Archive for May, 2009

When Google launched its O3D browser plug-in for displaying rich 3D graphics last month, I was dubious that the virtual world industry would eagerly embrace it as a platform for future MMOs. Most of the larger casual virtual worlds, like Habbo and Gaia Online, run… Read More »

Wireless networking gets all the love in today’s mobile world, but inside the home, wires will still play a key role in delivering entertainment and other content. Your set-top box may sport an Ethernet port, but it still connects to the wall via coaxial cable. Wires… Read More »

The buzz around the much-awaited Palm Pre has started. The make-or-break device that will define the destiny of the iconic handheld maker will hit the market later this week. Here is my super-quick hand-on review. Read More »

It is fashionable for media companies to paint themselves as victims of an increasingly Google-dominated planet. Desperate publishers are happy to collude or play ball with anyone who offers them a straw. Instead, they should be looking at various opportunities offered by technology to find a… Read More »

On June 1, you can attend Mobile Monday Silicon Valley and meet some of the innovative startups, especially many involved with location-based services. Among the startups making presentations, you will find Skout, a mobile location-based social dating service, GV World Surfer, which allows you to point your phone at places to get information, and BooRah, which offers Android-based restaurant searches. The event, which is being held at the Garden Court Hotel in Palo Alto, Calif., kicks off at 6:30 p.m. There will be some food and drinks for attendees. The event is free. Register here.

One of Apple’s great successes this decade has been its ability to unite the cell phone, the portable MP3 player and the music store in one ingenious handheld device, the iPhone. As new applications arise that allow on-demand streaming music on non-Apple phones such as those… Read More »

There exists, as I have previously noted, sufficient motivation for more advanced resource controls in IT infrastructure components. But while there are encouraging indications that component manufacturers are responding to this need, we have some distance yet to travel. Horizontal aggregation As we consider infrastructure components, we… Read More »

The Solid-State Future

Every so often a new technology emerges that changes everything. In the world of storage, the last major media shift was the move to hard disk drives (HDDs) from tape. While tape is still around today as a target for backups and archiving (it’s cheap,… Read More »

The Leading Class and the Lagging Class on the Web

In the same way that there is an economic gap between rich and poor, there has emerged in the Internet sector a creativity gap. Instead of an upper class and a lower class, however, the creativity gap consists of a leading class and a lagging class.… Read More »

Cloud Computing: Building Blocks for the Enterprise

When we consider cloud services — and the apparent lack of significant quality of service (QoS) control in them — we must also consider the relationship between QoS and capacity. Specifically, with sufficient capacity, do we even care about QoS controls? Is it a question of resources? For… Read More »

Email This
  or cancel