Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel. Mark Twain’s advice was apt in its time but sounds downright quaint these days. The ink-stained publishing world is battling against companies like Google and Yahoo that sell ads via any Internet-friendly gadget. And we know how that fight is going: The buy-ink-by-the-barrel types are struggling.
Hackers and computer security experts gathering on March 18 in Vancouver, British Columbia, for the third annual Pwn2Own contest will be targeting five smartphones: an Apple iPhone, a Research in Motion BlackBerry and phones running on Google’s Android, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and Nokia’s Symbian operating systems. The contest, sponsored by 3Com’s TippingPoint computer security division, will award $10,000 prizes to anyone who can break into one of the phones.
While traveling in China, Genevieve Bell figured she’d have no trouble getting a cellphone, but she was in for a surprise. The shopkeeper refused to sell her one on the basis of the phone numbers being unlucky. The encounter illustrates how technology and culture blend in new ways in a global society powered by cellphones and PCs.
There was a time when the geeks who keep a company’s tech systems running could get by without knowing the finer details of corporate strategy. Well, those days are over. This downturn could mean the end of the sequestered CIO.
A few hours before the global launch of Nokia’s latest high-end phone, the company gave a sneak peek at the gadget to a dozen bloggers and journalists gathered at its swank Midtown Manhattan concept store. With an elegant touchscreen that slid open to reveal a full keyboard, the device evoked lust in even the iPhone disciples present. So when can we get it in the U.S.?
Metaphorically speaking, Google is killing the newspaper industry. Online news is quickly hollowing out the traditional paper–the Christian Science Monitor eliminates its print edition, Tribune Co. declares bankruptcy, Detroit’s two dailies slash home delivery to three days a week–while Google rakes in advertising profits. Turns out that Google CEO Eric Schmidt professes a passionate desire to lend a hand.
Nintendo seems to have bucked the recession. The Japanese videogame manufacturer has doubled November sales of the Wii in the U.S. from a year ago, according to NPD’s latest release on gaming sales.
Nature abhors a vacuum, but apparently not in Silicon Valley, where it may not be easy to fill some very prominent vacancies. Right now you’ve got Jerry Yang abdicating at Yahoo, and Microsoft is looking for someone to run its online division. And there are persistent rumors that another huge job might be opening up at Google.
Let’s start with some uncomfortable truths. We wouldn’t be publishing an article about the under-the-radar guy who’s most likely to succeed Steve Jobs as chief executive of Apple if Jobs himself hadn’t shown up at a company event in San Francisco in June looking frightfully skinny and pale.
The world’s biggest record companies would love to shutter LimeWire. They say the popular file-sharing service has built a lucrative business by enticing users to illegally swap the latest hit songs without paying a dime. But not everybody in the entertainment business sees LimeWire as a pariah.
It would seem we’ve got all the makings of a tech shipwreck.
In the past few days, Xerox, Yahoo and eBay each announced plans to cut thousands of jobs. Esteemed Silicon Valley VC firm Sequoia Capital is warning entrepreneurs that it’s time to batten down the hatches because the good times are over.
With all the presidential campaign talk about American exceptionalism, it might be easy to forget that we do a pretty unexceptional job at some things–like shopping for computers.
The heads-down, can-do entrepreneurs, and libertarian-minded financiers who populate the tech industry aren’t typically the sorts to long for a government handout. But in the wake of the Treasury Department’s $700-billion-plus rescue plan, Peter Thiel speaks for many when he asks a simple question: “What happened to the dot-com bailout?”
The planned advertising partnership between Google and Yahoo, which was devised during Microsoft’s unsolicited bid for Yahoo, is headed for a federal antitrust challenge. And that could mean, according to one analyst, that Google could wind up walking away from the deal.
Dirk Meyer was six months out of college and working as an engineer for Intel when he ran into Bob Noyce, the company’s legendary co-founder and co-inventor of the integrated circuit, at the punch bowl at a shareholders meeting.
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