Put LIBOR on Yahoo Groups

LIBOR, the London InterBank Offered Rate, has been in the news lately as heads begin to roll in London and soon New York now that it’s clear LIBOR was manipulated by big banks, affecting the value of hundreds of trillions worth of financial instruments. This is a complex topic and it will be awhile — perhaps years — before it is clear how or even if you and I were damaged by these shenanigans, but everyone seems to agree that it can’t be allowed to happen again. But how? To make this happen I think we need a new understanding of what “transparency” means in financial transactions in the 21st century.

Transparency is supposed to mean […]

By |July 10th, 2012|2012, Banks, Business, Economy, Finance, Government, Internet, Technology|36 Comments
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Life after the personal computer

A reader pointed out to me this week that the personal computer is well over 30 years old — a number that has real consequence if you are familiar with my work. He remembered I predicted in 1992 that PCs as we knew them would be dead by now. I was obviously a little off in my timing. But only a little off. PCs are still doomed and their end will come quicker than you think.

Here’s what I wrote in my book Accidental Empires in 1992:

It takes society thirty years, more or less, to absorb a new information technology into daily life. It took about that long to turn movable type into books in the […]

By |June 30th, 2012|2012, Computing, Gadgets, Internet, Phones, Predictions, Software, Tablets|147 Comments
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Why YouTube isn’t the future of TV

In a few weeks I’ll be launching a YouTube channel where you’ll be able to see lots of shows readers have been asking about including Startup America and even that lost second season of NerdTV. YouTube, as the largest video streaming service anywhere, is the absolute best place for me. But YouTube isn’t the future of TV.

I know this because TV is a business and this channel I’m launching is a business and I’ve spent the last several weeks talking to investors and running the numbers every which way. I’ve spent many hours with my friend Bob Peck looking at the economics of YouTube and my unequivocal conclusion is that while YouTube is great, it […]

By |June 28th, 2012|2012, Advertising, Internet, Television|82 Comments
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The tablet computer rumble

Last week Microsoft kinda-sorta announced its new Microsoft Surface tablet computer. This week will come a Google-branded tablet. Both are pitted against the mighty iPad. Both companies see opportunity because of what they perceive as a Steve Jobs blind spot. And both companies are introducing tablets under their own brands because they can’t their get OEM’s to do tablets correctly.

For all the speculation about why Microsoft or Google would risk offending hardware OEMs by introducing name branded tablets, the reality is that neither company really had any choice but to make the hardware.  In the commodity PC market, no one company is likely to be willing to make the investment necessary to compete with the […]

By |June 24th, 2012|2012, Breaking News, Computing, Gadgets, Internet, Software, Tablets, Technology, Uncategorized|97 Comments
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I Hate Network Solutions!

About a week ago I finally moved the cringely.com domain to EasyDNS from Network Solutions, my registrar since 1992. I have written in the past about how much I hate Network Solutions, but this was our final connection and I am now free. But not without them kicking me on my way out the door, crashing this blog for four hours this afternoon.

I began the domain transfer  last Monday but Network Solutions, in its infinite wisdom, decided to complete the transfer today, Sunday, at 2:04 PM Pacific time. That’s when they simply shut down my DNS despite the fact that I’m still paying for their service (I’m paid up until November). […]

By |June 24th, 2012|2012, Internet, Media|37 Comments
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IPv6 rollout is a yawner (that’s good!)

Yesterday 3000 important web sites including Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Yahoo as well as many top Internet Service Providers turned on their IPv6 support and this time they left it turned on. Nothing happened. Or maybe I should say nothing bad happened, which is good, very good.

The world is quickly running out of new IPv4 addresses with almost 3.7 billion issued. There are two workarounds: 1) complicate the net further with cascading arrays of Network Address Translation (NAT) servers that slow things down, inhibit native inbound connections like VoIP, and defeat location services both good and bad, or; 2) move to IPv6 with 128-bit addresses (IPv4 is 32-bit) that would allow giving an IPv6 address […]

By |June 7th, 2012|2012, Computing, Internet|25 Comments
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The crowdfunding bubble of 2013

When President Obama signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act on April 5th, the era of crowdfunding began as individual investors everywhere were promised an opportunity to gain access to venture investments previously limited to institutions, funds, and so-called qualified investors. Come January 1, 2013, we’re told, anyone can be a venture capitalist, but hardly any of these new VCs will know what they are doing. Spurred by the new law we will shortly see a surge of crowdfunding startups giving for the first time unqualified investors access to venture capital markets. And it will be a quagmire.

Like disk drive startups in the 1980s each of these new crowdfunds will […]

By |June 5th, 2012|2012, Entrepreneurship, Finance, Government, Internet, Startups, Venture Capital|33 Comments
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What’s a Movie Cloud? That’s up to you

The Internet industry has spent almost 20 years now beating the crap out of disintermediation, which as we all know is the elimination of middle men from commerce, bringing producers and consumers in direct contact. As the market has grown and widened and tools have improved and got cheaper the nature of disintermediation has changed, too, to the point that today it is almost what we claimed it was back in 1995. To prove that I give you this video from Movie Cloud, which went up today on Indiegogo.

Movie Cloud is supposed to be the disintermediation of movies, bringing all factions together so that 50,000 feature films per year may bloom… maybe.

Whether Movie Cloud succeeds or fails I think it shows us […]

By |May 9th, 2012|2012, Breaking News, Internet, Media|45 Comments
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Beginning of the end for bufferbloat

As the go-to source for all news relating to bufferbloat, I’m glad to announce that the first of several possible solutions to the problem will shortly be available, just in time to save the Internet from self-destruction.

What, you didn’t know the Internet was self-destructing? Well it is.

Bufferbloat, my #1 prediction from 2011, is an artifact of cheap memory and bad planning in the Internet Age. In order to keep our porn streaming without interruption we add large memory buffers in applications, network cards or chipsets, routers, more routers, and even more routers until the basic flow control techniques of the TCP protocol are completely overwhelmed. Data glugs through the system like a gas can with […]

By |May 8th, 2012|2012, Breaking News, Business, Internet, Technology|40 Comments
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Brett Versus Bob: Taking Net Neutrality Personally

brettbob

Brett Glass (on the left) runs Lariat, a small wired and wireless Internet Service Provider (ISP) on the prairie in Laramie, Wyoming.  Bob Frankston (right) programmed VisiCalc, the first personal computer spreadsheet and for several years worked on home networking issues for Microsoft, somehow without having to move from his beloved Newton, Massachusetts.  Two nerds, a decade apart in age yet both vastly experienced, they have completely different views on Net Neutrality. Bob loves it. Brett hates it. Yet coming to understand each man’s position helps us better understand the whole Net Neutrality issue and what really matters.

Net Neutrality discussions usually come […]

By |November 3rd, 2009|2009, Internet|106 Comments
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