The Startup Channel

Screen Shot 2013-02-28 at 6.40.46 AMWe interrupt this book for a quick update on what’s happening in my so-called career. Shortly before beginning this serialization of Accidental Empires I explained that I would be doing some new projects including a book and a startup about startups – The Startup Channel (thestartupchannel.net). The latter project will now launch in April so it’s time to explain.

The Startup Channel will be an online video channel about startups and startup people. You’ll find it probably on YouTube unless some other Internet video outfit makes me a better offer (hint, hint). We’ll be launching with 40 hours of pre-produced content, which is a lot for online video where the […]

By |February 28th, 2013|2013, Advertising, Breaking News, Entrepreneurship, Finance, Industry, Internet, Media, Social Media, Startups, Television, Venture Capital|13 Comments
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Instagram’s Exit Plan

instaUpdate — Instagram now says it was all a huge mistake, that users own their pictures and there’s no way Facebook is going to sell them to anyone… but the company hasn’t yet revealed alternate legal language, which they should have been able to cobble up in an hour or two. The underlying problem of mean-spirited, self-serving, over-reaching terms of service is still with us at Instagram and almost everywhere else. Their revised terms of service were stupid and couldn’t stand. Let’s hope in their next attempt to grab rights (because that’s what this whole thing was about and probably still is) Instagram and Facebook treat their users fairly. Until they do, most of what’s […]

By |December 18th, 2012|2012, Breaking News, Business, Companies, Intellectual Property, Privacy and Security, Public Relations, Social Media|51 Comments
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LinkedIn SNAFU

I’ll be posting a column shortly about today’s announcements from Apple, but first an apology.  If you received a connection request from me through LinkedIn, I probably didn’t send it.  LinkedIn sent it all by itself.

Twice now I’ve been faced with a dialog on the LinkedIn network where it proposes to blanket the world with link requests on my behalf. Twice now I’ve selected NO! and from the responses I’m getting in my e-mail twice now LinkedIn has gone ahead in and sent the requests defying my express orders.

Am I the only person experiencing this?

I’m a native English speaker and pretty good at reading the language, too, so I don’t think I’m sending the requests by mistake.

Of […]

By |September 12th, 2012|2012, Companies, Internet, Social Media, Technology|50 Comments
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What’s a WeJIT?

This is the third in a series of columns about interesting new technologies.

Every few years something comes along to fundamentally change how we use the World Wide Web, whether it is online video, social networking, dynamic pages, or even search, itself. This week a new technology called WeJIT was announced that looks like something small but is really something big because it extends collaboration from specialized sites like wikis to everywhere HTML is used.  WeJITS are collaboration in a persistent link.

WeJITS come from Democrasoft, a company here in Santa Rosa that is best known for Collaborize Classroom, a cloud-based service used by more than 30,000 teachers to interact with students, deliver lessons from a global peer reviewed library, and even give […]

By |August 24th, 2012|2012, Breaking News, Education, Internet, Social Media, Technology|35 Comments
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Why Twitter is Worth More Than Facebook (At Least to Me)

This column was finished before I realized that this week is Twitter’s Chirp developer conference in San Francisco where Twitter will supposedly (and finally) explain how it intends to make money. As you can see below I have my own ideas on this. Let’s compare my ideas with Twitter’s later in the week and see whose are more fun.

I don’t tweet. Yes, I have a Twitter account that’s attached automagically to this blog and whenever I write something new it sends a link to the world. But that’s not tweeting, not really. Still I have several thousand followers on Twitter and pride myself that I don’t inflict myself on them more than 2-3 times per […]

By |April 12th, 2010|2010, Social Media|82 Comments
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