The Neokast Mystery

 

technologyevangelist-neokast179What 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 |March 8th, 2009|Uncategorized|132 Comments
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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 […]

By |March 2nd, 2009|Uncategorized|126 Comments
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Where's Steve?

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“The only thing worse than being talked about,” said Oscar Wilde, “is not being talked about.” That has until recently applied in spades to Steve Jobs of Apple, a guy who, when I’ve interviewed him, has always asked what other people have said about him, “especially the bad stuff.”

Steve is a guy who likes being talked about.  He likes it so much, in fact, that he’s adopted a strategy to encourage it.  This strategy involves very carefully doling-out bits of himself to the press not in an effort to discourage coverage, really, but to ENcourage it by limiting the supply.  Like everything else about Steve it is brilliant and cold.

This was the […]

By |February 21st, 2009|Uncategorized|292 Comments
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The Bentonville Mafia

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As promised, here’s part three of my series on fixing Microsoft for the 21st century.  This assumes we’ve already spun-off the Internet properties to Yahoo as I suggested a few days ago and a Bank of America/Merrill-Lynch analyst quickly copied.  Does that copying qualify me for a Federal bailout?

The big Microsoft news this week, at least from the press it has received, is Redmond’s decision to open a chain of stores.  Nearly all the pundits think this is stupid, while I think it was merely inevitable, given the nature of current Microsoft management, which seems to be more and more from Bentonville, Arkansas, home of Wal-Mart.

See that guy in the picture?  That’s […]

By |February 18th, 2009|Uncategorized|184 Comments
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Wall Street Can't Count

This post first ran on January 29th on my mortgage blog.  It got some traction there and  a  few mentions in the press so, lazy bastard that I am, I’m reproducing it here in a slightly improved form that corrects my own math error.

Take a look at this chart that someone sent to me a couple days ago.  I’m making it big so you can see as much detail as possible.  Have a look and then come back, okay?

Pretty scary, eh?  It’s a chart showing the deterioration of major bank market caps since 2007.  Prepared by someone at JP Morgan based on data from Bloomberg, this chart flashed across Wall Street and the financial world a […]

By |February 12th, 2009|Uncategorized|164 Comments
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