Web Technology & Entrepreneurship

Lots of people seem to be complaining, but Umair at BubbleGeneration points out no one’s really suggesting any improvements. There are plenty of sexy technologies we could try to throw into enterprise, but it would be a bit like adding a bikini to a business suit. But there are improvements that could be made to enterprise software that will help it do what it’s supposed to do–not be sexy, as Michael Krigsman points out, but to enable core business processes: gaining higher efficiency and reducing costs. In other words, making more money.

#1 – Optical Character Recognition

It’s almost … [Read the rest »]

LinkedIn is smarter than a lot of people are currently giving them credit for. Compared to Ryze and some other business-focused social networks, they’ve put together a really well-developed site. I can’t blame them for being caught off guard by Facebook suddenly going from a college student network to the next hot business trend with platform potential.

For business networkers, the fate of LinkedIn vs. Facebook will depend on a few things:

1. Facebook’s giving users the ability to display their profiles to people in different contexts. Professional contacts see one set of information, personal contacts see another.
2. Facebook making an

We are facing a communications medium extinction on a scale never before seen… or so I hear. Every day in my feeds I see someone saying that something is ‘dying’. Whether it’s newspapers, blogging, e-mail, or even telephones as we know them, if you believe the hype then you better start building time capsules to show your children what you had to work with before holonews, lifelogs, and thought-sends came around. But to paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of their death have been greatly exagerrated. Read on to find out what ‘death’ really means, what life after death looks like, … [Read the rest »]

~Updated below, 8/15/07~

Advertising won’t pay the bills for every web service forever. And there are many concerns that because customers are so used to everything being free, they’ll balk at subscription models. I think I’ve come up with what I think is a new business model for web services, in which users essentially earn paid account status.

On the same principle as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (possibly even integrating that service into yours), customers complete basic human insight tasks (“Is this a picture of a cat, or a picture of a dog?”) that assist you, your partners, or Mechanical Turk … [Read the rest »]

The Opera browser may be out-competing both Firefox and Internet Explorer. It’s true that in June they had only 1.8% of the desktop browser market. But when I read Opera’s API for the Wii Remote, I had a moment where I had to simply sit and stare, wondering if Opera’s developers are laughing at Microsoft fighting Mozilla over the same old territory while Opera is conquering the New World.

The Nintendo Wii has sold over 9.27 million units, which have access to the Wii “Internet Channel”, exclusively powered by the Opera browser as a free download from from April … [Read the rest »]

I found a quote particularly telling in the New York Times’ article on Bill Gates transitioning out of Microsoft. Ray Ozzie, chief software architect of Microsoft, was discussing the dangers of Mr. Gates making strategic decisions after not staying informed. He says:

“It can’t be a situation where he’s expected to suddenly, magically come up to speed,” said Mr. Ozzie, […] “You know, did you see the 20 announcements last week that Google did, Yahoo did, Cisco did?“[emphasis mine]

Why would Microsoft, a software, web, and now (sigh) advertising company consider Cisco, a maker of network hardware appliances, a … [Read the rest »]

Mike Arrington says Cisco may have acquired Click.tv, a “video annotation and deep tagging service”. I hope that rumor is true, because some exciting ideas crossed my mind that I think Cisco could implement if it took Click.tv’s technology and applied it to WebEx vido conferencing.

When GMail was first announced, one of the most revolutionary ideas it brought to the mainstream was the idea of never having to delete an e-mail again. That, combined with GMail’s -tagging- ‘label’ing features and fantastic search capabilities, has made it possible for the average user to store every e-mail they’ve ever received, … [Read the rest »]

Nokia is a company that’s pinged my mobile web radar several times in the past week, earning it a place on my watch list. They’re popping up in three key areas: hardware, software, and community.

Mobile Web Hardware

If I lived in the Valley, I might have to fear for my life for posting this, but it’s possible that the iPhone is not the best “internet communications device”/phone in existence. The Nokia E70 is being touted as an under-publicized rival to the iPhone. It’s certainly an impressive device, and addresses some of the key complaints about the iPhone such as … [Read the rest »]

The future is here, and it’s boring as hell. Web sites used to be pages of text, linked to other pages of text. Then they added images, and that was cool. Before you knew it, we had web sites that weren’t ’static’ but ‘dynamic’. Changing, exciting, multimedia. Then the multimedia split into audio and video that were content pieces in their own right, ‘new media’ if you will, like a podcast. But if you cut through the hype, a podcast is no more dynamic than those first web pages full of text. Even worse, really, because they’re not linked to … [Read the rest »]

I’ve long been a fan of AOL Instant Messenger over it’s Yahoo!, Microsoft, and more recently, Google, counterparts. Most non-techie users have a preference for an IM network based on one factor only: it’s what most of their friends use. The feature sets of most IM products are comparable, and though the user interfaces have different advantages and disadvantages, none are so bad as to make users reject them en masse. Even a lack of feature’s can be overcome through third-party plug-ins. I use “middle_man”:http://www.mymiddleman.com/ for AIM, and before that, DeadAIM. But as broadband internet has become more widely available, … [Read the rest »]