"release 2.0" entries
Steve Jobs rules the recording industry. Now what?
Last night's Grammy Awards ceremonies were even less relevant than usual, no small achievement. The TV broadcast began with a "performance" by that cutting-edge new artist Frank Sinatra and fell down from there. The only real emotional charge of an evening celebrating the most emotional of media came when we viewers were confronted with the disparity between the preternatural confidence…
Money:Tech Day 2: Best Lines of the Day [MoneyTech]
Like yesterday, the second day of Money:Tech was stuffed with early signals on everything from using website visits to predict the unemployment rate to the emerging market for catastrophe bonds. Here are just a few of the choice lines today: Michael Stonebraker, Streambase, on why fast-moving financial firms must keep their data in memory, not on a hard disc: "The…
Money:Tech Day 1: Best Lines [MoneyTech]
There's so much going on at Money:Tech today that I won't try to cheapen it my squeezing it all into a blog post. Indeed, we're planning a full issue of Release 2.0 in April to capture how much has happened in the collision of Wall Street and Web 2.0 since we first identified it last year (PDF link to issue,…
The Industry Standard is back. Why?
The Industry Standard ably chronicled — and, eventually, mirrored — the Internet boom that began a decade ago and died a few years later. (Disclosure: Despite its occasional excesses, I am honored to have been associated with the magazine.) After years of noticing that thestandard.com was still receiving ample traffic and — with one brief exception a few years back…
One Laptop Per Child will succeed even if it "fails"
The way people are dismissing the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project this week reminds me of how people were treating Hillary Clinton during the five days between her Iowa defeat and her New Hampshire comeback. To many observers, the inevitable has become the disaster in record time. Some of the anti-OLPC notes that have appeared since Intel was kicked…
Open Source Hardware Enters the Mainstream
A little suggested Sunday morning reading… We use this space, in part, to discern early signals of oncoming trends, and we're especially gratified when those trends show up in the mainstream. In today's New York Times you can read What This Gadget Does is Up to You (registration required), which covers the Neuros OSD, an intriguing open source media recorder….
You can opt out any time you like but you can never leave
Here's a brief follow-up to this week's thread on Facebook, Plaxo, and Scoble. This morning I found several dozen Plaxo notices in my inbox. Enough is enough, I thought, so I followed the instructions to opt out of all future messages from Plaxo. Here's what happened all three times I tried, a few hours apart: Well, that's one way to…
Who will be the next Open Source Public Enemy #1?
During the end-of-the-year break, a traditional time for bad news since fewer people than usual are paying attention, The SCO Group was delisted by NASDAQ. It was the latest bump down for SCO, best-known in recent years for claiming it owned Linux, which lost a major court decision in August and filed for bankruptcy in September. As SCO slides closer…
Human vs. Machine: The Great Challenge of Our Time
In an email conversation with Bill Janeway about our upcoming Money:Tech Conference, he said something really profound: The timeliness of this Conference is NOT only because "web 2.0" technologies and business models have reached critical mass in the financial markets. It is also because, as driven by the web more generally, the frontier between human and machine-decision making has…
Greatest error message ever?
Adobe pushed out an upgrade of its Creative Suite. I installed it, as prompted. This is what happens when I try to run any element of the Suite after the install: Click on the modal dialog box and the program closes. For extra redundancy, there's a second error message that reads "licensing for this product has stopped working." But I…