I, Cringely March 2009

Three Mile Island Memories

tmi2 This past weekend marked the 30th anniversary of the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island. If you are old enough you may remember where you were at that time and what it was like. I remember VERY well because I was on my way to the crippled plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Our President at the time, Jimmy Carter, was also a micro-manager and a former nuclear engineer: he wanted his own eyes and ears on the scene. Our little group eventually coalesced into the Presidental Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, led by Dartmouth College president John Kemeny, who was also the co-author of BASIC.

The lessons of Three Mile Island have been, for […]

By cringely|March 31st, 2009|Uncategorized|249 Comments

Rise of the Machines

tumbril “Where are the tumbrils?” asks my friend Adam Smith.If, like me, you have no idea what is a tumbril, it is a type of horse cart used during the French Revolution to transport condemned prisoners to the guillotine for beheading.What Adam wonders is how we can get so deep into such a hellacious financial crisis without finding at least a few bad guys to behead?

It’s a good question.

In one sense there simply have to be bankers or money managers of some sort who have benefitted greatly from the financial discomfort of the rest of us.On the other hand it is difficult to find many such people.Maybe they are hiding.I know I would.

By cringely|March 25th, 2009|Uncategorized|159 Comments

Bowling for Dollars

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I obviously hit a nerve (probably several) with my column on Parrot Secrets. Some of this was expected. The idea of making so much money from an inexpensive web site would appeal to a lot of people, I knew. And I felt good about sharing the story after sitting on it for five years for just that reason. But I wasn’t at all expecting the outrage that some readers felt over the owner of Parrot Secrets not being the nice blonde lady in the picture but a young Indian man who doesn’t even own a parrot. People were pissed and yes, it probably says something about me that I still can’t really understand why […]

By cringely|March 18th, 2009|Uncategorized|145 Comments

Parrot Secrets

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Let’s face it, the economy is in trouble and so are the rest of us. Based on the dregs I find in my spam filter that makes this a hot season for folks selling plans for how to make big money on the Internet – plans that mostly aren’t worth what people pay for them. Either these advertised sites are simply scams or they are promoting the obvious — often free government web sites that diligent folks could find on their own. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t legitimate Internet businesses that can be started on a shoestring. So to do my part for the economy I’m going to offer-up what I have always […]

By cringely|March 14th, 2009|Uncategorized|379 Comments

The Not So Bad Bank

piggy-bomb-bank02 We’re seven weeks into the Obama Administration and still looking for a way out of both the banking and housing crises. TARP didn’t seem to work, at least not as its designers intended. The new housing plan hasn’t been well received and now that more details are out you’d think there would be an even more negative reaction, but the press doesn’t seem to have even noticed the details were released last week.

Had anyone actually read the press release they would have noticed the Obama plan is no longer limited to refinancing 105 percent of a home’s purchase price, but offers instead what’s essentially a 5/1 Adjustable Rate Mortgage for homeowners and […]

By cringely|March 10th, 2009|Uncategorized|107 Comments

32 Years Down the Toilet: Neokast 2.0

I received a large response from my most recent column on the Neokast mystery. The most interesting post was this one:

Insider Joe says:

March 8, 2009 at 8:23 pm (Edit)

Um, the real answer to from someone who knows is much simpler and less intriguing:

a) NK’s management team had no business experience in either the streaming space or in running tech startups

b) Said Mr. Johnson was arrogant and unwilling to accept the above point

c) He was unable to come up with a business model that made money

d) He did not want to raise venture capital until it was too late to do so

Btw, there was never any serious offer from Microsoft or anyone […]

By cringely|March 9th, 2009|Uncategorized|61 Comments

The Neokast Mystery

technologyevangelist-neokast179 What happened to Neokast? It’s a mystery to me. But I suspect the answer will surprise us all soon enough.

Neokast, as readers of my old PBS column will recall, was a peer-to-peer live video streaming application developed by graduate students from Northwestern University near Chicago. That’s me talking about it there on the left, back in 2007.

I loved the company instantly. It was out of the Silicon Valley limelight, away from the technical mainstream for such software (Neokast was a .NET application and therefore pretty much Windows-only), but most important of all, it seemed to actually work. The potential was extremely compelling. Here’s how I described it back then:

“…the more people who watch your Neokast […]

By cringely|March 8th, 2009|Uncategorized|116 Comments

So THAT’S Why He’s So Interested in Mortgages!

Yesterday morning in Palm Desert, CA a number of technology startup companies were shown to the public for the first time at the DEMO Conference. One of these new companies was an Internet mortgage startup called home-account.com (don’t forget the dash). Home-Account was born in my kitchen in Charleston just over a year ago – long before any of us realized the housing crisis was going to be as bad as it has become. Just to be clear, I am a co-founder and shareholder in Home-Account.com.

People with ideas are always seeking me out. In this case my visitor was a mortgage broker from Charlotte, NC. He knew that lenders weren’t helping homeowners own their homes as quickly as they might. […]

By cringely|March 3rd, 2009|Uncategorized|102 Comments

And a Network Engineer Shall Lead Them

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Friday I was in Kansas City for a meeting of economics bloggers held at the Kauffman Foundation. My claim to being an economics blogger is slim, I know, but it was a chance to hang with some interesting people and learn something so I went for it. And in honor of that event, then, I’m making this column entirely about how we can tell when the economy is finally turning. There’s a strong argument that time is right now.

Yet the economy doesn’t feel any better to me. Does it feel better to you? Probably not. But what we’re looking for is the bottom, or rather that moment just past the bottom when things […]