"rumors" entries

I hate to play Valleywag, but I'm hearing rumors that the San Francisco Chronicle is in big trouble. Apparently, Phil Bronstein, the editor-in-chief, told staff in a recent "emergency meeting" that the news business "is broken, and no one knows how to fix it." ("And if any other paper says they do, they're lying.") Reportedly, the paper plans to announce…

Since iPhone postings seem to generate such a comment storm, it's obviously a topic of some interest to our readers. As a result, I thought I should point to Ed Burnette's argument that Cisco's iPhone trademark may be on shaky ground. Apparently, Cisco may have let the trademark lapse, and faked a photo to show it was in use before…

Update: It appears that the initiative is not the work of Google tagging New York nor an initiative mandated by government regulation, but something as distant as an accounting standard titled GASB 34 issuing municipalities financial reporting requirements to maintain their credit ratings. Interesting geodata can emerge from anywhere indeed. As so many times before, we only need inherent openness…

In response to an earlier post where I noted that 50% of JBoss deployments are on Windows, a reader wrote in to ask whether that was really true or whether it was simple Microsoft spin. I wrote to Bill Hilf, Microsoft's director of Platform Technology Strategy, who said those were the numbers given by JBoss when Microsoft and JBoss announced…

This story about Yahoo! hiring away the R&D group of Nuance is very interesting. Yahoo! recently released Yahoo! Messenger with Voice (beating Google Talk, incidentally), bought DialPad earlier this year, and flat-out say they plan to use the DialPad acquisition to offer call-in/call-out connection to the regular phone system. The Nuance acquisition seems to imply they’re also planning to add…

Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can't Index: "Our users want the world to be as simple, clean, and accessible as the Google home page itself," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt at a press conference held in their corporate offices. "Soon, it will be." Hilarious. Oh, yeah, and, The Onion launched a redesign….

A very interesting debate on Dave Farber's IP list dissects the difference in news headlines about Google's recent hiring of Kai-Fu Lee and Microsoft's subsequent lawsuit. Jason Lee Miller of Webpronews posted a link to an inflammatory story claiming bias: When the search terms "Dr. Lee court documents Google Microsoft" were entered into Google, the majority of results were emblazoned…

The Big Picture argues that the rise of advertising in movie theaters has so adversely impacted the movie-going experience that it's one hidden source of declining movie ticket receipts. Worth reading….

On the O'Reilly Editors' mailing list, Danie Steinberg writes: I've been suggesting that the play isn't to view them on the ipod (although that will be possible) but to use the iPod to show them on a tv. The feature in the photo iPod that allows you to use s video out to show your slide shows on a tv…

There's some interesting discussion over on Dave Farber's list about the rumored Apple switch to Intel and its implications (scroll to bottom of list on this link). (There are also some intriguing postings on Sun's analogous issues with the "other" non-Intel chip, the Sparc.) I forwarded one of the messages from the thread to the O'Reilly editors list, and got…