Archive for May, 2008

Red Herring has been escorted out of its offices by San Mateo County Sherriff's deputies. I have little sympathy for the plight of Red Herring CEO Alex Vieux, long known for his reluctance to handle day to day business affairs. The writers at the formerly storied magazine are a different matter - no one deserves to be blindsided like that from a seemingly trusted employer.
Vieux has been talking a good game for quite some time now, even as he [...]

There's been a little bit of buzz today about the news that IAC bought StarNet Interactive, the Israeli start-up that created GirlSense, but nowhere near the buzz it's gotten in my house. StarNet was spun out in late 2006 with $2.7 million USD in venture capital, and the details of the deal with IAC have been leaked, but however much he got for it, my bet is that Barry Diller got himself a great deal.
I first covered GirlSense last March, [...]

This is actually the second time I've sat down and mulled over the idea of co-browsing. The first time was a few months ago when I saw a launch, but I eventually decided it must be a passing fad (or a bad dream) and it would disappear. However, two other co-browsing applications have caught my attention and I realized I need to do my part to nip this trend in the bud before we are over-run.
The lesser offender of today's [...]

FaceBook stirred up a heap of trouble when Google's newest service, FriendConnect, went live and wasn't accepted on the FaceBook site. For a company that has thus far resisted being bought by Microsoft, FaceBook certainly has similar proprietary attitudes to user data. This has been apparent since they first got called on the carpet for not wanting heavy users like Scoble to port their data to aggregators like Plaxo.
Now FaceBook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is making noises that he wants to [...]

When I first saw Mike Arrington's post about Google revealing the identity of an Orkut user to Indian officials (leading to an arrest) hit Techmeme yesterday, I knew it was going to stir a bunch of people up. Until the Monday morning Twitter stream started going full-blast, however, I didn't know how vocal the Google detractors were going to be. Google's alleged mantra "Don't Be Evil" gets used quite a bit whenever people don't agree with one of Google's moves, [...]

It is one thing to say, "Let's make our website social and really get on board with this web 2.0 thing." However, sometimes talk seems much simpler than execution. For those who are looking for a quick and effective way to take their websites social, social publishing leader Wetpaint is willing to help you out…if you're willing to scratch its back when the time comes.
Marketwire just released two pieces of rather interesting information regarding Wetpaint. First, Wetpaint has just received [...]

Yahoo is turning out to be the Hillary Clinton of the web these days: running a campaign to save itself that is on its last legs and refusing to stand down and let the more stable web candidates win. It doesn't help matters that it is being pursued in the most schizophrenic manner possible by Microsoft, or that its own shareholders have long since had it with the shenanigans on both sides.
It is hard not to grow increasingly bored [...]

filtrbox is one of those sites that I think might be interesting, sign up for, see a screen after set-up that says "check back in a few hours" and forget about since I'm constantly being distracted by something else. Thank goodness I went back to check it out because I think filtrbox may be my latest addiction.
Odds are if you are a blogger, marketer, PR rep, or evangelist, you have several alerts already set up for information about yourself, your [...]

Here at Profy, we have a true multi-national environment. We authors all live in the United States, although scattered about. The development team is located in Novosibirsk, Russia. And Profy's CTO moved from Germany. Until recently, I'd never had a big language issue (as you can tell from her posts, Svetlana speaks and writes excellent English), but I'd be lying if I said it didn't shame me that most of the Profy staff are far more multi-lingual than I am. [...]