Technology Industry Archive

Would-be Google competitors in Web search make two fundamental mistakes that doom their efforts from the outset: one is competing with Google on its own terms, and the other is drumming up hype that their search engines can’t possibly match. But Microsoft’s new Web search engine, apparently dubbed Bing, may well avoid both pitfalls and emerge as a true giant-killer. The key is...

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There’s a new investment in Facebook setting off the terrible storm of valuation second guessing. “A Russian company paid $200 million for 2 percent, but Microsoft paid $240 million for 1.6 percent, and that means the company’s worth this … at the moment.” It’s industry gossip passed breathlessly from VC to reporter to pundit, and it means absolutely nothing. The...

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Nokia’s launch of its Ovi mobile application store was a fiasco, and bodes ill for the world’s leading handset vendor’s hopes of catching up with Apple. As paradoxical as that statement seems, Nokia is indeed chasing the momentum and cachet Apple enjoys, in large part because of the very iTunes App Store that Nokia was unsuccessfully aping with the Ovi Store. The Ovi Store...

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Every time there is news of a new search engine, pundits start asking the question, “Is it the Google killer?” Although this seems like more of the tired horse race journalism that James Fallows described in his 1996 book, Breaking the News, there actually is something to it. Only the target of the crosshairs is not Google, but text search itself, because it certainly cannot...

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Now this one really caught me off guard: Twitter is going Hollywood. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone confirmed multiple media reports (probably re-Tweeted thousands of times) that, “Twitter plans to launch an unscripted show that will put ‘ordinary people on the trail of celebrities in a revolutionary competitive format.’” Never one for half-measures or modesty, Stone...

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It’s taken over twenty years for Apple to get to where it can seriously rival Microsoft on the desktop, and ironically, for this could happen, the desktop had to become an anachronism. Another irony is that Microsoft is ignoring the signs of change, just as IBM did before being swamped by the Microsoft-led PC revolution. This change is the cloud — an environment that allows users to...

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A look at highlights of the past week in the high tech legal world: courts, regulation, and lawsuits. FCC to investigate Arbitron — The Federal Communications Commission is launching an investigation into whether Arbitron’s audience measuring device undercounts minority viewers. [Source: Ars Technica] Amazon countersues Discovery — Discovery Communications had sued Amazon for...

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Sometimes the world seems so strange that you have to step back and wonder. From what I can tell, there is an upsurge of high tech for … wait for it … Klingon aficionados. We’ll skip the merely obvious, such as screen savers and war cruiser simulators. Via GeekNews.net, anti-virus application vendor Sophos has a Klingon version of its product, with “[f]ree virus, spyware, and...

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Cisco hopes to do more than simply secure a large part of the smart grid market for itself; it’s also hoping that its technology helps prevent the kind of cyber-security breaches that could threaten the nation’s security. Cisco, SAP, Oracle, IBM, Google and GE are just a few of the major technology vendors offering electric utilities hardware and applications intended to improve the...

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The rumors are flying that Apple is preparing a tablet form netbook, as noted Larry Dignan at our sister site ZDNet. And as my colleague Michael Hickins so correctly notes, the company has multiple good reasons to make the push. But I think ultimately it are doomed to failure, caught in the cross fire of the current market’s dynamics and a long-established business model. Clearly the...

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