EA’s descent into hell
Great works of literature have the ability to resonate down the ages, earning fresh relevance as they are revived and their lessons applied to modern times.
The BBC’s dramatisation of Little Dorrit, just ended, seemed particularly timely as it highlighted Ponzi schemes and bank collapses in the 1850s, while Electronic Arts’ new game, Dante’s Inferno, could not come at a better time…or worse, to be more accurate.
Arguing over the “neutral” in net neutrality
Net neutrality – the idea that all internet traffic should be treated equally as it flows over broadband networks – is one of those slippery phrases that means different things to different people, depending on which side of the fence they sit.
Take the argument today between Google and the Wall Street Journal. The newspaper accused Google – which has been the strongest advocate of net neutrality, at least in public – of backing away from the principle by making secret arrangements with broadband companies to have its own internet traffic delivered faster.
Silicon Valley the winner as California moves ahead on greenhouse gases
Despite deep scepticism in some quarters about the economic impact, California’s Air Resources Board has backed AB32 (governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ambitious plan to cut the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by 30 per cent by 2020.)
You could call this the Silicon Valley Full Employment Act. CARB chairwoman Mary Nichols, announcing that the board had adopted the “scoping plan” for how to achieve the required reductions (equal to four tons of carbon dioxide a year for every man, woman and child in the state) made it clear what California hoped to get out of it.
Google Chrome has had a strange start to life. The browser is undoubtedly fast, and given it’s very new, has a lot of good features packed into it.
But where are the users? As Google took Chrome out of beta today , it revealed that the browser has gained 10m active users in its first 100 days. That sounds like a lot – until you compare it to others. Firefox – a rival browser that is more firmly established as the main alternative to Internet Explorer – has around 20 per cent of the browser market, compared to Chrome which is yet to break 1 per cent.
Why it’s still too early for Yahoo shareholders to count their chickens
Wall Street may be irrational, but it isn’t that irrational.
It’s been clear since Google walked that a search deal with Microsoft is the only way for Yahoo to make a meaningful difference to its performance in the short- or medium-term (notwithstanding the swingeing job cuts that took effect today.)
Nor is Microsoft hiding its intentions: after the last debacle, Steve Ballmer has, rightly, decided to be perfectly direct about his continuing interest, while at the same time stopping short of applying the thumb-screws to Yahoo again – at least for now.
So which factories will Sony close?
The restructuring that Sony announced on Tuesday – 8,000 job losses plus another 8,000 temporary workers, with five or six factory closures – has been criticised as light on specifics. The goal is to save Y100bn in the 2010 financial year, but there is no estimate of the cost, and little detail on which factories will close.Until Sony makes its intentions clear, all of its factory employees will feel under threat, but a few more details have now emerged.
The Amazon Cloud: no longer a mid-Atlantic kludge
As we’ve noted before, Amazon has been busy internationalising its cloud computing services step by step. A year ago it started offering the S3 storage service in Europe (an obvious first move, since privacy regulations often require companies to store sensitive data locally.) Earlier this year it announced a content distribution network (known as CloudFront) to put that information even closer to customers.
Now comes the step that will finally turn this into a true European cloud: customers will be able to elect to have their data processed as well as stored and distributed in Europe.
Clerk Dogs fetch movie matches
As a fan of film, I would have loved to have visited a certain video rental store in Manhattan Beach, California in the mid 80s.
It was there that the director Quentin Tarantino started out, as a video clerk discussing and recommending movies to film buffs all day.
It’s not quite the same, but San Francisco-based Clerk Dogs, a people-powered movie recommendation service launching today, is trying to recreate this personal service online.
Sony Ericsson goes Android
It takes more than one or two eye-catching gadgets, and more than a loose alliance of companies, to create a pervasive technology platform.
So Sony Ericsson’s announcement today that it will make an Android handset is an important sign of momentum for the Google-led open source mobile software initiative.
HTC’s first Android phone from T-Mobile got the ball rolling (I’ve already eaten humble pie on that one – it was certainly better than I’d expected based on the lack of buzz in Silicon Valley.) Motorola has also said it is pushing ahead with devices based on the software.
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