Author Archive

Oh, what the hey. We’ve come this far with our Vonage coverage. To quit before the horse is beaten to complete obliteration wouldn’t be fair to the loyal and the fully-engaged among all of you out there in readership land.
So we proceed once more in relaying an update on the dispute between American VoIP provider Vonage and the telecom giant AT&T made public in October.
A settlement, reached in early November between the two entities, was finalized late last [...]

It has surely seemed as though tech pundits everywhere have been occupied with the analysis of social networks over the course of the past year almost entirely, has it not? Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and various others – in that order – that have placed themselves in webpages everywhere on an almost daily basis. It looks as though they’ve even made record showings in various physical “old media” newsprints.
So why, you must ask, do we continue to ride the main line [...]

We first covered Jango in late October. We published a brief review of the startup, in which we essentially laid out an admiring conclusion overall. How to sum it up? Basically, we found it to be an appealing play on the Pandora concept, one with a rather unique approach. Its feature set could also be said to harbor a few touches new to the market.
And in addition to its initial launch setup, we also received a few words about its [...]

Remember when Digg launched its Images category earlier this month? It was an addition that really couldn’t have come soon enough. The social news company got plenty of notes of appreciation, plenty of big Xs and Os for finally putting it out there for the community. At last there was a convenience place to share all those cool Flickr finds…outside of Flickr. So all around thumbs up, right?
Sure, we can second such impressions. Many of us here [...]

TorrentSpy, once a stalwart participant of BitTorrent communications on the Web, found today that its future was no more. News widely emerged this morning of the website’s defeat amidst the powers of the MPAA in court. The judge presiding over the case involving the link farm “made a default ruling in favor of the MPAA…(saying) the site’s operators had tampered with evidence.”
Long a popular post for links to peer-to-peer file transfers, TorrentSpy first hit a rough patch when news of [...]

Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google have all been playing it pretty loose with their respective advertisement networks, giving Web-based gambling houses the option to market their services more or less as they wish.
And now the three largest text-based ad agents on the Net are paying for it. According to the AP, all parties mentioned above agreed “to pay a combined $31.5 million to settle federal civil allegations” that they worked to perpetuate illegal gambling in years past.
Some say the collective [...]

Blogs can be lovely magnets for rumors and gossip and plenty of other things analogous to under-the-table chitchat. Sometimes too lovely, even.
Enter, Think Secret. Wait. Actually, no. Exit, Think Secret is really as it goes today.
Yes, apparently Apple has succeeded in taking down the site that irked CEO Steve Jobs a thousand-million times too many through its brazen disregard for the oddly tight-lipped Cupertino machine that it’s editor and owner relentlessly pursued since the website’s inception. Well, maybe [...]

Forbes published Tuesday evening its second annual Web Celeb 25 list highlighting the most influential – both positively and negatively, we suspect – names known throughout the digital ether that have had the most impact on the 2007 zeitgeist of buzztastic junk.
Now, before we go any further and share some feelings about the picks as chosen by the business magazine, we feel it imperative to start with a question, short and simple: Why the cold shoulder? Why no Profy [...]

Yesterday, Amazon let known its establishment of a partnership between itself and the European startup SellABand. The association it will have with SellABand is simple: it will sell music released by artists developed through the independent service.
Why do we share this piece of information with you? Well, as many already know, Amazon several months ago unveiled its long-awaited music download service, appropriately named AmazonMP3. It was generally hailed by the blogosphere as welcome competition to Apple’s dominant iTunes [...]