So you’ve just finished the big website redesign. Your designers and engineers have put in hundreds of hours, you’ve quelled three rebellions in the IT department, and you’ve put the site through extensive QA testing. Now you’re ready to switch on the site and pop open the bubbly, right?… Read the rest
Month: July 2001
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.… Read the rest
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.… Read the rest
FBI busts Russian programmer
For cracking Adobe’s weak PDF encryption scheme.
Free-speech activists retaliate
Boycott Adobe / Free Dmitri campaign, clever logo… Read the rest
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.… Read the rest
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.… Read the rest
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.”… Read the rest
Do you know how much your website’s home page weighs? The question may sound ridiculous: How can something composed of evanescent electrons and photons “weigh” anything? But in the parlance of Web design, “weight” is shorthand for how big a webpage is, in kilobytes.… Read the rest
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.… Read the rest
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?)… Read the rest