Mitch Ratcliffe blogs about the constantly changing boundary between media and life, the businesses that live on that border, and the meaning of all this change to society and the economy.
In a penetrating analysis of the Facebook developers forum, 20bits shows that the participation of programmers in the discussion about the Facebook platform is rapidly dwindling, which suggests the platform itself is incompatible with the needs of the market. The fewer programmers writing for the Facebook platform, the less relevant that platform will be.
I've been using the Mophie Juice Pack, an external battery that slips onto the Apple iPhone, for the past week and recommend it highly. The battery is about half the weight of the phone itself and fits neatly and securely onto the iPhone to provide a full day's charge for almost any usage scenario.
The Microsoft-Yahoo deal implosion was a near certainty when the talks began. Two cultures as convinced that they are superior to one another can never coexist, so forget blaming anyone for what was inevitable.
A few months back, I told you about how my neck had gone bad, really bad. At that time, I was in the middle of a six-month dive into pain, alleviated only by gobbling unwholesome quantities of Percoset.
Tom Hayes has written a new book, Jump Point, that will get you thinking. Jump Point combines the freeconomics ideas recently covered by Wired's Chris Anderson with a globe-spanning perspective on competitiveness, but, most importantly, suggests that the impact of technology is a trailing phenomenon.
Here's a simple rule for preventing totalitarian rule in any nation: Don't build the systems for monitoring people's daily lives closely in the first place, and you will not be at risk of totalitarian rulers using those systems to overwhelm individual choice. The Wall Street Journal today has a long piece on the various ways that the National Security Agency has expanded its ability to monitor individuals within the United States without a warrant.
Whomever you support for president, I hope you'll consider joining me in asking the candidates for a pledge that they will enforce data integrity policies at least as rigorous as expected of publicly traded companies, and that they'll open their administration to public scrutiny of most public policy.After eight years of an presidency that considers itself immune to the simplest email storage requirements, the United States could use some insight into how decisions are made at the White House.
WASHINGTON (AdAge.com) -- ABC is appealing the Federal Communications Commission's decision to fine the Walt Disney network and 45 of its stations a total of $1,237,500 for airing scenes of a woman's buttocks on a 2003 episode of "NYPD Blue.
In a market where many of the global players have local listings for businesses and service providers, GenieTown is starting at the ground level and building up. The company, which made its public debut today, is a knowledge-sharing community built around person-to-person and small-business services providers in the Bay Area.
I was invited to a Microsoft forum on advanced retail display technology last week and came away with a strange sense that, although the future is going to look a lot like BladeRunner's stifling advertising environment, it could also be useful and powerful for the customer, not just the advertiser. We have to think about how to display information in a way that is important to purchase decision-making, not just try to tell people why they should buy, buy, buy!