"release 2.0" entries
Marcel Proust, Alpha Geek
Tim recently sent around a recommendation for The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage's enjoyable look at a decidedly pre-Silicon Valley tech boom, although the inflated promises of that period (i.e., the telegraph will bring about world peace) remind us of some of the more outlandish dotcom-era claims. Tim's note about Standage's book (which I recommend as well) provides a good reminder…
Trading for their own account
I promised recently to publish more of my reflections on what I've learned from studying the parallels between Web 2.0 and financial markets, one of the real wake-up calls was the way that Wall Street firms moved from being brokers to being active players "trading for their own account." Ever since I heard Bill Janeway point out that over…
The future is almost here, but the demo has been here for a while now
Forbes and others are reporting that Apple has applied for a patent for "a wireless system that would allow customers to place an order at a store using a wireless device such as a media player, a wireless personal digital assistant or a cellphone. The system could go far beyond the program that Apple announced with Starbucks in September, which…
New Release 2.0: Open Source Hardware
As a trusted colleague suggested recently, putting the words "open," "source," and "hardware" next to one another in a sentence is a sure way to cure insomnia among business people. But, before those non-alpha geeks among you click away, you might want to know what the alpha geeks know: that open source hardware is looking like it will be a…
iTunes Finally Allows Streaming … At Least to Grammy Voters
Despite protestations by the Cupertino Claque to the contrary, Apple Kremlinologists assume that Steve Jobs and Co. have had a music-streaming strategy ready to go, should the competition force it. That hasn't been necessary yet: The various DRM-encumbered music-streaming services haven't done much to challenge Apple's digital-music-selling dominance. And all evidence suggests that the current model has shifted plenty of…
Back Issues of Release 2.0 Available
Plenty of people have been asking if we could make individual issues of Release 2.0 available for sale. We have, and they're all available at /r2/backissues.html. For those looking forward to our next issue (December), it will cover open source hardware. And for the historians in the audience, we have every issue of our illustrious predecessor, Release 1.0, available for…
Search Engine Optimization and the Race to the Bottom
In the Radar back-channel, Wesabe's Marc Hedlund points us to a provocative post by Merlin Mann likening today's obsession with Google search rankings to cargo cults. Indeed, the desire for high rankings on a Google search page and the implied financial returns from that is making us do crazy things: making headlines boring, giving incorrect information up top in an…