September 6th, 2007
Okay, so Steve Jobs has given us four new iPods, with several variations on color, storage capacity, and other features. The media apparently thought it was a big deal, with cheers and applause throughout the Jobs presentation — but to me, it seemed like very little innovation, and a great deal of incrementalism.
For example, the […]
August 1st, 2007
It hardly seems relevant to post yet another commentary on the iPhone, since there are so many raves, critiques, and in-depth reviews out there already. But having now had roughly two weeks to play with my own iPhone (mine arrived in the mail on July 13th), I want to go on record as saying that […]
January 13th, 2007
It’s been four or five days since Steve Jobs announced the new iPhone at MacWorld, and I think most of the Internet buzz has died down by now. It would be impossible to provide you with links to all of the articles, commentaries, and reviews of this new razzle-dazzle cell phone, and a lot of […]
January 11th, 2007
We’ve had a “corporate account” with ATT for our business phone line for several months, during which time we’ve received several bills and paid them promptly. Don’t ask me why we switched to ATT in the first place; it’s a long story, but I think we previously had Verizon as a long-distance carrier. I don’t […]
November 9th, 2006
I’ve now finished two full days of the Web 2.0 Summit conference, and unfortunately have to catch a red-eye flight back to the East Coast without having the opportunity to participate in the third and final day of the conference. And before I get overwhelmed with a whole new set of meetings, deadlines, and other […]
August 20th, 2006
I ordered a Sanyo Xacti HD1 hi-def video camcorder a few days ago, and after telling myself that I couldn’t afford the distraction of playing with a new toy during the work-week, I finally opened the box yesterday and put all the pieces together. It’s an amazing piece of technology, small enough to fit in […]
May 8th, 2006
The first keynote presentation at this week’s Cutter Summit conference is on the emerging broadband explosion. After summarizing Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat message that more and more knowledge work is being “chunked, routinized, digitized, and automated” — and then moved offshore to countries with much lower labor costs than North America and Western […]
May 5th, 2006
The techno-savvy middle-class marketplace in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia seems to have an almost unlimited capacity to acquire sexy, new electronic gadgets — from iPods to PDAs, from the latest multi-function cell-phone, to the latest N-megapixel digital camera. I’m as guilty as the rest: I’ve just recently acquired a Nikon CoolPix P3 […]
April 23rd, 2006
In earlier postings here and here, I’ve written about SETI@home and the D2OL avian-flu project, which take advantage of the idle CPU cycles on desktop and laptop computers around the world, for interesting and potentially important research. Here’s another interesting application: what if we could use distributed computing to pool our idle CPU cycles to […]
April 22nd, 2006
Bill Gates is roughly 50 billion times richer than me; so maybe he’s 50 billion times smarter, too. But I can’t help wondering if his crystal ball is any less murky than mine, especially when I see him rhapsodizing about the tablet PC. For some reason, he loves to do this in Tokyo: at a […]
