3ones
The Simplest Stable Structure
February 11, 2010
GigaOM
Online video has largely succeeded at many of its goals: It is democratizing media and encouraging a culture of sharing and participation. Its pushing the television industry to modernize and become more interactive. Its freeing content from time ...
Amid the hubbub over the launch of Google Buzz, one aspect of the new Gmail social platform grew more and more contentious: the fact that many people wound up exposing their email and GTalk contacts to the outside world without realizing this wo...
Google yesterday announced Google Fiber, an experimental network that would connect between 50,000 and 500,000 people, or as many as 200,000 homes, to the Internet at speeds reaching 1 gigabits per second a truly jaw-dropping and envy-inspiring rate. Being big fans of broadband, weve been following the race to 1 Gbps and have come up with a list of places around the world where you can get 1 Gbps connections to your home.
Hong Kong: The Hong Kong broadband network currently offers a FTTH/FTTB 1 Gbps serv...
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Its a constant battle that entrepreneurs face when planning a new product or service: How do you know which features to include and which features to leave out? One of the hallmarks of a great design-oriented company like Apple is that it knows ...
February 10, 2010
GigaOM
Time Warner Cable plans to expand its DOCSIS 3.0 broadband upgrades in portions of Texas, Ohio and upstate New York during the first half of this year, according to Light Reading. Ive emailed the company for confirmation, but really Im hoping that...
If music subscription service Rhapsody hoped that adding mobile phone applications would turn around its fortunes, a new quarterly report from primary stakeholder RealNetworks suggests otherwise. Newly independent Rhapsodys subscriber base shrank ...
Things seem to be humming along in the Facebook game market: Zynga, the leading Facebook game company, with popular apps such as Mafia Wars and Farmville (whose users recently sent half a billion valentines to each other in 48 hours), has agree...
Weve kept a close eye on Chinese telecommunications equipment vendor Huawei for the last few years, and today the company justified our attention by telling me in an interview that in 2009 it grew its North American sales by 63 percent to $408 mil...
Opera Software today released the beta of Opera 10.5 for Windows. The big improvement in this new release is a new JavaScript engine; Opera claims that its eight times faster than the previous version.
As the web apps we rely on get increasingly ...
Google has acquired the social search startup Aardvark for $50 million, according to TechCrunch. Weve asked both companies for comment, as well as our friends and friends of friends on Aardvark (thats what it does), but havent gotten official conf...
Peter Sunde, apparently not content with having co-founded the worlds most popular index of copyright-infringing movies, music and software (the BitTorrent tracker known as The Pirate Bay) as well as inspiring the creation of an actual political...
The mobile browser startup Skyfire is joining the increasingly crowded WebKit bandwagon by buying kolbysoft, maker of Steel, a WebKit-based Android browser that appears to have cultivated a tiny but dedicated base of fans whove downloaded the app...
Some music blogs skirt the edges of legality (and some completely ignore it) when it comes to posting mp3 files of their favorite songs. But a number of popular music blogs say Google deleted their blogs without warning, despite the fact that th...
Apple just a few years ago became the leader in online music sales by offering a cheap, easy way to purchase songs and an attractive device on which to listen to them. Now, by halving the price of TV shows sold through iTunes, Apple is looking to ...
Aspera today launched a version of its rapid file transport software for the iPhone, which will allow iPhone users to squeeze their picture and video files through the crappiest connection that AT&T may have to offer. And it makes the transfer...
Google Buzz has received a ton of hype as a potential Twitter/Facebook/Foursquare/Yelp-killer, but its only fully available on about 80 percent of Android devices on the market. And thats got some of those older Android users furious.
As Android ...
Google today announced an audacious plan to build what is essentially the most cutting-edge broadband network in the United States. While it is being mis-portrayed in certain segments of the media as an ISP effort, in reality it is nothing more th...
Edgar Bronfman Jr.
Warner Music Group president Edgar Bronfman this week articulated what we’ve known for quite some time: that major record labels have lost confidence in the free streaming model for music consumption and, by extension, the fre...
It is not good to talk ill of the dead. It is okay, however to speak the truth, however harsh it might seem, about the living dead.
Rupert Murdoch’s $580 million MySpace purchase has outlived not only its utility, but has also finally hit its exp...
Owen Van Natta, the former Facebook executive who was picked to revive MySpace last April, is stepping down, News Corp just announced. Hell be replaced by two of his hires, Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn, who now each share the title of co-president, reporting to News Corp digital CEO Jon Miller.
Circumstances around the shake-up arent clear yet. Miller was quoted in a press release as basically saying that Van Nattas personal and professional priorities werent in alignment with MySpace. One thing is clear: Running MySpace, and trying to bring it back to relevance, is a tough job.
Google Buzz, in case you hadnt noticed, has been getting lots ofwell, buzz since being unveiled yesterday. Depending on your perspective, its either a huge Facebook-Twitter-MySpace-Yelp-Foursquare killer, or its a giant disappointment and theref...
February 7, 2010
GigaOM
Some of the lessons learned from the commercials during Super Bowl 2010: Beer solves lots of problems, women hold men back from their dreams and this year, pants are optional. But there were also some highlights for the web video world.
Flo TV pushed their mobile TV viewing device to hen-pecked men dragged out shopping to the game, but they also got behind will.i.ams My Generation remix.
Google had a relatively clever ad in the second half pushing their search ability but, um, did anyone need to be tol...
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January 21, 2010
O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies.
My friend Eugene Lin wanted some iPhone App Store money. So he made one iPhone app that was eventually accepted, then another that was rejected and then he found a hit with the racy Peek-a-boo. Along the way he learned the ins and outs of the App Store approva process and made quite a lot of money in Japan.
He shared his findings on this episode of the Ignite Show. Eugene was filmed at Ignite Seattle 8 in the funniest talk of the evening.
January 19, 2010
GigaOM
Some of my favorite Facebook users are my aunts on my dads side. In the last two years, since they joined the site, Ive gotten a window into their lives that I never had having grown up on the West Coast, far away from the family core. Ive learned...
January 13, 2010
GigaOM
Its downright impossible to be a private person these days. Sure, you could stay off Twitter and Facebook and lock the doors. But whether its a colleague uploading a drunken picture of you online, a personal letter to a friend stored on their webm...
Zillow, a real estate listing service thats nearing profitability, is also dreaming of going public, though its pragmatic enough not to set its sights on doing so for another year. Zillow COO Spencer Rascoff today told Bloomberg that the company w...
January 11, 2010
GigaOM
In response to what it says was a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure aimed at penetrating the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, Google said today it will cease censoring results on Google.cn. ...
Elastra has incorporated energy efficiency intelligence into its Cloud Server solution, allowing customers to define which efficiency metrics are important to them and then rely on the software to route each application to the optimal resources wi...
VMware, on the heels of its acquisition of SpringSource, has announced that it will acquire email and collaboration software player Zimbra from Yahoo. With Zimbra, the virtualization giant VMware is spreading out to applications, and moving stead...
Verizon Wireless next week will begin requiring a minimum $10 data plan with some new feature phones, according to information obtained by Boy Genius Report. The move not only appears to mark the carriers most expensive data plan yet, it could be ...
Cisco has netted Swisscom as a customer for its super-fast edge router, I noticed earlier this morning. According to OECD stats, the Swiss are leaders in terms of broadband service delivery, so I read on to see what I was missing. From the releas...
After contributing Thrift (scalable cross-language services development), Hive (data warehouse infrastructure built on top of Apache Hadoop) and Cassandra (inbox search, but now used more broadly) to the Apache Software Foundation, Facebook is tod...
The finding of a report from the telecom researchers at Bell Labs out this morning is basically: communication networks are highly inefficient. Networks could be 10,000 times more energy efficient, says the report and todays networks are optimized...
Google on Tuesday announced that it will be supporting uploads of many more file types on Google Docs, and ratcheting up the size of allowable individual uploads. There are also new, affordable online storage options. The moves are aimed at both e...
Graphic courtesy of Column Five Media
MetroPCS this morning reported lower subscriber growth and increased churn in the fourth quarter as the cutthroat competition in the prepaid space continues to heat up. The company only added 317,000 customers, down 39 percent from the year-ago pe...
Forrester issued an optimistic report today claiming that the economic downturn of the last year and half is over, and forecasting that tech spending in the U.S. will grow by 6.6 percent in 2010 (though not as fast as the firm originally forecast ...
Flurry is building up its war chest in the wake of last months merger with Pinch Media. The mobile analytics firm this morning said it has pocketed $7 million in a Series B round led by InterWest partners and including participation from four exis...
VigLink is launching today a service to help publishers take advantage of affiliate marketing offerings for sites they already link to in their normal course of writing. While many site owners may be aware that Amazon will send them a cut of reven...
Now that Pandora, a next-generation online music streaming service, has turned its first quarterly profit, the Oakland, Calif.-based company is looking at life beyond the web. And by doing so, Pandora is moving to embody whats being called the dev...
Though Googles social strategy has been catch-up at best to date, the company does have a master plan at least according to engineering director David Glazer, whom I spoke with last week at Google HQ. He said across a variety of products, Google ...
Compete Blog
Well The day has finally arrived, while I am only months away from my 10 year high school reunion. My latest accomplishment pales in comparison. Today marks the 10 year anniversary of my active relationship with Hotmail.com (please hold your applause to the end). Flying the face of a time where email was based on [...]
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November 20, 2009
O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies.
I'm on the board of CommonCrawl.Org, a nonprofit corporation that is attempting to provide a web crawl for use by all. An interesting report just got sent to us about the use of robots.txt files within the .Gov Top Level Domain, a standard known as the Robots Exclusion Standard.
In examining about 32,000 subdomains in .gov, it turns at least 1,188 of these have a robots.txt file with a "global disallow," meaning robots are excluded from indexing this content. Even more curious, on 175 of these sites, whi...
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With Facebook topping 330 million active users over the past week, the company's strongest growth region continues to be Asia. Over the last 12 weeks, Facebook added close to 17M active users in Asia alone. Since my previous post, the share of act...
- Spokeo -- abysmal indictment of society, first prize in mankind's race to the bottom. Uncover personal photos, videos, and secrets ... GUARANTEED! Spokeo deep searches within 48 major social networks to find truly mouth-watering news about friends and coworkers. PS, anybody who gives their gmail username and password to a site that specializes in dishing dirt can only be described as a fucking idiot. (via Jim Stogdill, who was equally disappointed in our species)
- Biologists rally to sequence 'neglected'...
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October 28, 2009
O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies.
It's difficult to make it to every conference and yet there are always new developments, technologies and issues during the off times. So we are trying something new. a series of Online Conferences that will happen through out the year. We just...
I took the set of users who posted tweets containing the hashtag #w2s and determined who those users followed. Unlike the list of the most followed users in all of Twitter, the list isn't dominated by celebrities. (A few coders landed in the top 5...
There is an unfortunate tendency to confuse delivering a bunch of 'chicken parts' with producing an actual living, breathing chicken.
MG Siegler, over at TechCrunch, has written an excellent article that shines a light on the cycle from hype to d...
Google has announced a free turn-by-turn navigation system for Android 2.0 phones such as the Droid. Google Maps Navigation is only available in the US right now. Google's release of a navigation is huge, but not unexpected blow to Tomtom (owne...
Google has announced a free turn-by-turn navigation system for Android 2.0 phones such as the Droid. Google Maps Navigation is only available in the US right now. Google's release of a navigation is huge, but not unexpected blow to Tomtom (owne...
I just finished Erving Goffman's classic sociological text, The
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. A friend told me to read
this for an exploration into what "identity" means online, and I did
find that the book offers some useful frameworks.
I have to admit, to start with, that it's a rather distasteful work:
personally, I don't see my entire life as a performance and everyone
around me as an audience. That seems to be just what Goffmn wants me
to do. (He calls this attitude his "dramaturgical pe...
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There has been a lot of attention paid to ebooks lately, and for good reason. Electronic books are portable, searchable, and more affordable than print books. The web has accustomed readers to having the latest information at their fingertips; we ...
- GMail Labs: Got The Wrong Bob? -- When's the last time you got an email from a stranger asking, "Are you sure you meant to send this to me?" and promptly realized that you didn't? Looks at the clusters of CCs you send and, if you normally send to Bob X but are trying to send it to Bob Y, asks you "did you mean Bob X?". This might be the best thing to happen to email since webmail and full-text search--it's ridiculous how little innovation is happening in email given how widely and heavily it is used.
- Spe...
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