and it was another record year for patent filings, as this graph shows. What got my attention, beyond the mere fact of how the pace of patent filings...
Sorry to be the house curmudgeon again, but I’m with Om. Skype’s new 2.0 release, despite the praise heaped on it by the WSJ’s Wall Mossberg today, demonstrates, more than anything else, the dearth of new ideas in telephony. The...
From a Hollywood Reporter article today, here is some interesting data on the number of EA games per year that included product placement advertisements: 2002: 2 2005: 11 2006: 13 And one more factoid from the same Hollywood Reporter article today:...
My blog posting tool of choice, Blogjet, is about to ship a version 1.6 with some very slick Flickr-integration features. Looks very nice, Dmitry....
Here is a tidbit on the steadily improving Google Scholar from this week’s Nature special section on web techologies, blogs, and science: It has just two full-time staff, plus leader Anurag Acharya. How many people do you think Elsevier and Thomson...
This week’s issue of the journal Nature has an interesting series of articles on science on the web age, especially the role of blogs, wikis, open data, and other such stuff, including the OpenWetWare initiative. The overview is (I think)...
The various lawsuits leveled yesterday in San Jose District Court against Verisign for monopolistic behavior in domain registration markets are good and meaty reading. Try this one on for size: As a result of the conduct alleged herein, Verisign and...
A Todd Bishop story in the Seattle P-I comes clean about Microsoft’s Fremont plans for local classifieds. While I had heard about the company’s foray into Craigslist-style classifieds before, this is the first official public disclosure I’ve seen of the upcoming...
I'm sorry, am I missing something? Yahoo adds an RSS reader to Yahoo Mail and people are acting as if Yahoo has created an implantable chip that mainlines RSS feeds into your brain. As I recall, Oddpost, the precursor to...
Someone is a real optimist: The domain blogging.com is on the market with a $2-million asking price. That may be more than the cumulative revenues of all blogging tools companies....
While most people still view webumentaries through the lens of big-budget 1990s boondoggles, there is no denying that at their best they are, especially when done in bottoms-up grass-roots fashion, wonderful uses of the web for the creation and distribution of unique...
The authors of the best-selling Freakonomics are alleging that a reviewer is gaming reviews of the book. Better yet, however, is the gloves-off debate in the comments section, including some interesting discussion about whether and how Amazon’s reviews can be gamed. [via...
Micrososoft is getting (negatively) better at losing money on every Xbox it sells: Xbox: -$24 Xbox 360: -$126...
Fraud is nothing new in dating, so it's unsurprising to see it appear in its online variant. Nevertheless, this AP piece is interesting in that, if true, the lengths to which Yahoo, Match.com, et al., go to try to keep...
While UnifiedRoot isn't the first company to think it can convince people to adopt a different way of addressing Internet domains, they seem like they have thought through making possible domain names like news.cnn (for CNN), products.ibm. Mind you are...
From a piece on Microsoft's thrust into high-performance computing in the current InformationWeek:The most powerful lessons in life sometimes draw from long-ago experiences. So it may have been when Bill Gates reminisced last week about bypassing Harvard's computer-science classes 30...
I just realized that WeatherBug has a published API that is freely available. Interesting....
I read this week's inane BusinessWeek cover story on Google as basically a love note from the investment banking industry to the search company. In essence we discover that VCs, bankers, et al., people who are used to being treated...
There is a practically-minded post on Domain Name Wire about the remarkable complacency at many companies (Apple, in this case) with respect to registering domain names for upcoming products. Too many companies, as the piece points out, assume someone somewhere...
Mark Sigal has a nice and thoughtful discussion about information arbitrage, a topic near and dear to my heart. It is a subject around which I have various investments and side projects (including the newly launched BubbleWire).[via Daniel Nerezov (in...
I'll give you an idea of how much newfound interest there is the domainer business. After I wrote here last weekend about some of the success domainers had quietly had over the last few years moving from a domain-squatting model...
Curious about when your local real estate market has peaked? One useful measure is real estate inventory, which is the amount of product (i.e., homes and condos) on the market. With that measure in mind, I have put together a...
In an otherwise unremarkable WSJ piece about the silly bidding war going on among Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google for top scientists and engineers, there is this fascinating rationalization from Alan Eustace of Google: One top-notch engineer is worth "300 times...
Which of the following four tech stalwarts has the most employees? No cheating by checking Yahoo Finance. When you’re tired of mulling, just use your cursor to highlight the area to the right of the company name to find the...
No company should have a senior management or board discussion concerning the success, or lack thereof, of their current marketing programs without presenting data on the following: The top five site referral words/phrases from Google searches (and how that compares...
I had a good time as a guest this morning talking about the consumer side of Web 2.0 during the “debate” on the Financial Times site. Give it a read and you’ll see my various comments on the topic....
I had a group come by recently and pitch me that the Next Billion-Dollar Thing on cellphones is … clip art. Ringtones, they argued, were only one part of personalization, and a passe one at that. The next frontier, to...
Carl at Accuweather wants to know of people who are using weather forecasts to trip alarms about upcoming severe weather, and then that are trading the news. I know I’ve heard from people claiming to do that, so let him...
Columbia Journalism Review has launched a cranky critique blog of business & financial journalism. While there’s plenty to criticize in business & finance coverage, you wouldn’t know by the initial installments of CJR’s Audit blog. For example, the writer goes...
The Free Press and Lee Eisenberg are apparently running a blog-o-sphere promotion of his upcoming new book, The Number, on retirement. If you’re interested, check out the offer here. It’s an interesting promotional idea, so I’ll be curious to see...
Today’s coverage of news that Google’s is upping the local coefficient on Froogle is another example of something that drives Google competitors nuts — and that is, how the company gets a free pass to breathless coverage of some sucky...
Just so folks know, I’m participating in a discussion about Web 2.0 on the Financial Times site this Wednesday morning from 7am to 8am PST. The address is www.ft.com/webfuture....
Okay, I’ve been reading Ray Ozzie’s comments on the creation of Simple Shared Extensions (SSE) — an RSS (and OPML) extension to allow two-way communications over RSS — as well as the FAQ and the spec. It’s all interesting and...
I'm fascinated by discussions of limits, whether social, physiological, or scientific. There are some fine books on the subject, and there is an entire literature of urban legends around what people are alleged to have said about limits that turned...
Xona's domain hacks tool is good fun. Hey, maybe I should register this Google variant!...
There is an absolutely fascinating piece up on the Business 2.0 site about the inner workings of the domain name speculation game. It is a business that has changed entirely from the old world of domain squatting, and now it...
This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. -- from The Hollow Men, by T.S. EliotRoger Lowenstein has an interesting...
Last weekend I posted something about Google's quiet partnering with Craig Ventner to use its technology in biological data. Well, a chapter from a recent book on Google gets into the subject in considerable detail:Over time, Venter said, Google will...
Nick Carr thinks technologists have a porn problem. According to him, they wink, nod, and retail porn’s technological innovations — Porn drove VCR adoption! Porn is driving micro-payments! Porn is driving online video! — while ignoring its damaging effects. In...
Sorry folks. In adding a feature to my site’s feed I created a bug in many feed readers. I was trying to make it easier for people to keep track of comments on the site, but in doing so the effect...
Nick Bradbury has some thoughtful musings about combining OPML with attention data to get help manage the overload problem. He’s on the right track, but having just a run a Report of my most frequently visited blogs in Nick’s Feeddemon...
The Financial Times has a decent Chris Nuttall piece looking at the question of whether Microsoft's late start into lightweight, Internet-based services (i.e., Web 2.0) will matter. Historically Microsoft has been the quintessential fast follower, a company that rarely was...
There have been enough rumors over the last couple of days that you could have turned it into a drinking game. But I now see speculation on Om’s blog, as well as over on Niall’s site, so, with a caution...
There is a useful new McKinsey study out on the disappearance of the middle market. Providers of good enough, Sears-style stuff are increasingly being squeezed between discounters and aspirational-driven prosumer gear. This trend has been going on for some time,...
From today’s Wall Street Journal, a reader survey of the number of blogs WSJ-ers read weekly. The answer? Relatively few:...
There is fairly remarkable story in today's WSJ about how escalating demand and sorely limited supply have pushed ad rates on major sites up to "Super Bowl" levels. Specifically, the front page slot for large display ads at Yahoo, AOL,and...
Curbed has some spy shots inside Google's remarkable 310,000 (!) squ ft NYC Googleplex. The space stretches the entire square block from 15th St to 16th St, from 8th Ave. to 9th. It used to be occupied by Prudential Financial...
So, I messed with Google Base a bunch tonight and it doesn't do much for me. I've as much data I'd like to store as the next seven people, but Google Base isn't going to be where it goes. While...
Granted, we aren’t talking billion-dollar errors here, but this Google Adsense rounding error is entertaining:...
The Hollywood Reporter has a lengthy and very interesting interview with Rupert Murdoch. Here he is on the whole Internet thing: THR: Looking toward the future -- which you are always doing -- do you see opportunities, or are you...
I’m up in the Palo Alto area for some meetings on Wednesday. While I’m otherwise booked, I just had something cancel at 10am, so, on a whim, if there is anyone with an interesting project in that geography that they’d like...
For a bunch of reasons today was a train wreck, but it was one that required writing and responding to an unholy amount of email. So, here are my email stats for November 14, 2005: Messages received (non-spam): 218 Messages sent:...
So far this is no-contest: MeasureMap wins the blog analytics “war” in a walk. The specialized tools at MeasureMap, while far from perfect, are much more useful to bloggers than are the general purpose analytics out of Google/Urchin. (Whether that...
Some remarkable stats on MySpace’s growth, according to a new Comscore Metrics report (cited in BusinessWeek): 150,000 new users a day during the first half of November, up from about 100,000 a day last summer 24.2 million unique users in...
While many people are applauding Google’s decision to open up Urchin to all-comers, some Urchin customers are less pleased. Matter of fact, they’re downright angry. I’ll quote one such Urchin customer to demonstrate. He had to change log-ins, is now...
As I expected, Google has taken its Urchin acquisition and launched free website traffic analytics. While there have long been free traffic stats packages, most of them were clunky, too hard to install, and were not integrated with marketing/ad campaigns...
From Bill Whyman (no, not Bill Wyman) of the Precursor Group, here are three big myths about Microsoft as it heads into its biggest product in a decade:It is just a PC-software company. "The facts show that isn't true," with...
From Recombinant Capital (via Barron's -- which was awfully good this weekend):... the cost to license a well-tested biotech product has skyrocketed in the past five years, from around $85 million to $185 million -- counting up-front payments, research subsidies...
The following is interesting, with "coolness" ranking well down the list of reasons people report having bought iPods. Granted, there are normative and truthfulness issues here, so you have to be careful about reading overly much into the results, but...
There is an excerpt from writer David Vise's new book, "The Google Story", in the weekend WashPost. It contains the following interesting snippet: ...The company is quietly working with maverick biologist Craig Venter and others on groundbreaking genetic and biological...
One of the more entertaining aspects of some systems is that the mere act of observing the system causes the system itself to change. Apparently that phenomena exists in places other than subatomic physics, like the world of bulk email....
Erick Schonfeld's piece in Business 2.0 titled "The Flickrization of Yahoo" is interesting, but the most useful stuff is really, really buried. Like in the final three paras, buried. It takes until then, once we've explained tagging, talked about social...
Mike Singer's (free) tray-resident Weather Watcher just keeps getting better and better. Its latest incarnation is fast-loading and data-rich eye candy, with oodles of dandy weather data for those of us that can hardly bear taking our eyes from the...
Join with Om, like I am, and take the No GYM (no posting about Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft) vow for the next week (or year, or whatever). Who will be Kramer and first out of this abstinence contest? A zen...
I sent a mildly complaining note to a senior official at a well-known software company today. I was unhappy about a product feature that had never worked properly, so I wrote to ask “wassup”. Here is our (entertaining and brief) correspondence:...
Here is something I find interesting about the flotilla of beta-stage tools I’ve been testing lately, ranging from MeasureMap (traffic stats) to some unnamed others for blog income: None of these tools for measuring and managing RSS-driven sites have RSS...
This N.Y. Times piece on email overload is fine, if generally not providing anything new. But this snippet did catch my attention: Four percent [of email-using respondents to a recent survey] looked at e-mail in the bathroom. Only four percent? Based...
In all the chattering recently about information overload, attenuation, tools, and related issues, George Miller’s classic article “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information” (The Psychological Review, 1956, vol. 63) has strangely...
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has fun update on the continuing debate over Richard Florida’s “creative class” ideas, plus an amusing wander through what’s happened to Florida since: Richard Florida -- remember him? -- theorized that cities successful at attracting artisans, creative...
This is remarkable stuff: Alexa shows Digg’s traffic rank “closing” on Slashdot. Granted, we have to be careful when dealing in logarithmic scales, but it’s still a noteworthy organic accomplishment in less than a year. [Courtesy of Amazon/Alexa and via Marc]...
Courtesy of the e-hospitality of ex-Oddpost-er Tony Conrad, I got a chance recently to play with his new blog search tool, called Sphere. A confession: I didn’t tell Tony, but I’ve generally been of the heretical view that pure blog search...
There are just too few good wiki jokes: Q. How many Wiki people does it take to change a lightbulb?A. One, but anyone can change it back. [via Iain Lamb]...
I had a nice sushi lunch yesterday in San Francisco with the estimable Om Malik . I see that he has blogged about our “attention crisis” conversation, and some of the ways we try to manage the problem. (Yo Om, “iconic”?)...
Search service Kayak’s new “buzz” feature is interesting — in effect, a social search for travel. From the (currently) quarter-million searches done by Kayak users since Monday, you see (with obligatory Google Maps add-in) the best-priced travel from the location of...
One of the things that bugs me about traditional media is that they allude to source documents, like emails, but don’t just give you the full text. It’s so inside baseball, and it drives raw data fans like me nuts....
Here is Jim “Mad Money” Cramer opining entertainingly on Google, media, and the outlook for newspapers: On big media’s fear of Google … “The cowering has to do with the fact that they don’t even know what the Web offers. They’re...
The Ad:Tech blog is here....
A writer from AdAge apparently didn’t think much of Saatchi & Saatchi ad guy Kevin Roberts’ keynote Ad:Tech speech. Here are some choice quotes: “…speech heavily laced with buzzwords … the tome seemed heavy with full page photos and sprawls...
The Ad:Tech conference is underway in New York, and as you might imagine given the Google-ization of (some aspects of) advertising, the technology component of the event is interesting. Among other things, events today (from my remote read) reinforced how...
Here is Ted Schadler of Forrester Research on the consumer device adoption cycle: New consumer devices follow an adoption cycle with three market phases: emerging, expanding, and maturing. In each phase, different consumer segments enter the market in large numbers....
I’ve written here in the past about Gmail’s non-support of the IMAP mail protocol, but I’m on a different mission today. Having recently set a truckload of my email to forward to Gmail, much of which I later download via POP...
From Dan Primack’s PE Week Wire, the following factoid is astounding concerning private equity powerhouse Carlyle Group: …Carlyle spent around $500 million in I-banking fees over the past year. ...
From an email to me today from the folks at WSJ online: The Wall Street Journal Online is available free through Saturday, Nov. 12. I'll still be sending out links this week to select articles that will continue to be...
Many people are rightly fond of author William Gibson’s saying, “The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” Let me refine this slightly, with online porn as the example domain. Yes, I recognize the amorality of what I’m...
I’m fond of the virtual sweatshop Amazon just launched via Mechanical Turk, but the progenitor of this stuff online is, as is almost always the case in technology, the porn industry. Here’s Cory at BoingBoing from January of 2004: Someone...
The following is excerpted from an email today to me from a VC friend of mine. He decided to remind me about some public predictions I made in a December 2004 column about the outlook for Apple. Here is what...
I keep running into vendors who have left out crucial features in their products and services, but who extol the virtues of their fine API instead. “We left those features out on purpose,” they say. “We want the community to...
I want a geography-based todo list. I want something to remind me that the next time I’m in San Francisco to be sure to call person X, person Y, and visit company Z. Because I constantly talk to people and agree...
Argh, Microsoft has bought p2p synchronization company FolderShare, a service that I rely on heavily. Note to BillG: If you screw FolderShare’s products/services/pricing up — including unnecessarily folding it into some other Live-related service that I do not want — I...
It is a running joke in mashup circles that every such thing somehow involves Google Maps. It is a fair comment, but I want to go a level deeper. As the saying goes, When your only tool is a hammer,...
One of the favorite talking points of many supposedly neutral observers of the currently changing software scene is that while all sorts of apps are moving to online services, there are apps for which that will never happen (usually for...
Does anyone out there other than me find this sudden infatuation with customizable portals, a la Microsoft's Live, reminding them uncomfortably of the life and death of a tool called Octopus circa 2000-2001? Ah, those were the days, when a...
Speaking of attenuation -- the idea that we want see more of less, not less of more -- I have an application I've written over the last little while that I'll launch here shortly. While you won't see all the...
BillG, this is 2005. Why isn’t Windows Live “Live”? Here are some cases in point from playing with Microsoft’s beta of its new portal (sic.) for its various online software products. I had the following un-live things happen: Added Hotmail...
Barry Ritholz has a harrowing post up about his recent experience trying to puzzle through a CD’s copy protection. His discovery? Among other things, that copy protection in the form of digital rights management is more of an economic club...
Instantly create your own Web 2.0 company! No water needed. Perl and Apache not provided. Your traffic may vary, etc. Here is a company I just created and am quite fond of: Your company name: Yahoodoo Your company product: tag-based...
Courtesy of comments at Digg.com, here is the saga of some people who caught a computer parts retailer accidentally selling a 400GB hard drive for $23.99. As you might imagine at the price, things got a little snakey -- right...
George Colony, the founder of Forrester Research, has built a reputation for gut calls on technology markets. No IDC-style gigabyte-sized, hundred-column spreadsheets for him, no sir. Instead, he looks at markets, companies, and technologies, let’s it all percolate inside him...
I somehow missed this nice piece from the WSJ (sub. required) in mid October talking about the transformation of the data storage industry, a change that is leading to a 60% yearly increase in capacity. Here are some of the...
There is a somewhat cryptic Gartner report out arguing (I think) that enterprise technology markets increasingly take their cue from consumer tech markets. If I have parsed the precis correctly, then I'm in raging agreement -- that is exactly what...
While it took Amazon much longer than I expected it would to get around to doing this, it’s big news that the company has finally added DVD, book, and music historical pricing data to its web services. Yes, it’s only...
Rice University chemistry professor Richard Smalley, a Nobel laureate and a leader in the world of nanotechnology, died Friday of leukemia. It is a sad & early death for a brilliant and wonderfully creative man:Dr. Smalley, a short, trim man...
Mark Cuban will love this story in the weekend L.A. Times: Speaking at the annual ShowEast convention in Orlando, Florida, M. Night Shyamalan, the director and writer of "The Sixth Sense" and "Signs", railed against the current push for simultaneous...
Okay, maybe not the absolute biggest, but it's close: The side-by-side juxtaposition of Copy & Paste in the Windows Edit menu. Having the two right alongside one another it is like having Matter and Anti-matter in adjacent cells in an...
In a typically knee-jerk contrarian post on his site, Nick Carr jerks his knee and takes me to task by leaping (as he predictably does) to the other side of this Forbes vs Blogs topic. The trouble is, there is...
There is another Internet access gap and it isn’t income-related, it’s age-related. From some fascinating new Census Bureau data released this week: And why does the “geezer gap” exist? The Census Bureau has the answer: Older demographics of people with...
The “living” Calit2 building — kind of a Media Lab West — at UC San Diego is having its dedication ceremony today starting at 10am in La Jolla. Festivities for the place run from 10am this morning to late in the...
Forbes magazine has an over-heated cover story this week nominally telling businesses how to fight back against blogs. Fight back against blogs? The examples — l’affaire Radicati, the Kyptonite Incident — are more appropriately read as human, and, yes, sometimes...
Granted, this is financial geek talk, but it’s still an important and largely unheralded change that looks like it’s finally set to reach critical mass: … the Securities and Exchange Commission has issued a call to action. This month, SEC Chairman...
Like me, you’ve probably been soberly informed a quadzillion times by market researchers, analysts, and would-be pundits that young people don’t use email. They use instant messaging, we’re told, and that the Rest of Us still use email is a...
In playing with a couple of interesting Web 2.0–ish beta apps today, I got to think about how software pre-market testing nomenclature has deflated somehow. Beta is the new shipped product, alpha is the new beta, and a five-minute high-order bit is...
I just discovered that Portland airport now has free wireless throughout the main concourse. No more sitting on my suitcase outside the Alaska Airlines lounge just to get free Wi-Fi! Oh joy, oh bliss!...
The WSJ is running a story tonight suggesting that it will be Ebay that takes on the chin from the new Google Base database service that the aforementioned search company launched and unlaunched today. While that’s possible, it strikes me...
For those of you in Vancouver and environs, I’m giving a Web 2.0–ish talk (maybe more like a throat-clearing, given that I’m only allotted fifteen minutes) at a Vancouver Enterprise Forum get-together on Tuesday of this week. It’s in some golf-ball-shaped building...
Dorrian Porter has an appropriately wry and jaundiced take on the current goofy ardor among some “entrepreneurs” (I use that term advisedly) to advertise for fellow founders: …I don't understand why some really smart people want to attract to their own...
One of the memes trotted out by Malcolm Gladwell in the Big Think roundtable with Time magazine last week was this one: A lot of what we've been talking about falls in the category of change, not progress. To use...
Today's WSJ contains a puffy piece about advertising in RSS feeds, but it does close with the useful point that one of the more significant barriers to RSS adoption remains the only-a-techie-could-love-it name:But before companies can start chalking up a...
In a roundtable from last week's Time magazine on technology and societal trends that I somehow missed until now, most of the best lines went to Malcolm Gladwell. Sure, some of this stuff is breathy Toffler-talk, but it is still...
I had meant to mention this for some time, but Jerry Michalski and Pip Coburn have, for about a year now, been hosting a great technology-centric web call-in show called Yi-Tan. While I long assumed Jerry and Pip intentionally kept...
Back in an October 8th Economist magazine profile of Technorati founder Dave Sifry there was this passage about Technorati's list of then-hot topics:Technorati is a pioneering search engine for blogs, which allows the surfer to connect to online chatter on...
I just realized one of my work email addresses was in a forwarding frenzy: People would send me email at the work address The address was set to bounce it to an ISP address that I only use to receive...
The very smart Scott White has an economically-literate and cheerfully personal look at how tricky it can be to bid on niche products online. As he says, the problem is that online markets, like Ebay, do nothing to give bidders...
Nick Carr is continuing with his quasi-religious re-interpretation of technology markets. Last week he mused provocatively on the amorality of Web 2.0, and this week he takes a similar perspective on the root problems with Google’s ham-handed handling of its...
I subscribe to a feed of domain names being put up for auction. It is a bizarro-world window into speculator land, a place where people stake out tiny virtual plots that they think will one day be of value to...
Lots of people punning about Flock now that the somewhat stealth browser-thingie is in wider beta. I have to confess, however, that I’ve messed with it and been largely unimpressed. It is nowhere near as feature-rich as my preferred browsing...
First-mover advantage, in all but the rarest circumstances, is a myth. For every example of someone winning a market by being first, there are ten (twenty?) examples of people failing and being supplanted by a late-comer, whether in technology (Google)...
I was scanning John Battelle’s book “The Search” today in a bookstore and I ran into an anecdote I hadn’t heard before. While I knew Andy Bechtolsheim was Google’s first angel investor, and I knew the investment happened quickly on...
Startup LogLogic does a nice job of telling the story about why it’s crucial to think in a nuanced way about the data thrown by your organization every day, and how you can make it searchable and useful. What they...
While I’m still thinking of exercise from my last post about exer-gaming, I ran into a fascinating paper in the Journal of Applied Physiology the other day. It was about some of the physiological changes and stresses induced by training...
I’ve been saying this was coming for years, so it’s good to see that the confluence of exercise and gaming is finally starting to happen (even if the WSJ writer isn’t fond of the idea): My visit to the Intel...
While Bob Wyman's Pubsub has been a mainstay of my blog monitoring -- I use it in particular for an ego feed with which I track mentions of moi -- but it is newly going nuts. In the last few...
The weekend N.Y. Times visited ex-Microsoft CTO Nathan Myrhvold and discovered that his kitchen was likely the main contender for best-equipped-in-the-universe:Myhrvold's kitchen just outside Seattle is a vast sculpture garden of stainless gadgetry, 2-inch-thick granite countertops, massive butcher-block chopping areas,...
There are some nifty personal productivity ideas for hacking Gmail in this ExtremeTech article today -- including that you can append anything after a "+" sign to your email, i.e., pig.bodine@gmail.com is the same as pig.bodine+pynchon@gmail.com are the same. But...
There is a fascinating Bob Garfield-penned cover piece in the current issue of Advertising Age on bringing the open source ethos to marketing -- specifically, to advertising. Bob talks to how there is now a two-way conversation between consumers and...
Over the last few days I have repeatedly gone back and forth from the #1 to the #2 position at Google for the keyword “greed”. I’m running a tight race with a “Seven Deadly Sins” site and its entry on...
… it’s still not better than Feeddemon. No watches, no filters, a slower UI, etc. etc. Bloglines is improving, and it’s great having (some) hotkeys, but it’s not there yet....
For some reason I haven’t said it here before, but I love PR Newswire. It is like being hooked up to an information machine gun powered by improbability drive: A chest shot of data, claims, and assorted pleas for attention,...
Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham have “flipped the switch” on their Union Square Ventures website and gone all blog, all the time. Here is their rationale: We realized that our [investment] thesis evolves incrementally as a result of our dialogue with...
Did PartyGaming pick the poker peak? (Try to say that ten times fast.) It sure seems like online poker peaked almost precisely when PartyGaming went public in a much-ballyhooed $9–billion IPO on the AIM this summer. Consider this latest news:...
From a new Guardian study on young people’s use of the Internet: On average, people between 14 and 21 spend almost eight hours a week online, but it is far from a solitary activity. There are signs of a significant...
Lots of people talking about this transcript of teenagers talking about technology from the Web 2.0 conference. While I’m hesitant to read overly much into what teens say they want from technology, I did find the negative comments on Skype,...
From a post by venture guy Steve Hall of Vulcan Ventures on things he saw on laptop screens around him at Web 2.0: By doing some casual monitoring of the numerous laptops around me in the audience, I discovered: A...
Great and visceral post from EVDB founder Brian Dear about his unease with last week’s Web 2.0 conference. While he and I talked about some of this in person in San Francisco, his post (the second of three) is great...
I’ve had some interesting conversations lately with a number of folks who are much closer to Microsoft than I am. Not to be offensively vague, but more than a few people are hinting at something significant impending on the financial/strategic...
Here is an app I’d like to see: Google maps for recreation. Whether I’m biking, running, blading, or other, I’m often stuck trying to figure out the optimal route from A to B, or wondering whether there are any good...
Among other things, the AOL acquisition of Weblogs, Inc., has apparently convinced some people that AOL has set a stake in the ground for how Weblogs are to be valued. While I’m entertained by the analysis, one anomalous purchase does...
One of the nice things about coming to a conference like Web 2.0 is the conversations you get to have. I have been able to chat with a host of folks I only run into at conferences (like Jeremy, or...
Another fun factoid from the new Piper Jaffray study on consumer markets: According to the survey, the intent to purchase a Plasma/LCD TV within thenext six months dropped from 40 percent in the spring 2005 survey to 11percent in this...
A new Piper Jaffray study is out looking at teens’ shopping habits, and this snippet on videogames is eye-opening: … 75 percent of teens say their interest in video games is declining and 78 percent indicated they spent less time...
In a sense, reality TV is just user-generated content. It is amateurs doing what they do, and creating content as a byproduct of their actions. Granted, network/cable television still has an unhealth level of control as mediator and distributor, but you...
I love Nick Denton’s ballsy riposte viz AOL’s purchase of Jason Calacanis’s Weblogs Inc: For what it's worth, Gawker isn't for sale. The whole point about blogs is that they're not part of big media. Consolidation defeats the purpose. It's...
In a recent biotechnology seminar I made the following case about overly enthusiastic biotechnology economic development initiatives, but it bears repeating. Officials insist on chasing madly after biotechnology companies, throwing money at the industry in hopes of getting companies and...
Here is (entirely anecdotal) year-over-year growth in Web 2.0 conference attendance: 2004: 400–ish (from foggy memory) 2005: 900–ish (according to the nice woman who registered me) Someone at O’Reilly can correct me if I have these figures badly wrong, but...
I had someone say this in a comment post that maybe Web 2.0 was just a Google affiliates program, given how every mash-up seems tied to Google. I see Marc Hedlund adding data to the point in a post from Web...
With news today that Google has added Princeton University president Shirley Tilghman to its board of directors, the company has entered a rarefied class. Tilghman will serve alongside Stanford University president John Hennessy, making Google almost certainly the only public...
Okay, my mash-up is finally working (mostly). I’ve just finished coding my little project, a Google maps mash-up I’m calling PublicLoos. As the name suggests, PublicLoos overlays the location of various public restrooms against a city map. In honor of...
The Stealth Project Formerly Known as 24 Hour Laundry is now live and called Ning. So, what is the service co-founded by Gina Bianchini and some guy named Marc Andreessen? It is a toolbox/playground for the unwashed to use and...
… I’m unapologetically fascinated by the activities of a new National Cancer Institute center here at UC San Diego: The National Cancer Institute (NCI) today awarded the University of California, San Diego $3.9 million in the first year of a...
I like how Brian Dear incorporates my “dark matter” idea into his description of how his Eventful service works: When it comes to events, EVDB and our Eventful service are all about enabling discovery of the whole long tail of events:...
Having been accused in a comment of running a “Web 2.0 Week“ here at Infectious Greed, I thought it best to just rename the site: Infectious Greed 2.0. I’m kidding. More seriously, the ideas underlying any supposed change are what’s...
In a piece in today’s Boston Globe, Monster.com comes across as surprisingly sanguine about the threat posed to the job listings company by aggregators like Indeed and SimplyHired. For their part the folks at the newcomer firms are aiming at...
Of the many missives directed Google’s way over last week’s announcement of an unusual tie-up with NASA, the most delightfully fun critique comes tonight from Matt Asay: Take a look at NASA's press release: NASA and Google have signed a memorandum...
A reader made some provocative comments on an earlier post about Web 2.0, so I’ll repost them here: As much as I love trying the new technology and services, very little has changed in how I use the web. Only...
I have used this Jose Luis Borges quote before (it comes the excellent collection Selected Non-Fictions), but things have been reminding me of it again this morning: The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our...
This story about a digital plague in the online game World of Warcraft is both fascinating and depressing: [The game’s designers gave] a monster the ability to curse in-game avatars with a self-propagating, albeit temporary, disease. While the developers only...
I have had many people ask whether I’m at Web 2.0 in San Francisco next week, and the answer is yes. I’ll be there for a somewhat abbreviated visit, arriving Wednesday afternoon and leaving Friday morning. If anyone would like to...
I had an interesting conversation with the CEO of a venture-backed company recently where he “explained” why CEOs of such firms need to be paid more now than an inflation-adjusted increase from, say, five years ago. He argued that in...
Here is some very cool stuff from the iGrid conference in San Diego: The first-ever live HD-quality video from a deep-sea vent. This video comes from the Juan de Fuca Ridge, about 200 miles off the Washington-British Columbia coast. You...
The New York Observer has a lengthy profile of Gawker Media guy Nick Denton, ringmaster for 14 blog sites, including such well known ones as Gawker, Defamer, Wonkette, Engadget, and Fleshbot. Among other things, we learn that some staffers are...
Interesting Josh Jaffe piece on TheDeal about v2.0 online travel guides. The latest iterations of such things, sites like 43 Places and TravelPost.com, take community/conversation-centric approaches, built around RSS and user-contributed stuff. Will it work? Well, everyone thinks they have...
From the current issue of entertainment trade mag Variety, a new word for me today: While games, graphics and ringtones are well-established, Americans can now add "mobisodes," byte-sized clips that play on a cell phone's screen, to their busy entertainment...
Yo Dick, there’s some fellow named Larry Lessig who has awfully nice things to say about you: Dick Hardt is brilliant. Watch (and copy) the style. Learn tons from the substance. (My pride is tied to the style only). Congrats,...
I’m messing around with the newly-launched Jotspot Live, which has some features of the collaborative part of Writely, plus some of Subethaedit. While I have no idea if anyone will pay for these apps, I love all the new collaborate...
While I’m traveling for the early part of this week, I’m looking forward to being back in La Jolla in time for some of iGrid 2005. Some really, really cool high-bandwidth applications being shown off there, some of which is...
A reader makes this comment in a post to my earlier note here about Ajax Office apps, but he is so on-point that I thought it worth elevating to an entry: Friends used to work for a company called Desktop.com....
In looking at FilmLoop — which launched last week at DemoFall in Huntington Beach — I was reminded of one of my pet theories. It goes like this: The ultimate form of (technology-centered) communications intimacy is unfiltered access to my...
I’m demonstrably not the only one who a) dumpster dives in referrer logs, and b) is often-entertained by what I find there. The following is from GruntDoc’s blog: A phrase used to find this blog recently: "if my patient has...
Judging by Pip Coburn’s comments in Waypoint 3.0 this week, he is as puzzled as I am by the eBay/Skype deal: So what was eBay thinking? Here are some options: Option 1: eBay was goaded into the Skype deal, and...
Leapfrog’s Peter Rip has, like many of us, been running into AJAX (or Flash, or Flex) re-dos of Office software components lately. The trend toward desktop-software-less office tools continues apace. AJAX Office is Everywhere! Wow. In the past three days...
While I’m an unapologetic fan of four-letter acronyms, it’s nice to see that event service/database EVDB now has a name for its people-facing aspect that won’t scare innocent bystanders so much: Eventful. Hey Brian, not that you asked, but I...
I’ve been complaining here for some time about how crummy current email clients are, from IMAP support to their outdated approach to message organization. Turn out I’m not alone: both Mac users and Windows/Outlooks sorts are not happy emailers either. While...
For us weather geeks this sort of thing creates a species of bliss....
Whoa, that’s two weeks in a row where I’ve agreed with Walt Mossberg. I’m going to have to soon stop reading the Wall Street Journal. Last time around it was Foldershare that had me agreeing with the WSJ’s big-footed technology...
It’s possibly the dumbest name I’ve seen for a search engine, but newly-launched Dumbfind.com has at least one quasi-interesting idea. Rather than forcing people to figure out how to stratify their search results by topic using keywords — like Churchill...
I’m fascinated by payphones. For example, for a long time when I used them it felt slightly declasse, as if I needed to say, “I have a cell phone, you know, but the battery is dead.” God forbid anyone should...
You don’t have to be a golfer to be impressed with how well golf equipment manufacturer Titleist gets RSS. The company has taken pretty much every segment of its business that produces customer-facing data and turned it into a feed,...
Only Fortune magazine running a “Microsoft is Doomed !!” cover next week could make things any cheerier for Bill Gates and his Washington-based software company. After all, this week we have a contrarian two-fer, with both BusinessWeek (“I’m Outta Here!:...
Zack’s Investment Research has launched some interesting new RSS investment feeds. So far, I’m fond of the “Bear of the Day” feed. Nice skeptical way to start the day....
I’ve been looking for some time for a Windows tool that allowed realtime collaborative document editing, a la the Mac-only SubEthaEdit. I’m now beta-testing Writely, a nifty web-based editor with a useful quasi-realtime collaboratation component. It isn’t the same as...
Today’s Wall Street Journal contains an article on so-called next-generation price comparison sites. While I’m a big fan of such things — I’ve been looking hard for investment ideas in the area — and I used Pricegrabber extensively in two...
Analyst Mary Meeker is back with a typically breathless report, this time on Chinese Internet stocks. NakedShorts has the most penetrating assessment: Internet Queen returns to the pump Henry Blodget and Jack Grubman are banned from the securities industry for...
EBay’s press release on buying Skype contains a Vegomatic-y (It dices! It minces! It chops!) justification for its purchase of Skype: – Skype will streamline and improve communications between buyers and sellers as it is integrated into the eBay marketplace....
The price on the blockbuster Oracle deal for Siebel works out to around 3.7-times sales for the CRM company, a fairly steep price, me-thinks, for a moribund enterprise software company growing under 5% a year. But when you factor in Siebel's $4.29...
Well, knock me over with a feather. The rumors of an EBay/Skype tie-up aren’t just rumors — there’s a deal. According to Reuters late tonight, the deal has EBay paying $2.6–billion for Skype — which is around 40–times current year revenues,...
Q: Who is the largest recipient of overnight mail in the world? A: The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). Source: I/P Updates...
With more than 100 responses in to my screen real estate survey already, I thought people might be interested in the results so far: 1) How many screens do you have now? 1: 44.6% 2: 50% 3 or more: 5.6%...
If you choose to you can live your life aloneSome people choose the citySome others choose the good old family homeI like living easy without family tiesTill the whippoorwill of freedom zapped meRight between the eyes. — “Philadephia Freedom”,...
There was a bizarre Henry Blodget column in yesterday’s NY Times. The subject? The tenth anniversary of Netscape. The strangest part of the piece was how little blame Henry apparently accepts for his role in creating the biggest bubble in...
I’m admittedly no instant messaging maven — and I sometimes go months without even being connected — but why is it not (seemingly) possible to have different modes of IM depending on what I”m currently doing? When I’m at work I...
Nick Bradbury has a nice quote on how Apple’s opacity is an irritating throwback to a pre-blog world, one where transparency and clear communiticaton channels wasn’t as important as it is today. Anyway, Nick’s example is built around how iTunes...
The plugged-in Matt Marshall at SiliconBeat says that next up for Google is … Google Finance: Now that we have Google Talk, the whispering here in Silicon Valley is that Google hopes to launch Google Finance sometime in September. We...
There is a fascinating discussion debate/underway between the folks at O’Reilly and various critics. The latter are claiming that O’Reilly’s sites are complict in search-spamming — the idea of raising a site’s ranking by gaming Google’s (and others) search algorithms....
From a Technology Review interview last year with venture guy Mike Moritz: TR: How about "first to market"?MM: An utterly dreadful phrase. I way prefer to focus on how a company becomes first in market....
I was scanning my referrer logs this morning and I noticed an unholy number of people coming here having searched for “Google Talk” at Google. While I mentioned the subject yesterday in a post, I sincerely doubted I had risen...
Pardon the brief commercial intrusion, but folks might want to stay tuned later today. I have a Google maps mashup that I’ve been busy creating in my not-so-spare time, and it should be ready shortly. I think people will find...
Google Talk, an instant messaging VoIP application from Google, is apparently imminent. I haven’t seen it, but ignorance is not an obstacle to all members of the commentariat. Consider the following quotes from Think Equity analyst John Tinker in an L.A....
Speaking as the recent acquirer of two (!) high-definition televisions — a Samsung 56” DLP unit and a Sony 34” LCD panel — I’m newly fascinated by pretty much anything that augurs more and better HD content for my two...
I’m entertained by Business 2.0’s new contest (?) whereby various namebrand VCs have posed business & technology problems around which they would like to see companies built. The ideas range from a co-op service for banks, to fraudproof credit authorization for...
The eclectic, insightful, and typographically ebullient Pip Corburn has released his first new piece of equity research since leaving UBS Securities. Those of you on the buy (or sell) side of things in technology will know Coburn well. He was...
Our man Dan Loeb is at it again, this time with a cheery letter to management of Western Gas, a Third Point portfolio company. After applauding the company’s potential for increased growth, and helpfully recommending that the company should initiate...
Akamai’s new realtime news consumption thingie is interesting, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what good it is. When I first loaded it global news traffic was 1% below normal, and now it has fallen to...
Given the news this morning that Google plans to sell 14.2–million shares, thus raising as much as $4.2–billion (at current prices), it is fun speculating what the company plans to do with its soon-to-be $7.1–billion total of balance sheet cash. After...
Chris Anderson nails what’s wrong with “Top XXX” lists of bloggers, especially those measured by incoming links. As shown in the most recent example, Technorati’s Top 500 list, such things are too head-centric: they over-emphasize one dimension (incoming links) and...
In quasi-venture capital news, Fresh Air’s Terry Gross has an interview today with Neil Clark Warren, the Evangelical Christian founder of online dating service eHarmony. Recall, about eight months ago eHarmony landed a $110–million venture round (well, more like a private IPO)...
Om Malik highlights the childish foo(d)-fight over who gets to attend Foo Camp, the invite-only annual O’Reilly event this weekend in Sebastopol, California. My take, as someone who is not attending Foo Camp, but who likes to think of himself...
From Charlie Wood’s blog, this excellent guerilla-style (but practically-minded) guide to real-world product management: With limited resources, an organization has to find a way to ruthlessly optimize its product development process. My personal product management philosophy is tagged in my...
Running around like a mad thing today — including a fascinating breakfast discussion about developments in contact lens technology — but here a few articles I’ve been reading that others may found interesting: Tim Draper as Gonzo VC I don’t...
Nivi has noticed something remarkable on Craigslist: I was recently looking through craigslist’s Bay Area computer gigs for engineers on a project I am working on (codename: Ninja). And I was blown away by the number of people who are...
ARTHUR: Go and tell your master that we have been charged by God with a sacred quest. If he will give us food and shelter for the night he can join us in our quest for the Holy Grail.GUARD: Well,...
The mordant Jeff Matthews is on a roll concering Patrick Byrne and the bizarre Overstock.com story: Did I stutter? Did I stutter or did I say I was going to take this fight to you? Well now you know what...
According to the L.A. Times, it is Blinkx that is the search engine object of Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition intentions. Fair enough, given the startup’s focus on rich media search, but not exactly the sort of centi-million dollar acquisition that many...
Really nice piece of data visualization (a current obsession of mine) here that lets you filter through zip codes interactively as you enter digits. Speaking of data visualization, Jon Udell noticed today that the folks at Juice Analytics (which is...
Today’s SF Chronicle contains a look at Google’s growing pains, with the company having long outgrown the small company description. Matter of fact, it is looking more and more like another large and bureaucratic outfit: But Google is also feeling...
There are two interestingly sorta-contradictory market research reports out. First this one: PHP, Perl and Python Development Drops Off In EMEA, New Evans Data Survey SANTA CRUZ, CA, August 3, 2005 - Researchers at Evans Data Corporation have released the...
From an interesting interview with Flickr’s Eric Costello about the evolution, history, and development strategy of Flickr: The inspiration in large part for [Flickr’s precursor] was actually Neopets, which had tremendous success among young people as a way to interact...
From BusinessWeek, perhaps the worst-kept secret in technology, that Skype is officially on the block, albeit with the tidbit that Morgan Stanley is running the book and an IPO is more likely than a sale: Skype: On The Block Skype,...
You had to know this was going to be one of his main subjects, but venture guy Bill Gurley’s Next Big Thing Q&A in the FT today includes an ode to the wonders of MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games), a...
Today’s Washington Post has a “two data points makes a trend” piece on the supposed rise of do-goodnik venture investing. Trouble is, the article contains virtually no data to support its point — that Silicon Valley sorts are now trying...
There is a cornuccopia of predictable “tenth anniversary of Netscape’s IPO” features floating around, from Fortune’s solid & interesting editorial package a few weeks ago, to a strange “Ask Bill Gurley” piece in today’s Financial Times, to a generally anodyne editorial...
The New England Journal of Medicine has a worried editorial in its current issue about the MatchingDonors.com website, which matches (live) organ donors with (live) would-be organ transplant recipients: [MatchingDonors.com] currently claims to have more than 2100 registered potential donors...
A Boston Globe article today makes it sound like it’s raining money in the venture fund-raising game: Five years after the dot-com bust, venture capital and buyout firms are in the midst of a new wave of fund-raising. Firms closed...
In case folks haven't seen it, Chris Anderson is saying that things were askew in his original "long tail" analysis. Instead of 57% of Amazon's sales coming from products in the long tail (i.e., outside the top 100,000 books), it...
There is a “two-points-makes-a-trend” (okay, four) piece in today’s Times on founders cashing out during venture investments. This would be interesting, if true, as VCs are usually chary about letting incoming capital in an early-stage financing round go to the company...
There is a nice new release of event search/monitoring database EVDB out tonight. Any resemblance to Google Local is, I would guess, intentional, but I do like the combination of tags with the Where/What interface....
Apparently Seattle-ites are just as fond of stealth startups as the sneaky boys and girls down here in California: Venture Capital: Startups are coming back -- quietly By JOHN COOKSEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER Here's a sign that Seattle's startup community is...
Earlier this week I bought a television online at a major electronics e-commerce outfit. Unlike the last time I purchasing something over $1,000 online, I was called afterwards by the vendor's credit department who asked some skill-testing questions. While I'm...
As hard to believe as it might be in this perpetually downbound sector, hard drive prices in the low end of the storage business (80mb) have newly been going up. From my (proprietary, ahem) data on hard-drive prices: Average 80GB drive...
Jeff Nolan asks a question that occurs to me every time I’m up in the Valley for meetings: How is it that the Silicon Valley has the worst damned cell coverage of any major metro area? And the most bizarre...
Mark Cuban continues to make the argument that in digital products it makes no sense to promote and sell a product twice. Case in point: Hollywood studios should run one marketing campaign for new movies, and then release in theater...
The Stalwart has a thoughtful look at why Google’s shares are currently weaker than you might expect — and why that might last thru August 19th....
The following chart shows the number of times various of my rules have been hit by comment/trackback spam on my Movable Type blog installation. I use MT-Blacklist to block such stuff, one of the pluses of which is that you...
AdAge has an interesting piece this weekend on Massive's first real-time ads being served into video games. Say what you will about its desirability, or lack thereof, this is inevitable stuff:Massive Inc., whose ad serving network for computer games began...
From a new paper demonstrating that stocks prices are skewed along geographic lines:The Only Game in Town: Stock-Price Consequences of Local BiasHarrison Hong, Jeffrey D. Kubik, Jeremy C. Stein Theory suggests that, in the presence of local bias, the price...
From a (scary) weekend Washington Post article, here is the three-year sales trend for electronic accessories (displays, DVDs, games, etc.) sold into North American cars:2003: $470mm2004: $830mm2005: $2-billionA decade from now doing the correlations with changing traffic accident incidences will...
If any Infectious Greed readers are at the always interesting Siggraph conference in Los Angeles this coming week, it’s looks like I’ll be there Monday/Tuesday. I’ve been attending Siggraph off and on since the mid-1990s (Orlando 1994 was my first),...
There is a timely Gina Kolata (she’s becoming a must-read for me) piece in today’s NY Times about how athletes are increasingly becoming data junkies, from heart-rate monitors to power meters. There is even a name for people overcome with...
Most readers of this site won’t have noticed or remember, but way back in April I put up a piece here about the Jack-FM radio format and the iPod-ification of radio. As it has turned out, the piece has had...
Are members (Marc?) of aSmallWorld sworn to Masons-style secrecy? Too bad, because while more egalitarian sorts out there might be be less fond than I am of a social networking site that is unabashedly elitist and exclusive, there is a...
From a Detroit News article on why golf handicaps have not come down despite significant improvements in golf club technology: "Amateurs are less consistent and, therefore, do not experience the full effect of this technology," said [a prominent golf course...
The current issue of John Brockman’s Edge contains a wide-ranging summer reading list, all orbiting the intersection of technology, science, and culture....
A few days ago I highlighted a post a reader had made here about Angie’s List, one of many sites that allow people to rate local service providers, like plumbers, mechanics, electricians, and so on. You might have thought the...
From Dave Weinberger, a moment of geek-out bliss via this list of all academic and scientific journals with RSS feeds: … the University of Saskatchewan Library's list of feeds from hundreds of journals, from Abacus to World journal of surgical...
Only in Washington would an agriculture committee (okay, the Rural Enterprises, Agriculture and Technology Subcommittee of the House Small Business Committee) be holding a hearing on the role of venture capital in biotechnology. There are some interesting folks presenting, and...
Fascinating watching as TV Guide finally concedes the inevitable, that a paper-based weekly guide to television programs is verging on irrelevant, like newspaper-based stock listings: TV Guide, in a major shift to win over readers and advertisers, will be overhauled...
While I have tried Konfabulator various times, I have to confess I’ve always ended up uninstalling it. Given that I’m a gadget junkie through and through, I am puzzled that Yahoo has bought the widget company. Anyone want to explain...
Focus is the new black. Last week at the AlwaysOn conference I watched as a bevy of back-row bloggers typed madly — doing email, blogging, IM-ing, participating in the in-room chat, etc. — as speakers tried desperately to get their...
A venture-guy friend of mine loves A.B.D.s. Translated from a grad school three-letter acronym, “A.B.D.” means “all but dissertation”. It is a higher-ed way of referring to people who have started a Ph.D., completed their coursework, likely done their comprehensive...
Oracle's Larry Ellison helpfully points out in an interview that there are too many software companies. He doesn't say which ones he's thinking about, but I can guess:For years Oracle wasn't acquisitive. What changed?The industry. It's in a phase of...
While sites like Angie's List -- customer reviews of local consumer-centric companies by region -- get a fair amount of attention, no-one talks much about the consequences of pushing "intelligence" to the edge. For example, a relatively small number of...
I’ve long been intrigued by the growing literature on technology’s unanticipated consequences. Examples range from the argument that better technology makes sports like tennis worse, not better; to how indiscriminate use of antibiotics has helped create hardier strains of bacteria...
Giving guidance as a public company is one of those things that you have to practise. There is a knack to being empirical and elliptical at the same time; it’s not something you just do, like taking a turn at bat...
It was apparently KP-day today at AlwaysOn, with KP partners Bill Joy and Ray Lane presenting, plus KP investee Kim Polese (of SpikeSource) on a panel. Perhaps KP overload somehow explains why the chat screen got so nutty during Steve...
Mark Cuban is onstage and the backchannel of chatter on the giant sidescreen at the front of the room is fairly brutal. Nothing like being onstage while someone accuses you of “pump and dump” tactics:...
George Gilder is onstage here at the AlwaysOn Conference, and he is in fine, mad form. So far he has noisily explained (complete with his uniquely Gilderian “throw me the ball” hand gestures) that WiFi and WiMax are irrelevant rearguard actions...
Moments ago onstage at the AlwaysOn Conference: Question (to Skype CEO Niklas Zennstrom): How is Tim [Draper, of DFJ] as a boardmember? Niklas (while sitting beside Draper): He’s great. C’mon people....
I’ve often said that the thing that I miss most — other than the outrageous money, of course — from my equity analyst days was a decent realtime newswire, like Reuters or DJNR. Well, while it’s not all the way there,...
Tim O’Reilly follows up an email discussion he and I have been having about the architecture of participation and drive-by data by pointing out that real social networks are out there and ready to be modeled — it’s email: When...
Way back in January of this year I pondered on this site what was up at WinZip. I had spotted a puzzling Dow Jones story alluding to $15mm in secured notes bought by Vector Capital in support of a deal...
The folks at search thingie Blinkx are among the most creative engineers around — and today’s launch of the must-use Blinkx.tv for rich media search results returned via RSS proves it — but they have the ugliest website in the...
From the wires, first we have Microsoft’s view of Google’s poaching of Microsoft search guru Kai-Fu Lee: 3:28pm Google Hired Lee To Lead China R&D Center [CBS Marketwatch] 3:28pm Microsoft Says Lee'S Google Job Focuses On Same Areas [CBS Marketwatch]...
Oh my, but the MySpace.com acquisition for more than half-a-billion dollars is going to cause a VC-driven content train wreck. We already had startups falling out of trees making MySpace comparisons, now they’re going to be thick on the ground,...
Argh. Email distribution lists are evil. While I am subscribed to a declining number of such things — RSS has appropriate replaced many of ‘em — I still get quite a few lists via email, from news to discussion. But...
I am sitting here this morning watching the British Open, doing some blogging, answering email, and, most importantly, following the Tour de France “queen” mountain stage via Cyclingnew.com live updates. The most recent entry was the following, which is definitely the sort...
You had to know this was inevitable, but it’s still interesting watching it happen: Outsourcing is already losing its luster (according to an article in Investment Dealers’ Digest), only to be replaced by, of course, insourcing! Some investors and the companies...
From AdAge: WASHINGTON POST WEB SITE PUTS ADS IN RSS FEEDS Becomes First Major News Site to Sell the Ad Format July 15, 2005 NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Washingtonpost.com yesterday quietly began integrating advertising into its RSS feeds, the first...
This Fortune magazine retrospective on Netscape and the birth of the web is well worth reading, with interviews from people like Jim Clark, Eric Bina, and others who have been out of sight for a little while....
Nick Bradbury’s new 1.6 beta version of (best in class) client-side feed reader Feeddemon is unsurprisingly impressive. It has nice synch features with Newsgator, a well thought-out approach to subscription software, and a spiffy and modern new interface that I’m...
My post-holiday, de-spammed, mailing-list removed, dupes-eliminated count of unread emails: 737. Oye....
While new Google Maps remixes are beginning to be about as common as dog hair in a house with a golden retriever, this one from socalTECH is nifty. It combines a Google map of southern California with a list of...
Mark Cuban has out an appropriately critical column today about podcasting. Speaking from his experience as a pioneer in streaming video, and as someone with a nose for making money, Cuban has this to say about the financial prospects for...
The estimable Andrew Odlyzko of the University of Minnesota gave a typically fascinating and contrarian talk on Internet economics and the telecommunications outlook at the San Diego Supercomputer Center earlier this week. The video is available here, and it’s well...
The RSS feed from DealNews is a classic syndication application, one that combines small pieces of information (product discounts) and perishability (one day only!) in a way that sends data to people and creates urgency and a compulsion to act. I...
While it’s not as slick as the cyclist in me would like — I want dynamic, high resolution, fully isometric views whereby I can “fly” the route, including grinding up the Galibier, etc. — but this is still a neat...
Many issues that seem sterile or settled in the abstract become downright visceral when they happen to you. Case in point: Nick Bradbury, make of the fine client-side Feeddemon RSS aggregator, has decided to turn his product into subscription software....
Social spreadsheet software: A contradiction in terms? [Courtesy (the excellent) Download Squad.]...
Sad but fascinating, there is apparently an unintended consequence of posting resumes online -- identity theft:The big benefit of posting your resume on the Internet is that anyone, anywhere can access it and offer you a job. The big drawback?...
Google has leaped up today's recalculated Financial Times list of the 500 largest public companies in the world by market capitalization. The search company has advanced 184 spots, making it far and away the biggest gainer: Google's phenomenal share price...
From an interview in GelfMag:Gelf Magazine: Why did you start blogging? What keeps you going? Jason Mulgrew: Revenge, mostly. That and I'm trying to make sure that a simple Google search will disqualify me from all future employment....
Not to read overmuch into this, but it was interesting to see last week that Pixar adjusted its earnings outlook based on crummy sales of its The Incredibles DVD. This is, however, part of an industry-wide softening in the DVD...
This is such an interesting factoid from the San Jose Business Journal and the Bureau of the Census. Detroit is no longer in the ten largest cities in the U.S., having been surpassed by San Jose:San Jose passed Detroit in...
Yesterday's Financial Times contains an interesting article on location-based technologies -- geo-visualization, to be jargon precise -- and their use in archaeology and retail. The core of the piece is a recounting of one fellow's search for Ulysses' Ithaca via...
Some would-be phishers have a clever new idea. Rather than pretending to be from your bank and sending you an email asking you to click through and confirm account details, they are pretending to be from a magazine whose mailing...
David Hornik of August Capital has taken a shot at the titleholder, Marc Canter, of most active conference-goer on the planet -- and conceded that the title is still Marc's to keep. Hey, it was worth a shot, but Marc's...
One of the problems with attending conferences like the current Where 2.0 is being buttonholed by smart and interesting people with great early-stage projects. Why is it a problem? Because while I'm fascinated with what people are doing I want...
From a panelist on a geolocation panel moments ago:"Looking for WiFi hotspots is a bourgeois activity [and then realizing people were laughing at the idea] ... and so is driving directions for that matter." While that might or might not...
John Hanke, founder of Keyhole (now part of Google), just did something in his Where 2.0 presentation that I think was a software first: He apologized for having created a binary-installed app (Google Earth) as opposed to a web app....
Here are two things most people demonstrably don't get about user-generated content in Web 2.0: It doesn't work if it feels like work.For the general population to embrace it needs to skew toward drive-by data.Too many of the current Web...
The WSJ has a classic third-column piece on the front page of today's paper. It is on the bizarro technology-denying behavior of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services boffins who, for reasons lost in the yellow-papered past, insist that fingerprints expire,...
I like Ajax-y online email app Oddpost, and was a paying subscriber before it was purchased by Yahoo, so apparently I'm going to get to play with the new Yahoo/Oddpost beta ... but I have a confession to make: I...
Tomorrow (Wednesday) and Thursday I'll be at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco. If any readers are around and would like to hook up send me a note and let's see what we can do. I'm fascinated by the...
From a piece in EE Time today suggesting that any phffft-ing of global house prices would have a nasty effect on semiconductor markets:[The analyst] cited an article in The Economist and reported that the total value of residential property in...
Whenever I first visit someone's house I can't stop myself from shelf-surfing. What books do you have? What CDs? It's not me being nosy -- okay, it is -- but it's something I can help myself from doing. I love...
For better or worse, the Supreme Court decision in favor of the cablecos is an important one, at least as interesting and important as the Grokster loss today. Read it....
This news is so interesting. As John Battelle points out, the further that Google goes down this path the more content creators you are eventually going to see abandon the nasty closed world of broadcast and cable quasi-monopolies. Consider, for...
InformationWeek has a useful piece about the continuing struggles over Bill S.786 and the National Weather Service's provision of free meteorological data. This sort of tussle, the piece rightly points out, is historically predictable:Efforts to control public information that profits...
There were two typically entertaining McNealy notes struck during a lengthy and combative interview by the S.F. Chronicle with Sun CEO Scott McNealy. First, we have McNealy on his own blog:Q: I was told that Sun was going to set...
The ever-quotable Tim O'Reilly is fond of saying that in Web 2.0 "data is the Intel inside". He is right, but I think his forward-looking phrase is set to become inverted. To start at the start, Tim's (correct) point is...
For those of you interested in such things, I have re-activated my custom RSS feed containing daily price trends in the hard-drive market at various size breakpoints. You can access the feed here, but note that the feed no longer...
People are making unduly much of Microsoft's announcement tomorrow that it is extending RSS to support other forms of information beyond news. Is it really a revelation to people than you can and should be thinking about RSS for more...
Charlie Wood, ex- V.P. Enterprise Solutions at Newsgator, has set up a new RSS company called Spanning Partners....
Some fascinating papers being presented here in San Diego at this week's IEEE CVPR (Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition) conference. Am hoping to pop by tomorrow to geek out for a bit on the latest work in this hot area....
Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the Associated Press late today that Google is not going to compete directly with PayPal. But it was a somewhat tricksy denial, with Schmidt saying that Google won't tread on PayPal's turf, saying, "[Google does]...
While Feedburner has launched an awareness API, the folks there have not yet given users a way to subscribe via RSS/Atom to your own traffic data. The absence bugged me enough that I wrote a little script so that you...
Assuming chatter about Google's plan to launch a PayPay-like payment service is correct, it is seismic stuff. It will transform the payment business, making eBay a near-term short. After all, PayPal represents something like 25% of eBay's revenue, and at...
Some people are seemingly, ahem, bowled over by their Treo 650s....
I added a command to Yubnub. You can now enter "SEC [company]" and get back the results of a search of recent company financial filings. For example, "SEC Amerindo" gets back some fun stuff....
Yubnub is a lovely idea: an Internet command line. Check it out and see what you think -- already find myself thinking of things that I need to turn into Yubnub commands. [From Scott White]...
When the first explorers came to North America you could have apparently clubbed cod to death with paddles from small boats. By the late 1990s, however, northwestern Atlantic cod populations had collapsed by more than 95% of maximum historical biomass;...
Wish it were possible to see this live query scroller somewhere else other than Google's lobby. Always stops me cold when I visit there. Originally uploaded by Stewart....
Entertaining essay from scifi writer Bruce Sterling in the Sierra Club's magazine's first ever technology issue. In effect, he argues that technology has helped get us into our current environmental problems, and it can help get us out:Even our civilization’s...
Can cell phones help you stop smoking? The answer is yes, at least according to the results of a study Robyn Whittaker of University of Auckland is going to present Wednesday here in San Diego. Nifty idea:The STOMP (STOp smoking...
The new (and clunky-named) book from John Hagel and John Seely Brown is out and getting good reviews. Called "The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends on Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialisation", the book argues that the recent ardor...
Jon Friedman of MarketWatch is apparently looking to build pageviews. While Jon is an able analyst of all things media, he has pulled a John Dvorak in tomorrow's column by nakedly trying to be the only guy on the other...
Jason Calacanis has some worthwhile stats up (go 2/3s of the way down) on how reader contributions are key to some Weblogs, Inc., sites:AdJab is getting half a comment to every post. Cinematical is getting 2.3 comments to every post....
While I don't usually link to press conferences (and I have to confess I didn't know conferences even had pre-event press conferences), this one with Nat and Tim talking about the upcoming Where 2.0 O'Reilly event is worthwhile reading on...
Lexis-Nexis apparently thinks it can build a business around helping companies categorize unstructured text:LexisNexis ... today announced the launch of a new taxonomy program that allows companies to license proprietary LexisNexis® taxonomies and access expert consulting services ... A team...
Angels fall like rain and love is all of heaven away Inside you the time moves and she don't fade The ghost in you she don't fade -- "Ghost in You", Psychedelic Furs (from Mirror Moves -- 1990) Okay, the...
Neat duelling stats in the booming external storage market (from IDC):Year-over-year revenue growth: 6.7% (to $3.8-billion)Year-over-year capacity growth: 58.6% (to 409 petabytes in Q1)...
The U.S. Federal government is set to roll-out some big changes to its Geodata site, including grass-roots marketplaces for geographical data:Version 2, will also introduce a new marketplace capability, according to Leslie Armstrong, deputy staff director for the Federal Geographic...
From the Inc magazine site:The Chicago Sun-Times announced yesterday that it would no longer publish stock tables in its print edition. Instead, the paper plans to "beef up" its Web-based coverage of the markets, including more investment tools. While many...
So far in my low-rent, small-sample study into the percentage of everyday people that are visible to Google the answer is even lower than I expected. I have spoken to eight people: two cab-drivers, a lawyer, two students, a cashier,...
Dealazon is a nifty use of Amazon's API combined with RSS. Yo Charlene, you might want to have a look....
But if they were chosen to come to Mauritius, why had they also been chosen to fail, and leave? Is that a choosing, or is it a passing-over? Are they Elect, or are they Preterite, and doomed as dodoes?-- Thomas...
Nature has an article summarizing some recent research showing that readership of online news falls off significantly by 36 hours after posting, with most subsequent readership traffic coming from archives/Google search. Fair enough, I suppose, but where' s the news...
Flow my tears, fall from your springs,Exiled for ever let me mournWhere night's black bird her sad infamy sings,There let me live forlorn.-- John Dowland (1563-1626)I had an interesting conversation recently with an editor at a major publication. He had...
In the spirit of my comment a few posts back about enterprise software turning into a loss leader for consumer products, Kragen Sitaker has captured the trouble with enterprise products in pithy and quotable fashion:Enterprise software is software that gets...
Shades of the famous Star Trek IV movie moment when Scotty tried to talk to his mouse, here is a sobering anecdote about how one woman went badly (but understandably) awry in usability testing:Over the last several months we at...
Chris Anderson has put up the slide I mentioned from my conversation with him at "D": Being a cliche is a *good* thing, right?...
While flat panels are already selling at a fantastic rate, they just passed an inflection point. How do I know? Because I just paid far more than I needed to for a new 32" Sony LCD television, largely because I...
The current issue of InformationWeek has a cover piece on Google's enterprise strategy, including an interview with CEO Eric Schmidt. The supposed nugget in the piece is Eric Schmidt's sorta pre-announcement that Google sees its Google Mini as a Trojan...
Today's Boston Globe opines that the "iCon" book about Steve Jobs that he banned from Apple stores is not worth banning:...''iCon" seems scarcely worth the bother. It's your typical corporate bigwig biography -- admiring but not fawning, critical but not...
Rohit Khare has a piece over at Infoworld where he muses about what comes after software solution du jour Ajax -- Ajay and Ajaz, of course. He argues, correctly, that Ajax's inbred inherent inability to handle "push" data streaming is...
Okay, not really-really, but this weekend's issue of Barron's does have an interview with a money manager who makes the case for being negative about Red Hat, the Linux vendor. In so doing he implictly makes the uber-bull case for...
While the bell has been tolling noisily for enterprise software for some time, the data has finally become as compelling as the criticisms. A nice summary of both is a piece in the current issue of IT Manager's Journal, where...
Jorn Barger at the ever-eclectic Robot Wisdom has been back for a while, and his site is still (sort of) RSS-less. While Jorn clearly uses RSS in his own wandering about, he wants to know what his readership thinks about...
I'm sitting here this morning riveted as I "watch" the pivotal penultimate stage of the Giro d'Italia, the world's second-biggest cycling race. But as will amost certainly be embarassing to me within a few years, I'm watching it via textual...
For the sake of argument, let's say that over the next four years that most non-stationary devices that can be Internet-enabled are made so -- and that most of those devices have embedded GPS and telemetry. Yes, phones, PDAs, cars,...
Here are two more technology finance podcasts for folks. First up is my interview with Dr. Jacobs, followed in the second podcast by a speech by the aforementioned founder, Chairman and then-CEO of Qualcomm:25-minute interview30-minute talk...
There is nothing guaranteed to bring back the spirit of Alexander Graham Bell quite like being on a conference call where multiple participants are on cell phones. People drop in and out, the call alert beeping both times, and the...
There is a good interview with David Roux of technology buyout firm Silver Lake Partners over at BusinessWeek. The decision to start Silver Lake in 1999 ranks as one of the shrewdest moves in recent private equity history. WIth the...
All you zombies hide your facesAll you people in the streetAll you sittin' in high placesThe pieces gonna fall on you-- "All You Zombies", Hooters (1985)One of the more interesting quasi-economic developments in the world of spam, security, etc., is...
News today that the NY Times is laying off 190 employees will have bloggers playing taps for the Times. Coming on top of news that the paper will be charging for access to its columnists, this is truly schadenfreude-inducing if...
Dennis: Come see the violence inherent in the system. Help, help, I'm being repressed! -- Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)Apparently the open wireless network in the main conference room yesterday at Walt Mossberg's "D" conference in Calsbad was...
I had a brief visit to the "D" conference in Carlsbad today, where I enjoyed a stimulating hallway meetup with Chris Anderson of "long tail" fame. Among (many) other things, we agreed that all memes worth memification need a good...
Back at O'Reilly's ETech conference in March some of the most interesting stuff centered on location. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the company announced an upcoming conference on the subject, called Where 2.0 (what happened to Where 1.0? oh, i get it) on...
While it sounds a little like duelling kitchen cleansers, O'ReillyNet's Tim O'Brien points out that Xamlon (here in La Jolla) is pushing AFLAX as an alternative to AJAX for doing interactive data-centric web applications. The company has redone Google Maps...
The N.Y. Times has a good overview this morning of Mark Cuban's plan to mess up the movie business for incumbents. It all centers around HD, digital technologies, and changing the release schedules, and it is an interesting read:Theatrical releases,...
There is a fascinating front-page article in Monday's Wall Street Journal on the tussle between publishers and academics over open-access journals. The gist: There is a move a-foot to abandon expensive journals from publishers like Reed-Elsevier and others in favor...
While some people were apparently disgruntled about the IDG Syndicate conference last week -- Too many suits! Too many businesspeople! -- I actually came away fairly, well, gruntled. While I like to beep, blink, and buzz at a dandy geek-centric...
I'm geographically book-ended by interesting conferences this week, with Walt Mossberg's "D" conference up in Carlsbad and Mark Anderson's "Future in Review" conference down at the Hotel Del Coronado across the bay from downtown San Diego. Anyone planning to go...
Smallthoughts has this nice musing about the role of email as universal life interface:I find myself using email as a quasi-database all the time: to make lists, send myself reminders, record important snippets of information, even log hours spent on...
Marc Hedlund at O'Reilly's (excellent) Radar site has a great comment about whether Google is hiding something:...the tone [of Google communications] just feels all wrong. It's akin to watching comedy from a foreign culture; you can see that the director...
I had a typically fascinating chat with Jon Udell this morning at IDG Syndicate conference. We talked about Greasemonkey, structured blogging, public email, and Google as a federated operating system. Eavesdropping around me, however, it is like hearing pieces of...
One of the more bizarre phenonema in technology companies is when entrepreneurs and founders become so immersed in what they have that they don't know what they have. Put differently, sometimes founders don't realize that the cheap hack they did...
I saw PatentMojo a while back, but I didn't mention it because it came so close to being right that the fact that it was wrong pissed me off too much. But now I see that O'Reilly Radar has picked...
I'm not sure yet how to best use my Google history data, but I just had a look at my Google search stats so far in May. I had no idea that I use Google so much:That said, I apparently...
Best letter to the editor about BusinessWeek's recent overdone blogs-uber-alles cover article:I am a longtime subscriber to your magazine, and this is probably the only time I am sending a complaint. The headline on the cover is about blogs. You...
Despite all the many RSS feeds to which I subscribe I still regularly scan a non-RSS scraped page I set up three years ago, one that doesn't even have an associated RSS feed. At www.kedrosky.com/stories.shtml I have a constantly updating...
James Fallows has an unintentionally (I think) funny piece in the weekend N.Y. Times where various folks alternately take credit for Ajax, or pretend that they invented it under another name earlier, or say that it doesn't really exist: CompanyWe...
It was an Internet-wounding error not to include a remote-upgradeable spam protection product in Movable Type from the beginning. Spam-ridden, abandoned MT sites are metastasized cancers in the web that Google and its ilk must now route around, to their...
Some savvy comments from Silver Lake's Roger McNamee on the perceived decrease in the amount of innovation in the technology world. Granted, most readers of this blog immersed in the Web 2.0, Ajax, Greasemonkey, tagging & open source memes won't...
Smart people are wrong-headedly applauding a Canadian telecom regulator's decision this week in the nascent VoIP market. The CRTC has decided to cut the baby in half, announcing that the Canadian residential VoIP market will be unregulated for new VoIP...
Last night I sat through a lively & irreverent presentation by Martin Wood, CEO and founder of Delkin Devices. Among the highlights was his insistence that if I really wanted to understand Delkin's strategy in memory markets I needed to...
From Metafilter:[There is a} growing gap between the really savvy web users and the plain old web users. For someone with a pimped up Firefox install, Greasemonkey, ad-blockers, flash blockers, spam filters and spyware free machines, the net is a...
One of the joys of ego feeds is that you find out that people you've never heard of are saying nasty (and occasionally nice) things about you. Consider this:There's a group of people I can't stand. The book world and...
Say what you will about Oracle CEO and founder Larry Ellison, but he gives good interview. This weekend's San Francisco Chronicle contains an exemplar example, with Mssr Ellison opining on life, Peoplesoft, romance novels, turning 60, giving advice to Steve...
This IDG Syndicate Conference in New York May 17/18 is turning into a real coming out party for RSS. An overnight success that has been almost eight years in the making, it's fascinating how RSS and syndication technologies have demonstrably...
Big-footed WSJ technology columnist Walt Mossberg has a piece in Thursday's paper on RSS. While it's nice to see Walt bringing RSS to the masses, the article is a little disappointing. He does the obligatory "What's wrong with browsers", and...
While somewhat self-congratulatory, this is a (perhaps unintentionally) mind-expanding quote from Microsoft's Bill Gates in a recent Seattle P-I interview:While discussing employee weblogs, Gates also talked about Microsoft's Channel 9 site: "A guy just goes around with a digital camera...
From Warren Buffett's annual meeting this weekend:Another skit drawing laughter was a send-up of the Judge Judy show (starring Judge Judy). Mr. Buffett, as plaintiff, sued Mr. Gates for $2 he lost in a poker game. According to Mr. Buffett's...
From OJR concerning the AP's decision to charge for web use of content:It’s time to take a lesson from music swappers and invent the new AP – a digital cooperative, a Napsterized news service. The 21st Century news business needs...
I look at things like Overstimulated's great "book burro" greasemonkey script and I increasingly find myself thinking, "Death to shopping search sites (and wrong-headed vertical search too)!" Book burro is a wonderful example of how people are are completely missing...
Bloomberg has a good piece pointing out that Google's success in growing advertising revenues means that it has already overtaken some former categories and companies:Internet advertising "is probably about 3 or 4 percent of worldwide spending but growing very rapidly,"...
Fascinating piece in the weekend WashPost on the technology for consumption in cars. From audio books to cup-holders, the market is large and expanding -- and important in its effect on other product sales:The car cup holder is such an...
Being loved by techno-pundit George Gilder is a blessing and a curse. On the one hand you get oodles of puffy publicity, as the tireless fellow tells your story again and again and again (and yes, he is still apparently...
Fascinating new Fed paper out on the frequence of retail price changes back in 1889-1891 versus 1997-1999. The upshot:The 1889-1891 microdata price quotes show: a lower frequency of price changes; a smaller average magnitude of price changes; fewer "small" price...
The settlement this week of the longstanding patent tussle between Gary Michelson and Medtronic in favor of Michelson for $1.35-billion got me thinking: What are the largest patent settlements on record? Well, here they are:Year Plaintiff Defendant Settlement ($mm) 2005...
Quiz question: Name the most valuable peer-to-peer (P2P) company in the world. The first person to get the answer right gets a wonderful prize, like me saying "Way to go!". A hint: It is pure P2P, it isn't one of...
BusinessWeek has a cover piece out about how blogs will change business -- shades of a certain Harvard Business Review article from a year ago -- which will virtually guarantee the article huge play in the blog-o-sphere. After all, ego...
A while back I called for a unified dashboard where micro-publishers could see their AdSense (and the like) earnings, their Amazon Associates income, and so on. After all, I argued, those people are running businesses, so they deserve the same...
The BBC has a fascinating series of (downloadable/podcast-able) radio lectures underway called "The Triumph of Technology". They are delivered by Lord Alec Broers, the U.K.-based President of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Chairman of the House of Lords Science...
According to a release from the NY Times, the site's RSS feeds generated 5.9-million page views in March of 2005. That is up a vertigo-inducing 342% year-over-year, and 39% in consecutive months. At the current growth rate NY Times RSS...
As you might expect, the most viscerally entertaining writing on the Adobe/Macromedia deal from some guy named Marc Canter:DING DONG - the WITCH IS DEAD!The 17 year nightmare is over.The rape and pillage is finally complete.C'mon Marc, tell us what...
The Newspaper Association of America's annual meeting is on this week in San Francisco, so I thought it would be fun to search the event's program for some keywords that bear on current technology trends and the newspaper industry's Internet-induced...
This WiFi roaming technology from Stefan Savage and Ishwar Ramani at UC San Diego is nifty. Called SyncScan, it proactively monitors all nearby wireless access points so that when the signal from your current one wanes you quickly leap to...
The following is arguably the most important marketing factoid (okay, faint praise) I will see this year. Based, in part, on a recent Piper Jaffray report, I break down the cost of customer acquisition, by method, as follows:Search: $8.50 Yellow pages:...
Accenture has an alarmist new report out arguing that ad-skipping technologies like Tivo will cost $27-billion in TV ad revenue over the next five years: In 2004, TV ad revenue topped $60B Industry analysts are predicting 6-10% growth by 2009...
Tara at Marqui is running an interesting experiment. Like many people, she is increasingly skeptical in the Internet age about the benefits to private companies of wire services, so she is running press releases on all four major services --...
I'm beta-testing Trumba, Jeremy Jaech's new online calendar thingie. So far I'm not quite sure what to make of it. While I like the interface -- clean, professional, and reasonably self-documenting -- and the functionality is solid -- it's nice...
Bill Gross's search site Snap has gone "all suggest, all the time". To see what I mean, go to the site and do a search -- a la Google Suggest, Snap tries to guess what you're really looking for. Sadly,...
Richard Florida has out a follow-up book to his widely-read "Rise of the Creative Class". (Recall, that was the book that provocatively pointed out that cities with more gay people tended to more entrepreneurial and creative.) The new book is...
I don't have enough background information on the event to draw too many conclusions, but lots of newswires reporting today that the U.S. didn't do well at the ACM's International Collegiate Programming Contest that finished April 5th. Here are the...
It feels a little like the return of 1994: Online ads are somehow controversial again, with some out there suggesting that one of the main reasons RSS/Atom has done as well it has is because syndication feeds generally don't contain...
In case you haven't seen it yet, this is a simply wonderful piece of data integration. Paul Rademacher's Redfin-killing remix of Google Maps and Craigslist housing data is one of those things that grabs your brain and spins it 45...
Some media outlets are making much of a new study out showing that most airline passengers don't want cellphones allowed on planes. While I'm sympathetic to that view -- airline cabins are one of the few technology oases in my...
Computer scientist Scott White has a melancholy, thoughtful and provocative piece up about information overload, its consequences, and when and how we should say "Enough". It is recommended reading. [obDisclosure: Scott is a friend.]...
Love it or hate it, feel-good Star 100.7 FM is almost certainly the most popular FM radio station south of Orange County, California. This is a mega-market, with something like 2-million people of radio-listening age, many of whom spend significant...
While a response of "chuck it" to a high-profile time-consuming flop is by no means limited to biotech folks, a piece in today's Seattle P-I is entertaining on the subject:Bob Schroff joined a Seattle biotech company in 1984 as a...
At the risk of descending into TLA (three-letter acronym) hell, where is there no BBB API? Put more plainly, why doesn't the Better Business Bureau online expose a programming interface? Because my problem is that without integrated BBB data, local...
I tinkered some more tonight with the Keyhole data in Gmaps and it got me thinking, but not about applications. After all, Gmaps is whizzy and fun, so let's agree to worry about paying uses later. <geeking> But that said,...
It is interesting how many times in the last year I have mentioned something on this site only to have someone from a related company send me a note asking to chat. Whether it was complaining about Feedburner (where's that...
Nice. Google Maps has integrated the Keyhole photographic data set into its local search. To see (literally), do a map search and then click the word Satellite in the top-right corner. The resulting images are zoomable and scrollable, just like...
There is a fascinating article in the current issue of the CDC's Emerging Infectious Diseases journal on the role of rumor-tracking in understanding an infectious disease's virulence. It turns out that rumors were a useful, if low SNR, source of...
Eric Schmidt, the Chief Google Guy over at Google, seems like a very decent fellow, so there is a chance that he is saying something other than he seems, but his quote in an article on Google in the current...
Advertising industry bible AdAge has out its 75th anniversary issue with the most important events that shaped the industry. While three technology-related moments make the list, and Apple's "1984" Macintosh ad is one of them, can you name the other...
Interesting paper being presented at the NSDI '05 conference in Boston in May. The metaphor of some species of DDoS as flash crowds is a nice one. Botz4sale indeed.Botz-4-Sale: Surviving Organized DDoS Attacks That Mimic Flash Crowds Srikanth Kandula and...
A VentureOne study summarized in today's San Jose Business Journal shows that CEO/founders are paid less than non-founder CEOs:Executives identified as chief executive officers and founders of U.S. venture-backed companies earn $200,000 in total compensation this year -- some $50,000 less...
The appeal to me of the subject of today's WSJ article in which I pop up must be clear. Called "New Web-Watching Tools Pique Interest of Investors", the piece touches on a number of emerging issues about which I have...
Apologies for the downtime here today. My hosting service changed hosting services and as tends to happen in such cases things went, to use the technical term, kerflooey.Anyway, to continue in a solipsistic vein, I am interviewed in a piece...
From Electronic Business magazine:Granted, it's an Intel-provided figure, but I would never have guessed that the CPU is only the sixth-largest consumer of power in a typical laptop. Heck, it's only one step above the fan....
Worth noticing that the same day Google bought web analytics vendor Urchin that a private equity firm (Francisco Partners) bought competitor Webtrends. The former went for $30-million, while NetIQ sold Webtrends for more like $95-million. I'm guessing that Google looked...
In case folks hadn't figured it out already, the company to which I referred in a post a while back was La Jolla-based EVDB. Yes, I know, some people don't like the space and/or what the company is doing, but...
This fascinating news stats page is going to get a lot of media sorts in a tizzy internally. Why is Competitor X getting so many more of its stories displayed by Google News than ours are? Just wait until Romenesko...
There is something deeply off-putting about Microsoft's Bill Gates' annual Think Week. As chronicled in Monday's Wall Street Journal, it is a week that he supposedly spends alone while reading, you know, smart stuff about the future of technology. But...
Barron's writer Eric Savitz comments in this week's issue on PC Forum and how the "long tail" has become a (dangerous) cliche :Pin the Long Tail on the Donkey: About once every three or four minutes, a presenter would refer...
In an otherwise irritating AP article that sweatily tries to make the case for Amazon as Big Brother, there is this shit-disturbing quote:Analyst Mark Mahaney with American Technology Research also questions whether A9 is worth the hefty investment.A9 ranked 41st...
While I find the idea of net-based citizen journalism interesting, I have to confess that now and then the contrarian in me starts getting testy. Too many of the people pushing this meme are card-carrying techno-utopians of the social variant,...
There is an interesting, if somewhat rearguard-feeling, article in the WSJ Friday on blog advertising. The gist: While companies are experimenting with running ads on blogs, most are nervous about committing given how editorially undisciplined (translation: prone to criticizing the...
Here's an idea: Social site ranking. Amir Michail, who is with the CSE department at the University of New South Wales, has an interesting little experiment he's trying out whereby people collaboratively rank sites. Here is the overview:It currently includes...
For some time now I've been using Caelo's NEO Pro overlay for Outlook email. It has been, in a word, a lifesaver. Here are just some of the things I'm fond of: Integrated search (far better than relying on an...
Business Week is now on the vertical search beat. The biz trade weighs in with a piece on vertical search that a) pretty much misses everything that's interesting, and b) over-focuses on consumer-centric search technologies. Boys and girls, what's interesting...
Vertical search outfit Eliyon is now apparently Zoominfo. It's still interesting stuff -- and they have exposed a little more search functionality on the front page. Here, for example, is a due diligence background search on some guy named Marc...
From a U.S. PTO press release today, the top patent-getting U.S. universities. Two things that I find interesting:The distribution follows something like a power law, with the top institution (the UC system) getting as many patents as the next nine...
I knew this was imminent:The backchannel at PC Forum has started a drinking game...Any time someone says "the long tail" drink.Any time someone says "tag" or "tagging" drink.Any time someone bring up Flickr's API take two drinks.To be somewhat serious,...
While Yahoo apparently wants Flickr for its strategic smarts vis-a-vis photo-sharing in social networks, HP has agreed to buy Snapfish today for more practical reasons: It sells printers ....Online photo service Snapfish, a unit of privately held District Photo Inc.,...
I'll be speaking at the IDG Syndicate Conference in New York on May 18th. Lots of interesting folks on the agenda, including Ross Mayfield, Jon Udell, Tim Bray, Jason Calacanis, Marc Canter, Bob Wyman, and others....
Interesting that Trumba and EVDB both spoke at PC Forum today. They are different aspects of the same problem, which broadly has to do with syncing & integrating events, whether personal, business, or community (broadly defined). As always, my interest in...
There is a new paper out that tries to puzzle through why some newly-public companies can't survive, even when cash is falling from the sky like ooblek. (It is an academic thingie, so they would never put it quite so succinctly....
Near as I can tell from the Trackback traffic at the Flickr blog, news that Yahoo has bought the company was not just the worst kept secret in recent history: It is also the most buzzed about story in the...
I promise not to prattle more about the long tail for a spell, but I indirectly had an interesting conversation with someone today on the subject. One of Chris Anderson's examples -- matter of fact, one that leads his original...
Apparently bloggers need to go easy when crossing the Canada-U.S. border. One such fellow, Jeremy Wright of Canada, was crossing to do some blog-related consulting in New York, only to be stopped, searched, and then turned back. Why? According to...
The current long tail discussion at ETech is interesting, but people are still missing something important, something that I think Chris Anderson underemphasizes, or maybe doesn't even get himself. We've always known there were lots of people not reached by...
Hedge fund manager Jeff Matthews has a typically savvy & practical take on why "Napster to Go", which is lightly touted by Walt Mossberg in today's Wall Street Journal, will fail:Go to a college campus. Ask a random student how...
News of Yahoo's impending family of blogging and social networking tools has leaked early. The Associated Press got wind of it, so now Yahoo has apparently briefed other outlets that The Social Software Formerly Known as Mingle (TSSFKAM) is now...
I was trying to explain to someone earlier today why I have (now) 300 feeds to which I am subscribed in Feeddemon. It isn't that I have time to read 300 feeds (or 200, or 100 -- or 50 for...
Why can't I get an online earnings dashboard analogous to what companies use for running their own businesses? While the money isn't exactly rolling in, I do earn online income from various sources, including Amazon (through the Associates program), as...
The American Chemical Society annual meeting here in San Diego is dauntingly large, something like 17,000 attendees, making it the largest scientific society in the world. A more practical example: In parking at the conference today before my talk (on...
The NY Times has a wonderfully muddled piece this morning wherein various media outlets try to pretend the world is other than it is. The subject: The merits of going to a paid-subscription model. Yes, media outlets need to make...
Monday's Wall Street Journal includes a paean to the wonders of Ajax. While the piece is mostly old news, it is interesting to see a mainstream publication like the WSJ chase a blogosphere meme so quickly. Does writer Lee Gomes...
A conversation I had recently with someone about the long tail led to some musing about its temporal opposite, the long march through bleak economic territory that precedes economic success (not to mention preceding outright failure). Said conversation then got...
For people who haven't yet read my Harvard Business Review piece last year on feeds and syndication technologies, let me summarize a theme that I find myself talking about to many groups: Dark matter -- of the information type.One of...
The trouble with stealth companies is that they're rarely worth being stealthy about. There are almost always a hundred similar folks doing similar things, so what's one more?Such is affirmedly not the case with a stealth company I visited today....
For those of you reading this in the SoCal area, don't forget O'Reilly' excellent ETech conference is in San Diego next week. Last year's edition was mind-expanding, and this year's promises to be more of the same, with a neck-snappingly...
Funny conversation I had with someone yesterday: We agreed that the thing that generally made us both persevere and keep trying any new service online, even if we didn't get it the first umpteen times, was having Jon Udell post...
Paul Graham is an annoying fellow. Specifically, he has two bad habits: He never writes a bad column.He writes long columns.If Graham wrote the odd bad column I wouldn't feel so obliged to read all of his lengthy, thoughtful, and entertaining entries....
Popular Science has put together a sure-to-be-controversial list of the U.S.'s top "technopolis" cities, the best cities for technology from a citizen's standpoint. Criteria included everything from wireless access to robotic surgery at local hospitals, and the results were as...
The best part in reading the Seattle P-I's investigative piece into InfoSpace's meltdown five years ago is the emails. Case in point: A series of pleading messages from InfoSpace CEO Naveen Jain to a partner in a venture fund (one...
In case anyone is interested, there is a rough-cut streaming version of my recent interview with Qualcomm CEO, co-founder, and chairman Irwin Jacobs available here. A properly edited multi-camera version at broadcast quality will be available on UCSD-TV (and at the...
I want to read this InfoSpace article -- it sounds like good dishy fun -- but given the length I'm having a hard time working up the energy. Where are decent automated text summarization tools when you need them?...
Great post from David Ascher on some of the overlooked things holding up the emergence of Web 3.0. My favorite example? Keyboard shortcuts. Looking to my own behavior the main I reason I don't use as many online apps as...
There is something deliciously ironic in news that the NY Times is replacing its mid-week Circuits technology section with a mid-week fashion section:Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2005 17:29:59 -0500 To: [New York Times newsroom] Subject: From BILL KELLER: More New...
Vhayu Technologies in Los Gatos has obtained a patent for real-time financial search. Best as I can glean from the filing, the company's patent is for a technique linking real-time stock quotes to news and time. While that may not...
Analyst Pip Coburn of UBS is quoted extensively in a WSJ piece today on this wood anniversary of the bursting of the technology bubble. I agree with the following comment of his, which should make Pip worried that we're both...
From a nice Gary Rivlin piece on troubles at eBay in the weekend NY Times:"For a lot of our sellers, the average selling price is getting less and less and their eBay fees continue to go up," [said the head...
Ah, the Slashdot Effect. It is the favored Hail Mary pass of every traffic-starved webmaster everywhere: "If only a few thousand basement-dwelling Slashdot readers would show up here and drive traffic up, up, and up ...." Or then again, maybe...
To those folks out there who are so blithely dismissing the entire idea of vertical seach sites, from Kayak to Eliyon, I have a question: How easy do you find it parallel parking your Chevrolet Silverado Crew Cab Z71 in...
A recent book about Norbert Wiener, the creator of cybernetics, and one of the earliest and most important theorists of our technology-drenched days, looks to be a moving piece of work. The book is called "Dark Hero of the Information...
Back when I was an equity analyst one of the favorite put-downs I would hear from portfolio managers was for them to sniffingly say, "What's to prevent Microsoft from doing that?" It was an all-purpose way for a PM to...
The opening paras from my National Post column tomorrow:Matt Drudge, creator of the Drudge Report online scandal sheet, is having his tenth anniversary right about now. Yahoo, the online search firm, is turning ten this week. Amazon.com, that late-bloomer, turns...
Forrester Research has gotten into the "Apple Should Buy Tivo" act, with a relatively cogent piece out this week saying same by media analyst Josh Bernoff: To: Steve Jobs From: Forrester Research Re: Your Mass-Market Dreams You may have noticed...
Here is Howard Gold in this weekend's Barron's on why most bloggers don't matter:Few bloggers have editors who can save them from themselves and few break any big news. They generally react to original stories that appear elsewhere or link...
A new (article-body)">breed of first-time (and second-time) venture funds is emerging:Ignition is part of a new breed of venture capitalist ... Rather than investing in a range of business ideas, many of these so-called emerging funds are highly focused, concentrating...
I point to WSJ stories fairly regularly, but I am apparently in the minority according to Adam Penenberg's excellent Wired story. Granted, I go through some contortions to knock down the walls around the garden: I am a WSJ subscriber...
Dave Jung says his ical calendar page is newly getting pinged like mad by a Googlebot. While that constitutes far from irrefutable proof that Google is planning to launch a (beta) calendar service, but it makes sense to me -- and...
One of the more unusual Feedster searches to which I'm subscribed in Feeddemon is people apologizing for not posting. Yes, yes, I know, it's not exactly riveting reading as people explain that they haven't had time to post lately, but...
Yes, podcasting is all the rage, with high-profile pieces popping up pretty much everywhere you look. That said, however, it was interesting to see the lousy week had by pseudo-podcaster Audible. The company's stock fell more than 30 percent on...
The contrarian in me wants to believe that people are over-pessimistic about the prospects for newspaper, and so I'm feeling more and more like advertising remains underrated as a savior for high-traffic news sites. Nevertheless, judging by my own reading...
Forrester Research founder George Colony went looking for column-inches last year and he predicted ominous stuff coming for Google. It hasn't happened, and he is not repenting:Q. Let's talk about Google. You came out against it to some degree last...
The AP has out a worthwhile profile out of Ben and Mena Trott, the founders of blogging software provider Six Apart, the maker of Movable Type and TypePad, among other products. While it may not have been the intent, I was...
Here is a zen question: If Barron's has an article about online poker this weekend (which it does), and business blogs write about it (which they will), will anyone know? I wonder. After all, most MT sites now use MT-Blacklist,...
Good discussion over on Larry Lessig's site of various ways to do PPT presentations remotely. With a young family, Lessig understandably doesn't want to spend as many nights in hotels in 2005 as he did in 2004 (186)....
I hate when software companies get acquired in my (metaphorical) backyard and I didn't know the company. While I had vaguely heard of Candy Labs, I have to confess I had little idea what they were doing -- and search...
Oh boy (no pun intended), but this name-centric data exploration site is fascinating. What, for example, is up (well, down) with Paul? Why has it fallen off a cliff since the 1960s? And why are my brothers' names (Robert, Doug,...
Fascinating article on Newsweek's site about the paucity of data providers for online mapping:At the center of this technology [mapping] explosion is Navteq and its chief rival, Netherlands-based Tele Atlas. They have a duopoly in mapping data, and license their...
David Card is opening the Google browser office pool. His theory? Microsoft's announcement today of IE 7.0 is driven more by its view of Google's browser plans than by supposed competitive inroads made by Firefox. It is a fine and...
This is admittedly only interesting to a small segment of this site's readership, but for those of you who, like me, use Yahoo for some of your mail, there is a new version of the YahooPops! freeware app (for SMTP/POP...
Good list and discussion here of all the shiny gee-gaws being shown this week at DEMO in Scottsdale....
Don't you love how Google confounded the amateur stock pundits today? The drumbeat was relentless about the amount of GOOG stock coming out of lockup -- 177-million shares, nearly double what has come out since last summer's IPO, and roughly...
Bubbler, announced today, is neat, but why do all these Web 2.0 blogging vendors keep trying to force the storage of content on their own sites? Yes, I understand your business model -- $5/month, etc. -- but that just doesn't...
Frank "Infectious Greed" Partnoy rarely fails in his insights into capital markets, so I heartily pass on his positive comments about the newly released book "Icarus in the Boardroom". Written by a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania,...
iUpload's Perspectives, to be launched tomorrow at DEMO, is creative and interesting, but I have a feeling I'm not quite getting the story straight in my head. It looks like a multi-outlet content repurposing tool, sort of a blogging hub....
Typically amusing insights from the Real Time gang at the WSJ in a column on cell phone "drunk dialing". While it springs from a scene in the intermittently interesting film "Sideways", Mssrs Fry and Hanrahan do call the following "drunk...
I was in a meeting recently with some folks from outside the U.S. who wanted to know about San Diego's economic resurgence over the last fifteen years. How, they wondered, had things improved so markedly, from a reliance on defense...
It is entertainingly ironic that news leaked out today about Google having fired a blogger who used to be on its payroll. After all, in an analyst meeting today Google's Sergey Brin complained that the search company couldn't hire as...
Well, that is now settled. Amazing:Carly Fiorina, one of the most powerful women in American business, was ousted as chairman and chief executive of Hewlett-Packard Co. on Wednesday after disagreements over strategy at the computer and printer maker. People are...
While I'm a fan of 75% of what Google does, I am still amazed at the company's voracious consumption of Yahoo-like online categories. With Google Maps out today, the search company now has four major consumer services in beta: Video...
Yahoo is venturing where many media technology companies have gone before -- and where it has usually ended badly: Hollywood. Check this story in today's L.A. Times:Watch out, Hollywood. There's a new player in town.Yahoo Inc., the Internet portal created...
From an O'Reilly Network interview with Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield:Of Flickr's 3.5 million photos, 82 percent are public71 percent of the photos have some kind of human-added metadata that was added in FlickrA Boston Globe photo editor found a picture recently on...
The cover of next week's issue of Business Week is nanotechnology. For those of you keeping track of magazines as contrarian signals, that officially means that the current enthusiasm for nanotechnology has peaked. I just thought folks might like to...
The average price paid for search keywords dropped 3% in January. Leading the way down were telecom/wireless-related keywords, which were off 28%, according to researcher Fathom Online. While this was mostly seasonal and therefore predictable, somewhat more interesting was the...
This news is nice, and will rapidly make Hubmed more useful than ever:The National Institutes of Health Thursday unveiled a policy aimed at giving the public free and faster access to federally funded medical research.NIH Director Elias Zerhouni said the voluntary...
This is potentially useful: Monitoring the latest published patent applications by RSS. The free site includes keyword filtering, as well as industry-specific feeds....
David Pogue has an interesting interview with Steve "Nano" Jurvetson in his current column:David Pogue: Everybody's heard of nanotechnology, but not many people know what it is. What is it? Steve Jurvetson: We define nanotechnology as the manipulation and control...
Good piece in Business 2.0 on Ram Shriram's angel-investing successes, and his high-profile involvement with troubled social networking sites Friendster and Plaxo:If both companies do crap out, Shriram's reputation will be blemished. But will he be blamed for the high-profile...
This post at Silicon Valley Watcher fits nicely into one of my pet theses: In business/competitive intelligence, less is more when it to search. Put another way, small search sets that are properly directed and well understood are much more...
In the comments to the earlier post on rebooting the car someone asks about proximity searching via public search tools. In other words, where you can do a search for articles that contain "boffo" and "equities", but where the two...
A discussion between me and a service manager yesterday while checking in my 2002 Hyundai Santa Fe for some recall work that needed to be done:Me: So, what has to be done under this recall?Him: I'm not sure ... let...
Lifehacker....
More on this later, because it has interesting implications, but it is a fascinating story. The kicker -- that this GPS stalker got done in by battery life -- is deliciously ironic....
One of the pillars of Internet communications is the ubiquitous WinZip. While the .zip format that it uses is in the public domain (and originally the creation of Phil Katz), WinZip unarguably makes the most popular Windows client-side .zip implementation:...
Ray Ozzie is in the current Information Week saying that email is dead and instant messaging rules. I dunno, given that I have gone the other way. I have largely stopped using instant messaging because I found it too intrusive,...
I was talking to someone last week about a recent conference call on which I distinctly heard a toilet flush. It turns out I'm not alone:Three years ago, engineer Randy Thompson was on a weekly conference call about the design...
The WSJ is becoming fairly relentless on the "Carly Fiorina has failed story", so it will be interesting to see if the story gets legs. If so, and there is some truth to the argument, things could change awfully quickly...
Thoughtful piece by Bill Burnham on RSS overload, its solutions, and why meta-feeds are better than user-added tags:While tagging may be doomed to confusion, there are some other potential approaches that promise to bring order to RSS’s increasingly chaotic situation....
Funny piece in Wednesday's Washington Post on Google's (mandatory) annual ski trip, which required the now-sizable search company to rent the entire Squaw Valley resort. The piece's biggest revelation is no revelation at all if you have ever spoken to...
Just watch those RFID companies get another stock bump tomorrow on this USA Today story:Posted 1/25/2005 6:59 PM Technology could speed border crossingsBy Leslie Miller, Associated PressNOGALES, Ariz. -- U.S. officials want to see if the same technology that speeds cars...
The complaint docs in the suit by some Epinions founders vs. its venture capital backers is well worth reading. While I think that this is likely to turn into a messy case of caveat emptor, entrepreneurs should still read the...
Jon Udell, as usual, puts into words something true and important that has been nagging at me for some time:I argue that our increasing reliance on network storage makes the need for desktop search less acute than it formerly was....
Readers of Infectious Greed will not have been surprised by news that Google launched search of video transcripts today. After all, the impending service was tipped on this site almost two weeks ago. We're so darn smart....
Business Week's puckish new Deal Flow "blog" on the world of venture investing has a savvy response to the question, "Why invest in biotech?" After all, drug discovery is a brutal business: it's so hard to a drug approved, it...
London cabs will apparently soon be full of phones. According to a study cited on BBC News, more than 63,000 phones have been left in London cabs over the past six months, which works out to about three phones per...
The Times of London is running a somewhat bizarre story on Google tonight. It implies that it has inside skinny that Google is prepping to take on Skype in the VoIP business:GOOGLE revolutionised the internet. Now it is hoping to...
I started writing something critical about Google's "nofollow" proposal, which I felt alone in not being enamored with, but I then ran across Matthew Skala's excellent post. He says it all, and says it well. Here are Matthew's main complaints...
Kevin Rollins' comments on iPod to Silicon.com in an interview this week has Apple-istas predictably roiled:Apple's created a niche. If you look at the grand scheme of things this quarter, we are supposed to achieve something like $13.5bn in revenue....
From a USA Today story about the founder of Picasa:Google executives liked [Picasa] so much, they ended up buying Picasa ... Then [founder Lars] Perkins tried to quit. "I said, 'I have a real problem with bosses, that's why I've...
The arrival of RNAi (RNA interference) has been highly positive for drug development, given the public struggles of competing gene-knockdown alternatives, like first-generation antisense, but its rapid rise (mostly since 2001) has led to a somewhat bizarre situation:Mammalian scientists were...
Like Jeremy, I have somehow ended up on vacuum-buying detail. I wouldn't burden people with this were it not for how much the vacuum market -- and vacuum technology -- has changed. While vacuums are not yet fun, exactly, the underlying...
According to Ann Grimes of the WSJ in a storm in Monday's paper, uber-VC firm Sequoia Capital distributed 27% of its Google shares (now worth >$1-billion) to its LPs back in November and December. While the distribution itself is unsurprising,...
The WSJ has one of its usually excellent technology supplements in Monday's paper. While this edition is not one of the Journal's best -- there is something rote about it, with the obligatory "software sucks" piece, the usual "whither 3G"...
Fun piece (in PDF format) by Joel Spolsky about why you may think you need venture capital, but you don't. Yes, he creates something of a straw man that he then beats mercilessly, but it is fun to watch --...
From ProMed:Viet Nam: suspected avian influenza case hospitalized in Ho Chi Minh City- -----------------------------------------------A 35 year old woman from Viet Nam's southern province Tra Vinh was admitted to hospital on Tue 11 Jan 2005 [on suspicion] of suffering from avian...
This must have seemed like a dream "book club" discussion at Slate: James "Wisdom of Crowds" Surowiecki vs. Malcolm "Blink" Gladwell. Well, the dream was better than the reality. While the discussion is intermittently interesting, it starts to feel vapid...
Interesting results from research at Penn State:Penn State engineers have developed a new model for high-speed broadband transmissions over U.S. overhead electric power lines and estimate that, at full data rate handling capacity, the lines can provide bit rates that...
"It's existential marketing with maybe even a touch of nihilism."-- Venture capitalist Roger McNamee on Apple's new iPod slogan, "Life Is Random"...
Sergey Brin co-authored a thought-provoking paper in World Wide Web Journal's latest issue. Titled "Query-Free News Search", it is on methods for finding news articles on the web that are relevant to news being simultaneously broadcast -- and Brin and...
A decision has come down in the Thom Calandra case. A former writer & editor for CBS Marketwatch, he is accused of having engaged in stock-scalping and is being fined accordingly. In other words, he allegedly took positions in thinly-traded public...
Interesting talk today (available online) at UC San Diego's Cal-IT Center on developments in anti-worm technologies:ABSTRACT:In the time it takes to read this sentence, the 2003 Slammer worm probed over a hundred million Internet hosts. Worse, this attack was both...
There is apparently some juicy stuff in the new book "Blood on the Streets" by Newsweek writer Charles Gasparino. According to a Newsweek press release, the book "details the rise and fall of three high-profile Wall Street analysts -- Merrill...
Technology transfer managers are woefully underpaid (and understaffed). As the current issue of Nature Biotechnology points out, U.S. universities are making a rapidly-rising amount of money from licenses and options -- more than $1-billion in 2003 -- but only a handful of...
One of the more perverse aspects of the so-called "sell"-side of the brokerage business is that many clients prefer to talk to salespeople rather than analysts. Why, one initially wonders, would you want to talk to a passionate flogger rather...
Ross Mayfield has created an interesting Flickr group called Parking Lot Indicatr. The idea: Have people take pictures during non-business hours of parking lots at public companies under the theory that it means something:Off-hour parking lot density is a leading...
There is a story floating around on Reuters that is going to get a lot of wrong-headed attention. According to Reuters' (courtesy of Brad) summary of this Business Week cover piece, the NY Times is contemplating going paid for its...
fyi:Hi folks and happy new year -- For a story we may do for CTV's National News on Friday night, we're looking for some BlackBerry PIN fanatics. Do you know any friends, colleagues or clients who love to use BlackBerry's...
Chris "Long Tail" Anderson of Wired points to this interesting piece on the pro-am revolution. The gist: From astronomy to activism, from surfing to saving lives, Pro-Ams - people pursuing amateur activities to professional standards - are an increasingly important...
... Geocities. Or so says the tirelessly truculent John Paczkowski of GMSV. The supposed tie-up may or may not work out that way, but it is such a nice analogy that it is at least worth pretending that the above...
Given that meta-blogging (blogging about blogging) is the most-read topic on blogs, why is it that Jason and/or Nick haven't yet launched a blog about blogs?...
There is a brief quote from yours truly in this piece on venture capital bloggers from Venture Capital Journal (and written by the estimable Tom Stein):But how far can VC bloggers really open the kimono? Paul Kedrosky, academic director of...
Not enough people are saying it, so I will: the 60 Minutes segment on Google Sunday night was an embarassingly sloppy wet kiss from CBS to Sergey, Larry, et al. Apart from the comments by John Battelle -- edited down...
There is an eye-opening comment buried deep in an article nominally on venture capital in today's Boston Globe. The piece is an otherwise somewhat self-congratulatory one about how well Boston-area security startups did in 2004, mostly via mergers. This snippet,...
Traffic to any sufficiently large general-purpose non-news web site seems, to a first approximation, like it should be manageably stable over time. While traffic may increase (or decrease) over a given period as a site's popularity grows (or falls), IT managers...
Like most people, I have been following the aftermath of the recent calamitous tsunamis in southeast Asia. With that in mind, a Friday discussion of tsunami prediction on NPR was interesting:Sunday's earthquake off Indonesia unleashed tsunamis that destroyed coastal regions...
A few weeks ago I wrote here about the emergence of peer-to-peer weather. Well, the NY Times has now picked up the idea of grassroots weather reporting: Mr. Truta, 33, was so fascinated by the weather moving off of the...
The WSJ has a list online of the most popular (okay, most clicked on) articles in the WSJ Online in 2004. As the piece points out, it is indicative of the WSJ's net-based readership in that there are only two election-year...
When most people think about venture capital they imagine forty-something (I mean their age, not their number) guys in khakis and blue shirt sitting in some office on Sand Hill Road waiting for bright young things to show up and...
The following, according to today's Wall Street Journal, is what was in and out in technology ("Desperate Housewives"?) in 2004:I'll say it: C'mon guys, this list is just sooooo, 2003....
Not to turn this into FlickrBlog or anything -- the real one is far prettier than anything I could muster -- but I see that InsideGoogle is pushing the rumor that Google may be planning to acquire Flickr. The IG...
Here are the first few paragraphs from tomorrow's National Post column. I pick Google's IPO as the business story of the year, and then conclude ominously by warning that while Google may be prominent in biz press again next year, but...
Circling back to Adam Bosworth's excellent ISOC 04 talk, he made many thought-provoking comments, among which was the following:Who here really cares if Excel adds a new menu item unless it is one that lets you more easily discover information...
Periodically a succession of stock tickers crosses the wire and you get that strange feeling, like Steve Martin in L.A. Story, that a supposedly inanimate object is talking to you. I just had that feeling moments ago when I saw...
Anyone out there still looking for Gmail accounts? I'm sure there can't be many, but if so, post a comment here with your email address and I'll send the first four Gmail invites. Google has just deigned to give me...
Clay Shirky has a typically quirky and insightful look at the myriad ways that Flickr is inserting itself into people's lives. Instead of going all airy-fairy-falalutin' on us, however, Clay keeps both feet on the ground this time, and touches...
Wired editor Chris Anderson has scored a cushy book deal for his article "The Long Tail". While he has conceded as much on his Long Tail website, the specifics are in an article in New York magazine:Wired editor Chris Anderson...
Fast Company has an interesting profile of Malcolm "Tipping Point" Gladwell in its January issue. It is well worth reading, with it impressive how Gladwell has gone from a "mere" New Yorker staffer to becoming required biz school reading:Soon after...
Little did I know that my favorite broadband pundit Om Malik was capable of such intricate and entertaining contortions. Poster-boy for contrarianism that he is, Om has studiously avoided saying anything nice about Skype, the waaaay over-hyped VoIP software. Good...
I host a semi-regular program on UCSD-TV/UC-TV that is rebroadcast on the Dish Network (channel 9412!). Called "The von Liebig Forum", it is generally a talk, and then an interview conducted by me with high-visibility folks who live/work at the...
The following is the opening 'graph in a piece on "top doctors" in the October issue of San Diego magazine:I can't explain it. Put a list of local doctors in a magazine, create a cover with a trustworthy-looking physician--or an artsy...
Venture Capital Journal has a cover up-with-VoIP piece in the current issue, complete with somewhat self-deprecating testimony from DFJ's Steve Jurvetson as to the utility of (DFJ investee) Skype. It's about the conferencing, baby:... Jurvetson ... confesses that until recently, he's...
Good discussion over on Brad DeLong's site of Movable Type's culpability in the nasty comment spam problem out there. After all, neglected & spam-ridden MT blogs are analogous to the broadband-connected zombie PCs that issue so much spam and so many...
The RIM messaging opinion is out from the Federal District Court -- RIM lost on 11 of 16 counts in its appeal of a prior ruling in favor of NTP's patents for wireless messaging -- and it makes for harrowing...
Almost every academic paper includes a list of people being thanked for somehow assisting on the paper. It's referees, but it also includes colleagues, family, friends, and who knows whoever else. So, who is the most thanked person in science?...
The WSJ is reporting tonight that Google is set to radically expand its book search service, and combine that, sort of, with Google Scholar. It is a bibliophile bonanza: In a dramatic expansion to an existing Google service that makes...
Just tried the new MSN Desktop Search and had possibly the fastest user experience ever. It looked pretty, but it insisted on having its results display in an Internet Explorer pop-up. Given that I use Maxthon for my browsing I...
In case you missed it, Jason Pontin, the former editor of Red Herring, has now been editor at MIT Technology Review for a spell. There is a useful piece on his ambitions in the N.Y. Times this morning....
Here is a hypothesis for you: In the not-too-distant future employees & contractors will be bought and sold at least partly on the basis of Google hits. Want to get some more attention for your organization? All else being equal...
I should have mentioned this sooner, but Urs Holzle of Google's talk at UCSD is online in streaming format. It's here, and at roughly the ten-second mark you'll notice the back of a dark-haired guy's head swim into view in...
I have to confess I'm having inordinate existential fun with 43things. Call it Flickr for ideas, the service allows you to share to-do lists and goals with others anonymously. The result? A cacophony of priorities, from the mundane -- "own an...
From an interesting Nature article (subscription required) on the quickly-closing biotech IPO windows:Companies described as working on genomics brought in almost $1 billion in the last IPO window, whereas this time not a single genomics company went public. The same...
Why are so few new biotech drugs showing up (and being approved) at the FDA? While you might explain away the low raw number of biologics approved so far this year by saying that maybe the FDA approves biotech drugs...
Stuart Watson has come public with his Syndicate IQ syndication-traffic tracking project. From my discussions with Stuart his focus is interesting, in that it is more on commercial content publishers and large-scale providers of RSS/Atom feeds than on individuals. Perhaps...
I noticed this evening that "Mining interesting knowledge from weblogs" is the most-read article on ScienceDirect. How many people, do you think, were like me and pulled down the paper thinking, at least initially, that the paper was about those...
While I'm going to get into this in more detail in an upcoming article, unbelievers in the merits of narrow search should have a closer look at Eliyon Technologies and some functionality the company has exposed on its front page....
ProMED has been a guilty pleasure of mine since the SARS outbreak almost two years ago. Back then ProMED was the first news service to deliver word that a strange outbreak was killing people -- in February of 2003, almost...
Did anyone else catch Sergey and Larry on Barbara Walters tonight? A more superficial interview than this one would be the metaphorical equivalent of drinking so little from a cup of water that you didn't break the surface tension. [Update]...
It used to be a sort of rule-of-thumb that all software products accrete features until they allow you to send and receive email. The world has changed. As I have discovered by sitting through an unholy number of vendor presentations lately,...
The current New Yorker has a must-read Atul Gawande piece about the effect of data transparency on hospitals and healthcare. As the article's subhead puts it, "What happens when patients find out how good their doctors really are?" The answer:...
In a post Jeremy Zawodny delights in highlighting a recent InsideGoogle entry (got all that?) bemoaning Google's almost-inclusion in the 2004 Weblog Awards as a portal:the 2004 Weblog Awards (vote today!) ran a test poll back in November just to...
Now that I run Copernic's search as a background process I see a steady list of "what's new" on my computer. For example, until I actually search for something, all the new emails are listed on the main screen as they...
While Chris Pirillo's review of MSN Messenger 7.0 is worth reading just for its lip-smacking savagery, there are some serious points here. Reading this, Microsoft increasingly reminds me of one of those out-of-it kids you met in high school who, tired...
Bloomberg Markets magazine has an interesting piece in the current issue on a computer model used by JPMorgan Securities entertainment group to decide which movies to finance and which ones to pass on. While the accepted wisdom in movie production is...
I mentioned in an earlier post that ScienceFriday on NPR this week had a list of the best science books of 2004. Well, here are the books: “J. Robert Oppenheimer: And the American Century,” David Cassidy. (Pi Press, 2004) "Mind...
I see that Google has, in effect, retracted its "update" earlier this week to Google Groups. Given my critical comments here about the changes to G/G, I'm going to cheerfully accept all credit for having forced Google's hand on this...
According to Friday's New York Times, IBM has put its entire personal computer business up for sale. As most people will know, IBM effectively created the PC business (in conjunction with Microsoft), to the point that for the longest time...
Tomorrow during hour two of NPR's Science Friday:Well, it's been a great year for science books, from Edward Larson's "Evolution" to Brian Greene's "The Fabric of the Cosmos." In this hour, we'll run down the top books of 2004, just...
I generally take the other side where the consensus at Slashdot is concerned, but in their criticism of revisions to Google Groups and that indispensable interface to Usenet, past and present, they are spot on. Google has messed up. Deep...
Missed this until now. Mamma.com (the firm in which Mark Cuban is a large shareholder) has reached a deal to buy search firm Copernic:Mamma.com Inc., (the "Company"), (NASDAQ: MAMA) and Copernic Technologies Inc. is pleased to announce that the Company...
What happens after trackback and comment spam? Granted, neither problem is entirely solved, but let's just say for the sake of argument that they are both beaten down to manageable levels. What's next for spammers?How about ego spam in RSS? Like...
The WeatherBug folks have launched a service whereby you can measure temperature, rainfall, wind speed, and other such stuff via a PC running WeatherBug. While that is all well and good, what is much more interesting is that the company...
There is a typically cross, contrarian, and insightful interview with venture capital patriarch Don Valentine over at News.com. In it he argues correctly that nanotechnology is an overhyped technology in search of a problem, but he goes on to make...
Do athletes take more risks when you give them better safety gear? That idea pops up in a NY Times piece today on the merits (or dangers) of soccer protective headgear. Apparently there is a major push underway in soccer...
Who would have thought it, but librarians are now the hippest kids on the technology block. A number of the most interesting talks I have heard in recent months have been by librarians, and two of the blogs of which...
The IEEE is flogging a new journal, called Systems Biology. Here are some interesting-looking papers from the table of contents of the first issue:Igesias et al.: Uncovering Directional Sensing: Where Are We Headed?Liu et al.: Copasetic Analysis: A Framework for the Blind...
Fascinating story in the SF Chronicle on the life-or-death tussle between traditional real estate brokers and online competitors over sharing listing information:In the last several years, the National Association of Realtors has pushed an online listings policy that could allow...
Many are mulling whether RSS feeds should have ads. That is, fundamentally, a non-debate debate: Any economically viable feed is eventually going to contain ads. The only open issue is how many ads, of what kind, and how carefully targetted...
There is an interesting paper in the February 2004 issue of the Journal of Adolescence. It looks into the whole question of linkages between video games and adolescent aggression. The paper's conclusion? The two are linked:Six hundred and seven 8th-...
eBay founder Pierre Omidyar seems like a level-headed fellow, so the Q&A with him today in Business Week is worth a look. I was entertained, however, at the following exchange:Q: You now live outside Las Vegas. Why did you leave...
I see that Paul Allen's Vulcan Ventures has made an investment in one of my favorite examples of next-gen search companies: Eliyon Technologies of Boston. For those of you who have somehow missed my intermittent musings about the joys of...
From tomorrow's NatPost column:Last week a few million people in the U.S. received in their home mailboxes a catalog from eBay. It contained 32 shiny pages of products currently for sale on the online auction service.Wait a minute. As any...
The LA Times profiles a few people it encountered in a recent late-night visit to a Hollywood Internet cafe:Debbie JeromeUnemployed Law School GraduateWest HollywoodWhat are you doing here tonight?Looking for jobs online.What's the most annoying thing people do in an...
From Thumbshots.com, here are some comparative ranked search results for keyword "google" at MSN and Google. Interestingly, Google-related results generally score lower on MSN than on Google -- except for Google itself, which scores higher on MSN than on Google....
Bill Stensrud of Enterprise Partners was in to give a talk yesterday on commercialization of early-stage research. Without diving into everything that he had to say in a provocative discussion, one idea he threw out was that the venture business...
While I've tried Google Scholar and it's nice, it's only marginally better than my usual query line of "pdf keyword site:edu". The latter gets me to more or less the same place, and they're both in the main database, so...
So .... I was looking at Google trading volumes this week in light of the much-ballyhooed 30+-million shares coming out of IPO lockup. And I discovered something interesting: Google's trading volumes went through a gestalt shift back on October 21st.Here...
Okay, while it's nice that Google has now rolled POP support to my Gmail account, I kind of wish it hadn't. Why? Because in the absence of POP I would have cheerfully convinced myself that Google's Gmail crew was working...
A few paras from my upcoming Canadian Business magazine column:The biotech business is broken. It really doesn't matter where in the market you look because the symptoms are everywhere: This is one sick industry. Among other things, the drug industry...
I would like to see Blinkx succeed -- the San Francisco startup has far and away the most innovative feature set of any of the host of desktop search tools out there, and the new 2.0 release is even better --...
Here are some clips from tomorrow's NatPost column:Who would have expected it? Recent news in search, plus a competitor's browser, plus a new lawsuit from Novell, have done what millions of dollars in Microsoft public relations never could: Make Microsoft...
The WSJ has a quirky piece this morning arguing that the dominance of Microsoft Word's spell-checker is the real stifling effect of Microsoft's dominance of office productivity software. Its enforcement of grammatical practises, like umlauts and accents, seems outdated and...
Whether it is just monkeys and typewriters or something more serious and credible, bloggers are productive folks. They post and post and post. Tom Curley, head of the Associated Press, had a nice factoid on the subject at a conference...
From an article in today's NY Times about Microsoft's anti-Apple rush into music markets:"Over time, proprietary standards always lose because industry standards always win"-- Michael A. George, General manager of Dell's consumer business...
As the Economist points out, there is nothing the game industry likes more than noisily reminding us all how games sales exceed box office receipts. But as the Economist says, the two are not really comparable:Film-going is mainstream: nearly everybody...
To borrow the title of Frances Cairncross's estimable book, the death of distance is a fact. As the Economist points out in its current issue, falling transport costs have been a fact over the decades, and that has lead to...
Many people are reading all the wrong messages out of Merck's Vioxx's troubles. It is not merely that Merck ignored the risks in the product; that is a simplistic and overly risk-skewed view. It is deeper than that, and it has...
Good crack from a piece on the recently-completed biotech investors' conference in the Bay area:Venture investors at the 12th annual Biotech Investment Conference here Wednesday said "risky business" enough times to make entrepreneurs wonder if they were discussing an'80s movie...
From an IDC release today:"Pharmaceutical companies recognize that innovation is happening, but it's happening somewhere else."...
I have written various times about the joys of meta-data and of mining webservices, so I'm having fun messing with eBay's new Pulse service, as well as with Terapeak's latest iteration. While I'm a minimal eBay user (three sales ever),...
John Battelle says that he is hearing a major Google software update is coming. Well, while John is calling it a rumor I can say that the update was discussed in a little detail by Urs Holzle during his talk...
Why is Adsense (or equivalent) taking so long for RSS feeds? While Feedburner's experiment with Amazon links is interesting, it doesn't work all that well. The books aren't closely enough related to the content, and the ads are obtrusive. It...
For any readers in the San Diego area with an interest in search technologies, note that Dr. Urs Holzle of Google (on leave from UCSB) is speaking November 8th at 11am on search in the CMRR Auditorium at UC San...
There is an interesting piece in Sunday's Washington Post on some of the consequences of the rising number of special-purpose databases popping up. The central example in the Post story is a returns database used by retailer "Express":Darlene Salerno considers...
"The Fight for Dominance of the Desktop has Moved into the Search Market, According to IDC"- November 4, 2004...
A confession: For no good reason other than I never needed one before, until recently I had not created a wiki site, nor had I ever been a material wiki contributor. Given that I'm usually an early adopter of all sorts...
Yo Brad, what about us? While Brad Feld writes rapturously about MIT's Deshpande Center in an entry over on his blog, I'm sure he is planning to write something equally nice about the von Liebig Center here at UC San...
Oye, why do people still quote Mary Meeker? Granted, I'm about to do same, but I'm not today's Wall Street Journal, and at least I have the decency to lampoon the former Queen of the Net. Anyway, here is Mary-Mary...
In yesterday's NY Times Virginia Postrel highlighted a recent game-theory economics paper that looked into why Republicans and Democrats were so far apart on religious issues, rather than racing to the middle as political theory predicts. In essence, the paper...
Management consultant & all-around organizational gadfly-guy Tom Peters has taken to criticizing Jim "Built to Last" Collins in speeches. Peters says that organizations are not built to last (the title of Collins' best-selling management book); they are built to take...
I see that various people in the blogosphere are getting a case of blog fatigue. Somewhat like influenza, its symptoms are tiredness and a general feeling of lassitude leading to required rest. While the kind of rest required during influenza...
There is an interesting new study on the economics effects of music downloading out from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Here is the summary:Recording industry revenue has fallen sharply in the last three years, and some -- but...
There was many misreads of the Google IPO, the most important of which was how well it would subsequently perform. But one other received wisdom on the offering was that it would not usher in a a new and upbeat...
Entertaining discussion over at Jeremy's site on how people handle email. Do you have newest messages on top, stack-style, or newest on bottom, with email as a queue? I'm a stack guy and I don't think I could cope with...
Many folks are passing around the link to analyst Mark Meeker of Morgan Stanley's new report that high-fives syndication technologies. I have to confess that while it was fine, and had some decent examples, it didn't really do all that...
The WSJ has a piece this morning on how palmOne had its bacon saved by a hot product, the Treo. And more specifically, the story talks about how the new Treo 650 is going to cause a major shift in...
News that Google has purchased satellite image database company Keyhole is interesting. While many are playing the news straight up as an example of how Google is expanding its search offerings, more interesting, at least to me, are the implications...
With MT Blacklist doing its usual yeoman work keeping my comments clear of spam, it is interesting what sort of stuff does make it through. Here is a sample of four URLs contained in spam messages missed by MT Blacklist...
While Cebit was long the largest technology tradeshow in the world, I have never really heard which scientific conference had bragging rights. According to this post over at Nature, pride of place goes to ... the Society of Neuroscience's annual...
Remarable how many people are salivating over the Treo 650. Here is John Paczkowski of GMSV:Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Treo 650? If you're reading this and you happen to work at PalmOne, do me a favor and...
The UN ECE has a fascinating report out on the rise of robots world-wide. Here are two highlights:How many robots are now working out there in industry? Worldwide at least 800,000 units (possibly the real stock could be well over...
Nick Negroponte on swapping and the peer-to-peer payoff from InformationWeek:A parallel and more intriguing form of trade in the future will be barter. Swapping is a very attractive form of exchange because each party uses a devalued currency, in some...
Could there have been a better example of the changing of the guard than Thursday night? Google & Microsoft both report earnings, the purported future and past of technology markets, respectively. It played out like it was scripted: Microsoft reports...
Bambi Francisco of CBS Marketwatch has a frothy piece implying that there remains a supply-demand imbalance in Google shares, and that could mean a much higher Google share price real soon now -- make that much, much higher: Institutional investors have...
So, the new Google is more forthcoming and transparent, as evidenced by CEO Eric Schmidt's saying early on that he was "eager and interested" in people's questions on last night's earnings call, right? Well, here is the first question out of...
What's going over at Yahoo Mail? A while back Yahoo bought Oddpost, the makers of a quirky but well-done Outlook-style web-based mail client. As an early and licensed user of the product, I remain quite fond of Oddpost, and I...
The Google results are out, and the call starts in three minutes. Others will spend way more time on this than I will, but here are the highlights and some quick analysis. Analysts were looking for $0.56 this quarter, and...
Oh, Pascal! Many moons ago I learned programming language Pascal in engineering school, doing bubble sorts and the usual such set of fine CSE 207 things. There is an interesting public symposium on the language's 30th anniversary being held at...
Pop!Tech is streaming live here. It is a quirky and unapologetically intellectual conference, right down to how it embraces the power of digressions and scatteredness -- and it is also worth listening it. Right now Richard "Rise of the Creative...
Lots of speculation afoot this week given the arrival on Thursday of Google's first quarterly results as a public company. The trouble is, it is turning out to be a little like the first quarterly results for some newly-public KGB:...
My minor-key claim to fame vis-a-vis the Stewart-Crossfire meltdown on CNN last Friday is only that I spotted the Bittorrent link (at Boing Boing) early Friday evening, and then reposted it here. Since then, through zero assistance from me, it...
Nick Bradbury of Feeddemon fame asks "What's wrong with RSS?" It is a good and timely question, and he provides a partial answer -- security:But what are the security issues that are specific to RSS? Developers such as myself are so...
Another week, another venture capital-centric technology conference. Why are these things so bad? With rare exceptions -- Chris Shipley's spirited and interesting DEMO being one of them -- such conferences are deathly. There are too many venture capitalists delivering a...
"It validates our market." It is one of the great marketing lies of all time, right up there with "never under-priced", "lifetime warranty", and "customers are #1". When a company sees that a bigger and better-financed competitor is entering their...
Dean Takahashi has an entertaining set-to with Sun's Scott McNealy in Sunday's San Jose Mercury-News. There is bickering throughout, but the best snippet is this telling exchange:Q There is a perception that Sun is trying to lock in customers with...
The irrascible Om Malik doesn't like Google desktop. Among the most contrarian people I know, Om can be counted on to find an orthogonal way of looking at seemingly over-covered subjects. Case in point: Google's new desktop search tool:I think...
Been pressed for time last 24 hours, so didn't mention this sooner .... but, in case you have been hiding in a spider hole you may not have noticed that Google has launched its much-anticipated desktop search tool. So far,...
This is admittedly anecdotal empiricism, but it was hard not to notice the emergence of RSS as a legit financial topic during last night's Yahoo earnings call. The boys and girls on Wall Street are starting to ask about this...
A year or so ago I clipped and emailed a part of the Q&A section from Microsoft's quarterly earnings conference call. The reason? A bizarre and rambling 319-word question from Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker. (My clip got sent around...
John Battelle has a nice piece up on saving the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, and other closed-garden subscription-only publications. I think John has nailed it: For mass-market publications like the preceding the benefits of pure subscription-only models with no...
It feels simultaneously like one hundred years ago and yesterday, but tomorrow, October 13th, marks the tenth anniversary of the first public release of "Mosaic Communications Corporation's" browser, a product called Netscape 0.9 Beta. For those of you who weren't around...
It was inevitable, but Six Apart's march into corporate markets -- alongside receiving a new infusion of venture capital -- was going to bring out the critics. A WSJ story this morning chronicles SA founders Ben and Mena Trott's trot...
I love my Gmail drive. While I have various ftp storage areas and whatnot, the clean integration of my Gmail account into Windows Exporer as a 1 GB drive is nifty as heck -- and useful too. I have put...
In case folks out there haven't noticed, by popular request I have switched over to full-text feeds. If that is irritating people to no end, then let me know and I'll add another feed that is abbreviated like the old...
How many technology-related monthly bills are you paying? Cell phone, Tivo, XM radio, etc. etc. For many people this is becoming not insignificant. A generation ago people made three monthly payments -- mortages, utilities, and newspapers -- and now the...
Fortune Magazine discovered Gawker Media's Nick Denton in the current issue. It says he is getting serious about converting buzz to cash, and Fortune points out that he has just launched a bevy of new sites for the "online-GQ demographic"....
Is venture capital antithetical to RSS and weblogs? The ever-gnomic Dave Winer argues so in a (financially) bleak one-liner this weekend: Venture capital conferences about weblogs and RSS are like Republican conferences on the environment.While he isn't explicitly making the...
There is a classic moment in a Seinfeld episode called "The Watch" where George has "negotiated" with a network biggie to give Jerry and George a deal for their proposed "show about nothing". The trouble is, the deal that George has...
Stewart Alsop is stepping down from being a partner at venture firm NEA. One of the many folks who jumped into venture capital during the go-go days of the late 1990s, Alsop never sounded like he had entirely escaped his...
The WSJ highlights some interesting findings from a recent Sphere Institute report:More than half of the people working at technology companies in California in early 2000 had left the technology field or the state by the end of 2003, and...
Ira has a tech trifecta on Science Friday tomorrow: earthquakes, influenza, and Mt St Helens. They're my three favorite subjects -- gloom, doom, and boom:Scientists watching Mt St. Helens say seismic activity at the volcano has slowed down since last...
As a parent of a 7-month-old and a 3-year-old I'm as concerned as anyone about either contracting influenza. But that said, the current fervor over influenza vaccine shortages strikes me as misplaced. Yes, the U.S. is short a little less...
What drives you to try new technologies? For most of us it is seeing or hearing of someone else trying the thing. But here is a question: Is the role of proximity in consumption reduced online? In other words, when I...
Microsoft has released a second iteration of its MSN search technology. Is it any better than the last go-around? Well, that depends on what you didn't like last time. This version is mildly less crowded than the last one, but...
Am I the only one who thinks people are totally adrift for being rapturous over shock-jock Howard Stern's decision to go to to Sirius satellite radio? What are people thinking? This is a mistake for Sirius (the $100-million in Stern comp...
Chris Anderson of Wired's interesting "long tail" article is the subject of some typically entertaining commentary on Slashdot. As per usual in such cases, it is an unhealthy mix of insights mixed with "I know you are, but what am...
Jeremy Zawodny indirectly makes this interesting point in a post from Web 2.0: If open platforms are so great, why is the adoption of open platforms so poor? An interesting example is instant messaging, where every platform is closed --...
A thoughtful and interesting post from VC/analyst Bill Burnham. He argues -- correctly -- that enterprise software is being torn apart from the inside, up-ending the binary-centric world in which most of us have grown up, and replacing it with...
While some folks are reporting that a new feature has appeared in their Gmail accounts -- the option of being notified of new Gmail via an Atom feed -- I haven't received that option yet. I'm guessing that a staged launch...
The FT has a highly entertaining piece on the indefatigable Steve Ballmer and his (failing) efforts to convince European investors that Microsoft's best days are ahead of it:"There is still all that mainframe and Unix stuff. Wheeeugh! We have not...
In a zero-surprise ruling today, the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to hear Morris Communications' appeal of the 11th District Court's decision in its case with the PGA Tour. The latter had alleged that Morris was inappropriately grabbing that data...
Today's WSJ has a Lee Gomes column on RSS. It's worth reminding folks that while RSS and the like seem like old hat, most people don't discover stuff until it appears in places like the WSJ, NY Times, etc. Anyway,...
I am a fan of electronic markets. I find that I turn to them more and more, whether the subject is the likelihood of an FOMC rate increase in November, or where the S&P 500 will end the year, or...
While it's not a statistically significant sample, I have had at least three separate conversations with senior technology people lately who, like me, feel cheery about the current technology resurgence. They are all capivated by the many fascinating things going...
While I'm as entertained by Google's aptitude test in the current MIT Technology Review as anyone, the comments here on the company's underlying fondness for hiring way-smart people are worth thinking about:...Google misses the point of its next evolutionary stage. Finding...
In typical too-late-to-be-useful financial-press fashion, the NY Times weighs in Wednesday with the belated realization that Google's share were winners after all. Why? The company's share performance, of course, with Google stock up more than 50% from the $85 offering...
I learned a long time ago that when you can't make a decision it's okay to ask yourself, "What would happen if I said 'yes' to both?" Hosted feed-reading and client-side RSS feed reading are a case in point. I...
In case other folks hadn't noticed, Wired has become worth reading again. Case in point: There is a piece in the October issue that is going to become de rigeur in tech conference, venture capital and startup circles, with the...
Congrats Stewart and Caterina on the new investors. I see that Joi Ito and Esther Dyson have now both disclosed. Good stuff, and some savvy folks....
Various people have sent me a link to Watchcow and its new-ish service, so I'll just pass it along. It is an interesting RSS application -- it tracks price-changes at Amazon on wish-list items and then syndicates it back to...
Jon Udell has a typically thoughtful post where he segues from the topic of canonical URLs to that of the network effects that flow from defragmenting fragmented online conversations. It is worth reading, and something about which I feel strongly....
John Paczkowski of SiliconValley.com is quietly creating the most drily funny oeuvre of tech-related commentary anywhere. He is cheerfully adept at sticking in the knife, catching executives speaking sweet nothings, and generally providing much-needed context for the silliness that passes...
Photo-sharing app Flickr got a rave review this week from Andy Ihnatko of the Chicago Sun-Times. As he writes, the app includes many of the best features of a host of other such services, plus some others that are unique...
As part of my ongoing quest to recover from a lost laptop I have resolved to do a better job of keeping my many computers in approximate synch. I have, after all, two laptops, two office desktops, one home deskptop,...
There is a certain cyclical inevitability to these things. A year ago we were in the "Whoa, look at all the money these people are getting" stage. Now, a year later, we are in the "Oh-oh, social software companies are...
Ray Lane of Kleiner Perkins -- and ex- of Oracle -- says Oracle Corp. would be worth more if it stopped dabbling in non-database businesses:"If Oracle were a database business only, it would be much more profitable than Microsoft and...
From my column in tomorrow's National Post:So where are all the naysayers now? It is almost exactly a month since Google went public and the search company's stock is up an impressive forty percent from its $85 selling price. It...
I was talking to a conservative (and smart) billion-dollar fund manager friend last week who loves RIM, so I have been feeling better lately about my cheery feeling toward the wireless messaging company. Not surprisingly, many out there think that...
Judging by the buzz, you would think Wal-mart had whole buildings full of people doing nothing but planning the downfall of entire industries via RFID. That is apparently not the case, as this Information Week piece makes abundantly clear:InformationWeek: Are...
As I have remarked on before, the single most common topic on blogs is apologizing for not having blogged. So ... here is an apology for not having blogged (much) lately. I have been traveling like a fiend, and then...
Will someone please make me like A9? I am absolutely sure that Google is not the apex of search, and A9 has some interesting features, but I just haven't found that feature that makes me feel like A9 is indispensable....
A piece in Monday's WSJ indirectly makes the argument that online auctioneer eBay is too big to fail. While the piece cites various examples of smaller auctions that are making inroads on eBay by being focused, it concludes with the...
Some comments by Christian Lindhold of Nokia and Stewart Butterfield of Ludicorp/Flickr in my comments section got me thinking: Is nothing viral anymore? If you recall, back in the 1990s everything was viral. Email was viral, auctions were viral, payment...
I'm fond of measuring TTL at conferences. I don't mean time-to-live, however, even if some conferences are so dreadful that the measure might seemingly apply. I mean time-to-laptop: How long it takes before an arbitrary percentage -- usually 50% --...
The first few paras from my column in tomorrow's National Post on the the Oracle antitrust decision:Game on! A U.S. District Court has ruled against the U.S. Department of Justice in its antitrust case against Oracle. The decision will set...
Christian Lindhold of Nokia is up on the stage here at DemoMobile right now and he just said, "Sharing of pictures is still an unsolved problem". He is, of course, pushing Nokia's new Lifeblog and its just-announced partnership with SixApart,...
Anyone going to the Albany Symposium? I'm missing it this year, but I'd happily hear a report. And speaking of entertaining conferences, I'm at Demo Mobile in La Jolla, so if any readers are there, let me know....
A survey in today's WSJ asks this question: "Is it appropriate for toddlers to play educational games on computers?" One respondent answers as follows: ...
Dell and Gateway have apparently stopped including floppy drives in new computers. So here is the question: What took so long? You can't store diddly in 1.44MB, so that's not the pitch, and it hasn't been for some time. It strikes...
Today's San Jose Mercury has a piece saying that the social software funding bubble has moved on to companies like SocialText, Jot, etc. I don't entirely agree with the bubble comment, although I take their point. One difference, and not...
Good tick-tock retrospective piece out on the Google IPO. Here are some highlights:July 23: David Sheff, author of the Playboy article on Google, e-mailed Google's publicist and told her that the story would appear in the September issue, due to...
Judys Book, a Seattle-based startup, gets plugged today in John Cook's Seattle Post-Intelligencer column. The pitch is the following: Finding qualified mechanics, dentists, house painters and other tradespeople isn't easy, especially for newcomers to a city. Judys Book will combine social...
There is a nifty paper in the October issue of the Journal of Finance arguing that hedge funds, contrary to orthodox efficient market theory, rode the technology bubble of the late 1990s rather than trading against said overpriced stocks. What's...
Good piece in today's LA Times on the joys of coming up with codenames for technology products. I don't mind sitting in on codename discussions, but I try desperately to avoid anything to do with real product names. Those meetings...
Nasty news from Intel in its mid-quarter update tonight. The company had been guiding analysts toward Q3 revenues of $8.6b-$9.2b; now it is saying the quarter looks more like $8.3b-$8.6b. From peak to trough that is a 9.8% cut in...
Since comparing Blinkx and Copernic Desktop Search earlier this week, I have stubbornly continued to run the two tools in tandem. And now I have surprised myself somewhat with the results. While the things that bugged me about Copernic (and...
The Dallas Fed is putting on an interesting-looking conference September 10th called "Where IT's @: Technology and the Economy". There will be some solid speakers for your $110, including Nick "Why IT Doesn't Matter" Carr, Hal Varian (UC Berkeley), and Chris...
While they headline the rising numbers on spam, the buried lede in this Information Week piece is how the spam problem is actually getting solved. The real meat is about half-way through the the article:Despite these sobering numbers, filtering tools...
Why is there no startup beating the tar out of Microsoft as a small-business replacement for Exchange Server? As most people likely know, Exchange is a fine thing, but it is not the sort of product you lightly install in...
Services like the new Star38 Caller ID spoofing service mean it's only a matter of time until we get to spam-style formal whitelists and blacklists for phones -- especially for VoIP devices. After all, if Star38 is going to circumnavigate...
Jon Udell argues that Microsoft's WinFS filesystem isn't just an over-engineered solution in search of a problem, and its delay also shows why Microsoft just can't win:It's hard to cry a river for a company like Microsoft, but sometimes they're damned...
Desktop search is never going to be a highly fundable investment category -- rightly or wrongly, investors are just too skittish about the impending entry of Google, Microsoft, et al., -- but I'm still an admitted search junkie. Call it...
From a Gartner Group interview with Clayton "Disruptive Innovation" Christensen. In the snippet he is discussing failures in technology marketing, specifically why marketers wrongly apply consumer products principles to tech markets, leading them to value buyer characteristics over buyer needs...
The first few paras of my column in tomorrow's National Post:The recording industry can't seemingly help itself from alienating customers. The latest example? Threats being directed toward Ottawa, Ontario, programmer Scott MacLean over his TimeTrax software.MacLean felt that he was...
From a story in today's SF Chronicle:A growing number of entrepreneurs, faced with spiraling accounting costs and stiffer corporate governance rules, are choosing to keep their startups private or sell them to a rival rather than take them public. For...
It usually starts with one of the two big dogs of technology journalism: John Markoff of the New York Times, or Don Clark of the Wall Street Journal. Having tipped a few key analysts to what your new company is...
Venture folks are torn on the value of software patents. Some think they are worthwhile, and they point to various business method patents, or even to some of the many patents underlying DVD players. Others think that software patents are...
I was wandering around a bit in the previous post, from Richard Feynman, to beach volleyball, to Krispy Kreme. I'm always curious whether others have found links among such superficially unrelated things, so it is interesting to Google the question. It...
If the addition of a "most popular" articles feature at the Wall Street Journal online isn't new altogether, it is the first time I've noticed it. I'm a big fan of that sort of thing, and regularly scan similar pages...
Interesting article in today's NY Times on I-Neighbors and the idea of overlaying online local communities onto physical locales:Mr. Gordon, 43, a business executive who lives in Lexington, Mass., sent an e-mail to his neighborhood's list wondering if any recreational...
Pleasurable dinner/chat last night in Vancouver with Dick Hardt of sxip and Stewart Butterfield of Flickr fame. They are up to very different things, of course, but it is remarkable how many of my recent conversations implacably converge on emerging...
Good piece on picopower in Smaller Times. Particularly interesting is a section about mid-way down concerning research being done by recent U.C. Berkeley doctoral grad, Shad Roundy:"...Shad Roundy, with professors Paul K. Wright and Jan Rabaey, is seeking out power...
Courtesy of Fred Wilson, I just came across the alt-energy blog. Interesting stuff, and an active area for investing. Spotting this site comes on the heels of a useful article yesterday on rising VC enthusiasm for solar technologies....
Reed Elsevier with its dependence on expensive academic-oriented databases has for some time been what hedge funds sorts call an "investment short". In other words, it has structural problems that make it likely its best days are past, and it...
I argued some time ago that Apple is wangling to repeat the greatest marketing mistake in business history. This article only confirms my suspicions, with it clear that Apple has the same hidebound hardware strategy that doomed the Macintosh to...
Decent piece in today's SF Chronicle summarizing the various players, big and small, chasing desktop search. We have, of course, Blinkx, X1 (misspelled in the article as X-1), and Copernic, among others. So who is best? Sadly, the article settles...
Good and sensible-minded piece in the current Economist on spectrum policy. As it points out, the FCC would make better speed cops than real estate agents, and the day it figures that out spectrum will become much more abundant. The...
This had a certain inevitable feeling to it, but it is still interesting:SAN FRANCISCO & SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 13, 2004--eBay, The World's Online Marketplace (Nasdaq:EBAY) (www.ebay.com), and craigslist, an online community featuring classifieds and forums (www.craigslist.org), announced today that...
When I joined Digital Equipment Corporation after my undergraduate engineering degree many (many) years ago, I was puzzled at the way people seemingly knew implicitly when and where to go for stuff. There would, for example, be a meeting, and everyone...
A new Pew Report says that the number one online activity (after general search) is looking for directions:A full 87% of Internet users look for maps or driving directions online, and they choose the online mode over offline mode in...
At the risk of diving perilously into a circularity vortex, why isn't there an RSS feed for RSS? I'd like to be able to subscribe to an RSS feed for my own RSS feed, one that would tell me when...
Ah, I love the increasingly Spy vs. Spy perversity of the anti-spam email struggle:Dan Lukas, lead security architect at Aurora Health Care, makes no attempt to halt e-mail with "Viagra" in the subject line. Here's why: Junk e-mailers learned long...
Larry and Sergey really have to learn how to dial down the hard sell. The following is from one investor's account of attending the ongoing Google IPO roadshow:"They've violated all 10 Commandments of doing an IPO," said Tom Wyman, a...
While the effect of weblogs on the sometimes cozy world of print journalism is vastly overrated -- the recent Democratic convention solipsistic silliness (blogs covering blogs covering blogs) was a nice example -- but they are arguably accelerating the news...
From Jon Udell in InfoWorld, a remarkable statistic claimed in an unnamed study:A recent survey found that 75 percent of Dartmouth students have shared their network passwords.... "They like having someone who can check their e-mail for them or log...
Over the weekend I was searching for something at Google and, in a slip, I searched under the name of a site I used to run years ago: Groksoup.Now, for most people reading this site the name Groksoup will deservedly...
There are lots of folks out there arguing that some combination of RSS and instant messaging is going to replace email. There are many reasons why such people are wrong, but looming large among those reasons is that email is...
Interesting-sounding new book out about how copier technologies changed the world. Among other things, it tells a story of how IBM turned down a chance to enter into a joint venture with then-unknown Xerox in 1958:Arthur D. Little concluded that...
As I predicted some time ago, the parade of negative Google IPO articles is growing. Both the NY Times and Dow Jones are out with stories today listing all the tech execs and related digerati who won't be buying shares...
It's always interesting watching to see new domains registered that use a keyword of interest. ResourceShelf has been tracking new domains with the word "google" somewhere inside, which is entertaining enough, but recently I have been checking out new domains...
I'm seeing all sorts of RSS-based stuff these days. While I'm most interested in business applications of RSS, whether caching or database or textual related, most of what I'm seeing lately is consumer-oriented.Many of you will have seen RSS Calendar,...
There is some sanity on the planet: the Nanosys IPO has been "postponed". I love the final few lines [emphasis added] of this otherwise gray story in the NY Times:Nanosys, the leading symbol of nanotechnology's promise to generate lucrative innovations...
Nasty news tonight for Google in a revised filing makes the unthinkable seemingly possible: Google's public offering could be postponed. In essence the company committed a no-no -- between 2001 and 2004 it issued 23.2-milllon shares of common stock that...
Siemens Business Services has done a survey on how much time people spend on the phone with their information technology support people per week:More than a third -- 36 percent -- of the U.S. white-collar workers surveyed said that they...
Hitting for the cycle in baseball means getting a single, a double, a triple, and a home-run in the same game. It is understandably rare, even in these, ahem, performance-enhanced times.In the equity analyst business hitting for the cycle is equally...
The probe into the cause of the American Airlines and U.S. Airways outage last Sunday continues. The computer troubles took down the two airlines for two and three hours respectively. So, what caused the trouble? Here is an airline spokesperson:Officials...
If there were a John Dvorak drinking game, it might go like this: Everyone drinks each time the long-time PC Magazine columnist says Bill Gates, MS-DOS, or mentions an early PC technology; you quaff twice if he calls someone stupid;...
The Google IPO contrarianism to which I referred a few posts back makes a tentative appearance in a NY Times business article this weekend. Granted, the scary-sober Fred Hickey also shows up, but you can sense a few portfolio managers...
Brad Feld asks an interesting question: Where have all the fax machines gone? In closing a venture deal last week he noticed that many formerly-fax-sporting people no longer had fax machines. How did that happen?The superficial answer is that over...
Most marketing sorts (now there's a not-so-august group) argue that the greatest marketing mistake in business history was not New Coke, it was Apple's decision in the late 1980s not to widely license its Macintosh operating system. The company's dumb...
One inexpensive and non-technical way to reduce the consumption of telephone numbers -- and thereby deal with area-code exhaustion -- is to recycle telephone numbers. That works, but it comes with consequences, as this story shows [via FARK]:A 16-year-old [Norwegian] girl has...
It's not just television that is seeing declining interest in the prime demographics. It is happening to radio too. According to a release from Statistics Canada, radio listening among teens has declined 24% in the last five years. Blame whatever...
Today's WSJ has a Kara Swisher piece singing the "wikis change the world" theme. To her credit, she touches on some of the most important issues, like managing collaboration, avoiding edit storms, and deciding who the canonical sources are in...
I and many others have written repeatedly on how the Google IPO, as currently structured, is not a good deal for investors. It's too expensive, the dual-class share structure is shareholder-hostile, the company is not sufficiently forthcoming about strategy, too...
From a trip report by a Microsoft intern who recently spent some time hanging in Bill Gates' house:I personally asked him about his opinion of Nicholas Carr's prediction surrounding the commoditization of information technology. His response (verbatim, might I add),...
Not counting abandoning email, which certain Cassandras out there continue to advocate, there are two solutions to the current email overload that most of us are experiencing: better tools and better techniques. I have written on better tools before, so...
Not to turn into "All Google IPO, All the Time" -- I'll leave that to the regular media, who are doing just fine at that -- but Jim Cramer (of Kudlow & Cramer and RealMoney fame) has a nice piece...
In an entertainingly feisty interview with Broadcasting & Cable, the ever-combative Roger Ailes opines on the prospects for Fox doing its own all-business network. Will he unseat his prior offspring, CNBC? Here's Roger: Nothing is imminent. We thought we needed...
Hollywood is struggling with the same issue as the recording industry: How to make money from downloads before a generation of people think that content is free and copyright doesn't matter. From what I can see in this fascinating Bloomberg...
From a WSJ story this morning on Microsoft's fourth-quarter earnings release:"We've got a really great end to the year and an extraordinarily good pipeline for the future, so we are very jazzed here in Redmond."Investors might disagree with all that...
What happens when no-one deletes email anymore? It is not a rhetorical comment, and recent developments in the courts and under Sarbanes-Oxley only make it more likely:"...cigarette maker Phillip Morris yesterday discovered the heavy cost of deleting those less-than-savory electronic...
According to this piece in the San Diego Union-Tribune, rooms around San Diego this weekend are going for $667 a night and more. And that's just for the tony climes of the Super 8 Motel in Mission Valley, or the...
Great. I'm not the only one who says "Hello? You still there?" when doing Internet calling: "We thought, 'Wow, some of these phones are really, really clear and quiet,'" says Longhini, who was evaluating Cisco VoIP gear two years ago...
From an excellent and candid interview with Dell CEO Kevin Rollins: Q: Dell was one of the hip companies of the late '80s and early '90s. What kind of advice would you give to one of the hip companies now,...
From a Business Week interview with reformed Microsoft basher, and current Sun CEO, Scott McNealy: You know, there was a lot of rhetoric [in my Microsoft bashing]. And by the way, when I said it, it was clever and quotable,...
There is a fascinating corporate espionage case wending its way through the Canadian courts. WestJet, a fast-growing discount airline, has been accused by Air Canada of accessing the latter airline's internal systems and using that information to better schedule its...
A new "safe email" study from The Economist has some journalists in full finger-wagging mode. The headline on TechWeb says it all: "Execs Still Open Attachments". A sub-head goes to state that a "Survey says that 75% of senior executives...
The July issue of IEEE Communications magazine has some good pieces on VoIP and related QoS/management issues, with the Takahashi et al., and Bing et al., papers being particularly useful. The former suggested some practical perceptual measurements of QoS, and...
Oddpost is like the people behind the online email app: quirky, frustrating, and technically excellent. It is a stupendously idiosyncratic example what is possible to do with a Javascript app. It is also a great example of how much better...
In what is almost certainly a first, an Apple product manager conducted an iChat video conversation with another Apple product manager back in Cuptertino. The twist, however, is that the first product manager was on an airplane somewhere between Munich...
From an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education summarizing a new study showing that the growth and adoption of education technologies has been much lower than many expected: [The report's author] said he found that many faculty members thought...
Someone please tell me whether Blinkx is the niftiest thing since Google, or just the second coming of ... well, a hundred near-miss technologies. At the perceptive Om Malik's textual urging I am trying out this new integrated contextual search...
I am fascinated all over again with email. Except that it's the longer the thrill I got more than a decade ago from sending messages to people hither and yon, but it's recognizing that email is going through a very...
The SF Chronicle has a nice piece on the outlook for tech.biz trades Wired and Business 2.0. A favorite factoid:In 2000, the Industry Standard sold more ad pages than any magazine in history. In 2001, it went bankrupt....
Microsoft did an interesting thing at this year's Tech-Ed conference. It asked people at Tech-Ed who were blogging about the conference to send Microsoft a link back to the RSS feed for their blog. In turn, Microsoft incorporated those micro...
This AlwaysOn interview with investor Roger McNamee is interesting for what it says directly -- client-server software is dead; PeopleSoft isn't dead -- and also for what it says indirectly. Because in additional to playing prognosticator, McNamee uses the interview...
As "electro-" was to a company's name in the 1960s and early 1970s, so ".com" was in the 1990s, and so, apparently "nano-" is in the early part of this century. Companies are rushing to remake themselves "nano" in light...
When I saw the headline in Barron's this weekend I thought they were kidding: "[Mary Meeker] Sees Big Opportunities in China". Mary, the last big-firm Internet analyst standing from the go-go days, is fond of Chinese Internet stocks, those playthings...
It had to happen -- a market has grown up around Google's not-yet-launched Gmail email service. On one side of the market you have current Gmail beta users, some of whom apparently are allowed to invite one friend to join the...
Google is about to do something that many thought would happen eons ago: Introduce a free search tool for Windows PCs. Supplanting the woeful search function that comes with Windows PCs, and overnight wiping out tiny search tool upstarts like...
In the comments to my earlier post on this whole Six Apart/MT/free software affair, a reader writes that Six Apart isn't alone in turning a "free" product into a "commercial" product:As an example, look at Nick Bradbury's software. His FeedDemon...
Can you make money from selling free software? The recent community meltdown over Six Apart's decision to change license terms for its popular Movable Type content management application has many people wondering. You can, but you also have to set...
Weather has become an economic battleground. First we had Sequoia Capital's recent sizable investment in WeatherBug, and now we have James Fallows' N.Y. Times piece (see last para) which notes in sidelong fashion how AcuWeather and others are trying to...
Rosy-eyed sorts optimistic about the wonders of wireless would do well to read the following snippet from an AirDefense press release. It is a collection of just some of the WiFi shenanigans that occured on the conference floor this week...
Eagerly awaited in envious technology transfer offices across the U.S. was the specifics of Stanford's licensing deal with Google. After all, Stanford is the patent-holder for the PageRank technology underlying Google's architecture. How much was Stanford going to make on...
This is one of those "it's always high growth when you start from zero" examples, but it is still an interesting factoid:According to an ITU report to be released May 3rd, Africa is now the fastest-growing mobiles market in the...
News that Monster.com is introducing a new employment index is pleasing to me along a couple of dimensions. First, it recognizes that "offline" employment indexes are no longer very representative of the broader population. After all, I'm assuming most job...
So, it's the eve of Google's IPO offering. The company spiffs up its interface, adds a few search thingies, and caps it all today by announcing ... free email? Good golly, but that feels awfully 1997. Sure, it's nice having...
Upon the death of Dolly the cloned sheep last year, Carl Feldbaum, the head of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), received a lot of media calls. What happened? Did Dolly's death have to do with cloning? His response:"...Dolly was incredibly...
The FT is joining the chorus of people musing about how Google's current market position is likely to be transient:Remember AltaVista? It was once market leader, too. As George Colony, chief of Forrester Research, observes: "There are no walls protecting...
One of the more remarkable balancing acts in markets is that of increasing revenues in a fast-growing semiconductor market. Why? Because average selling prices (ASPs) tumble so quickly that you have to grow like asparagus weed merely to maintain the status...
Sitting here in the lobby at O'Reilly's eTech it is fascinating as a sociological experience. There are a dozen people sitting around me, all of whom have laptops out (myself included). Almost certainly some of them are sending emails or...
I'm at the Emerging Technologies Conference here in San Diego this week, so postings may be intermittent and/or particularly electic. Speaking of digressions, it is strange living in a place that other people go to for conferences. Three out of...
The current issue of Nature Drug Discovery contains the following interesting graph:The author of the piece argues that the minor improvement in the absolute number of approvals in 2003 masks some important (and positive) changes at the FDA: Regulatory review...
According to the current Advertising Age, things were busy, if nervous, at this week's National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE -- pronounced to (sort of) rhyme with "nasty") conference in Las Vegas. TV execs can't figure out where the...
Judging by this interview in Business Week, Apple CEO/founder Steve Jobs still doesn't understand network effects. The miscue is in his answer to a series of questions about Apple's currently dominant position in online music retailing. Before I explain further,...
My National Post column today was on bumpf and posturing at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos.Update: Ah, if only I had seen this story before I had written the above column. Apparently the WEF anticipated my criticisms...
Microsoft's quarterly financial results tonight seemingly have many investors in a tizzy. It has nothing to do with the higher-than-expected equity compensation costs, however. Those are shuffling of costs from one period to another, and it isn't all that important...
Quirky piece in the Independent about Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's recent marriage to romance novelist Melanie Craft. It is requisitely snide in that U.K. way, so you get bon mots like the following: "At 34, Ms Craft is 25 years...
Razors are commodities, but that hasn't stopped Gillette et al., from trying to find ways to extract marginally more money from innovation-hungry consumers. We started down that path in fairly defensible fashion, with Trac II razors that did, demonstrably, shave...
Do "disruptive technologies" have to be cheaper than the thing they are disrupting? It's may seem a silly question, but it cuts to the heart of an anomaly in Clay Christensen's widely-loved theory. After all, Clay argues compellingly that many...
A while back eBay began mining and reselling information from its database of transactions on its site. At the time, while most people ignored the announcement from eBay, I said that it marked a massive change in the market...
Don't let anyone kid you about how the Internet destroys incumbents' business models. Case in point: General Media, the publisher of Penthouse magazine. It filed for bankruptcy protection in August of 2003, and it now says it has a reorganization...
And the free-phone beat goes on. Tim Bray discovers the wonders of Internet telephony (sans even would-be service providers like Vonage): "I can have a free videophone call home, that goes on as long as I need to and nobody's...
What happens to distance conversations when you take away the cost constraint? That thought experiment is playing out empirically right now, and I think we're seeing that people have text/video conferencing wrong. It is not that that instant message and...
Either Canadians responding to a recent survey don't know what WiFi is, or pollster Decima Research has its data wrong. That is the conclusion I come to after reading David Akin's precis of a Decima report about wireless "hot spots"...
Nice piece in today's Financial Times linking together a number of disparate happenings, like Amazon's new full-text database, but all with a common cause: People tend to confuse the secular trend [digitisation] with the cyclical phenomenon of the dotcom bubble,"...
Seoul tops, New York 4th, Toronto 10 in digital city ranking The e-governance Institute at Rutgers University and a Korean university surveyed the online presence for 100 of the world's biggest cities and determined that Seoul, Korea is the model...
Fascinating article in this morning's WSJ about absent presence and surfer voice. The idea? There is a rise in that half-engaged, less-than-attentive tone of voice we use when we are talking to someone on the phone, while also instant messaging,...
So, Yahoo has announced disposable email addresses -- addresses that you can use for a single purpose, but aren't really linked to your main email account. It is a decent solution to one part of the spam problem, that of...
Absolutely remarkable data from the always-interesting Jon Udell. By scanning his busy log file for access to his popular site, he shows just how seismic the changes are in the "agents" accessing his web properties. I say agents because it...
My weekend National Post column: Tick, tick, tick. That is the doomsday clock ticking down on the remaining days until AOL shutters (or sells) its Netscape unit. It is about time. AOL Time-Warner and Microsoft settled their lawsuit last...
Am away speaking at a Microsoft conference in Seattle, so things will be light here for a spell. Some fascinating anthropological observations so far though....
I'm busily sorting through the myriad RSS readers out there, convinced that despite the remarkable three-paned sameness of the things, that one of them will stand out as better than the rest. So far I'm wandered through Syndirella, RssBandit, NewsDesk,...
The latest developments in the razor market are interesting. We have gone from twin-blade razors, to triple-blade razors, and now we have the first examples of four-blade razors. While consumer novelty and pointless innovations are important parts of a functioning...
An interesting Wall Street Journal story today on the "Buffalo Spammer", a fellow who was rotating through multiple Earthlink accounts sending millions of spam messages. Apparently the WSJ story was very well-timed: he was hit with $14mm in fines late today. That is,...
Geek note: Great, savvy comments from Tim Bray on the pluses and minuses of dealing with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Like democracy, they're better than the alternatives, but that's not necessarily saying much. Two key points that he makes: CSS is...
This week will mark the 10th anniversary of the release of NCSA's Mosaic browser application. The NCSA at UIUC is marking the occasion with a symposium to be webcast live on April 29th. Where were you when you first saw...
