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Recent Posts | All O'Reilly Posts
Jimmy blogs at:
http://radar.oreilly.com
April 30 2008
One year ago, we published an issue of Release 2.0 entitled "When Markets Collide" (download a PDF), in which we considered what Wall Street and Web 2.0 might have to teach one another. Quite a bit, it turned out: the key parallels we uncovered include latency (both have to do… read moreSpongeBob SquarePants Supports O'Reilly Research Finding
April 06 2008
In O'Reilly Radar's recent reseach report, Virtual Worlds: A Business Guide, we contend that virtual worlds will go mainstream. The most powerful data point supporting our argument is that the most active and popular virtual worlds nowadays tend to be those populated by children. The next generation is growing up… read moreMarch 25 2008
I love The New York Times. I've read it almost every day of my life since I was in high school. For all its recent flaws -- the weirdo profiles of the major presidential candidates are the most high-profile --... read moreDan Roam's "The Back of the Napkin"
March 21 2008
I can't draw. Really. I'm a competent interaction designer, but my graphic design skills are those of a plankton. I can't draw on the right side or the left side of my brain. Yet, like everyone else in business and... read morePenguin's Missed Ebook Opportunity
March 19 2008
I've seen several softball pieces (such as this one) praising Penguin's decision to release, on Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader, some classics of English literature, starting with Jane Austen, with certain extras, in multiple ebook formats. Austen's Pride and Prejudice,... read moreJill Bolte Taylor's amazing TED talk
March 16 2008
At least three of this year's TED talks were flat-out amazing: Tod Machover's, Benjamin Zander's, and Jill Bolte Taylor's. The first of them has just been posted: Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard neuroanatomist, eavesdropped on her own stroke. As I... read moreNew O'Reilly Radar Report: a Business Guide to Virtual Worlds
March 06 2008
Virtual worlds, particularly Second Life, have generated much excitement -- and much skepticism. In Virtual Worlds: A Business Guide, the newest O'Reilly Radar report, Ben Lorica, Roger Magoulas, and the O'Reilly Radar team get past the hype (and the anti-hype),... read more@ETech: Tuesday Morning Keynotes
March 06 2008
Saul Griffith started the day with a sober, but ultimately hopeful, talk about energy literacy. The subtitle of the talk was "know what you can do, do what you can," and the core of his talk (we'll point to the... read more@ETech: Wednesday Morning Keynotes
March 05 2008
Another day, another set of expansive keynotes. John McCarthy, father of LISP, a giant in artificial intelligence, gave a sit-down high-level talk about Elephant 2000, a proposed programming language intended for transaction processing and electronic data interchange. He described Elephant... read moreMarch 05 2008
Most of the Yahoo news these days is about its possible absorption by Microsoft, but there are still new projects coming out of the company. Right now Tom Coates is onstage at ETech, launching fire eagle, an open location information-brokering... read moreExploring the Facebook Application Ecosystem: A New O'Reilly Radar Report
March 04 2008
After we published our Facebook Application Platform report, we heard from a lot of people. One of them was Shelly Farnham. And like Victor Kiam, the entrepreneur who liked that razor so much he bought the company, we liked Farnham's... read moreO'Reilly School of Technology + Mathematica: What Do They Add Up To?
March 04 2008
Last month, the O'Reilly School of Technology and Wolfram Research announced that the school was licensing Wolfram's flagship math program Mathematica to create a web-based version of the system. Right after the announcement, we ran an interview with Scott Gray,... read moreEverything I Knew About Metcalfe's Law Turns Out To Be Wrong
March 02 2008
In the recent Release 2.0, which covers the next generation of CRM, I invoke Metcalfe's Law, which I've always understood to state that "the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users on... read more@TED: Best of Day 4 and a Wrap-Up
March 01 2008
The last day at TED is a combination of exhaustion, anxiety, and wistfulness: exhaustion because we've been neglecting our sleep, anxiety because we remember how much work awaits us after the event is over, and wistfulness because we realize we... read moreMarch 01 2008
The joke among TEDsters is that, around the third day, it becomes an endurance sport. It's one thing to be in a room listening to spectacular insights for a few hours. It's another to be doing so for half a... read moreFebruary 29 2008
In this month's Release 2.0, we consider the next generation of customer relationship management (CRM) and the search for an all-in-one-place inbox and address book. We need some sort of universal inbox and address book because it's not just email... read moreFebruary 29 2008
It was a day of extremes at TED, ranging from an extended session examining the pervasiveness of evil to an evening celebration of some of the most life-affirming ideas possible. It also ranged from the sober (how to survive a... read moreTeaching design to businesspeople
February 28 2008
The "D" in TED stands for "design," and it's become a truism that design is a crucial element of business success. Ask Apple. But the conventional wisdom still maintains that design is a "soft" art, not worthy of attention... read moreFebruary 28 2008
If nothing else, TED is a trip. The veteran conference has gone through many permutations. Under curator Chris Anderson, TED is still full of technology, entertainment, and design, but it has really lived up to the change-the-world rhetoric that was... read moreThe Dangers of Predicting the Future
February 20 2008
The instant-analysis business is a tricky one. None of us have working crystal balls; any attempt to predict the future, even the five-minutes-from-now future, is risky. For example, on January 31, mere hours before Microsoft made its unsolicted $44 billion-plus... read moreR.E.M., Open Source, and Staying Alive When an Industry Shifts
February 19 2008
Over the weekend, Nat posted "Artistic License 2.0 and ... REM?!" which noted that the veteran rock'n'roll band was releasing its new video under an open license (if not in an open format). It's good to see an old band... read moreSteve Jobs rules the recording industry. Now what?
February 11 2008
Last night's Grammy Awards ceremonies were even less relevant than usual, no small achievement. The TV broadcast began with a "performance" by that cutting-edge new artist Frank Sinatra and fell down from there. The only real emotional charge of an... read moreMoney:Tech Day 2: Best Lines of the Day [MoneyTech]
February 07 2008
Like yesterday, the second day of Money:Tech was stuffed with early signals on everything from using website visits to predict the unemployment rate to the emerging market for catastrophe bonds. Here are just a few of the choice lines today:... read moreMoney:Tech Day 1: Best Lines [MoneyTech]
February 06 2008
There's so much going on at Money:Tech today that I won't try to cheapen it my squeezing it all into a blog post. Indeed, we're planning a full issue of Release 2.0 in April to capture how much has happened... read moreThe Industry Standard is back. Why?
February 06 2008
The Industry Standard ably chronicled -- and, eventually, mirrored -- the Internet boom that began a decade ago and died a few years later. (Disclosure: Despite its occasional excesses, I am honored to have been associated with the magazine.) After... read moreJim Cramer, unplugged [MoneyTech]
February 06 2008
Those who know Jim Cramer only from the final segment on his nightly CNBC screamfest are missing someone as reasonable as he is entertaining. That more balanced Cramer spoke with Money:Tech conference chair Paul Kedrosky this morning about how technology... read moreIf you can't be at the conference, at least join the prediction markets [MoneyTech]
February 06 2008
Money:Tech is about to begin and we'll be reporting from the conference. For those not here who'd like to play along with our conference prediction markets, join in.... read moreFebruary 06 2008
We've been noting more and more signals that multitouch screens are catching on beyond the iPhone and iPod Touch. We've recently seen a hint from Microsoft and a Walt Mossberg overview in the Wall Street Journal. And there's a high-profile... read moreA rare post about the music industry that isn't completely depressing
January 30 2008
The Qtrax debacle is getting most of the attention this week, with Warner Music's ridiculous CEO compensation close behind, but there is promising news in the music industry worth noting. Late last year, there was much fuss around Radiohead's decision... read moreJanuary 29 2008
I've been an enormous fan of the work of Edward Tufte for decades. His notions about density of content are extremely relevant in this age of information overload, and he has just released a video in which he evaluates what... read moreWhy Apple might not be able to get away with it anymore
January 14 2008
Tomorrow Steve Jobs will deliver his usual Macworld Expo keynote. Rather than speculate on what he might say -- there's plenty of such chatter out there today, ranging from the well-informed to the hilariously speculative -- I'd like to concentrate... read moreOne Laptop Per Child will succeed even if it "fails"
January 13 2008
The way people are dismissing the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project this week reminds me of how people were treating Hillary Clinton during the five days between her Iowa defeat and her New Hampshire comeback. To many observers, the... read moreOpen Source Hardware Enters the Mainstream
January 06 2008
A little suggested Sunday morning reading... We use this space, in part, to discern early signals of oncoming trends, and we're especially gratified when those trends show up in the mainstream. In today's New York Times you can read What... read moreYou can opt out any time you like but you can never leave
January 05 2008
Here's a brief follow-up to this week's thread on Facebook, Plaxo, and Scoble. This morning I found several dozen Plaxo notices in my inbox. Enough is enough, I thought, so I followed the instructions to opt out of all future... read moreWho will be the next Open Source Public Enemy #1?
January 04 2008
During the end-of-the-year break, a traditional time for bad news since fewer people than usual are paying attention, The SCO Group was delisted by NASDAQ. It was the latest bump down for SCO, best-known in recent years for claiming it... read moreDoes Facebook own this blog post?
January 03 2008
Facebook, apparently, owns my birthday. Yours too. At least that's one way to interpret why blogger Robert Scoble got kicked off Facebook. While testing an upcoming version of Plaxo Pulse, Scoble scraped information on his contacts (name, address, and birthday,... read moreJanuary 03 2008
Adobe pushed out an upgrade of its Creative Suite. I installed it, as prompted. This is what happens when I try to run any element of the Suite after the install: Click on the modal dialog box and the program... read moreJanuary 02 2008
Tim recently sent around a recommendation for The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage's enjoyable look at a decidedly pre-Silicon Valley tech boom, although the inflated promises of that period (i.e., the telegraph will bring about world peace) remind us of some... read moreThe future is almost here, but the demo has been here for a while now
December 28 2007
Forbes and others are reporting that Apple has applied for a patent for "a wireless system that would allow customers to place an order at a store using a wireless device such as a media player, a wireless personal digital... read moreNew Release 2.0: Open Source Hardware
December 26 2007
As a trusted colleague suggested recently, putting the words "open," "source," and "hardware" next to one another in a sentence is a sure way to cure insomnia among business people. But, before those non-alpha geeks among you click away, you... read moreiTunes Finally Allows Streaming ... At Least to Grammy Voters
December 13 2007
Despite protestations by the Cupertino Claque to the contrary, Apple Kremlinologists assume that Steve Jobs and Co. have had a music-streaming strategy ready to go, should the competition force it. That hasn't been necessary yet: The various DRM-encumbered music-streaming services... read moreWhy Global Warming Is Bad for the iPhone
November 30 2007
Last night, in chilly Boston, I had to go from one event to another, but didn't know where the second one was. I asked a colleague where to go next. He took out his iPhone and started pecking out the... read moreNew Edition of Facebook Application Platform Report
November 27 2007
In October, in response to the great interest in Facebook opening up its platform to developers, we released The Facebook Application Platform, a report by Tim O'Reilly, Niall Kennedy, Dave McClure, and the Radar team that offered plenty of data... read moreHey, AT&T, What's the Value of a Closed Network Again?
November 20 2007
Closed networks, its proponents maintain, offer a trade-off. Individuals or outside developers can't make any changes or improvements to it. But since the network and its applications are controlled at a single source, individuals are supposed to get an easier... read moreOpenSocial on Facebook (Sort-of)
November 16 2007
A friend of Radar alerts us to a new Facebook application that appears to make Facebook an OpenSocial container. One of the developers is from Google. It's unclear what's happening here -- Could this be the beginning of a guerilla... read moreCondescending Customer Service
November 16 2007
When Gmail recently added IMAP to its features, I sent a note to the customer service box of the web-based email service I use for personal mail to ask whether IMAP was coming to that service. I received the following... read moreNovember 14 2007
A member of the Radar team, typing on his iPhone, just wrote me that he was at SCO when in fact he was at SFO. That amusing typo made me wonder what SCO, which attempted to convince courts that it... read moreJapan Leading the World From PCs to Devices
November 06 2007
If you want some more evidence that the future may revolve more around devices than what we now consider full-blown computers, consider this report from Japan (AP, via Yahoo), which notes that "Overall PC shipments in Japan have fallen for... read moreBack Issues of Release 2.0 Available
November 02 2007
Plenty of people have been asking if we could make individual issues of Release 2.0 available for sale. We have, and they're all available at http://radar.oreilly.com/r2/backissues.html. For those looking forward to our next issue (December), it will cover open source... read moreSearch Engine Optimization and the Race to the Bottom
October 30 2007
In the Radar back-channel, Wesabe's Marc Hedlund points us to a provocative post by Merlin Mann likening today's obsession with Google search rankings to cargo cults. Indeed, the desire for high rankings on a Google search page and the implied... read moreRecent Posts | All O'Reilly Posts
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