Archive for May, 2009

The blogosphere has been abuzz over the new product announced by Google named Wave for the last few days. I myself have somewhat mixed feelings because judging by the screenshots Wave is not exactly what we love Google for - minimalism and style. To be 100% honest, Wave looks like a complex application with a [...]

Twitter seems to be just about everywhere these days and every news publication seems to have a purpose to link Twitter to every news event they cover - related or actually not. And while Twitter is becoming increasingly popular, everyone seems to have realized that the power of using Twitter is in the number of [...]

Here in Russia we have very strong traditions of celebrating professional holidays. For example, as soon as we go to school, we learn to celebrate the Teachers’ Day when we give presents and flowers to the teachers we will spend the next 10 years with at school. Representatives of almost every profession have a professional [...]

As a Russian living in Russia and doing business internationally, I am known for my strong belief in localization for internet products - both for startups and established web companies. Yet sometimes one realizes that even the best efforts can result in absolutely nothing because you can never predict everything about a country where you [...]

Some of you may remember the latest terrible story of a 19-year old suicide while broadcasting everything live on Justin.tv. This was a terrible story and many people were outraged with the behavior of the people watching everything without actually understanding the guy was serious and calling the police or trying to help him in [...]

You must remember ShopSavvy: this was the application that was heavily used to demonstrate the power of the first Google Android-powered T-Mobile G1 phone. This application permits users to scan bar codes of various items when doing real-life shopping using their cell phone cameras and ShopSavvy will find better deals for the same products in [...]

Russia is well-known for its liberty when it comes to piracy: one almost never sees a court trial featuring any crime related to downloading content from torrents or using pirated software here in Russia. But I did not really know Russia has already become a safe shelter for foreign pirates - in the way that [...]

How many people do you follow on Twitter? To me the number is huge and I am still surprised to realize how many people I like to track on the web when looking at my Twitter timeline. But even if you only follow a hundred people or even less and have strict rules and principles [...]

Even despite of the fact that we are supposed to move our computer-based tasks to online applications instead of using our desktop for anything but opening our browser, in many areas creators of web-based applications still want to rely on the desktop tools to penetrate deeper in our lives and turn us into loyal users.
This [...]