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June 27, 2003
WiFi slam dunk
NetStumbler.com: "Vivato, a wireless infrastructure company, today announced that Hoopfest, the largest three-on-three basketball tournament in the world, will use Vivato 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi Switches to blanket the City of Spokane, Wash., with Wi-Fi during its 2003 event scheduled for June 28-29, 2003. "
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Keep them telemarketers away
FCC: "Consumers can register on-line for the national do-not-call registry beginning June 27, 2003."
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 7:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 25, 2003
Get wiki with it
The Supernova Wiki is now up and running, courtesy of my friends at Socialtext.
What's a wiki? you ask. (Or at least, some of you ask.) It's like a collaborative Website where each page is editable by users. The wiki is useful for real-time information and collaborative tasks (like figuring out where to meet for dinner) that don't work as well with the linear narrative structure of Weblogs. The Supernova wiki, like the group blog, is open now for your contributions.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 4:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 18, 2003
Heading to Switzerland
I'm off to Zurich for what looks to be an interesting workshop on information policy.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 3:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Supernova Weblog
We've launched the Weblog for Supernova 2003. Not much there yet, but this will be an important resource for conference-related information.
We've got several other community-oriented tools in the works for the conference. Stay tuned!
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 11:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 12, 2003
Firebird
I'm trying out Firebird, the new stripped-down version of Mozilla. So far, the performance is excellent. It has most of the good stuff I like in Mozilla, but not the pieces (e.g. the mail client) that I don't use. Tabbed browsing doesn't always work properly, though -- sometimes tabs don't close, and sometimes I lose the previous page list. And I miss the progress image showing when a page is loading. Still, not bad for a 0.6 release.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Here come the photoblogs
Yahoo! News: "As many as 42 percent of mobile phone users who had heard about photo messaging said they expected to send at least one photo message a week in the future, according to the survey of 5,600 people by management consultants AT Kearney and Britain's Cambridge University."
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:48 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 10, 2003
Who really won the browser war?
Mitch Kapor: "I have replaced Internet Explorer with Mozilla as my default browser on my ThinkPad. (I will save for another time the story about my choice of PC's. I also have a Mac and use it regularly. Where is the Linux machine, you may well ask -- but as I said, that's another story)"
I use the same configuration as Mitch. At most "digerati" conferences I go to, the two machines that are over-represented are ThinkPads and PowerBooks.
As for the browser, Mozilla and its stepchild Firebird are finally reaching their potential, some five years after the project was launched. Microsoft succeeded in killing the browser market, but not browser competition.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
A Quarter-Million Spams Per Year
Just ran a quick check of my email logs. The four primary layers of filtering I use (SpamAssassin rule-based, PopFile Bayesian, EarthLink probe-based, and hand-coded rules) are now catching over 700 spams per day, which represents 85% of my total incoming email.
That's a quarter-million spams per year. For one person. Scary.
Thank goodness my filters, after much training, catch about 99% of the spams, with only occasional false positives. I still can't imagine the average user going to the trouble I have to make the filters work.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 9, 2003
Europe imposes VAT on online sales
Here in the US, e-commerce transactions have largely been exempt from sales taxes. All sorts of dire predictions are made about what would happen if this distinction went away. Well, maybe now we'll find out. The European Union is imposing value-added tax, roughly analogou to our sales tax, on online services and transactions.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Dan Gillmor: "Last year, about
Dan Gillmor: "Last year, about 10 percent of all international calls used VoIP, says Tom Evslin, chief executive of ITXC, a New Jersey company that sells VoIP services to carriers. Evslin expects a jump of 15 percent to 20 percent this year."
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 5, 2003
Spectrum review
The Bush administration plans to order a year-long review of government use of radio spectrum. Will this simply transfer spectrum from government agencies and the military to private licensees, or will the administration consider the more revolutionary change of opening up some of that spectrum on an unlicensed basis?
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Powell's argument
If you want to understand FCC Chairman Michael Powell's rationale for loosening media ownership restrictions, read his statement (PDF) in his Congressional testimony yesterday.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Silly conference reporting restrictions
I can't fathom why conference organizers still insist their events are "off the record" in this age of WiFi and Weblogs. For a small private workshop, fine. But any time a CEO of a public company stands up in front of several hundred executives, he or she knows what they say is fair game. After all, journalists could just interview the attendees and get them to confirm what the speaker said. It's pretty silly when armchair bloggers break news simply because the journalists next to them aren't allowed to report what they hear.
At "Supernova", we put no such restrictions on attendees. A conference is a conversation, and if you're not comfortable saying something that might be repeated, don't say it. Pervasive Internet connectivity and low barriers to publishing are realities that everyone needs to deal with. From my perspective, the fact that attendees, whether professional journalists or not, can blog the event is a benefit, not a threat. It enhances the conference for those present and those elsewhere.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 7:55 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 4, 2003
Time dilation
Here's the striking thing about the Palm-Handspring nerger. Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky were at Palm for six years. They were at Handspring for five. Yet the Palm saga seems vastly longer than the Handspring saga. By the time the two left Palm, the company was on top of the world, having created an entirely new market category that was growing like wildfire. It had already gone through two acquisitions (US Robotics and 3Com). Handspring, by contrast, now seems like a short detour.
I feel like we're experiencing something similar to the effects of Einstein's theory of special relativity, where time dilates as objects approach the speed of light. For those inside the Internet bubble, time passed in an instant. But looking back from the outside, it seems like an eternity.
The world I remember in 1994, where people who read Wired and used Mosaic were either geeks or members of the Bay Area counterculture, had totally disappared by dotcom boom days of 1999. Yet the 1999 world remains strangely familiar today, despite the massive change in the market. Browsers, IPOs, VCs, and all the other stuff that suddenly hit the public consciousness during the boom haven't gone away. That may be part of what keeps people from seeing that we've moved from the downslope of the Web era to the run-up period for What Comes Next.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 4:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The big story of 2003-2004
One word: consolidation.
This week, PeopleSoft bought JD Edwards and Palm bought Handspring. These are early indications of an extraordinary consolidation binge in technology and media. Get ready for many more big merger announcements.
This will happen for several reasons. Everyone in high-tech was hoping that the economic downturn would be over by now, but instead we're still bumping along the bottom of the IT spending trough. That, combined with ruthless commoditization pressures, means no one can grow their way out of the current situation. Everyone must either find a small but lucrative niche, or get big enough to compete with gorillas like Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Nokia, and Sony.
Add to that this week's FCC decision to loosen media ownership rules. As was the case after the 1996 Telecommunication Act passed, a massive round of consolidation is inevitable. As my friend Blair Levin of Legg Mason puts it, every media company must now decide whether it's a buyer or a seller. Staying on the sidelines isn't an option.
What we're seeing now isn't the bubble-era M&A, in which inflated stock fueled deals for their own sake. It's also not the bottom fishing that has characterized the telecom infrastructure market since it imploded in late 2000. The upcoming consolidation will be a major reshuffling of the deck in many industries.
There will still be innovation and opportunities for startups. But the established companies will be spending a bigger chunk of their time buying each other than looking for new opportunities. Whether this is good or bad depends on your perspective. It's just going to be a fact of life until the feeding frenzy ends, which is probably when the economy finally recovers.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 1:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 3, 2003
Album #5
Album 5, with photos from March through the end of May, including Eli's first birthday party, is now online.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Sign the petition right now!
Larry Lessig isn't just fighting excessive expansion of copyright law, he's proposing a well-balanced alternative. If you care about the future of the Net, go sign the petition to reclaim the public domain.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 12:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 2, 2003
FCC Newspeak
You know, I've defended the FCC and Michael Powell many times. But I'm pretty disturbed by this headline from the FCC's press release announcing it's long-awaited loosening of media ownership rules:
"FCC Sets Limits on Media Concentration: Unprecedented Public Record Results in Enforceable and Balanced Broadcast Ownership Rules."
This is Bushism: Do one thing, but say you're doing something else so frequently and fervently that people believe it. I'm concerned about the actions the FCC took this morning, but more concerned about its reluctance to defend them forthrightly. I hope Chairman Powell hasn't concluded that he must sacrifice his refreshing candor to improve his political effectiveness.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 12:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack