Author Archive

LimitNone: Why You Should Build a Product, Not a Feature

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira

LimitNone is learning a very difficult, and probably very expensive, lesson: you need to build a product of your own, and not a feature for someone else's product. The start-up had an agreement with Google that allowed Google to see their "trade secrets" for an app they had built to bridge users from Microsoft Outlook [...]

Do People Seriously Use Google to Find Porn?

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira

Europeans, who seem to find many of the American idiosyncrasies when it comes to issues about pornography downright antediluvian, can tune out right now unless they'd like a giggle, or to weigh in on how silly Americans can be about things like naked adults. Here in the States, it's fairly amazing that adult films do [...]

The Fine Line of User-Generated Content Ethics: Russert Leak Fired

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira

Henry Blodget and Peter Kaftka are in an uproar. The person who changed Russert's Wikipedia entry was determined to be a lower-level employee at Internet Broadcasting Services, which is a company that provides web services to television stations. Apparently, the employee heard the reports, and felt it was his or her civic duty to update [...]

Google’s Android delayed; too late to compete with iPhone?

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Android is delayed until sometime in the fourth quarter, and some cell phone manufacturers aren't even going to be able to get an Android phone out until 2009. The original Android announcement from last November suggested that phones would be out by the second half of this year. [...]

The Zuckerberg Patent Application: Another Seed in the Walled Garden?

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira

Someone on Hacker News was kind enough to post a link to a patent application filed under Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg's name. The application, filed with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) in February, has a fairly generic description, "Systems and methods for dynamically generating a privacy summary" with the abstract not [...]

A Day in the Life of the Tech Middle Class

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira

My initial reaction to Steven Hodson's post about the digital divide between the haves and the have nots has stuck with me, but apparently, 10 days is too long for it to have remained in the attention-deficit world of the Twitterati. The gap between the designers and the intended users is growing ever wider, and [...]

Sure, Facebook Looks Good in Chinese and in Russian, But Is It Even Wanted?

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira

Facebook fans look to the social networks most recent ComScore numbers as a sure sign of worldwide domination, and touted the release of Chinese and Russian translations of the site as the best thing since sliced bread. In reality, the release of Chinese and Russian versions may be too little too late for two markets [...]

Tech Blogosphere: More Water Cooler, Less Telephone Game, Please

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira

Remember playing the "telephone game" as a child? You'd stand in a line or sit in a circle and pass messages from one person to the next, whispering into an ear. At the end of the line, the message was usually so garbled from the first person as to be unrecognizable from what it began [...]

Qtrax Finally Launches. Sort Of.

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira

Qtrax finally launched, reaching a milestone that many thought would never happen. After huge delays in getting up and running, some of which led to contracts with record labels expiring and then having to be renewed, they are up and running. Well, sort of. Qtrax’s launch was supposed to provide free and legal music from [...]

Facebook Finally Welcomes Homeschoolers

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira

As a former homeschooling parent, I read Facebook's announcement this morning and wanted to applaud. Facebook's minor verification system has always required a school affiliation for the minor, which means that homeschoolers have been unable to sign up as themselves. Facebook doesn't detail what the verification process for homeschoolers will be, but it will be [...]