Category Archives: technology

Why is the NYT Breaking the Web?

Websites get old, and need to be redesigned occasionally. That we understand. But the first rule of designing a website is that you make sure you can redesign it without breaking all the incoming links. And the first rule of … Continue reading

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Kindle 2: Still Expensive

Megan McArdle loves her Kindle, but says that Amazon doesn’t want to have "a glut" of Kindles if the new Kindle 2 fails to sell as well as the original. My feeling is that having too many Kindles in stock … Continue reading

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Is Google Too Big To Fail?

Robert Cottrell has a provocative post about the cloud today. Is the future of information in the cloud? Robert has his doubts: I’d be on the pro-cloud side, were it not for the crash of cloud banking. The message from … Continue reading

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Apple Loyalty Datapoint of the Day

As John Gapper notes, the new Taylor Swift album is only $3.99 at Amazon, for an unencrypted, iPod-friendly MP3. At iTunes, by contrast, it’s $11.99 for an encrypted AAC. Yet it’s still the top-selling album on iTunes. Is there anything … Continue reading

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Information Overload Datapoint of the Day

The Dow swung 780 points between its low point and high point just in the first hour of trading this morning. This is a crazy market, and it’s overloading the information systems: here’s a screencap I took just now, from … Continue reading

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The WSJ’s Gorgeous Redesign

I love the new WSJ.com. It’s clean, intuitive, elegant, easy to read, and blazingly fast. I should imagine that subscribers will spend a lot more time there now than they were spending up until now, just because the site is … Continue reading

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Opening Brazilian Windows

Brazil has always felt the need to push back against the imposition of international intellectual property rights from the global powers in the US and Europe: it famously simply disregarded TRIPs and decided to manufacture its own antiretroviral drugs when … Continue reading

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Web Features: Don’t be too Ambitious

The NYT has the news, this morning: BusinessWeek is adding a feature to its website at the end of September. This is clearly meant to be a big deal: it’s the product of "two years of quiet development," we’re told, … Continue reading

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Apple vs Google

Apple is worth more than Google. Huh? This doesn’t make sense to me. Let’s start with the obvious: Google makes more money than Apple does. It had earnings of $10 billion over the past 12 months, compared to $8 billion … Continue reading

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Frank Quattrone, Whiner

Frank Quattrone made his fortune by taking Silicon Valley startups public during the dot-com boom. Even at the time many awkward questions were asked: weren’t most of these companies too small and too young and too unprofitable for a full-scale … Continue reading

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Mobile Banking for the Poor

At a press conference this morning in Mumbai, mobile-banking company Obopay announced an alliance with Grameen Solutions — an alliance with an extraordinarily ambitious goal. In ten years’ time, the companies said, they would like to see 1 billion of … Continue reading

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Lies, Damned Lies, and Blog Rankings

I’m not a fan of lists, and I’m especially not a fan of top-blogs lists. But I’m kinda tickled by Wikio’s August blog ranking: Hey look, Market Movers is higher up than really great blogs like Wooster Collective and Stuff … Continue reading

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Computers in the Oval Office

In England, they call it "silly season": the slow-news days of the summer where newspapers find themselves forced to run faux-provocative opinion pieces, just because there’s nothing else to fill the newshole. It was surely only a matter of time … Continue reading

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Bandwidth Datapoint of the Day

Tim Wu: Americans today spend almost as much on bandwidth — the capacity to move information — as we do on energy. A family of four likely spends several hundred dollars a month on cellphones, cable television and Internet connections, … Continue reading

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Managing Your Online Reputation

Kate Murphy has found a chap called Kent Campbell who, for between $500 and $10,000 per month, will try to make sure that the first page of search results, when someone Googles your name, will include lots of nice positive … Continue reading

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Further Tales of Microhoo Incompetence

The WSJ reports today not only that some kind of Microsoft-Yahoo deal might be on again, but also that: In mid-May — weeks after Microsoft withdrew its bid — Yahoo offered to sell itself to Microsoft for about $33 a … Continue reading

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Great Email Rants of All Time, Windows Edition

This is I think now my favorite email ever. It’s over 1,000 words of ranting about how utterly useless Windows is: I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack … so I went to Microsoft.com. They have … Continue reading

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Let Me Pay to Send Email!

Lee Gomes writes today about the serious problem of false positives when you install a spam filter. It’s a problem I feel particularly acutely: my email address has been floating around the internet for so long that sometimes I feel … Continue reading

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Dell’s Cunning Business Strategy

Michael Dell on why businesses are going to have to move to Vista eventually: A lot of new hardware features are coming out–broadband, wireless, fast graphics–and those aren’t supported by XP.

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FiLife: A Disaster

In case you were wondering why Ron Lieber left the managing editorship of IAC-WSJ joint venture FiLife to become a columnist at the NYT, now you know. FiLife has launched, and it’s a disaster. It looks like a parody of … Continue reading

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The Economics of the iPhone

I’ll leave the likes of Dan Frommer to do the big-picture corporate economics of the costs and benefits of changing Apple’s business model. I’m more interested in the user end: if the price of an iPhone drops by $200, but … Continue reading

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Google’s Top 10 Universities

Vanity Fair has a wonderful oral history of the internet, full of real gems. About 11,000 words in, we get to Google’s Larry Page: One of the first things we did was just understand the relative importance of things. It … Continue reading

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False Positives at Blogger

What’s going on with Blogger? Both Yves Smith and Brad DeLong have run into problems of late, and I have a nasty feeling that it’s an unloved orphan stepchild within Google, and that it’s likely to continue to deteriorate further … Continue reading

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How to Monetize Free Wi-Fi

Susan Stellin reports today on the way in which hotels, airports and the like are increasingly rolling out free wi-fi in addition to their paid-for offerings. She explains: Travelers want to log on everywhere at no charge, while hotels, airports … Continue reading

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Why Yahoo Shouldn’t Buy Back Its Own Stock

Bill Miller is kicking himself this morning. The second-largest shareholder in Yahoo, he wanted $35 to sell out to Microsoft, and so he held on to his shares rather than hand them over to arbitrageurs at $29 or so. But … Continue reading

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