If you’re going to use the web to perform a survey of your customer base, this report on a similar project from American Express should serve as a cautionary tale.

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Yes, the New York Times is with it. So much so that they can pull off an ironic headline in full belief that they and their equally hip readers will all get the joke when they read this article. Patent Owner Sues the Internet We salute you, Gray Lady! Actually Well, it’s always fun to [...]

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Angie’s List is a web site that allows consumers to see ratings on local service companies, such as plumbers, remodelers, electricians, and so on. All ratings are subscriber driven, and Angie’s List seems to make most of their revenue from the $5.95/month subscriber fee they charge – an anomalous revenue model in today’s web. I [...]

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Visa’s web advertising is sadly misguided – it seemed to be aimed at investment bankers and executives. I’d like to think that the majority of the people actively using the web are from a different category – one I’ll call the Z-axis.

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It seems like this is the summer of multicore panic. I can’t open a technical magazine without some pundit declaring that our current programming paradigms are useless when running on new multicore CPU architectures. Venerable analyst John Dvorak, who generally actually understands what he is writing about, coughed up this mess (with minor excisions for [...]

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I thought Yahoo! Music Unlimited was going to be the next great thing – until I started using the service. Buggy software and brick wall support lines soon showed me that sometimes a bargain is not all it is cracked up to be. Fortunately, a white knight rode up to the rescue: Visa’s disputed charge system.

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Motorola has a new bluetooth headset, and shows themselves to be total boneheads by advising us to use it in the two worst possible ways: while driving and when in confined spaces with other people who don’t particularly want to hear us yakking on our cell phone.

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You know how when you buy something that has “batteries included” and you think, well, isn’t that nice? Take a look at those batteries and you’ll often see some off brand that you’ve never seen before. I learned my lesson about that when the crappy Toshiba batteries included with an expensive Schwinn exercies bike filled their compartment with toxic goo, basically ruining it.

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My modest proposal could make the U.S. the first country to make a sensible adjustment of Intellectual Property laws to deal with realities in the 21st century.

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In this op-ed piece I tout the merits of pending US legislation that seeks to make some medium-sized changes in the way the patent system works.

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