Profile of David Berlind
Chief Content Officer, UBM TechWeb
News & Commentary Posts: 186
Articles by David Berlind
3/26/2013
Acronis file management tool now works with MobileIron AppConnect to lock down and improve access to corporate files for remote workers.
3/20/2013
Will IT need to limit which devices can connect to the corporate network? It feels like we're heading for separate Internets, aligned with mobile OSes and their respective clouds.
3/7/2013
Big data, enterprise mobility and software-defined networking lead the themes for conference sessions and exhibits at Interop Las Vegas 2013.
10/9/2012
Yobie Benjamin, global CTO for a large financial institution, recently joined David Berlind and Fritz Nelson on the set of InformationWeek's Valley View to discuss his top priorities.
2/28/2012
At Mobile World Congress, Cisco talks up a vision of its gear at the heart of an Internet where wireless devices seamlessly roam anywhere, automatically adjusting to new networks.
2/27/2012
Nokia is first to seize the Mobile World Congress 2012 stage, bringing a slew of new phones including one that begs the question whether it's more camera than phone.
2/27/2012
On the third episode of Valley View, hosts David Berlind and Fritz Nelson interview San Francisco Symphony CIO Michael Skaff about how he's keeping one of the City's leading non-profit organizations on the bleeding edge.
2/27/2012
Business Intelligence startup Metamarkets aims to take "BI in the cloud" one step further.
2/26/2012
Startup's cloud-based business intelligence solution takes on
entrenched on-premises BI providers.
2/26/2012
Google social and mobile global marketing director Rikard Steiber comes to the set of InformationWeek's Valley View to explain why businesses should use Google Plus to engage their customers.
2/26/2012
Fritz Nelson rounds up a month's worth of headlines and YouTube video worthy of ridicule.
2/14/2012
Telephone companies have the assets and track record in delivering secure and reliable services to grab a piece of the enterprise cloud services market popularized by Amazon and Rackspace.
1/12/2012
Velcomp CEO John Hamann is at CES 2012 with an important message; Why pay big dollars for a cycling computer when your iPhone can do everything a cycling computer can do and more (like turn your performance data into riding advice).
1/12/2012
Steelcase is at CES 2012 demonstrating an office collaboration solution called media:scape. Media:scape allows information workers to easily tie their HDMI-capable PCs, tablets, and other devices to a single HD screen and switch between them for screen sharing. But it's expensive.
1/12/2012
Fun is always a major theme at CES 2012. For owners of iOS-based devices who want to declare war on their co-workers, Dream Cheeky's iOS-based, remote (Bluetooth) controlled missile launcher could be a good weapon of choice.
1/11/2012
At CES 2012, CSI GlobalVCard's Erica Santiago gives a demonstration of how customers of the company can easily generate limited-use virtual credit cards that show up as an image on a smartphone or mobile device.
1/11/2012
InformationWeek catches up with DarbeeVision to get a look at "the Darblet." With one HDMI input and one HDMI output, the Darblet is an amazingly simple piece of hardware that significantly enhances the quality of the HD video being passed through it.
1/11/2012
ContentWatch -- the folks known for Net Nanny -- and MokiMobility announced at CES 2012 that they will be partnering to deliver a mobile device management solution that draws on the strengths of both companies in the areas of content filtering and remote administration.
1/10/2012
Sometimes, the best gadgets don't involve a lot of high tech or silicon chips. Such is the case with Keyport's Slide which is a completely fresh approach to an old problem -- how best to keep your keys.
1/9/2012
Using a small dongle that plugs into an iPhone's 30-pin connector, Dexim uses the iPhone's accelerometer to remotely control toy cars and trucks. At CES 2012, Dexim was showing other gadgets off as well.
1/9/2012
Optoma Technologies --- known for its small projectors --- was at CES 2012 showing off three of its hightly portable offerings. One is a battery-operated 100 lumens LED projector that's small enough to fit in your pocket.
1/9/2012
Belkin is at CES 2012 showing off a prototype for a Thunderbolt docking station. On the input side, the docking station has connections for USB, HDMI, Ethernet, audio, Thunderbolt, and USB. On the output side? Just one Thunderbolt port for a Macbook.
1/9/2012
VMware was at CES 2012 showing how its virtual machine platform for Android makes it possible for smartphone users to keep there personal and work lives separate without having to own two phones.
1/9/2012
By connecting a radio transmitter directly to a residential router, Liftmaster makes it possible to remote control garage doors and houselights from smartphones and tablets. Garage door openers? Yes. There's an app for that.
1/9/2012
At CES 2012, Boost Case announced an $80 modular iPhone 4/4s case that the company says will double the average iPhone's battery life.
1/9/2012
Boost Case is at CES in Las Vegas demonstrating its newest design for a modular battery extension case for the iPhone 4 and 4s. Boost says that with the case (which includes a 1900 mA battery), most users will get twice the daily battery life that they're used to getting.
1/6/2012
Here's a sneak peek at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show's array of gadgets, from dream cameras to clever iPhone cases--and even a cycling computer that promises you a beach-ready body.
10/17/2011
At Web 2.0 Summit 2011, Intel Data Center Group vice president and general manager Kirk Skaugen explained Intel's vision of adding a billion more people to the Internet -- many of them through embedded devices -- by the year 2015. Skaugen claims the current number of Internet users to be approximately 1.5 billion people.
10/17/2011
At Web 2 Summit 2011 in San Francisco, "former" Napster co-founder Sean Parker took the stage to be interviewed by Federated Media Publishing chairman John Battelle.
8/4/2011
TechWebTV catches up with Whisper Systems' CTO and co-founder Moxie Marllinspike to discuss and demo WhisperCore -- a mobile security solution that brings BlackBerry-like centralized enterprise-grade security to Android devices.
7/29/2011
If and when Amazon releases an iPad-killer of a tablet, it won't be its industrial design or user interface that might tip the industry on its ear. If such a tablet is released, it's reliance on Amazon's Whispernet and the business model behind it could be a tipping point.
7/27/2011
Now that the public radio show This American Life has tarred, feathered, and skewered software patents, it's time for you to chime in on the whether the patents could be stifling innovation.
3/23/2011
Between the dwindling opportunities for hardware differentiation in the smartphone and tablet markets, and the Windows-like commoditizing effect that Android is having across mobile device makers, Motorola Mobility (like its competitors) have few options but to build their own user experiences.
3/17/2011
TechWebTV catches up with Okta at Cloud Connect 2011 to find out how the company is using its Active Directory-compliant single sign-on service to help enterprises easily give employees access to cloud services.
3/10/2011
CA Technologies was one of the many systems providers on hand at Cloud Connect in Silicon Valley that were showing off point-and-click cloud provisioning and management tools.
2/9/2011
If you think it's too risky to do business with startups, think again. Some of the biggest brands in the world are placing their IT bets with startups and the Under the Radar conference is where they get to find and vet them.
11/4/2010
Although many social enterprise solution providers are betting their R&D fortunes on Twitter and Facebook-like activity streams, will lack of standards hasten adoption?
10/22/2010
Prior to the existence of Google's Street View, solving this "killer" problem in the matter of minutes that it was solved would not have been possible. Thank you Google.
10/14/2010
There once was a day when Interop was wall-to-wall hardware. But times-are-a-changing as that hardware gives way to software and that software can be delivered as a pre-configured virtual machine-based appliance.
10/13/2010
FoIP (Fax over IP) is the kissing cousin to VoIP and Sagemcom will be at Interop NYC showing off its FoIP-based network fax solution running on Cisco's AXP platform.
10/11/2010
Although it's relatively uncertified, a new type of RDIMM from Netlist targets memory bottlenecks, particularly in virtual machine-based consolidation exercises where a server's processors can support more VMs than its memory can.
9/24/2010
To promote an All-You-Can-Fly-In-30-Days-For-$499 program, JetBlue attempted to disintermediate the traditional media and its own email marketing capability by relying solely on social media. But did it work?
5/20/2010
Mortal enemies one day. Bedfellows the next. That's how it felt at the Google I/O 2010 conference when, in the course of two days, Google drove two stakes (HTML5 and VP8) through the heart of Adobe's Flash, and then announced unflagging support for Adobe, particularly in its battle against Apple.
5/19/2010
If HTML5 is the Web application platform of the future (as Google and Apple would very much like it to be), then Jolicloud founder Tariq Krim's vision that netbooks should essentially boot straight to the Web (as though the Web was their operating system) could signal a trend for where the operating systems of PCs and smartphones are heading.
5/12/2010
While it may look and feel like Microsoft Access, Caspio.com is most definitely not Microsoft Access. But it does many of the things that Microsoft Access promises to do for its users, only from the cloud. While at the Cloud Connect conference, TechWeb.com Editor-in-Chief David Berlind captured a demo of Caspio on video from the company's CEO Frank Zamani.
5/11/2010
Can you really develop mobile applications for iPhones, iPads, Android-based devices and BlackBerries with nothing more than Web-browser? Yapper thinks so and gave TechWeb.com editor-in-chief David Berlind a demo of how it works at Web 2.0 Expo 2010 in San Francisco.
4/15/2010
By the end of this year, both companies will find themselves on the same fundamental office computing architecture: a hybrid approach that supports both desktop- and browser-based office computing.
4/15/2010
Improved collaboration features and better integration with Microsoft Word are hallmarks of Google's revised Documents app. Our video shows details.
4/14/2010
Video shows how more muscle for scrolling and moving or freezing rows and columns highlight Google's updated Spreadsheets app.
4/12/2010
We weigh reality against rhetoric as Microsoft looks to dissuade customers from experimenting with, let alone adopting, Google Apps.
4/8/2010
Technology vendors have focused on collaboration as the next productivity revolution. Have they been going about it all wrong?
2/4/2010
Google has removed what for many CIOs and IT professionals has been one of the last remaining hurdles to their adoption of Google Apps for business documents, spreadsheets, presentations and probably most importantly: email. Yesterday, the biggest of the cloud-based challengers to Microsoft and IBM-Lotus announced it now has a range of Blackberry-esque mobile device management features (including the ability to remotely wipe a smartphone) for iPhones as well as Windows Mobile and Nokia-based dev
1/27/2010
On the eve of one of Apple's most yet anticipated product launches in history, McGraw-Hill CEO Terry McGraw pre-empted Apple CEO Steve Jobs when he let slip confirmation on CNBC (video below) that Apple is indeed launching a tablet later today (Jan 27, 2010). McGraw revealed that it will run on the iPhone OS as well as details of the company's dealings with Apple. Separately, tech gadget site Engadget.com has what appears to be some very convincing photos of the device which it estimates to be 9
1/25/2010
If you're a cloud computing startup, innovator, or just a developer who is tinkering with that pet cloud project in your "garage" and you're looking for some prime time exposure (including free exhibit space at Cloud Connect), then you should be thinking about putting yourself in the running for Launch Pad at Cloud Connect. I, along with fellow InformationWeek editors John Foley and Fritz Nelson, are among the 10 jury members a
1/22/2010
Had the Chinese shot intercontinental ballistic missiles into 33 US-based businesses including those in the finance and defense industries as well as the Mountain View-based headquarters of Google, there would be no question in anyone's mind as to whether war had been declared on the US. Is there any difference now that a Chinese government-backed organization has cyber-attacked 33 US businesses<
1/20/2010
From separate coasts, InformationWeek editorial director Fritz Nelson and I have been trying to launch the video version of the Fritz & David Show for what seems like forever. But technology has conspired against us. We're close, and we'll keep trying. But in the meantime, we've decided to offer the audio version of the weekly program that gives you a peek at how we talk about latest technology news and buzz amongst ourselves here at InformationWeek.
1/11/2010
From time to time, we in the trade press are asked by public relations firms to relay to them our perceptions of some company. In most cases, I've never even heard of the company which leads me to think that my head must be in sand (either that, or these solicitations are simply sly ways for obscure companies to get noticed). On the heels of announcing that AT&T is going to resell a Dell-branded Android sma
1/7/2010
Saying it's "almost as portable as a phone and as powerful as a PC" and that it's ideal for reading, surfing the web and taking entertainment on the go, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer revealed what he called "slate PCs" at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas yesterday. Due later this year, one slate he demonstrated comes from HP and runs Windows 7. Until now, even though "shipping" is a feature (the touch-enabled Win 7 OS is already shipping), Apple has been getting all the credit (even from
1/6/2010
Yesterday, on the way home from my interview of Free Software Foundation founder and president Richard Stallman, I listened closely as Slate's Farhad Manjoo told NPR's Neal Conan the facts about Apple's forthcoming tablet PC: that there are no facts. Well, there's one. Apple's brand has gotten so powerful that everyone including
1/5/2010
After carrying-on for many years an on-again, off-again email-only relationship with Free Software Foundation president and founder Richard Stallman (or "Chief GNU-isance" according to the FSF staff), I finally met him today for a face-to-face interview. While the interview was actually for a larger project we're working on here at InformationWeek, we spent a considerable amount of time talking about the issues he wrestles with every day. One of them is GNU and the highly misguided usage of the
10/7/2009
There's a bit of news coming out of Amazon today. The company is dropping the price of its existing basic Kindle (the smaller form factor one, not the larger $489 Kindle DX) from $299 to $259 and introducing a third Kindle that's the same as the basic one, but that's $279 and can roam internationally. This is a huge boon to both international travelers and people living in countries where the 3G CDMA 1x-EVDO radio technologies found in the original Kindles (basic and DX) don't work. Given the am
10/6/2009
Back in the day, the people at Microsoft who were responsible for bringing the world Office for the Mac (the Macintosh Business Unit) fancied themselves as outcasts on the company's sprawling Redmond Campus; Outcasts with something to prove. When a new version was on the way, they'd parade into my office talking smack as though they just left the Windows version of Office lying on the canvas after a knock-out blow. They'd proceed to demonstrate how the Mac's underpinnings enabled functionality t
10/6/2009
Eolas Technologies has announced a new patent infringement suit, the defendants of which reads like a Who's Who list of big tech and consumer brands. Eolas is the company that filed a patent infringement suit and ultimately prevailed over Microsoft for the latter's inclusion of plug-in capability into Internet Explorer. In today's lawsuit, Eolas says that Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Google, Sun, eBay and man
7/30/2009
With one bombshell already having been dropped at the BlackHat Conference (that most implementations of SSL are configured to give up everything including logins, credit cards, etc.), researchers dropped another one today when they demonstrated how the SMS infrastructures of GSM-flavored operators such as AT&T and T-Mobile are hackable to the point that cell phones can be hacked and their users can be tri
7/30/2009
iSEC Partners partner (and Black Hat researcher) Alex Stamos says there's really no such thing as cloud computing. According to him, it's just a trendy name to take your money. Regardless of what you want to call it though, the vulnerabilities inherent to it are very real. That was Stamos' message in a briefing he gave this morning at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. Among the highlights of my podcast interview with him; Salesforce gets a gold star and Windows-based virtual machines are ar
7/29/2009
Though it's not the bombshell that was dropped by Moxie Marlinspike, another researcher is here at BlackHat briefing attendees on how he cracked the Social Security Administration's code for creating social security numbers and how governments and organizations must respond now that SSNs are not secure in their commonly used contexts as passwords and identifiers (includes podcast interview).
7/29/2009
No edition of the Black Hat conference would be complete without a few security bombshells; The ones where attendees learn that a huge swath of their digital security -- previously thought to be totally secure -- is little more than a house of cards that, thanks to some Black Hat researcher, just came tumbling down. Here in Las Vegas, Moxie Marlinspike is one of those researchers and he's here demonstrating how SSL is that house of cards. Think your implementation of SSL is secure? Think again.
7/29/2009
Today is the first day of the infamous Black Hat Briefings taking place at the Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas and most of what the attendees will hear today is being presented publicly for the first time by the various researchers in the building. Today, for example, is the day that many researchers reveal their discoveries and exploits but in some cases, they hold back on the tools or details needed to replicate their research until the impacted vendors and organizations have an opportunity
7/28/2009
"What I'm about to teach you could land you in jail and destroy your life and family if you choose to use it for nefarious purposes." These words and others like them have been repeated many times in the nearly 50 security classes being given during the training portion of Black Hat, now onto its fourth day in Las Vegas. The "classrooms" here at Caesar's Palace are filled with everyone from self-proclaimed hackers (their badges say so) to digital forensics s
7/22/2009
When it comes to open sourced content management platforms and their creators, there's no question about the celebrity status that WordPress and its young founder Matt Mullenweg have ascended to. If offered an opportunity to interview Mullenweg about some news, I'd undoubtedly jump on it. But when I was offered the chance to do the same with Dries Buytaert, my initial response was "Dries who?" Once I realized "Dries, the creator of Drupal," I didn't hesitate (podcast below).
6/16/2009
As one of the head counselors of Energy Camp (Tom Raftery of Greenmonk fame is the other; blog, Twitter), I pay pretty close attention to anything colored green; green organizations, green initiatives, green events, green vendor programs, green news, etc. It was only after the last Energy Camp at Interop in Las Vegas that it dawned on me why the overall green movement gets o
5/28/2009
Jan Carlzon, former CEO of Scandanavian Airlines (SAS) and author of the bible on customer satisfaction (Moments of Truth) would be rolling his eyes right about now if he could have heard the telephone conversation I just had with a US Air. I've just learned that despite holding a US Air-issued Dividend Miles card (pictured below) in my hand (the one to which I've been applying my last 15+ years of US Air travel), I am a
5/4/2009
It's the week of May 4th and if you're down at RIM's annual user conference in Orlando, you might be wondering what some Google-folk are doing there circulating amongst all those BlackBerry-lovers. Answer: They're giving enterprises yet another reason to swap Google Apps' cloud-based email, calendaring, and contact management for their on-premises installations of Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes. I've been t
4/1/2009
At Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, I had a chance to catch up with Apture CEO and founder Tristan Harris to "shoot" a ReviewCam movie of Apture's innovative cloud-based hyperlinking service that seems to automagically work with any content management system. What's special about Apture is how frictionlessly it adds new levels of context and depth when hyperlinking something (e.g.: text) in ways that the native CMS (egg: WordPress) could never do and it does this (a) by adding only a bit of Javasc
4/1/2009
I've been at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco all day "shooting" ReviewCams of sites and services that claim to fit into the Web 2.0 category. One such demo that I captured on video (see below) is essentially a search site that's designed for especially for people who are researching topics and who would prefer to have their search results organized in a way that's conducive to learning about some subject matter rather than just wading through pages of search results. Kosmix.com may be worth a try
3/27/2009
While working on the post that I just published about whether data that's stored in the cloud is really safe or not (answer: your mileage will vary), I came across a post from Michael Arrington that speculates on whether Google's forthcoming super secret announcement on April 7th is that Google's App Engine
3/27/2009
Earlier this week, over on InformationWeek's sister site that's dedicated to Cloud Computing -- Plug into the Cloud -- George Crump asked a question that I thought I knew the answer to: Is data in the cloud risky? Crump points to a "Post a Comment
3/24/2009
With no change to its business model or pricing (subscription-based support starting at $349 per server), Novell launched version 11 of it Linux distribution known as SUSE Enterprise Linux. For the first time, according to Novell officials, support is now available for running applications that were originally designed for Microsoft's .NET or Silverlight platforms. But, given how IT shops are starting to pinch pennies by moving to the cloud, must Novell change course?
3/20/2009
While at Sun's CommunityOne East Developer Conference where Sun announced a pretty compelling entry into the cloud computing market (called the Sun Cloud, see the details and listen to the podcast), I caught up with Sun Cloud Computing CTO Lew Tucker who sat down with me to demo a GUI-based virtual datacenter deployment tool (all in a Web browser). Perhaps Sun should call it 4D; Drag, Drop, Deploy, and (
3/18/2009
The Web is brewing with analysis of the news that IBM is in talks to buy Sun. Most of it covers the sensibility of IBM buying into Sun's existing businesses and customers. But, should IBM acquire Sun, it will also get a portfolio of cloud offerings that are being announced later today at Sun's CommunityOne East Developer Conference in New York. Given the traction that cloud computing is getting and how IBM isn't viewed as a cloud player (by a long shot), an acquisition of Sun would instantly put
3/17/2009
Although she dodged the question at the end of my podcast interview (below), Arista Networks CEO Jayshree Ullal can't help but think that history is going to repeat itself. Following Cisco's acquisition of Crescendo Networks in the '90s (where she worked), Ullal ended up working for Cisco for 15 years. Notwithstanding its newly announced Intel-based blade servers, Cisco usually prefers to buy than build. If everything Ullal says about Arista's 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches and "the cloud's" appet
3/13/2009
Stealing a page from the playbook it used to launch the Liberty Alliance (and undermine Microsoft's Passport service in the process), Sun Microsystems' newly appointed cloud computing chief governance officer, Michele Dennedy, tells me in this podcast how she now has her sights set on forming a similar industry consortium for governance and privacy in the area of cloud computing. Additionally, Dennedy's appointment is one of many ducks that Sun is getting in a row as it gears up to make some all
3/13/2009
Based out of Reston, Va., ScienceLogic CEO David Link is no Silicon Valley insider. He might as well be, though, because the technology that ScienceLogic has cooked up in the form of it's 7-in-1 EM7 data center management appliance is the sort of solution that usually requires a patchwork of solutions from the management titans normally associated with such functionality: BMC, CA, IBM, and HP.
3/11/2009
If you haven't seen it yet, I encourage you to check out our first ever ReviewCam. Using video, the goal of our ReviewCams is to put you up close and personal with an editor's-eye-view of Web services or software.
3/11/2009
In this, our first ever "ReviewCam", Socialcast CEO founder Tim Young demos his company's namesake service while we're "rolling tape" on the demo. For $1 per user per month Socialcast offers its customers a private service that includes Twitter-style microblogging, Del.icio.us-style social bookmarking, and FriendFeed-style lifestreaming. But for brownie points, Socialcast also integrates with the actual Twitter, Del.icio.us, and other social networks like YouTube, Digg, Facebook, and Google Read
3/6/2009
In this, my second installment of Interop Insider, Cisco e-mail security group product manager Nick Edwards explains the company's newest foray into the cloud -- that of reproducing the e-mail security functionality found in the company's IronPort appliances as a cloud-based service offering. With Interop in Las Vegas just around the corner, I'll be publishing an entire series of Interop Insiders (each with a write-up and podcast interview) to give you an ide
3/5/2009
Last week, I wrote about how the recent Gmail outage actually draws attention to why Gmail is more worthy of enterprises than it has ever been. That opinion stands in contrast to a story my colleague Antone Gonsalves recently published (see "Google Takes Credibility Hit With Gmail Outage"). My response
3/5/2009
John Herren, known by some for inventing TagCloud.com, is a talented developer who has spotted opportunity at the intersection of Twitter and what he calls "Web hooks." In a blog he posted earlier today, he offers some real-world examples of how easy it is to trap Twitter's e-mail notifications for events that can trigger any business process. The same could go for an
2/27/2009
I've decided to start publishing a new series of podcasts that I'm calling Interop Insider. After all, in addition to publishing InformationWeek, TechWeb also is the producer of some great events like Interop. So, given that us InformationWeekers can get an inside track on what's happening with our sister events, why not jump on that track early and develop an audio series that can be heard over time, or piled in its
2/25/2009
When it comes to running custom apps in the cloud, there are basically two architectures. One involves an IaaS (Intel-as-a-Service) provider like Amazon with its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) where you load your own software stack onto Amazon's pay-as-you-go bare metal (virtual as it may be). The other is to develop your code to run on one of the platforms as a service (PaaS). One such PaaS is Salesforce.com's F
2/25/2009
In this, my first "unboxing" video on InformationWeek, you'll see me unpackage an Amazon Kindle 2 straight off the UPS truck. Amazon had planned to ship the first round of Kindle 2's on Feb. 24. But they shipped a day early and I received my review unit yesterday. Here's a video from carton to Kindle 2.
2/25/2009
One reason Apple's Macs have consistently produced a pristine experience -- particularly when multiple Apple technologies are involved -- has to do with the degree to which Apple controls both the hardware and the software. It's also one of the reasons that the Mac is such a great multimedia workhorse. But judging by a great many posts across the Web and our experience here at InformationWeek, Apple has a serious problem with two technologies that should work flawlessly together: the iS
2/25/2009
Barely one month has passed since the folks at Google announced that users of Gmail would be able to access their in-boxes even though the Gmail servers themselves were inaccessible. For example, if (a) you have no Internet connectivity or (b) the Gmail service goes down. It was only a matter of time before a Gmail failure put the newly announced offline mode to the test. Although most of us here in the U.S. didn'
2/23/2009
I've got a bunch of interesting jobs here at TechWeb. Some jobs have titles (currently, I've got three official titles). Others don't. One of my lesser known roles has to do with our video strategy across TechWeb's Web properties and events. I wore a similar hat when I worked for ZDNet and thanks to innovative video cameras like Panasonic's AG-HVX200, we were able to publish nicely produced video without sacrificing too much of the speed of blo
2/19/2009
And not an electric one. Today, thanks to yet another political inquiry, the White House disposed of all its technology (computers, smartphones, etc.). And thanks to some Draconian law dating back to 1908 (the same one preventing Congress members from parking their goats on Capitol Hill), President Obama and his team will have to rule the free world without the collaborative agility currently enjoyed by teenagers and terrorists alike. After all, that is how I read reports of clampdowns on everyt
2/19/2009
Last week, after shooting my video coverage of the launch of Amazon's Kindle 2 in NYC, I sat down with O'Reilly Media founder and CEO Tim O'Reilly, who was producing the Tools of Change For Publishing Conference across town. The book publishing industry is going through a massive, and in some cases very painful, transition. In my podcast interview with
2/18/2009
For tech titans, it's a time-honored ritual in the hi-tech business; Use your market "influence" to drive acceptance of your proprietary technology for as long as possible, until you have no other choice but to lift the proprietary veil (if only just a bit). By then, momentum is driving your success anyway. Such has been the path of Goliaths Microsoft and Apple. But it remains to be seen if Amazon-the-book-Goliath can repeat industry tradition with its strategy for Kindle, or, if a tiny 3-person
2/17/2009
The damage could have been worse. I had my guard down. Although today started like any other day, I hadn't even taken one sip of my tea when I noticed a slight hiccup to the way things normally work when logging into Facebook (see image below). And now, someone out there (I'm not sure who) has the password I used to use for Facebook as well as for a handful of other sites. It's one of my not-to-be-used-for-transactional (financial)-sites passwords. So, nothing serious is at risk and I think I m
2/9/2009
It's about 9:53am and I'm at the Morgan Library off of Madison Avenue in NYC where Amazon executives are preparing to make a big announcement. Since the notices first went out to this invite-only affair, the speculation has been that Amazon is going to to announce version 2.0 of its proprietary electronic book (ebook) reader; the Kindle. The Internet is already riddled with pictures of the new model (video and photos below). Based on what's been written,...
1/29/2009
Six years ago, just before moving into our current home, my wife and I decided that we would constantly have that home filled with music and she entrusted me to the task of making it happen. Yet, it was only over these last holidays that I finished "the design." It took me that long to figure out how to do some complicated things like integrate a single digital audio library across the whole home audio system, all of our computers, and our portable digital audio players. I'm still not completely
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