Follow the Money

There’s a dispute going on right now between Comcast and Level3 Communications concerning the peering agreement between those two companies. Comcast says the dispute has nothing to do with the fact that Level3 just got the Netflix video streaming contract while most observers think that’s all it has to do with.

I think so, too.

Peering is at heart nothing but restraint of trade. Peering came about when various Internet backbone providers noticed they were all connected to the same big data centers and points of interconnection, normally inside telco central offices. Simply pulling an Ethernet cable from one rack to another could interconnect millions of users from two different backbone providers, saving time, distance, router hops […]

By |December 3rd, 2010|2010|18 Comments
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3D and Me

Is watching 3D movies good for your eyes or bad? I think it might be good, at least it seems to be for me.

Last weekend we took the kids to see Megamind 3D, which was great fun except four year-old Fallon and I both sacked-out for about 15 minutes during the second act, completely missing the death of MetroMan. Fallon had been pretty busy playing in Kung Fu Panda World that day so I can understand why he was tired, but I really had no excuse. Still, even though I saw only 80 instead of all 95 minutes of Megamind 3D, it had a profound physiological effect on me. I think watching the […]

By |December 2nd, 2010|2010|36 Comments
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Wikileaked

I spent eight years at InfoWorld working as a gossip columnist and know a thing or two about news leaks. So here is the gossip columnist’s view of this week’s huge Wikileaks story about U. S. diplomatic cables. It comes down, frankly, to a squandered opportunity.

Wikileaks is a garbage dump for embarrassing information. When it is about truly bad guys or even just the other guy (not us) most see some value in the site, but those in power really hate it and so do the media, which might surprise you.

Maybe an example will help. Back in the early 1990s I got a call one day from someone at Apple who wanted to […]

By |December 1st, 2010|2010|58 Comments
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The Decline and Fall of E-Mail

I have in my computer every e-mail message I have sent or received since 1992. Minus the obvious spam, this database comes to about half a million messages from people as varied (or similar, if you think about it) as Larry Ellison and Larry Flynt. But lately my e-mail seems to be dying. Yours is, too.

What’s happening to e-mail is complex but comes down to changing contexts and competing media. Back in 1992 communication for me meant e-mail (which at that time for me was cc:mail, MCI Mail, and Internet mail), snail mail, Usenet newsgroups, bulletin board systems like The WELL, telephone, and fax. Today the mix has changed almost completely and I have Internet […]

By |November 27th, 2010|2010|172 Comments
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Rhythm and Noise

So Exchange Traded Index funds and the $1.2 trillion invested in them have increased volatility for small cap stocks making the whole IPO process less attractive for many founders of U. S. tech companies — our kind of companies. It’s not the end of the world but has been a downer of sorts for both the market and the tech industry for the last decade. What’s to be done about it, then?

“The problem as we see it could be 80-90 percent contained if only Exchange Traded Funds were subject to the same sort of trading circuit breakers that were imposed by the SEC on regular shares after the Flash Crash of earlier this year,” says […]

By |November 17th, 2010|2010|54 Comments
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