Google Wave, the Internet giant’s new online collaboration tool, has generated much buzz among developers, and now it has a large geeky fan following doing strange and relatively useless things.
Putting content online is a risky game. You could win an audience measured in the millions and lose control of your work to pirates.
Social networks like Facebook and MySpace can be scary places for big marketers. Who knows what kind of vulgar or offensive material resides on their heavily trafficked pages?
There is life after Google–though the increasing number of search alternatives popping up around the U.S. are careful not to take the search giant head-on. With three-quarters of all search traffic, Google might seem unassailable. But potential competitors are busy developing new ways of finding information and hunting down the investors they need to support them. Last year, more than 50 new search companies raised $330 million in venture financing, according to MoneyTree.
No corner of modern American life is untouched by technology. And no technology is more transformative than the Internet. The simple reason for this is that the Internet is, at bottom, a communications network, and communication is the foundation of society, business and government. When you scale up communications, you change the world.
GameStop shares are getting clobbered today on news that Amazon.com is getting into the business of buying and selling used videogames–and so is Toys ’R Us.
Credit Suisse analyst Gary Balter explained in a research note today that one reason he has maintained an Outperform rating on GME shares is that the company has dominated the used videogame business; he notes that used games generate 44 percent of the retailer’s gross profits, nearly twice the segment’s sales contribution to the company.
Wednesday would be a really bad day for Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Mark Hurd to break his winning streak. Central bankers around the globe are sweatily trying to revive faltering banks. Luckily, Hewlett-Packard has a man at the top now who could be called Maalox in human form.
Only a few companies know how to manufacture new CEOs. Scott McNealy has done it again and again. More than 75 people–including a number of women–who have wound up as chief executives at technology companies trace their managerial roots back to time spent with McNealy, who was one of Sun Microsystem’s four co-founders in 1982.
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’s cultish following is creepy, but his resemblance to Thomas Edison is uncanny. He was there at the birth of the personal computer. He has had his second coming. He has healed one very sick company. And along the way he has changed the way we think about music and movies, telephones and computers.
So, you just got laid off from the struggling portal. Congratulations. Ten years from now Steve Jobs’s iPhone will be just another obsolete gadget. Rob Bailey’s vitamin vodka, however, will still refresh.
In what tech pundits at Gartner Research call the curve of hype and gloom, Linden Lab’s virtual world, Second Life, has officially entered the gloom stage. In October, Reuters pulled its full-time Second Life reporter Eric Krangel, who had written daily news stories about the virtual world’s economy for a year and a half, out of the virtual world.
Digital bibliophiles may have hoped Amazon would offer up a new e-reader before the holidays. But they haven’t let their disappointment–or the tanking economy–put a damper on Christmas Kindle-mania.
Roelof Temmingh has a knack for stirring up trouble. The 35-year-old South African electronic engineer has fought legal battles with financial institutions, developed theoretical models for cyberterrorism and served as a technical adviser for a book about how hackers could take over the continent of Africa.
There’s a new member of the “Not Ready for Primetime Players”: The Xbox 360. Microsoft has delayed the launch of “Xbox Live Primetime,” its programmed series of interactive games with real-world prizes, until the spring.
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