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Mark Evans

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Archive for December, 2006

Goodbye 2006, I’m Going to Miss You!

I’m not one for predictions (I’ll leave that exercise for folks like Peter Cashmore and Tony Hung) so I’ll focus on the year that was. The highlight was the birth of my son, Elias, whose arrival managed to interrupt the one movie (Bad Cop, Bon Cop) my wife and I actually went to a theatre [...]

Google Gazing

Why is it that Google is held to such high standards? Blake Ross (a Firefox co-founder and Google employee) wrote a lengthy and critical post a few days ago suggesting Google was being evil by trying to cross-promote some of its other products from its search results page. This prompted TechCrunch to pile on [...]

The Web and Sydney: Urban Myth or Reality?

In a story that sounds strangely familiar, a German tourist ended up in Sydney, Montana rather than Sydney, Australia after apparently mistyping his destination on a flight booking Web site. It was four years ago that a British couple ended up in Sydney, Nova Scotia rather than Australia’s Sydney after typing “Sydney” on a Web [...]

Agonizing over Vista

Rather than immediately jumping into the controversy over the rightness or wrongness of Microsoft’s offer of a free Vista-loaded laptop to dozens of bloggers, I decided to watch from the sidelines for awhile to gather my thoughts. (Disclosure: I’m one of those bloggers who was given a Ferrari laptop by Microsoft. My employer, b5media, plans [...]

Instant iPod

For some reason, the idea of buying an iPod from a vending machine strikes me as brilliant. The ubiquitous MP3 players have been available for sale at a few airports in the U.S. At Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, one vending machine has sold more than $55,000 worth of iPods in the past month, which is [...]

Welcome to Your Global Neighbourhood

Hoping to strike book publishing gold twice in a row, Shel Israel’s in the midst of writing Global Neighbourhoods, which looks at how the Web is creating digital/virtual communities “defined not by physical boundaries, but by common interests”. Here’s the most recent overview. Shel’s last book, Naked Conversations, (co-written with Robert Scoble) has become one [...]

What’s Technorati’s M&A Future?

Maybe I’m out of the loop but something you don’t hear too much about these days is whether Technorati is a takeover target. It wasn’t that long ago that there was all kinds of speculation Technorati would be acquired by Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. Now, the buzz seems to have evaporated.
Maybe Technorati’s business model isn’t [...]

Bubbling Talk About Bubbles

The Wall St. Journal has an intriguing story about whether Web 2.0 is another bubble. It features a discussion between Todd Dagres, a founder and general partner with Spark Capital, and David Hornik, a general partner with August Capital. Dagres believes Web 2.0 is a bubble and that “billions will be lost on Web 2.0 [...]

Higher Cable, Telecom Bills for Canadians

Canadians have been blessed with some of the lowest telecom prices in the world due to a combination of competition and regulation. Since the long-distance market was deregulation in the mid-1990s, prices have continued to tumble. In the high-speed Internet business, prices have been below those paid by U.S. consumers, while local telephone prices have [...]

The Uncertain Future of the Pageview

At b5media, pageviews are a core element of how we assess our blogs and how we appeal to advertisers. So it’s interesting to watch the fireworks happening within the blogosphere about whether the pageview is relevant anymore. Some of the issues involved the different methodologies and approaches used by analytics service providers such as comScore, [...]

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