Archives: May 2006

Muni Wi-Fi: Bringing Expectations Back to Earth

Posted by: Olga Kharif on May 30, Categories: wireless

Every city, nowadays, seems to be planning a municipal Wi-Fi network. Problem is, consumers' expectations of these networks are often out of whack. Two most prevalent myths floating around are:...

Poetic Justice for Stock Option Backdating

Posted by: Rob Hof on May 26, Categories: stock options

As a complement to the National Center for Employee Ownership's new take on stock option backdating--so much in the news in tech and beyond--Executive Director Corey Rosen has penned a...

The Wikipedia Death Watch

Posted by: Rob Hof on May 26, Categories: Wikipedia

Ay-yi-yi. That's one pitched debate over at Nick Carr's blog, especially in the comments following his original post pronouncing the death of Wikipedia. It's fascinating in a way, but it...

eBay-Yahoo Deal: Less Than Meets the Eye?

Posted by: Rob Hof on May 25, Categories: Google, PayPal, Yahoo, eBay

It's no merger, as at least one overeager analyst had suggested, but this morning eBay and Yahoo announced a fairly wide-ranging deal to work with each other. Looks like a...

Vonage IPO, Hotter Than MasterCard's? Wait a Minute...

Posted by: Olga Kharif on May 23, Categories: VOIP

Mention Vonage, and you'll get opinions as diverse as political views. In today's BusinessWeek story, Peter Elstrom shows that the Web-calling company's future is uncertain, and its shares, being priced...

Identity theft gets personal

Posted by: Steve Hamm on May 23, Categories: security

The bad news came in a harmless looking package. It was a letter from Wells Fargo Home Mortgage informing me that a computer containing my name, address, social security number,...

The New MacBook: Apple Envy Again

Posted by: Rob Hof on May 19, Categories: Apple Computer

Months after deciding to buy an Apple for the first time, a lot of people keep asking me what I ended up choosing. Uh, well, nothing yet. Lack of time...

Why Are Blog Names So Boring?

Posted by: Rob Hof on May 18, Categories: blogging, blogs

Just ran across Cathode Tan. Even if I didn't like the posts (and I do), I probably would have subscribed just for the great name. But it got me thinking...

Aging Software: Watch Yourself Grow (Older)

Posted by: Olga Kharif on May 17, Categories: software

Scotland's government health officials have created new software allowing people to see what they will look like when they grow older. Check it out, it's fun!

Archiving Phone Calls? Why Not; It's Cheap

Posted by: Olga Kharif on May 16, Categories: telecom

Archiving phone calls is becoming increasingly cheap and easy. And that could lead to some corporations doing just that.

Can Anybody Tell Me Why Vonage Isn't Toast?

Posted by: Rob Hof on May 16, Categories: Skype, VOIP, eBay

My colleague Olga Kharif raises questions about whether Skype's new plan for free calling to U.S. landlines means growth in the States isn't up to snuff. Well, maybe, but I...

"Reality Television of the Internet"

Posted by: Rob Hof on May 15, Categories: MySpace, Social Media, Web 2.0, social networks

That's what Jon Gibs of Nielsen//NetRatings calls social-networking sites, which the market research firm today says attracted almost half of all Web users--led by MySpace, of course. There are certainly...

Who Reads Blogs Anymore?

Posted by: Rob Hof on May 15, Categories: blogs

Obviously a lot of people. But not A-list blogger Mike Arrington of TechCrunch, apparently. At the TiEcon conference in Silicon Valley last week, he threw out this aside: "I don't...

TechCrunch Goes Green

Posted by: Rob Hof on May 12, Categories: Web 2.0, blogging, blogs, startups

Mike Arrington's well-read TechCrunch blog has a new look, as he announces on one of his other blogs, CrunchNotes. Many of the commenters there aren't so sure about the...

Sidebar Wars

Posted by: Steve Hamm on May 12, Categories: software

I saw "sidebar" demonstrations from Yahoo and Microsoft this week, and this is shaping up to be the new battleground for the hearts and minds of the Net-surfing public. For...

Bubble or No Bubble?

Posted by: Rob Hof on May 12, Categories: Entrepreneurship, Web 2.0, bubble

My colleagues Justin Hibbard and Heather Green examine not only the overriding question in Silicon Valley--are we in a mini-bubble, at least in Web startups?--but how that's coloring the way...

Deleting Online Predators Act: Quit the Fear-Mongering

Posted by: Rob Hof on May 12, Categories: MySpace, Social Media

From the Don't They Have Better Things to Do? Dept.: The appropriately acronymed DOPA is supposed to protect children from online predators, but the poorly written law seems to be...

Vonage IPO: Customers to the Rescue

Posted by: Olga Kharif on May 09, Categories: VOIP

Web-calling service provider Vonage will sell some of its IPO shares to its own users. That's a smart move, intended to keep Vonage's IPO from fizzling.

A Tale of Two Companies

Posted by: Peter Burrows on May 09, Categories: Personal Computers

Today, as Dell execs hunker down in Austin to ride out the negative winds swirling as a result of its preannoucement yesterday, execs from Hewlett-Packard's Personal Systems Group will be...

R.I.P. SGI?

Posted by: Rob Hof on May 08, Categories: Digital Imaging, Innovation, Silicon Graphics, computer science

Yeesh, 7 cents a share. How far Silicon Graphics has fallen--now, to Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In its early 1990s heyday, it was as hot as Google (many of whose...

The Hunt for Software Pirates

Posted by: Steve Hamm on May 08, Categories: software

A couple of days ago, I got a message on my home computer purporting to be from Microsoft telling me it wanted permission to download some software onto my...

The Future of eBay

Posted by: Rob Hof on May 04, Categories: Amazon.com, Google, PayPal, e-commerce, eBay

Most of the stories on eBay's analyst day today focused on the the company's vow to grow faster than e-commerce at large--and how that's a big challenge given its size...

Microsoft and SAP make sweet music together

Posted by: Steve Hamm on May 02, Categories: software

Back in late 2003, Microsoft secretly approached SAP to discuss the potential of a merger that would have been by far the largest coupling in software industry history. After months...

Enablr, Take A Note Of That!

Posted by: Olga Kharif on May 02, Categories: podcasting

If you make podcasts, check out a cool new site called Enablr.com. The site offers a podcast transcription service. And that service comes with neat features like the tip jar, allowing your podcast's listeners to contribute money toward transcription services.

Virtual World, Real ATMs

Posted by: Rob Hof on May 02, Categories: Social Media, Social Software, e-commerce, games, gaming, virtual worlds

The one thing about my recent story, "Virtual World, Real Money," that still mystifies a lot of people is the idea that virtual money inside an online game can be...