Stories on the tech industry, content marketing and online sales enablement
Tuesday a big story broke that could have impacted millions of web users. A researcher discovered a major security flaw involving the Domain Name System (DNS), and instead of selling the information or using it to market himself he went to major internet vendors and discussed the vulnerability with them. Today Microsoft, Cisco, Sun and…
Last week stories broke about a significant change in the way Internet addressing will be managed. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has opened up the process of assigning new top level domains (TLD’s), such as .com and .net. Potentially any string of letters could be a TLD — maybe we’ll see…
Last night I attended a big social media gathering at MCCXXIII (1223 for those not into roman numerals) on Connecticut Avenue. It was pulled together quickly by Robert Scoble, noted tech blogger and roving fastcompanyTV producer. He hooked up with Andrew Feinberg of Capitalvalley.net to preach the gospel of new media to Capitol Hill. Gary…
An interesting survey came out of the telecom industry’s NXTComm show last week in Las Vegas. It’s been getting a lot of play in trade publications. Attendees to the show were asked a number of questions, including whether they thought the Internet could ever “break” due to increasing traffic levels. The study was conducted by…
It’s been a few days since Microsoft reportedly walked away for good from discussions with Yahoo, and the vitriol being hurled at Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang is really something to behold. There certainly are facts to back it up, but the uniformity of the conventional wisdom and the level of anger puzzles me. Some of…
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…
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…
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…
