As 2008 takes its final breaths, I am sitting in my apartment, which is enveloped in a thick fog that’s hiding both the ugly high-rises and the beauty that is the San Francisco Bay. The fog is also muting the sounds of the city–a good enough reason as any to ponder the year that was.
The technology sector, already rocked by the credit crunch and slowing global economies, is facing a bleak 2009, the impact of which is going to be felt across the entire ecosystem. From PC makers to chipmakers to chip equipment makers, almost everyone is bracing for a stomach-churning ride.
Last year Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello told The Wall Street Journal that his company was “boring people to death and making games that are harder and harder to play.” Prophetic words, though no one was listening at EA.
With Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang gone, and the company actively seeking his replacement, the big question is what should it do next and whom should it hire to replace Yang? Kara Swisher has a lot of names on her short list, though I don’t think any one of them will prove to be Yahoo’s knight in shining armor. Regardless of the company’s final choice, here is what Yahoo shouldn’t do.
Last night I reported on a special meeting held by Sequoia Capital for its portfolio companies, warning them about the fiscal hurricane that was going to hit them, and how they’d better figure out ways to survive what could be a big downturn.
Sure, most of us can get pretty fired up over the thought of a monthly 250GB bandwidth cap, but what about the companies that provide online video services? After all, as Om Malik pointed out, the cap isn’t about excessive bandwidth usage as much as it is about stymieing online video sources like Hulu, Netflix and Amazon.
In response to today’s news that Google is releasing its own browser, code-named Chrome, I decide to call John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla Corp., the folks behind the fast-growing Firefox browser.
On Monday Google launched a new advocacy campaign, Free The Airwaves, an effort by the company to get some traction around white spaces, the tiny slivers of spectrum that reside in the 700 MHz band spectrum vacated by analog television’s switch to digital transmissions.
The third annual WordCamp San Francisco was held this past weekend, bringing together WordPress users and developers to discuss the past, present and future of their favorite Web publishing platform. Since its humble beginnings as a fork of the b2\cafelog blog software in 2003, WordPress has grown to become one of the most popular blog publishing platforms.
Last July, at the time of the launch of the new iPhone, we asked the question, where are the iPhone games? Looks like we have an answer: they are coming, and in a big way. Of course, you can already buy Tetris and grab Tap Tap Revenge, the No. 1 free app, for, well, free, [...]
The battle over Yahoo’s search business as witnessed over the last few days seems both ridiculous and petty. And it takes the attention away from what is Yahoo’s true value: a media aggregation platform. Yahoo is the place a lot of people — some 400 million — visit to get their news, sports scores and email. I have always liked that business, and yesterday I experienced, first-hand, the enormous strength of Yahoo.
Unless you’re using Enron math, BT’s new plan to connect 10 million homes — roughly 40 percent of the United Kingdom — with fiber networks at a cost of £1.5 billion doesn’t quite add up. At today’s conversion rate, that’s about $3 billion — or $300 to wire up each of these proposed 10 million homes.
Nokia, already a stakeholder in mobile OS maker Symbian, has announced that it will buy the remainder of the company and throw all the assets into a new platform called the Symbian Foundation, which will unite all the flavors of Symbian into a single, common software platform that will go open source in two years. The story is not that this happened but why–and what it means for the mobile industry.
It should come as no surprise: Incumbents are beginning to act like incumbents. But while the cable companies are the first ones to jump on the tiered broadband bandwagon, they won’t be the last. Their argument for limiting bandwidth and data transfers based on price sounds like a good idea, especially as a way to get bargain hunters to buy. In the long run, however, tiered broadband is a terrible idea that will bring the innovation inspired by flat-rate broadband to a screeching halt.
Google’s senior-executive exodus continues. YouTube’s head of monetization, Shashi Seth, has now left the company to become the chief revenue officer of Menlo Park, Calif.-based start-up Cooliris. In his new job at the start-up, which has raised some $3 million in Series A funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Seth is going to help develop a new business and advertising model.
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