This happened exactly one month before I moved to Silicon Valley from North Carolina. As I recall, the movie got lukewarm reviews, and I never saw it. Or even really thought about it, for that matter.
But recently, it’s popped up on my radar in rather random fashion. One of the keywords I track on Twitter is “silicon valley.” And at least a couple times each day, someone makes a reference to the movie:
I’ve been following the patent reform debate closely. This is one of those perennial issues that everyone wants to see fixed, but can never find a compromise. But today comes word that the White House has backed a compromise that promises to move legislation at least out of committee. From the Wall Street Journal:
“President Barack Obama’s administration supports major changes proposed in landmark patent legislation, likely accompanied by a roughly 15% fee hike, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Director David Kappos said Tuesday.
“While a compromise, it clearly moves the ball forward,” Kappos said of the bill, which if approved would bring the first major changes to the patent process in 50 years. On Monday, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke wrote a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee expressing support for the Senate legislation.
The bill, introduced by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., pushes to harmonize the U.S. patent process with international standards and grants the patent office more authority to make rules and increase fees.
About a year ago, I started using a service called SlideShare. The idea is pretty simple. You can upload PowerPoint presentations and it converts them into Flash presentations. These new presentations can then be shared and embedded just about anywhere. It’s all very Web 2.0.
Since I’ve been using SlideShare for awhile, I was happy to get a chance to chat on Monday with SlideShare co-founders Rashmi Sinha and Jonathan Boutelle. The company is announcing two new services today that are noteworthy, if for nothing else, because they will move SlideShare into earning revenues in ways besides advertising. And since I think ad-supported business models are mostly doomed to fail, I applaud them for moving into new revenue models.
But as we chatted, and as I thought about presentations, I was struck by just how important such presentations have become in our culture. Indeed, corporate presentations have improbably become a form of entertainment. It says a lot about how our relationship to business and celebrity has been transformed in the digital era. Read the rest of this entry »
A few months ago, I wrote a column calling the Federal Trade Commission’s attempts to regulate blogging a mistake:
“I have no doubt the folks at the Federal Trade Commission have all the best intentions when it comes setting out disclosure guidelines for bloggers in order to protect consumers. But it’s an effort that’s doomed from the start.”
I can’t link to the column because it’s behind our paywall. But I figured no good would come of it.
Well, I didn’t expect the FTC to listen to me, and they didn’t let me down. On Monday, the FTC released new rules to regulate product endorsements in advertisements and blogs.
I’m reporting a piece on job-hunting in the great and growing wildness of the twittersphere. I’m finding hype, hope, good and bad, lots of noise. It’s a wonder you tweeting job-hunter don’t have your heads explode after a few hours in that place. The piece should run later this week sometime. Let me know what you think.
Chip industry watchers have been eagerly awaiting news about the progress of Intel’s graphics-oriented chip, dubbed Larrabee, which has been under development for what seems like ages.
Intel executives hope Larrabee will help them compete with the highly popular graphic chips offered by Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices.
But when Intel gave a little demonstration of its chip last week during the Santa Clara company’s annual San Francisco event for people working on Intel-related products, the reaction among some analysts was less than awestruck.
“The 3D graphics were underwhelming” compared with those offered by Nvidia’s and AMD’s chips, wrote Global Crown Research in a note to its clients.
In its own note, Raymond James called Intel’s unveiling of Larrabee “surprisingly pedestrian” and noted that “the sad demo tells us the project is in trouble.”
Back on Sept. 17, Palm released its long-awaited earnings. They were eagerly anticipated because these would be the first full quarter that included the performance of the Palm Pre. Ever since, analysts and investors have been trying to figure out whether the numbers were good news, bad news, or something else entirely.
This head scratching was reflected in the news coverage of the earnings. The Mercury News had a first-day headline that said “Pre Sales Give Palm A Boost.” But within a couple of days, the consensus seemed to turn against Palm, with analysts and others questioning just how good the numbers were, and worrying about the company’s outlook. Four days later, the Motley Fool wrote: “Palm Discovers Its Limits.”
The confusion was largely due to a change in accounting methods. More on that in a second. But once we take a closer look at the numbers, it seems clear to me that Palm seems to be setting itself up to be sold. And that would likely need to happen sometime in the next six to 12 months.
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