Steve Ballmer is My Friend?

Fellow AppsLabb’er Rich, just informed me via IM (which is so 1999, why aren’t we Twittering?), that Steve Ballmer friended him on Facebook. Turns out that both Paul (AppsLab poobah) and I were also friended by Steve. Maybe the rumor is true, and Microsoft is digging out $6 billion for Facebook (Techmeme coverage). Or maybe… Read More

Blast from the Past, Courtesy of DEC

By way of John Battelle, Googleblogoscoped and Waxy. DEC gives us a great prediction of things to come. Remember the DEC Alpha? It wasn’t forced to compete with unknown companies, unless you consider Intel a little company. I do like seeing the classic Mosaic browser in action. I’m reminded of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.… Read More

Odd News

In case you’ve been wondering, I collect these stories, and when I get a few, I dump them. Like it, don’t like it, tell me in Comments. Details on Taser’s XREP electric shotgun shell emerge From Engadget, cool and frightening all at once. Chinese Youth Killed By Cell Phone Battery Blast It’s supposed to be… Read More

We’re Number 45!

Eddie Awad today posted a list of Oracle blogs ranked by Technorati Authority. AppsLab is 45 on his list. The list ranks all the blogs he aggregates using OraNA aggregator. I have embedded his Google Spreadsheet below; Eddie, I hope that’s fine with you. Tom Kyte, no surprise, is number 1. Eddie, Justin and Steven… Read More

So Much for the Backup Plan

Maybe Eric Schmidt was reading this blog over the weekend. On Saturday, I observed that Eric was being coy when he called the enterprise an agreed that the enterprise was a backup plan for Google, just in case that whole advertising thing doesn’t pan out as planned. Today, Google announced it is acquiring Postini to… Read More

Too Many of Me, Part 2

Ionut Alex Chitu over at Google Operating System has a post about Socialstream, a new kind of social network, created by a project in the Master’s program at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute and sponsored by Google. Don’t the already have a orkut that’s kind of a big deal in Brazil? Anyway, the feature… Read More

Google’s Backup Plan

I read today that Google Apps will soon include the features acquired from JotSpot. Not that big a surprise, but adding wikis and web site building capabilities to Google Apps will make them even more compelling in comparison to Microsoft Office. I hope Docs and Spreadsheets will be graced with these features, too. Anyway, it… Read More

Too Many of Me

Jeff Nolan addresses an issue that many others (e.g. Robert Scoble, Anshu Sharma) have begun to complain about recently. Namely, there are too many social networks to use realistically, and no one has adequately addressed the requirement for a cross-network identity management tool. For people in a position to give advice on new technology (Which… Read More