Thursday, February 01, 2007 10:28 PM EST
In his blog, Amazon CTO Werner Vogel, a longtime friend of Jim Gray, the missing Microsoft executive that is considered among other things to be the father of transaction processing, reports that private efforts are underway to use sattellite imagery and online mapping servics to try and find the boat that Jim Gray set sail on three days ago.
The Coast Guard recently reported that it is having trouble locating the missing boat using conventional search methods. Gray, a leading architect of Microsoft's SQL Server database, is widely admired across all spectrums of the technology community that is marshalling its collective resources to help find him -- Michael Vizard
Friday, February 16, 2007 1:32 PM EST
John Battelle is wondering, three years in, what the next phase is for the amorphous concept of Web 2.0. The next Web 2.0 conference is this fall. Meanwhile, the Web 2.0 Expo is coming in April.
Thursday, February 22, 2007 2:19 PM EST
Yahoo is planning to launch a new video news service this quarter that will feature a crooner who sings the headlines and top stories. The new entertainment project, Yahoo's first since Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone, comes after the ouster of former Hollywood exec Lloyd Braun, who was pushing for Yahoo to develop more original contnt.
Thursday, February 22, 2007 2:32 PM EST
Microsoft officially opened its video-sharing site, SoapBox, this week, but nobody came. Most videos have only a few hundred views. The software giant has been sniffing around other video sites though, including original revenue sharing site Revver.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007 9:08 AM EST
There was a lot of buzz surrounding Marc Andreesen's social application builder Ning when it launched at the 2nd Web 2.0 conference in '05. Since then social apps have drawn some attention, most notable Yahoo's beta Pipes service, which lets non-programmers mashup two or more Web services. And today, Ning relaunches to praise from Silicon Valley pundits. But are there enough consumers out there who want to roll their own Web apps?
Tuesday, February 27, 2007 9:21 AM EST
The BitTorren download store has finally arrived, but it's crippled by DRM. The store offers over 3,000 movies and TV shows, but the movies are only available for rent, not purchase. The movie studios need only realize that DRM removes value from their product to understand that DRM-crippled media will never compete with unshackled media.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007 2:44 PM EST
Despite years of grumbling about wrong-headed government regulations and laws, the Silicon Valley tech crowd failed to show up at this week's Tech Policy Summit. Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, Representative Rich Boucher (D-VA) introduced a bill aimed at softening some of the provisions in the DMCA. The Elctronic Frontier Foundation says this is good news for consumers, but don't get your hopes up -- similar bills have failed in the past.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007 3:01 PM EST
If you're among the conspiracy theorists who think Digg users and sysops are intentionally directing or misdirecting traffic, check out Monitoring Buries at Digg at Search Engine Land. Turns out, by modifying a few parameters in the Digg visualization tools' query strings, you can watch buries occur in real time. Who knows: You may spot a trend.
Monday, March 05, 2007 2:35 PM EST
The United States Patent and Trademark Office will test a project this spring that will post patent applications online, invite comments and rank those comments for serious consideration by the agency's examiners. The Globe and Mail's Matt Ingram says the program is an important first step toward unclogging the patent office pipeline, despite the Web crowd's reputation for being illiterate numbskulls. The very literate crowd at Slashdot, meanwhile, wonders about the dangers of letting corporate users rank their competitors' applications.
Monday, March 05, 2007 2:43 PM EST
USA Today unveiled a major redesign this week, allowing users to comment on every story and personalize their reading experience. Super ad mensch Steve Rubel says the paper didn't go far enough, and should allow readers to open blogs on the site, too. But publishing guru Scott Karp argues the opposite, pointing out that most USA Today readers don't like the change, and probably don't care about "social" tools anyway.
Monday, March 05, 2007 2:55 PM EST
The Recording Industry Association of America announced on Friday that it had adopted royalty rates for music published over the Web. Those rates will likely impact small webcasters who won't be able to afford the fees. Doc Searls annotates the negative repercussions.
Tuesday, March 06, 2007 3:14 PM EST
Microsoft's general counsel criticized Google in his prepared remarks to the Association of American Publishers, arguing that the search giant doesn't respect copyrighted works, either with its book scanning projects or with YouTube. Microsoft, of course, offers competing book scanning projects and is involved with the Open Content Alliance, which only copies books with the publishers' permission, so their resistance to Google's projects is to be expected. Danny Sullivan dissects Microsoft's claims at Search Engine Land.
Monday, March 12, 2007 8:35 AM EST
Web 2.0 app of the moment: Twitter, the insta-presence and personal updating tool that lets you tell your friends what you're doing and read the mini-chunked diary entries of others. Breathless technophile Robert Scoble thinks Twitter is the bee's knees, while those with more critical minds think the app just adds more noise, less signal. Regardless, if you're not at SXSW this year, Twitter can be your best outlet for information.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007 2:01 PM EST
Viacom dropped a bomb on Google and YouTube yesterday, filing a lawsuit in New York federal district court accusing the search giant and vid share site of massive copyright infringement. Entrepeneur and vocal YouTube critic Mark Cuban was unsurprisingly pleased with the suit, while most of the blogosphere reacted with derision. Tech lawyer Lawrence Lessig notes that the real questions will be whether YouTube has the "ability to control" uploads before they are identified as infringing.
Thursday, March 15, 2007 4:16 PM EST
Yahoo is getting serious about its new apps innovation team, codenamed Brickhouse, and has just hired entrepreneur Salim Ismail to galvanize their efforts. Ismail, who has founded no less than seven companies, will help Yahoo to compete with smaller companies which increasingly beat Yahoo to the innovation punch.
