Archive for December, 2005
« Previous EntriesThe Perils of Switching Blog Platforms
Saturday, December 31st, 2005I've noticed recently a few high-profile bloggers - Om Malik and Michael Arrington - have switched to a new blogging platform (Wordpress). Both have experienced technical woes and problems in moving their blogs but unlike the rest of us, they seem to have a small army of technical help and/or tech-savvy friends to work out [...]
The Battle over Net Neutrality
Saturday, December 31st, 2005I'm a bit late wading into the increasingly-contentious “net neutrality” bugaboo but if you've got some reading time over this last holiday weekend, you may want to check out a feature I wrote in today's National Post about what's going on. I've tried to boil down why some of the large U.S. telecom carriers such as [...]
Must-Have Web 2.0 Apps..and Some Much-Needed Pragmatism
Friday, December 30th, 2005TechCrunch (a.k.a. Michael Arrington) offers up a list of Web 2.0 applications he couldn't live without. It includes most of the usual suspects - FeedBurner, Bloglines, Flickr, Measuremap, Memeorandum, del.icio.us, Technorati and WordPress and Skype. It was a pleasant surprise to see Pandora, which offers a streaming music service (free and subscription-based) that adjusts to [...]
Google-Opera Deal…But Not "The" Deal
Thursday, December 29th, 2005In the wake of the speculation about Microsoft acquiring Opera, Google has done a one-year deal that will make it the default search engine for Opera Mobile and Opera Mini. The wireless space appears to be where Opera has a good chance of thriving as opposed to the desktop where it, at best, has 1% [...]
Nortel Sells Volt Delta Stake
Thursday, December 29th, 2005Only Nortel would come out with a double-shot of news during the week between Christmas and New Year. Earlier this week, it acquired Tasman Networks for $99.5-million in cash to establish a presence in the corporate router market. Today, it discloses the sale of a 24% stake in Volt Delta for $56.4-million. Nortel picked up the equity position [...]
FT Names Brin, Page Men of the Year
Thursday, December 29th, 2005The Financial Times has named Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin as Men of the Year (apparently beating out Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko). I guess it's difficult to argue with the choice(s) given Google's growing presence and popularity but did Google really have more of an impact this year than [...]
Who's Rates Technology Inc.?
Wednesday, December 28th, 2005In Canada, we've become super-sensitive to litigious patent holders given how NTP Inc. has being making life difficult for Research in Motion for the past four years. So, it's fascinating to see Rates Technology Inc. jump into the spotlight by suing Google for infringing on its VOIP patents. (Here's the lawsuit.)Like NTP, RTI is nothing [...]
And the #1 Spam for '05 is…..
Wednesday, December 28th, 2005Spam is still very much alive and well. AOL said today it has been blocking an average of 1.5 billion (yes, that's billion) of spam message a day in 2005. That's impressive but it still means more than 150 billion spam message still weaseled their way into AOL e-mail boxes. A big trend this year, [...]
Accurate Blog Stat Packages (Part II)
Wednesday, December 28th, 2005A couple weeks ago, I did a post on the hunt for accurate blog statistics. Given the slow news flow over the holidays, I figure it's time for a bit of an update. In terms of raw numbers, there has been consistency among Measure Map, Blogbeat, Google Analytics and StatCounter. The range of unique visitors [...]
Some Surprises - Good & Bad - in 2005
Wednesday, December 28th, 2005 My weekly column
in today's Financial Post looks at some of the most pleasant and
troubling high-tech surprises in 2005. The highlights include the rise
of Firefox (10% market share and counting) and the reinvigoration of the browser market - even if Flock stumbled out of the gate with a not ready for prime-time beta.
Another positive was [...]