For the early adopter crowd: Microsoft has released browser-based trial versions of Office 2007 (including Word, Powerpoint, Access, Excel, etc). Unfortunately, the demos won’t allow you to save documents to a local hard drive, but they’re still interesting if you’re looking to see what functional and GUI changes/improvements are in store (Jensen Harris, […]

Enterprise software, Business Models | 1 Comment »

I’m a fan of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory–recent controversey notwithstanding. Still, I was surprised by the following chart from Wikipedia’s statistics page:

The chart shows that 416,139 “wikipedians” have made 29,580,205 edits to various articles (there are currently 1,306,883 articles in total). That’s a lot of edits, but what’s more interesting […]

Business Models | 3 Comments »

The recent news that AOL released a log file containing more than 20 million search requests from more than 650,000 subscribers is frightening for many obvious reasons (see here for examples of inane and sometimes downright creepy queries). I’m not sure if AOL violated any legal agreements with their user community (see the […]

Security, Policy | 7 Comments »

Numbers of the day: 9 years ago, there were 2 million pay phones throughout the US.
Today, mainly thanks to cell phones (though neglect is also a factor), there are only about 1 million working pay phones (source: Newsweek).
What’s the next industry ready to be disrupted? It’s already well underway in TV, real estate, […]

Web 2.0, Startup Ideas | 2 Comments »

What should you do if your company’s product fails?
Dreamhost, a web hosting provider, had a miserable July due to multiple service failures. For a hosting company, this is about as serious an issue as there is. That said, the company’s explanation, posted on their corporate blog, is superb: they clearly […]

Blogging, Policy | 6 Comments »