Ever since Google firmly established itself as The One to Beat on the web, the company has become the subject of almost every conceivable product rumor, a surprising number of which either turn out to be true or contain kernels of truth. For example, people speculated for years about Google building an ad-supported “gPhone” mobile […]
Mozilla Labs, the R&D department for the group that puts out the amazing Firefox, just released a preview for a new browser technology they call Ubiquity. It’s a little rough at the moment, but shows a lot of promise. I’m a little skeptical that the average user will really understand its power, however, though I’d […]
Google made a big announcement Monday night that has the web development community talking. They announced and released a preview version of App Engine, a set of tools that lets you quickly build web applications and deploy them to Google’s infrastructure for instant scalability. I want to talk a bit about why it is important […]
Several months ago, I received an advanced copy of Nicholas Carr’s newest book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. I immediately read through most of it while on a business trip and yesterday finally managed a few minutes to finish the last few pages. So, here’s my slightly-late review of this […]
Earlier today, the O’reilly Radar blog had an interesting post about an innovative new auto insurance company, of all things. They’re called MileMeter, and the thing that makes them different is that you buy your car insurance from them by the mile, not by the quarter, year, etc. This is obviously going to be a […]
You’ve been hearing about my love of Amazon for years now, including the awesome web services platforms they are making available to developers everywhere. They started off with a cheap and easy to use message queuing service (SQS), later added pay-as-you-go remote file storage (S3), then added on-demand computing capacity (EC2), and most recently, flexible […]
My Facebook lovefest continues. Late yesterday they announced the latest version of the Facebook Platform, which opens up the site (and its millions and millions of users) for 3rd parties to build on. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, just know this: It’s a very big deal.
TechCrunch calls Facebook the “Anti-MySpace”, and for good […]
I’ve been able to put more time into my independent study over the last few weeks. While that’s plenty of work for me, I’ve decided to do a little experiment during the process: dump Microsoft Word and instead write it online using Google Docs.
So far, I like Google Docs. A lot. I love being able […]
Technometria is fast becoming one of my favorite podcasts every week. I like to say it’s “like The Gillmor Gang, but actually good”.
This week’s episode is one of the best yet. It’s a conversation with Doug Kaye of IT Conversations/GigaVox Media and Jeff Barr, Web Services Evangelism at Amazon. They discuss Amazon’s suite of web […]
He survived a helicopter crash back in 2003 and laughs about it now. Instead of ignoring Tim O’Reilly and other critics during the Amazon 1-Click patent controversy in 2000, he joined the conversation and spearheaded the movement for patent reform. He’s a big fan of science fiction. He can talk to you about web services and other technologies like […]