Larry Dignan and other IT industry experts, blogging at the intersection of business and technology, deliver daily news and analysis on vital enterprise trends.
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic.
Andrew Nusca is a writer-editor for ZDNet, contributor to CNET and the editor of SmartPlanet, ZDNet's sister site about innovation. In 2013, his coverage will focus on enterprise startups. He is based in New York.
Rachel King is a staff writer for ZDNet based in San Francisco.
In characterizing salesforce.com as a company that he sees as a Microsoft rival, one that that he looks at "intensely" to understand the keys to its success, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates once again appears to be making adjustments at the helm of his huge ship.
At the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference today, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos introduced A9's OpenSearch, which he hopes will to do for search what RSS has done for content. OpenSearch lets users add searchable columns to the A9 search application and syndicate them via a few extensions to RSS.
This morning at Etech, Danny Hillis blew minds with a taste of the consulting and design work done at his current venture, Applied Minds. He showed pictures and video of six and four-legged mobile robots, including one in the form of a snake that moved exactly like one.
Rael Dornfest and Tim O'Reilly opened the Emerging Technology Conference with a discussion about what "alpha geeks" can run with and get their hands on, and small things loosely joined (credit to David Weinberger). Dornfest, O'Reilly Media CTO, talked about hacking as remixing, which he said is akin to rap and sampling dance music.
I'm in San Diego at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference this week, and I'll be popping in here with reports from time to time. Today I went to a tutorial on RSS and Atom by Ben Hammersley.
Quite frankly, I'm ready to ditch the idea of owning a PDA or an MP3 player. After all, my phone (the one that's irradiating me as I sit here and write) goes everywhere with me and the only reason it doesn't function as my full-time PDA or MP3 player (or digital camera for that matter) is that it doesn't have the memory to host everything I'd want to stick on it (contacts, notes, music, podcasts, documents, e-mail, etc.
It has now been almost six months since the last time we heard about what progress (or lack thereof) the SenderID e-mail authentication specification was making on the anti-spam standards front. It's been so long that I was beginning to wonder what's up and if there's any hope of ratifying a standard any time soon.
Perhaps the moral of this story is that you can't teach a dog new tricks. Particularly these old dogs, who, like my old dog, bite back if you don't handle them just right.
If you've followed any of my coverage of the patent mess that the technology industry is in -- and it's a real mess -- you'll know that I'm in agreement with anyone who says it's a mess but not necessarily in agreement with those who say get rid of it, or those who say to keep it.
At the Churchill Club last night, Garage Technology Ventures Managing Director Bill Reichert led a discussion with a panel of notable startup veterans: Kamran Elahian, Steve Kirsch, Dan'l Lewin and Heidi Roizen.Here are a few highlights of the interview, which is available as both an MP3 download and as podcast that you can have downloaded to your system and/or MP3 player automatically (see ZDNet's podcasts: How to tune in).