Category Archives: Uncategorized

At InterPlay, there was a healthy crowd of several hundred people, many of whom had paid $199 to be there. That’s a low price for a conference, but it’s unlikely people interested in this industry will be able to attend such confabs for such a small fee much longer.

Examples of the early enthusiasm for the space include $15 million in funding for the Social Gaming Network from Greylock Partners, the Founders Fund, Columbia Partners, and Novak Biddle Venture Partners and $10 milli Continue reading →

2View, one of my favorite tools for adding notes to digital photos recently ceased to exist, and since then I’ve been wondering if any other services would pop up in its void. Today I’ve been playing around with Picbite, a wonderfully simple (and slightly similar) way to add small speech bubbles or annotations to photos from your hard drive or from a Web link.

I don’t think it’s nearly as fun as 2View was, but with more types of speech bubbles to use, it has got great potential Continue reading →

Hey, you should have seen my breakup e-mail with Jimmy Wales.

“So how long will it be before Valleywag drives someone in our community to suicide? My fear is that it isn’t a matter of if it will happen, but when. Valleywag and Nick Denton, though, will likely look forward to the event, and the great traffic growth that will surely follow.”

Of course, as all of Silicon Valley likely knows by now, Wikipedia’s major domo is getting razzed over at Valleywag. The geek Continue reading →

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CIO.com asks the question, “How do you spot a bad CIO?” With a nimwit CEO, it’s a bit easier because the numbers tell the story: profits and sales falling, etc.

To this list I’d add:

But how do you discern a failing CIO before she fails? CIO.com has some answers:

What would you add to the list?

High employee turnover
Rehashing the same ideas, projects and technologies that s/he’s implemented in all previous CIO positions
Firing existi Continue reading →

The second obvious hassle is software updates. Software installed on the C disk constantly needs to be upgraded both to new versions and releases as well as applying bug fixes. Anti-malware software is likely to have daily updates. Microsoft has a partial solution for this, but my initial impression is that it’s all but useless. Every now and then SteadyState will need to be disabled so that necessary changes can be made to the installed software.

There is huge amount of software d Continue reading →

And so it grows.

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Tastemakers, yes, but also kingmakers. I’ve found a range of new music (Yes, Indie, for the most part) through Pandora and other such services. Really, really good music. That’s how I initially found Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!, Band of Horses, The Essex Green, Surfan Stevens, Super Furry Animals, and more.

I was surprised to read on David Kusek’s blog (Future of Music) that Indie’s share of the music market is galloping toward 30 percent. Continue reading →

Digital TV test offers some real-world lessons

iPod Touch 2.1 software update is live

A trial switch to digital TV may not have gone very smoothly, but the FCC says it gave them the valuable lessons they were looking for to help prepare for a nationwide switch next February.

AOL rolls out one-stop e-mail service

Sprint first to offer HTC Touch Pro

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Today’s stories:

Flipping out: BlackBer Continue reading →

Citysense can also show you where, based on historic data, the most “unusual” levels of activity are going on. You then have the option of looking up nearby businesses on Yelp and Google Maps, or bookmarking locations on Socialight, thanks to external APIs built in.

Then, using the location-aware technology built into the handset, Citysense eventually begins to “learn” where you spend most of your time, and as the product grows beyond San Francisco, eventuall Continue reading →

The Pinnacle Video Transfer provides high-quality MPEG-4 encoding in H.264 at up to 720×480/576 (NTSC/PAL) resolution and supports multiple inputs including S-Video, composite video, and stereo audio. You can choose to set the quality of the digitized footage to be good, better, or best. The lower the quality, the less storage space the video requires. The device uses high-speed USB 2.0 connection to offer digital video transfer speed up to 480Mbps.

For this reason, I am impresse Continue reading →

Shorter Gartner (tip o’ the antlers to Daring Fireball):

Oh, man, we were so high when we wrote that!

Continue reading →