Avram Miller says Steve Jobs has one more Apple intro

steve-jobs-apple-big-brotherWe all have friends (people we know) and friends (people we not only know but hang out with). Maybe the better contrast might be between friends and buddies. Well Avram Miller is one of my buddies. He lives down the road from me and my kids prefer his pool to ours because his is solar heated. The retired Intel VP of business development is quite a character, knows a lot of people who know people, and understands the business of technology at a level few people do. So when he wrote a post this morning predicting that Apple will clean Google’s clock in search, I sat up in my chair.

Avram’s thesis is […]

By |April 28th, 2014|2014, Breaking News, Companies, Internet, Social Media, Software, Technology|125 Comments
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Facebook drones won’t work for aerial Internet

Screen Shot 2014-03-31 at 12.50.56 PMFacebook, trying to be ever more like Google, announced last week that it was thinking of building a global ISP in the sky. Now this is something I’ve written about several times in the past and even predicted to some extent, so I’d like to look at what Facebook has said so far and predict what will and won’t work.

Longtime readers will know I’ve written twice before (here and here) about satellite Internet and twice about aerial Internet, too (here and here), so I’ve been thinking about this for over a decade and even ran some experiments back when I lived in […]

By |March 31st, 2014|2014, Companies, How To's, Internet, mobile technology|62 Comments
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WhatsApp is the first of several big acquisitions for Facebook

FaceAppIf yesterday’s announcement of Facebook paying $19 billion in cash and stock for WhatsApp surprised you then maybe you’d forgotten this prediction I published on January 8th:

#6 — Facebook transforms itself (or tries to) with a huge acquisition. I wrote long ago that we’d never see Facebook in the Dow 30 Industrials. The company is awash in users and profits but they’ve lost the pulse of the market if they ever had it. Trying to buy their way into the Millennial melting data market Facebook offered $3 billion for Snapchat, which turned them down then rejected a $4 billion offer from Google. Google actually calculates these things, Facebook does not, so where Google will now reverse-engineer […]

By |February 20th, 2014|2014, Business, Internet, Social Media|36 Comments
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What if Marissa Mayer went to jail?

Dai SuganoWednesday at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer presented her company’s side of fighting the National Security Agency over requests to have a look-see at the data of Yahoo users. It’s a tough fight, said Mayer, and one that takes place necessarily in private. Mayer was asked why tech companies had not simply decided to tell the public more about what the U.S. surveillance industry was up to. “Releasing classified information is treason and you are incarcerated,” she said.

Go directly to jail?

No.

How would that work, exactly? Would black helicopters — silent black helicopters — land at Yahoo Intergalactic HQ and take Marissa Mayer away in chains? Wouldn’t that defeat the […]

By |September 12th, 2013|2013, Breaking News, Government, Internet, Privacy and Security|52 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|Comments Off on Instagram’s Exit Plan
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