Lately Gabriele and I have been impressed with some wine from Courtney Benham, part of the the Martin Ray family of wines. http://www.martinraywinery.com/about/index.html Recently we’ve had the 2006 Mendocino County Petite Syrah and Pinot Noir. Both are good wines at very good price points — $11.99 and $15.99, respectively. The Petite Syrah was surprisingly light […]
A new survey came out during a Broadband Policy conference here in DC. It was put on by Pike and Fischer, a subsidiary of BNA (http://www.bna.com/about/companies.htm) that looks at broadband from a policy perspective: http://www.broadbandpolicysummit.com/ The survey found that 40% of attendees ranked high speed as the most appealing advanced service, substantially more than services […]
I was interested to read a few days ago that Verizon plans to discontinue its branded social community and move it over to Facebook. Their Facebook page has over 18,000 “fans”: http://www.insidefacebook.com/2008/06/04/verizon-moving-its-branded-social-network-to-a-facebook-page/ Of course it’s very smart of Verizon to particpate in social networks — Strategic Communications Group has its own page, and we regularly […]
Fierce competition is back on the web browser front. After Microsoft crushed the Netscape challenge in the mid to late 90’s, Microsoft Explorer cruised for years as the overwhelming leader in the web browser market. It still is, with approximately 75% market share. But out of the Netscape defeat rose the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit […]
The WSJ reported today that John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods is back online with a vengeance. He was cleared by the SEC of any wrongdoing relating to anonymous postings on Yahoo Finance message boards. Mackey had attracted media attention by posting critical comments about the rival food chain Wild Oats under the screen name […]
Gabriele and I got back recently from a short San Francisco vacation. We spent Saturday 5/3 in Napa county, after being given some really good advice on what wineries to hit. Of course we didn’t get to a fraction of the original target list, but still had an incredible day. Chateau Montelena (www.montelena.com) is justifiably […]
Excellent MediaPost article today by Steve Smith, longtime reporter for Media Industry Newsletter, an Access Intelligence property. Steve writes about a new way NearbyNow, the company that adds new media channels to mall shopping, is using mobile to spur retail sales. The company offered SMS sale information for some time. (Unfortunately at no malls near […]
Lots of good reporting lately on the $13.9B purchase of EDS by HP. Many are saying its the clearest sign yet that cloud computing has fully arrived. Others say the purchase is more about buying market share and becoming the world’s #2 IT outsourcing company, behind IBM. Rob Hof of BusinessWeek has a really good […]
Gabriele and I are just back from a visit to San Francisco. Of course we did a Napa Valley day, and that will soon provide content for a nice long post. We finished a fun day of vineyard visits and tastings with dinner at Greystone restaurant, a fantastic place operated by the Wine Spectator and […]
Saw an interesting news item that broke Monday courtesy of DomainNameNews and SlashDot that hasn’t been broadly covered yet. Apparently VeriSign has been awarded a patent for the resolution of mis-typed domain names. This was at the heart of the controversy back in 2003 around their SiteFinder Service. Amidst a storm of criticism ICANN insisted […]
RCR Wireless broke a story last week about AT&T buying millions of femtocells from British company ip.access LTD. According to research and banking firm ThinkPanmure, AT&T plans to offer the devices for as little as $100. http://www.rcrnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080424/FREE/895619934/1014/rss01 Why is this important? Because femtocells can solve two critical wireless problems — poor indoor cell coverage for […]
(graphic credit New York Times) Interesting article in the Times today about the battle between Research In Motion (RIM) and Apple for dominance of the smartphone market. Smartphones are becoming so capable these days I call them $79 personal computers. As the article notes, until the introduction of the iPhone the market was focused on […]