I spent last Friday night at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco watching the Crunchies. The third annual version of the tech award show was co-hosted by three leading high-tech blogs: GigaOm, VentureBeat, and TechCrunch. According to the official Cruchies description, the show aims to “recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year.” You can read a nice overview of the event and after-party by Jessica Guynn of the Los Angeles Times.
It was an entertaining, if low budget, affair. In fact, the casual nature of the show in such a fancy space was quite charming. There were corporate jugglers providing entertainment and the reliably funny Richter Scales served up a nice glee-club style spoof (see video above).
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:
Shares of VirnetX, the developer of Internet-calling and instant messaging software that sued Microsoft in 2007 claiming the software giant infringed three of its patents, doubled in value today after the Scotts Valley company reported that the federal court hearing the suit had issued a “Markman” order that adopted interpretations of the patent claim language that it Read the rest of this entry »
That’s about all you can think after seeing the latest video game sales numbers from research firm NPD Group. NPD reported earlier today that U.S. retail sales of game merchandise fell 31 percent in June compared with the same month a year earlier.
The industry has posted year-over-year sales declines for every month since April. That fall-off has negated what started off as a fairly strong year, with sizeable growth through March.
If history is any guide, investors who are interested in buying shares of Microsoft might want to do that before it actually releases its new Windows 7 operating system upgrade.
That’s the conclusion of a Bloomberg story published today by reporter Dina Bass, who looked at Read the rest of this entry »
I recently bought a 13-inch MacBook. And I’m giddy a like a school girl about it.
But rather than just wax poetic about the joys of Apple, I wanted to share my journey and a few of the things I learned about myself along the way.
Just to get one thing out of the way, I’m not going to indulge in a lot of PC or Microsoft bashing. I’ve used various PCs and Windows-laptops over the past decade, and I have few complaints. But what was interesting, and this was something I didn’t recognize until much later, was how little passion they inspired. I liked these machines, but I certainly never bragged about having one, and never talked them up to friends.
VirnetX, the Scotts Valley supplier of tools for securing real-time communications over the Internet, has hired a Texas-based law firm with a track record of fighting Microsoft in court to represent it in its current suit against the software giant.
McKool Smith will now lead VirnetX’s litigation effort in a suit brought against Microsoft in February 2007 Read the rest of this entry »
The gathering is usually a good opportunity to take the pulse of the entrepreneurial community. In advance, I spoke with SVASE President and CEO Chris Gill to get his thoughts about the state of Silicon Valley during the downturn. Read the rest of this entry »
You know that you are in trouble when the chief software architect of Microsoft, a company synonymous with bloated code, criticizes your product as too complicated.
Coming from Bill Gates, Microsoft’s retired chairman, that assessment of “Wave,” a new collaboration tool developed by Google engineers, Jan and Lars Rasmussen, may have sounded like sour grapes. After all, mass enthusiasm for Wave, which was unveiled last week, stole the thunder from the introduction of Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine.
But the critic was Ray Ozzie, the soft-spoken, painstakeningly polite, universally admired developer of Lotus Notes and Groove. Ozzie began by earnestly praising the software developers who created Wave. “I have nothing but the most high degree of sincere respect for the people who took this on,” Ozzie said, and you could tell from the tone of his voice and the look on his face that he meant it.
Ozzie, after all is the guru of collaboration. It’s the topic his mind wanders to when it finds itself unoccupied, he told a crowd gathered for a Churchill Club event in Palo Alto on Thursday night. Ozzie said he continuously ponders how people can “more effectively connect” their brains so they can better work together. What he has seen of Wave, Ozzie added, he liked. “It’s nice,” he said.
But he cautioned that Web software needs to be simple. With Wave, “complexity is an issue.”
The remarks may have helped puncture some of the hype around Wave. A demo of the software last week at Google’s developer conference last week prompted a standing ovation. At its most basic, Wave ties e-mail together with instant messaging. But Wave doesn’t stop with a more diverse inbox, it seeks to reconceptualize online communication.
Wave is currently going through internal testing at Google and it is unclear when it will be available to the public. Though dubious that Wave will grow into a big success, Ozzie predicted the project would contribute to developing better Web-based tools. “We will learn a lot from their technology,” he said.
The games industry frequently surprises me … and not in a good way.
One of the most obvious things about the current console cycle has been that the Wii is the dominant platform. To date, Nintendo, has sold 50 million Wiis worldwide. In contrast, Sony and Microsoft have sold about 52 million PlayStation 3s and Xbox 360s — combined.
At least in the United States, the Wii’s lead on the other two consoles has just kept getting bigger. In recent months, the Wii has typically outsold both the PlayStation 3 and the 360 combined — by a wide margin. Read the rest of this entry »
Shares of VirnetX, the developer of Internet-calling and instant messaging software that sued Microsoft in 2007 claiming the software giant infringed three of its patents, doubled in value today after the Scotts Valley company reported that the federal court hearing the suit had issued a “Markman” order that adopted interpretations of the patent claim language that it 
If history is any guide, investors who are interested in buying shares of Microsoft might want to do that before it actually releases its new Windows 7 operating system upgrade.
VirnetX, the Scotts Valley supplier of tools for securing real-time communications over the Internet, has hired a Texas-based law firm with a track record of fighting Microsoft in court to represent it in its current suit against the software giant.
On June 9, I’ll be stopping by the annual 
too complicated.
One of the most obvious things about the current console cycle has been that the Wii is the dominant platform. To date, Nintendo, has sold 50 million Wiis worldwide. In contrast, Sony and Microsoft have sold about 52 million PlayStation 3s and Xbox 360s — combined.
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