Technology Industry Archive

California’s Supreme Court ruled yesterday that employers in the state cannot keep employees from working for competitors in their next job or from starting competing businesses. This will likely prevent federal courts from using a particular interpretation of California law that favored some employers. “An employer cannot by contract restrain a former employee from engaging in his...

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Congress has been turning a critical eye on consumer privacy concerns in online advertising. Last week, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce started to put pressure on leading companies in the industry, and this week Google and Yahoo both responded by strengthening opt-out provisions for consumers who don’t want their activities track to better serve advertising. The question is if...

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The Pew Internet & American Life Project has come out with yet more Internet search statistics — in this case, only half of all people online use search during an average day. That’s useful information, but I’ve also been noticing that much of what we think we know about search is concerned with what people do, but not necessarily why they do it. When companies focus too...

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There always seems to be a tech company that others consider unbeatable. Everyone in the industry draws back and talks in hushed tones. And every time this happens, people spook themselves unnecessarily. Today Google is the deus ex machina, the deified competitor rising from some computer’s innards. Look at what is actually happening with the company and realize that it is far from...

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I’m no fan of Apple’s control freak persona because it is always a disappointment. Just when the company looks poised on the verge of commercial greatness, it stumbles and settles for merely good. And recently developments suggest that Apple might not even make that level, if it continues on its current path. Here is some of the evidence from the last month or so of that desire for...

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Any time contract manufacturing (CM) in electronics feels pressure, it’s only a matter of time before the effect hits the rest of the industry. According to an iSuppli study, there’s been a sharp contraction in CM growth that will result in major consolidation. It will only be time before the impact transmits to everyone, from a Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, or HP to start-ups. Contract...

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When California state controller John Chiang said that he couldn’t lower the pay of 170,000 state employees as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered, his statement was less about intransigence than the power of legacy systems — a power that the glamour-addicted high tech industry might profit from recognizing more often. [T]he California controller, John Chiang, says the state’s...

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A couple of privately-held social networking companies are taking the unusual but interesting and, I’d argue, smart step of letting their employees sell some stock now, rather than later. The move should go a long way to avoid the problem of key worker attrition while boosting loyalty. Eric Eldon at VentureBeat reported that Facebook would let employees sell 20 percent of their fully...

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Many reports describe Intel’s new multi-core chip design, code-named Larrabee, as a GPU, or  a “graphics processing unit” intended to be the graphics equivalent of a CPU. But that may be missing the big picture. The company seems to be working on a new approach to chip design that maximizes processing flexibility. I’m wondering if Intel is trying to produce a chip that...

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I thought we all had finally hit Yahoo saturation, at least so far as the shareholder meeting and proxy vote went. But no, there is apparently more squabbling on the horizon, with questions raised about the accuracy of the vote counting. The proxy committees of two funds owned by one big institutional shareholder, Capital Research & Management, had suggested that votes be withheld from...

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