By Reshma Kumar at June 20, 2008 1 Comments
Obsessive internet use is a public health problem which is so serious it should be officially recognized as a clinical disorder.
Do you get a high from the internet? Do you find that you need to shoot up again online right after you get offline? If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, your diagnosis may be in. And while this is not Internet Addicts Anon or where you can get the 12-step program to recovery, the first step is definitely admitting there is a problem. And this is exactly what psychiatrists are More»
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By Joseph Hunkins at June 09, 2008 1 Comments
Apple’s new iPhone was announced today and it’s very impressive. With data transfer speeds approaching those of Wi Fi, the iPhone is truly a very powerful internet enabled device. Apple has also announced a price cut to $199 per phone. A cut supported by hundreds of dollars in in subsidies that the carriers are going to pay for each unit.
The tricky pricing part is that carriers will be raising the cost of the data services from $20 per month to $30. This is going to More»
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By Joseph Hunkins at June 06, 2008 4 Comments
In an interview with one of the nation’s most prestigious offline news entities - the Washington Post - Steve Ballmer of Microsoft asserted this as a key aspect of Microsoft’s vision:
…. there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form. He also confirmed that Yahoo Microsoft negotiations have resumed, and Ballmer also pleaded quite a bit of ignorance about what the competition is doing:I have no More»
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By Joseph Hunkins at June 06, 2008 0 Comments
Mega shopping site Amazon.com was down today for about 1.5 hours and the site still appears to be reeling under pressure which now will include a lot of of new visitors checking to see if Amazon is “up yet”.
Amazon reportedly loses over $30,000 per *minute* of downtime, and I’m guessing this does not even include Kindle sales which probably would add at least another $1 to that number.
No word yet from Amazon PR or Amazon’s evangelist Jeff Barr (though AWS is still up!) on what’s going on, but we should know soon.
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By Joseph Hunkins at June 05, 2008 1 Comments
As if Yahoo didn’t have enough problems, they now appear to have *really* pissed off Carl Icahn, who in addition to holding a large stake in the company is clearly set to do whatever it takes to make either a Microsoft Merger or other stock-enhancing options bear more fruit.
Today’s letter from Icahn to the Yahoo board is here at the SEC but I’ve summarized it below. Icahn is clearly not pulling any punches claiming that the board is acting outside of shareholder interests. In addition to calling them a “doomsday machine” he also suggests the following, based in part More»
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By Joseph Hunkins at June 05, 2008 3 Comments
As my son and I were configuring a new laptop we were given the choice of a Microsoft Office Suite, or free Microsoft Works, or *nothing*. My son quickly chose the nothing, saying he likes Open Office better than MS Office, let alone Works. I was sympathetic to the idea that there’s really no longer much if any need to buy expensive - or even cheap - offline software.
I rarely even use offline software these days since so much of the work is done online using a Content Management System tool like WordPress, online More»
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By Joseph Hunkins at June 04, 2008 2 Comments
Several new startups are trying to take advantage of using the internet to very cost effectively solicit and collect survey data. Vizu and Crowdscience are two of these new companies.
I’ve done a lot of surveys as part of travel research projects, and although online tools are cheap and efficient at collecting data they generally suffer from two flaws. The first is that you are measuring online people only. This is not as much of a problem as it was before because as millions pour online every month, More»
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By Joseph Hunkins at June 03, 2008 1 Comments
Time Warner Cable is experimenting with metering internet use, saying that 5% of the customers are using half the total bandwidth. The plan is to charge the heavy users an extra $1 per gigabyte.
Although this plan could have some short term benefit to Time Warner’s low bandwidth customers I think it’s doomed to fail for several reasons. First, it simply flys in the face of the unlimited use we’ve all come to enjoy. Second, it really looks more like another way for Cable company to nickel and dime an extra few More»
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By Joseph Hunkins at May 31, 2008 0 Comments
Writing over at the National Journal, Shane Harris is suggesting that Chinese hackers, perhaps acting in conjunction with China’s government, may be wreaking havoc in the USA, even leading to the major Florida blackout in August of 2003:
Computer hackers in China, including those working on behalf of theChinese government and military, have penetrated deeply into the informationsystems of U.S. companies and government agencies, stolen proprietaryinformation from American executives in advance of their business meetingsin China, and, in a few cases, gained access to electric power plants in theUnited States, possibly triggering More»
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By Joseph Hunkins at May 30, 2008 0 Comments
Although at first glance one might suggest that three Person Pong on iPhone is a silly waste of time, I would argue that this little clip gives us insight into three key areas of the evolution of technology: Gaming, Mobile and Social. All will become lucrative and powerful markets of the future, and in combination these may become the world’s biggest market.
Gaming is already poised to overtake film as the world’s top entertainment market, and the Asian example shows us that gaming will likely come to equal or exceed More»
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