Aug 27th, 2009 - You have to give Sony credit, they are really trying new strategies to wrestle eBook marketshare from the Amazon Kindle. This month they announced several new editions of the Sony Reader, including the brand new Reader Daily Edition, which should be in stores in time for the holiday shopping... (Read More)

Aug 21st, 2009 - In a move that could only be characterized as surprising, Sony announced last week that it was going to be using the open ePub eBook standard, which in theory should enable Sony Reader users to access and use any books created around the standard. Sony Readers will also be able to read Adobe PDFs... (Read More)

Aug 25th, 2009 - In a wide-ranging interview with the German Magazine Der Spiegel recently, the Head of Google Europe, Philipp Schindler, defended his company against the latest round of attacks from publishers who claim that Google is siphoning profits without creating content. Truth be told, this argument is... (Read More)

Aug 14th, 2009 - I'm special, so special. I got to have some of your attention, give it to me! ~Pretenders, Brass in Pocket Ah the games companies play trying so hard to get our attention. For the last 6 weeks or so Microsoft has done a fine job of turning the media attention machine on itself, so you just... (Read More)

Jul 21st, 2009 - Today Yahoo! is releasing a new version of its search tool with many changes. This is significant for a number of reasons: Yahoo! has been in the news lately mostly as Microsoft's take-over target. The make-over provides the company with a news opportunity that's actually about an upgrade to... (Read More)

Jul 17th, 2009 - It's not always easy, And sometimes life can be deceiving, I'll tell you one thing, its always better when we're together ~Jack Johnson, Better Together News leaked out this morning on the All Things Digital Blog (and subsequently widely carried by the New York Times, PC Mag Online, Wired and... (Read More)

Jul 15th, 2009 - When Microsoft first announced their retail strategy back in February I wrote a post called Microsoft Retail Strategy Doomed to Fail and I haven't changed my view. Today, it became clear that in the face of all common sense they are continuing to push forward with this wrong-headed idea. ... (Read More)

Jul 9th, 2009 - At the end of May, Computerworld reported that Asus, one of the early Netbook success stories had all but given up on Linux Netbooks. This was telling because the Asus Eee (of which I own one) has a very nice, simple-to-navigate interface. It starts up fairly quickly and has long battery life, but... (Read More)

Jul 8th, 2009 - I've speculated in the past that nothing could keep Google from moving Android from a phone to a computer. After all a phone is just a hand-held computer, so it should come as no surprise that Google officially announced yesterday that it was getting in the computer operating system business with a... (Read More)

Jun 18th, 2009 - One of the big rules of online advertising as I understand it is that you count success to a great extent based on how many people click through to your site. It's really the basis of how people get paid by Google for Google AdSense. If you get click-throughs you get paid and advertisers pay Google... (Read More)

Jun 15th, 2009 - I've seen a lot of love for Microsoft's newly branded search engine, Bing lately and frankly I just don't get it. Bing landed a couple of weeks ago with a huge ad budget (as I wrote in Microsoft Ad Wars Turn to Google) and a big splash, but I've used it and I don't see anything new here, but a... (Read More)

Jun 1st, 2009 - Lots of talk about Google Wave last week, but after reading five articles that all described it in a similar fashion, I still didn't quite get what all the fuss was about. Finally, at the behest of one of my online friends I looked at the first 40 minutes of the 1 hour and 20 minute presentation... (Read More)

May 29th, 2009 - It's never a dull moment when it comes to Google, Microsoft and Apple (which is why I write about them so much), and this week Google and Microsoft made some big announcements. For Google, it was Google Wave, an incredibly hyped new communications interface (more on that it in a moment). From... (Read More)

May 25th, 2009 - Ad Age reports that Microsoft is ready to spend $80M to try and turn people's attention away from Google, the dominant search market leader, and toward Bing, Microsoft's latest search engine offering. Much like Microsoft's attempts last summer to prop up Vista, trying to turn consumers to a new... (Read More)

Aug 24th, 2009 - For years now, Apple has been on a heck of a ride creating pleasing products with a loyal customer base, but suddenly this month the tide seems to have turned, at least in the press. As my DaniWeb colleague, Davey Winder pointed out last week, the press jumped on numbers earlier this month that... (Read More)

Aug 19th, 2009 - Today Dynamite Records, a fixture in Northampton, MA for more than 27 years shut its doors. Probably doesn't matter to most of my readers, but consider this news against the backdrop of figures released this week by the NPD Group indicating that iTunes controls 25 percent of all US music sales in... (Read More)

Jul 24th, 2009 - Word came out yesterday that AT&T didn't have a great quarter (which ironically sent the stock price soaring because it wasn't as bad as expected). This loss seemed perplexing to me given that Apple reported its numbers earlier this week (as I wrote in Lauren's Wrong: People Definitely Want Macs),... (Read More)

Jul 22nd, 2009 - Apple released its third quarter numbers yesterday and by any benchmark they were impressive. Consider these numbers as reported by Macworld: * $8.34 billion in sales and a net profit of $1.23 billion * 5.2 million iPhones * 10. 2 million iPods * 2.6 million Macs (of which1.75 million were... (Read More)

Jul 16th, 2009 - It was revealed yesterday that Apple began blocking Palm Pre users from syncing with iTunes. Apparently the latest upgrade, which I installed just this morning won't allow Pre users to sync with their phones. Seriously, Apple? Are you really going to be this petty? Do you really feel this... (Read More)

Jun 26th, 2009 - On June 15th, less than two weeks ago, the Apple Insider blog reported that Apple sales continued slipping in May. Mac sales were down, perhaps not as much as expected but still down, and more surprising, the previously recession-proof iPod sales were falling. Could it be that the economy was... (Read More)

Jun 11th, 2009 - Apple kicked off its annual World Wide Developer's Conference on Monday, and it proved something very important; it could generate plenty of excitement without Steve Jobs on stage. I know that I along with many others watch with anticipation as live bloggers on the scene gave us the blow by... (Read More)

Jun 8th, 2009 - As usual Apple put on quite a show at the WWDC 09 Keynote on Monday, but what struck me was the undercurrent of derision for its exclusive carrier AT&T. Tucked in among the big announcements of faster, cheaper Mac Books, $29 Snow Leopard upgrades, the long rumored $99 iPhone and of course the all... (Read More)

Jun 2nd, 2009 - The iPhone faces a critical test this month with several factors coming together to threaten the dominance of the popular smart phone. First of all there's the Pre, a shiny new comer that threatens to overtake Apple's cool factor when it's released by Sprint this month (as I wrote about in Are You... (Read More)

May 19th, 2009 - According to multiple sources, the Palm Pre is set to launch on June 6th, which happens to be the 65th anniversary of D-Day invasion. I guess we can call this the Pre-Day invasion. Instead of storming the beaches of Normandy to take on Nazi Germany, Palm will be taking on the mighty, mighty Apple... (Read More)

May 14th, 2009 - In February, 2008 I wrote a blog post called Is Apple Working on an eBook Reader: Does It Matter? Today, I would answer my own question with "Hell yes it maters." If Apple enters the eBook market, you know it would be expensive, but it would be a desirable device, and come on, you know you would... (Read More)

Aug 17th, 2009 - The whispers have been getting louder lately that Apple will be be announcing the long-rumored Tablet next month at its September keynote. We have all learned that these rumors are often wrong and Apple moves at its own pace, but the idea of an Apple Tablet with a 10 inch... (Read More)

Aug 13th, 2009 - You have to give Steve Ballmer and Microsoft credit. After years of sitting on the sidelines playing defense and catch-up, this year they have definitely been on offense. Whether it's the ad wars, releasing Bing, the deal with Yahoo!, the retail strategy or its latest move, a deal with Nokia , the... (Read More)

Aug 1st, 2009 - Yesterday was the major league baseball trade deadline and lots of teams made big deals and took huge gambles for short-term gain, while possibly risking the future in the form of younger, cheaper, but unproven talent. Microsoft and Yahoo! also made a trade of sorts when they signed an historic... (Read More)

Jun 21st, 2009 - Speaking about consumer search last week, Steve Ballmer said he now regrets that Microsoft quote "didn't start earlier" unquote. But it seems to me that Microsoft has been all in for a long time and they just haven't been very successful at consumer search. It wasn't so much they gave in, as... (Read More)

Jul 19th, 2009 - Last week Amazon did something despicable. They violated the privacy of every Kindle user when without warning they remotely deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from Kindle Readers. It seems that Amazon had determined these books had been purchased "illegally." (The irony of... (Read More)

Jul 13th, 2009 - I read a blog post this morning on the Mini-Microsoft blog called Microsoft Has Turned the Corner and it got me wondering if they really have, or if it was merely wishful thinking on the part of the author. Then I saw that Microsoft had released Office 2010 videos and there was a lot of typical... (Read More)

Jun 28th, 2009 - How come I can't let go? I'm between two worlds ~Tom Petty, Between Two Worlds As I watched vendors navigate the changing software world last week at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston, it struck me that the old companies are trying desperately to hold onto to the markets they have dominated for so... (Read More)

Jun 12th, 2009 - Sherri McLeish from Forrester reports that 80 percent of enterprise customers still use Microsoft Office. While this is down significantly from the 95 percent reported in this 2006 BusinessWeek article, it still makes me wonder why so many companies would continue to use Microsoft Office given the... (Read More)

Jun 7th, 2009 - Ah, Microsoft, that crazy company from Redmond, WA is at again. This time they want to rename the Netbook unilaterally to the...drum roll please..."low cost small notebook PC." As first reported in the Digitimes last week, Microsoft decided on their own that the name was not appropriate and... (Read More)

Jul 7th, 2009 - My colleague Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols waxed nostalgically on Monday in his Computerworld Cyber Cynic blog about CompuServe, the long-time service that shut down recently, and which Vaughan-Nichols says he's going to miss. As much as I like SJVN, I have to say good riddance to old technology. It... (Read More)

Jul 6th, 2009 - Over the last year, Microsoft ads have been simply bad on one end of the spectrum and horrible on the other. It's really time for the company to reconsider their ad agency choices and their overall strategy because right now they are throwing good money after bad. I had one friend who described the... (Read More)

Jun 29th, 2009 - In the final days of a failing model, old media made one last futile attempt to save its fading way of life by trying to expand copyright law to exclude fair use and linking. Just this morning, my DaniWeb colleague, Sharon Fisher wrote a post called This Blog Post Could Be Illegal. Seems... (Read More)

May 28th, 2009 - I've been to a couple of conferences recently where I was surprised to see representatives of the U.S. military on panels discussing various uses of technology, but I was shocked to learn that the military was on the cutting edge of the technologies being discussed. To be honest, my perception of... (Read More)

May 21st, 2009 - I attended two seemingly unrelated events things this week: I saw the new Star Trek movie and I attended the MIT CIO Conference in Cambridge. At the conference, Tom Malone, who is the Director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence (think about how much they must have just on that campus)... (Read More)

May 15th, 2009 - I've never been a big fan of American Idol or reality TV in general, but the tit for tat going on between Microsoft and Apple ads reminds me a bit of a reality TV competition with bloggers acting as Simon and Paula and the gang. We watch. Sometimes we laugh. Sometimes we sneer, but it's all in good... (Read More)