LifeBlocked

Internet-y as the next blogger, I’d like to point out how wired.com noticed that the Phoenix New Times figured out that LifeLock CEO Todd Davis (you know, Mr. 457-55-5462) who dares criminals to steal his identity has, in fact had his identity stolen at least 13 times. But in a repudiation of the Internet tendency to simply point at the findings of others and say “like he said, ” I’ll now explain how the identity thieves got away with it. Given that, as you know, LifeLock is “guaranteed. ”

What LifeLock does primarily when you subscribe is they put a fraud alert on your file at all three national credit monitoring agencies […]

By |May 24th, 2010|2010|116 Comments
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TV after YouTube

YouTube made two fascinating announcements recently: 1) viewers are now downloading an average of two billion videos per day on the service, and; 2) YouTube is almost showing a profit for Google, its owner.  Think about the glorious inefficiency embodied in that latter statement:  two billion downloads per day just to break even.  And this is supposed to be the future of television?  Hardly.

I think the future of television is Veetle.

Veetle, if you haven’t heard of it, is a Palo Alto-based startup that isn’t nominated for this summer’s Startup Tour.  Veetle appears from my vantage point to be a peer-to-peer video distribution system that most closely parallels the current cable TV model except […]

By |May 19th, 2010|2010|244 Comments
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The Gate is Closed

Update — Startup questionnaires go out this evening (Monday, May 17th).  If you don’t receive one and think that you should have, please contact ma@cringely.com or courtney@cringely.com to that effect.  The list of MIA nominees below is current as of Monday afternoon. — Bob

Nominations for the Cringely (NOT in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour are officially closed.

The next step is distributing to a designated founder or executive at each nominated company our festive questionnaire.

Despite the hard work of Mary Alyce Cringely and Miss Courtney, we still have more than 100 nominated companies for which no official contact e-mail address yet exists.  We have written to all these companies and called all of them but for some […]

By |May 14th, 2010|2010|81 Comments
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Question Time

We have less than a week to go for nominations to the Cringely (Not in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour.  Mrs. Cringely (Mary Alyce) and Miss Courtney are contacting all 400 companies so we can distribute our festive company questionnaire to the right person. This is a harder task than we had guessed.

We need this questionnaire for two purposes: 1) it gives us standardized data with which to most fairly select the final 24 companies, and; 2) companies that don’t bother to return the questionnaire will be eliminated from the competition, saving us some work.

The questionnaire goes to the CEO or CFO or whomever in the company is supposed to be providing adult supervision.

What we are discovering, however, is that:

1)  Many nominated startups don’t have […]

By |May 11th, 2010|2010|79 Comments
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Book 'em, Steve-O

It’s time for me to weigh-in again on the beef between Apple and Adobe over Flash versus HTML5. Why is this such a big deal that it seems to be verging on a blood feud? What turned these two companies so ruthlessly against each other that Apple CEO Steve Jobs is writing anti-Flash essays on the Apple web page while Adobe is giving all of its employees free Google Android phones that run Flash?

eBooks.

Forget all the BS spewing right now from the Apple camp. What’s really at the basis of this fight is the future of electronic books.

This idea, by the way, is not new with me but came originally from reader Michael L. Jones […]

By |May 6th, 2010|2010|108 Comments
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