Author Archive

Stay Out of Our Packets or We’ll Sue

Alistair Croll, Saturday, May 31, 2008 at 3:18 PM PT Comments (8)

Bell Canada may have to pay for violating net neutrality. A May 29 class action filing says Bell should reimburse each subscriber 80 percent of their subscriptions and $2,100 in penalties for throttling traffic to a fraction of advertised speeds and invading their privacy.
Bell had over two million DSL subscribers, and $3.6 billion in data [...]

Canadians Rally for Net Neutrality

Alistair Croll, Wednesday, May 28, 2008 at 3:00 PM PT Comments (10)

As a few hundred scruffy protesters gathered in Ottawa yesterday to support Net Neutrality, busloads of teenagers on school trips to visit Canada’s seat of government walked past them, blissfully unaware that the fight to keep Facebook free was happening right next to them.
[...]

Can World of Warcraft Help Build a Better Workforce?

Alistair Croll, Tuesday, May 27, 2008 at 10:11 AM PT Comments (8)

If you’re good at leading people in online games, you’re good at doing it in the real world. At least that’s the theory posited in two studies, one by IBM last year and another, more recent one from Harvard. Both studies noted similarities between CEO skills and those displayed by in-game leaders. They also found [...]

Why Small Really Is Beautiful

Alistair Croll, Tuesday, May 20, 2008 at 9:00 PM PT Comments (13)

VCs might dismiss small startups as “lifestyle companies,” since with only small investments needed they’re often too small for big VC firms to work with. But for the entrepreneurs themselves, it’s a way to keep control and avoid dilution. And there may be another reason not to take money, particularly if you’re targeting other small-businesses as customers: Personality.

3Tera Unbundles Applogic and Unveils a Virtual Data Center

Alistair Croll, Tuesday, May 20, 2008 at 12:01 AM PT Comments (1)

Virtualization holds lots of promise: Move your physical machines to virtual ones, and you’ll reclaim capacity at the same time that you make operations easier. But applications seldom run on one machine; instead they’re a combination of servers, switches and routers. 3Tera’s recently announced product road map may let companies provision whole data centers atop [...]

Why WetPaint & Other UGC Sites Get Big Money

Alistair Croll, Sunday, May 18, 2008 at 9:01 PM PT Comments (5)

First the money flowed to social sites like Facebook that showed the world how to get users to interact. Then it moved on to “roll your own” platforms like Ning that allowed people to build their own social microsites. But as Web 2.0 startups get increasingly specialized, the money is following, as today’s announcement from [...]

Are Spammers Moving to Social Networks?

Alistair Croll, Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 10:25 AM PT Comments (4)

MySpace this week won a ruling against Samford Wallace and Walter Rines, reinforcing the fact that there’s no love lost between big web sites and spammers. But it’s also a sign of an escalation of the war on spam.
Spammers are finding virgin territory in emerging messaging tools, including SMS and social networks. Ferris Research projects [...]

When Is the Right Time to Launch Your Own Cloud?

Alistair Croll, Thursday, May 8, 2008 at 1:37 PM PT Comments (13)

If you successfully launch a number of web firms, at a certain point the economies of scale of others’ clouds starts fall away and you may as well run your own. But is it always a good idea to build your own cloud when you get big enough to do so?

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