Integrating online and offline business
Harder than it looks, but you really have no alternative. My latest column for Business 2.0 looks at the lessons to be learned from Webvan’s collapse — and its smarter competitor, U.K.-based Tesco.
Microsoft suffocating the software-development ecosystem?
Software giant removes Java support from Windows XP. Author and developer Clay Shirky asks PC manufacturers to resist Redmond by installing Java on their PCs anyway. Columnist Dan Gillmor is a supporter.
FBI busts Russian programmer
For cracking Adobe’s weak PDF encryption scheme.
Free-speech activists retaliate
Boycott Adobe / Free Dmitri campaign, clever logo
Hope for the future: A couple of recent news stories point to the incredible resourcefulness — and speedy learning — of young people encountering the Internet for the first time. The Financial Times reported late last week on Indian street children discovering free Internet terminals placed on the streets of Delhi by a researcher. According to the story, these kids figure out how to browse the Web within minutes, without any instruction at all. One group of children even figured out how to disable the monitoring application that the researcher was using to track the kids’ activities on the free kiosks. What’s interesting is how quickly the children gained sophisticated computer knowledge by working in more-or-less cooperative groups.
Somewhat more frightening, but still inspiring, is the story of Marcus Arnold, a 15-year-old who became one of the top legal experts on an advice site, despite having no legal training whatsoever. In this long but thoughtful NY Time Magazine piece, Michael Lewis talks to Arnold and his family, and meditates on how the Internet enables kids like Marcus Arnold to jump out of their physical circumstances and grab opportunities that would be otherwise unavailable to them. It’s worth a read.
eCompany Now is now Business 2.0, and they’ve debuted a new site design under the new URL. My work as the “Defogger” continues under the magazine’s new name, with a weekly Web column and a monthly print column. This week’s column on slimming down your home page leads the new site’s lineup today.
Good news for California citizens: Now you can be notified by pager when your neighborhood is scheduled for a rolling blackout. “Oh goody,” millions of power-hungry Californians are no doubt thinking. “Now I can plan ahead for those enforced hours of idleness and darkness when the power cuts out.” Provided, of course, that you remembered to charge up your pager or cell phone before they cut you off. Visit California’s state government portal to sign up.
A Georgia State IT administrator is being prosecuted for installing P2P software on college computers. The university says that in so doing, he robbed them of more than $400,000 worth of bandwidth. This, even though the software primarily ran during the December break, when the computers were otherwise idle and unused. If you use a P2P distributed-computing application like SETI@home, could you be vulnerable to the same kind of prosecution? Let’s hope the court sees the ridiculousness of this case and doesn’t set a dangerous precedent. Granted, companies (and universities) have the right to set and enforce policies regarding the use of the computing hardware and networking bandwidth they own. But criminal prosecution? Get a grip.
I have to admit I didn’t call this one: Webvan is going out of business, making official what observers have been speculating for months. In the two years since it got started, Webvan burned through about a billion dollars of investors’ money (OK, it was actually $800 million, but whats a few hundred mil between friends?) and had almost exactly nothing to show for it at the end of the day.
How anyone can spend that much money and still not emerge a major market force, I don’t know. Back when they were getting started, I predicted Webvan would eventually give FedEx a run for its money as a rapid-delivery service, capable of bringing everything from fresh eggs to Playstations right to your door. At the time, that seemed like a critical piece of the e-commerce pie. As it turns out, FedEx and UPS are doing just fine handling deliveries for the few dot-coms still in business, and for the rest of the nation’s economy, well, it’s still pretty much owned by the same giants as ever.
