Author Archive

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 into Gmail. When Google turned around and built out a feature to do the same thing, LimitOne filed suit for deceptive business practices. They claim that [...]

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 such incredible business, considering that few people will admit to ever watching them. There is a booming business that's done under cover of online purchases, black-plastic-wrapped [...]

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 Wikipedia, assuming it was "common knowledge."
Kaftka and Blodget and a slew of other bloggers are all upset about the firing, claiming that unless the story [...]

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. I suppose November 2008 is technically the second half, but a late T-Mobile launch is allegedly pushing back a Sprint-Nextel launch until 2009. China Mobile [...]

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 giving a whole lot more detail:
"A system and method for dynamically generating a privacy summary is provided. The present invention provides a system and method [...]

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 you have to wonder if the eventual fate of Web 2.0 won't be a result of the chasm in the middle.
Personally, this week has been [...]

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 that already have their own established social networks. While Web 2.0 seems almost dominated by products from and designed for English speakers, both China and [...]

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 as. So goes the tech blogosphere these days.
News moves at a fast and furious pace, with each blogger trying to jump on the latest news [...]

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 EMI and Universal, with more labels in negotiations. But after all the delays, there are still far too many things missing. One being a version of the [...]