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Verizon, Google, Cisco, Telefon AB, Ericsson, and HP are among a group of high tech companies planning to buy important IP before patent trolls snap them up, as the Wall Street Journal reports. But is this a real concern, or corporate spin? The mass of patent litigation is hardly all due to a handfu...
The Harvard Business Review has an interesting analysis of the viability of the "long tail" concept. In looking at comparative sales of video and music, researchers Anita Elberse and Felix Oberholzer-Gee find that the tail may be more bobbed than most people have been thinking: Using econometric mod...
With the departure of Bill Gates, it's tempting to call it the end of an era at Microsoft -- except it isn't. There is no real past at Microsoft. For all of its more and less successful forays into game consoles, PC games, the TV industry, online communities, advertising and mobile devices, the soft...
Given the recent news of LinkedIn's billion dollar valuation, I thought some results of a market research analyst firm In-Stat March 2008 survey looked interesting. Premium services in social networking and similar Web 2.0 offerings are clearly going to be an important revenue stream. So far, the ge...
Shortly after venting about the business drawbacks of giving control of technology to others, I came across an interesting piece in Wired by Bruce Schneier about "kill switches" in everyday technology. Microsoft, it turns out, has even filed a patent for a "digital manners policy," so that cell pho...
I got a link to an interview transcript from On the Media, the NPR program about the media industry, and had to pass it on because it's one of the smarter discussions on technology and the Internet I've seen in a while. Jonathan Zittrain was hawking his new book, The Future of the Internet and H...
In the face of overwhelming competitive odds, hostile investors, and key employees jumping ship faster than a microprocessor can count, Yahoo management is taking the tried and true way to face adversity: reorganization -- its fourth in 18 months. VentureBeat is finding the situation predictable be...
At this point, you've probably heard that LinkedIn raised $53 million, mostly from Bain Capital Ventures, which translates into a $1 billion valuation. That leaves us with the obvious question: Can the company really be worth that much? There have been lots of wild numbers on the social-networking f...
Non-compete clauses in high tech employment contracts are standard fare. But these defensive efforts may actually backfire where they work most effectively. To be sure, I haven't reached this conclusion by analyzing reams of data, but it passes the "sniff" test. At a recent panel discussion on the ...
With Nokia's acquisition of Symbian, it is going head-to-head with Google Android and Windows Mobile to make a run at building the top software platform for mobile phones. The problem is that all three of them could be making some bad assumptions about the way the mobile phone market -- particula...
When Nokia announced that it was ready to buy the outstanding 52 percent of mobile device OS vendor Symbian for about $410 million, the handset manufacturer's stock started heading up, and for good reason. Nokia decided that it would make the software royalty-free open source. In one move, it had tr...
According to Microsoft Watch (via Slashdot.org), the U.S. government is already reviewing Windows 7. Under the terms of Microsoft's November 2001 Justice Department settlement and final court judgment issued about a year later, a government-sanctioned "Technical Committee" has overseen Windows devel...
It's official. Google is now a big time software developer. How can we tell? Its largest software development project ever -- the Google Android smartphone platform -- will officially be delayed. When Google announced Android in November 2007, it said that Android-powered phones would be availab...
Professional organizations and most of the high-tech world has been moaning about a shortage of graduating engineers for years. Some German companies think they have an answer, according to the Financial Times: Start recruiting in kindergarten and nursery school: "It is a new development in that we ...
Software as a service has turned into platform as a service (as if we needed another "aaS") and as this application battle royale gets underway developers need to think about these efforts in terms of audience. For instance, Bill Appleton, CTO of DreamFactory, which makes cloudwareâ€"rich Int...
