The rise of online video: Looking beyond the strike
Mathew Ingram points to a BBC report that describes a sharp increase in the number of people visiting online video sites since the Hollywood writers' strike began. Both sources also point to the Pew Internet & American Life...
Second Life cracks down on "banks"
Linden Lab is finally banishing bogus banks from Second Life. It's amazing it took so long, particularly after the Ginko Financial collapse and other signs of financial irregularities, but the lawyers and business executives behind...
Dryad and the 3D modeling challenge
One of the bottlenecks that has held back the development of three-dimensional, computer-generated environments are the building tools. I've discussed the learning curve associated with standalone 3D modeling programs (see When...
Forget prime time: "Video snacking" at lunch creates a Web video niche
The New York Times has highlighted an interesting trend in Web video: "Video snacking," in which cube-bound viewers take some time to browse and share comedy clips, news reports, and other light video fare:In some offices, workers...
Former Linden Lab CTO relocates to USC Annenberg
A few weeks back there was a lot of buzz in Second Life surrounding the reported departure of Cory Ondrejka from parent company Linden Lab. Ondrejka, Linden Lab's CTO and the architect of the virtual world's technical infrastructure,...
A digital native discovers the Web
My daughter has finally discovered the joys of the Web. Not surprisingly, her interests have nothing to do with checking email, catching up with the news, blogging, or surfing to other text-based sites -- the stuff that I like to...
Video: Best gadgets of 2007, and the struggle for dominance in 2008
IDG has put together another video of tech highlights for 2007, this time covering the most sought-after gadgets of the year. The iPhone is a no-brainer, but there are a few other technologies that you may have missed, including...
Video: Best Future Technology of 2007
The following video, prepared by our colleagues in the IDG News Service in Japan and Boston, gives an overview of some emerging consumer technologies from the past year. A flexible version of Sony's OLED display has to be seen to be...
Ondrejka forced out of Second Life's parent company?
I was surprised to see this item on the front page of the New York Times website this evening: Cory Ondrejka, Linden Lab's CTO and a key architect of the virtual world almost since its inception, has supposedly been forced to step...
The ultimate IT kluge: Running IT operations at the South Pole
I just finished reading Rob Mitchell's interview with Henry Malmgren, an IT manager who oversees a rather unusual shop: The Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. When I worked at Network World at the beginning of this decade, I...
The global electronics supply chain: Who's responsible for cleaning up Chinese sweatshops?
A student group in Hong Kong recently published a blistering report about conditions at several Dell suppliers in China. The report, "The Manufacturing of Sweatshop Computers: Behind the Zero-Inventory Strategy," is enough to make...
Play as a research tool in Arden
Economist, author, and virtual worlds researcher Edward Castronova has announced the public release of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that he designed. The plot of Arden I, The World of William Shakespeare, inserts...
MIT's OpenCourseWare project sets an example for higher education
Six years ago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had a very bold vision: To share course materials from all MIT classes with the Web-connected public. This dovetailed with MIT's mission to "advance knowledge and educate...
Wikipedia infighting: Why is this a surprise?
Uh-oh. Another scandal at Wikipedia. The Register lays out the evidence, and reports the angry reaction:... Many longtime editors are up-in-arms. And the site's top administrators seem more concerned with petty site politics than...
Review: The Flip video camera
Why do video cameras have such terrible UIs? In the early days of analog video cameras, it was kind of expected -- the only people who could afford them were pros or enthusiasts, and it made sense to have knobs to control color...
If you think Internet advertising is irritating now ...
Remember "punch the monkey"?It was kind of funny, at first. It was the year 2000, Internet advertising was just starting to move away from banners and other print-based concepts, and a silly, animated, flash-based game was a novel...
Harvard takes down a Factiva-powered text-mining operation
The Crimson, the student-run newspaper at Harvard, has a report of an unusual incident in a campus library. Administrators at the Harvard Business School library were forced to block a user's IP address from accessing Factiva, an...
Scaled pricing: A new business model for music
The recording industry is in trouble. While the transition from analog records to digital CDs was a profitable one for Capitol, Universal, Sony/BMG, Warner Brothers, and the other big labels in the 1980s and early 1990s, the ongoing...
Wii Watch: Desperate parents, meet the hoarders and profiteers
Last night on the local newscast, one of the anchors had a segment about trying to buy a Nintendo Wii. And she had the same results that I did a few weeks ago: No consoles available anywhere. It's not just here, either: Nintendo...
The Kurzweil interview, continued: Portable computing, virtual reality, immortality, and strong vs. narrow AI
My 40-minute interview with futurist, inventor, and author Ray Kurzweil was too long to print in its entirety in the The Grill, so I'm publishing the additional segments on my blog. Earlier I posted Kurzweil's comments about the...
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