VentureBeat

$19 billion for WhatsApp only makes sense if you view it in the context of the pending battle that Facebook — and Google — are preparing to wage against the telcos that control their access to customers. If you want to know what Facebook’s strategy might look like for the next five years, read this

This story, from last week, appeared earlier on VentureBeat and on LinkedIn Today, where it’s generated a ton of commentary. I also did a video on the topic with KRON-4 TV, embedded here. You can only put so many dents in the universe. This week, Apple unveiled a respectable upgrade of its iPhone li

Vineet Jain came to America with just $100 in his pocket — literally. He laughs as he remembers arriving in the San Francisco airport in 1993. “I had a single $100 bill, folded up in my shirt pocket,” he says. Now, he’s running rapidly growing hybrid cloud company Egnyte — his second startup — and l

My latest “Dylan’s Desk” column for VentureBeat looks at a disturbing trend: The way app developers are giving up on three decades of openness and interconnection. I am not yet sure that this is a truly widespread or irreversible trend. But I do feel skeptical about the rush to replace mobile websit

My latest column for VentureBeat started off as an attempt to describe how I’ve replaced Google Reader, with a custom-rigged PHP-based RSS news river of my own, supplemented by some IFTTT recipes and a minimalist RSS reader called Skimr. But it turned into a meditation on impermanence and change. He

I went to Austin, and I came back with an excellent orange beanie. I also spent a lot of time talking to interesting people and — when I wasn’t busy producing content for VentureBeat — drinking a bit too much. (And I made a brief appearance on NPR, which made my mom really proud.) I’m […]

Last year, Courtney Stanton organized a conference for game developers whose 12-person speaker roster was half women, and half men. And she did it without considering the gender of applicants. In the world of tech conferences, that gender ratio is almost unheard of — let alone getting there without

Swipp, a new “social intelligence platform,” is trying to bridge the gap between evanescent, useless social data (I ate a B.L.T. for lunch today! Look at this cool mural!) and more lasting, but less personal, knowledge, like the Wikipedia entry on San Francisco. “We want to create a smarter, wiser p

Published on VentureBeat When IBM bought Lotus for $3.5 billion in 1995, it looked as though the venerable computing giant was just about to lock up the software industry and coast to unstoppable profits. Eighteen years later, Lotus looks more like a millstone around IBM’s neck than a flywheel givin

Here is my latest column on VentureBeat: We need more people like Aaron Swartz. I spent much of the past few days thinking about Aaron Swartz and what a loss we suffered when he took his own life last week. His passing breaks my heart. I didn’t know him, though he was in my circle: I […]

After a two-week holiday break, my VentureBeat column is back. This week: why CES still matters. Coincidentally, this morning NPR ran a similar story on Morning Edition. The reporter points out that, while big companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon don’t have booths at CES, they still s

People are increasingly dissatisfied with their social networks — the advertising, the lack of clear privacy protections, the intimations that anything you say can and will be used in a promotional manner at some point in the future — and some of them, this week, have even started to abandon them. K