Long player
I started reading David Weinberger's new book, Everything Is Miscellaneous, this weekend. I'd been looking forward to it. Weinberger has a supple, curious mind and an easy way with words. Even thou...
A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn't Its Copyright?
WHAT if, after you had paid the taxes on earnings with which you built a house, sales taxes on the materials, real estate taxes during your life, and inheritance taxes at your death, the government wo...
Optimus Maximus: 113 keys, ready to pre-order
Ready to move around some funds in your accounts? Take out that loan from your mom? Tell your wife you just don't know why the account's a grand light? The Optimus Maximus is up for pre-order for $...
Did Microsoft go lose its head over aQuantive?
I've been trying to find a way to illustrate just how screwy Microsoft's $6 billion bid for aQuantive is, and here it is: For $6 billion in cash, Microsoft could have hired, in a single day, 60,000 en...
Gallery: Giz Hearts Maker's Faire
That's Lisa and yours truly at the Flickr/Yahoo! booth, where they'd take a polaroid and scan it using some custom ware on a Sharp photocopier directly to Flickr. — And here's my photo stream of 90 ...
Bright Ideas: Reaping Results: Data-Mining Goes Mainstream
RODNEY MONROE, the police chief in Richmond, Va., describes himself as a lifelong cop whose expertise is in fighting street crime, not in software. His own Web browsing, he says, mostly involves chec...
Google reach deals with news websites
INTERNET SEARCH engine Google is understood to have reached deals with several large UK news groups over carrying their content on Google News. — The deals are reputedly being kept strictly secret f...
E-Commerce Report: Bad Hair Days Lead Pair to Web Incubator and Venture Capital
FOR many entrepreneurs in the first dot-com boom, the name of the game was "portal-matic." Spin a wheel, pick a niche interest group, build a comprehensive Web portal aimed at that group's needs and ...
Putting data mining in perspective
Steve Lohr of the New York Times has an well reported story on the how various corporations, cities, crime fighters, financial institutions and even cement companies are using data mining to improve p...
New and 'improved' Gozi Trojan version on the loose
Stealthier Russian Trojan on the loose since April — Jaikumar Vijayan Today's Top Stories or Other Security Stories — A new, stealthier version of a previously known Russian Trojan horse pr...
Narrowing Online Market Focus
Keywords are key: Small businesses find pay-per-click ads can be economical tool — Howard Mora started buying pay-per-click Internet ads two years ago for his Fremont pet-sitting business, the Anima...
Prototype: Why Work Is Looking More Like a Video Game
WORK is not play. But maybe it should be. — In fact, Paul Johnston has remade his company on the idea that business software will work better if it feels like a game. Mr. Johnston is not some awkw...
Betting on the Future
There's a lot of good reason for gloom and doom in the newspaper business. Unfortunately, that pessimism seems to extend to the potential for online advertising to significantly contribute to revenue...
Yahoo may net Bebo owners $1bn
Yahoo is rumoured to be working on an attempted takeover of Bebo, Britain's most popular social networking site, which could turn its British-born founder into the next internet billionaire. — Micha...
For Texting Teens, an OMG Moment When the Phone Bill Arrives
Sofia Rubenstein, 17, got in trouble the way a lot of teens do these days. — Her incessant text-messaging racked up a huge phone bill on the family's wireless plan. — "It's whatever pops into my h...
The (Bayesian) Advantage of Youth
A couple of weeks ago, Fred Wilson wrote, in The Mid Life Entrepreneur Crisis "...prime time entrepreneurship is 30s. And its possibly getting younger as web technology meets youth culture." After s...
Anshe to Launch Inter-World Financial Market
Virtual entrepreneur Anshe Chung will launch a virtual world-spanning financial market in early June, according to a news release on the Anshe Chung Studios site. The service will "allow direct capit...
MyMiniLife: Your Embeddable Virtual World
MyMiniLife is a Flash based virtual world/social network. Users create and customize a character and then build out a virtual space, adding walls, floors, doors, windows, etc. Users can then add cus...
Geni: Earning That $100 million Valuation
When genealogy site Geni announced that it had raised a venture round from Charles River Ventures valuing the two month old startup at $100 million, more than a few eyebrows were raised. For the last...
Internet Giants Vie to Snap Up Web Ad Firms
It's a good time to be an Internet advertising company. — In the struggle for advantage in the digital advertising boom, companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL are rapidly acquiring once-ob...