Yesterday, while China Web watchers were digesting the latest bit of news on the requirement that PCs sold in China include government-mandated Internet filtering software, the Web as we knew it a week ago quietly returned.
February 2005 was a tough month for those of us who worked at the Wall Street Journal Online, where I was in my fourth year as managing editor. A slew of media experts were telling the world that we were making a mistake of historic proportions by keeping WSJ.Com a paid site.
The criticism usually followed the same route. First, the author would invoke the obligatory paean to the Journal’s historic greatness. That would be followed by a tsk-tsking that the Journal had walled itself off from the “conversation” and thus was en route to irrelevance, followed by obsolescence.
How badly does the newspaper industry need new ideas? Here’s the story I often tell when that question comes up. The year was 2005, and I had recently joined the venerable Dow Jones from Yahoo, where I had led the team that helped build the financial portal. My job at Dow Jones was head of all consumer online sites, including WSJ.com, Barrons.com and Marketwatch.com.
Yes, this may be the worst recession America has seen since World War II. But the people who are bringing us the Consumer Electronics Show would like to point out that sales of tech products are actually faring pretty well when compared to what happened during previous recessions.
You might be familiar with phishing attacks, those messages sent by criminals that look like they’re from a bank or Nigerian prince. But what about Twishing?
The term may enter the tech lexicon this week, thanks to an attack targeting the Web site Twitter, which runs a popular service that lets people share short updates about what they’re doing.
There’s lots of talk in the tech industry these days about capitalizing on growth in “emerging markets,” countries like China, Vietnam and Brazil where people are rapidly buying computers and printers.
A story in Monday’s Boston Globe says Hewlett-Packard Co. is taking that strategy one step further: Its printers, writes Farah Stockman, “have become a top seller” in Iran–a country whose economy the U.S. government wants to prevent from emerging.
Apple’s highly successful retail stores may be lauded for their sleek modern design and smart layout, but the Georgetown district in Washington, D.C., doesn’t seem to care.
Microsoft may not need Yahoo, but Steve Ballmer’s legacy sure does. Perhaps that is why Ballmer opened a new chapter in the annals of perpetual torment [last Thursday] with this musing at the GartnerITXpo: A Microsoft takeover of Yahoo would “make sense economically for the shareholders of both companies,” he declared.
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