Facebook Comments Epitomizes Everything I Hate About Facebook
9:30 am PDT • April 3, 2011
It’s been a month since we introduced Facebook Comments round these parts, time enough to have given it some serious consideration. And my conclusions are as follows: …are you kidding…
How The Mainstream Media Is Failing Us With Its Nuclear Hysteria
7:17 am PDT • March 24, 2011
The news from Japan is both awful and appalling. Awful: 23,000 confirmed dead or missing, and counting. Appalling: pretty much anything to do with the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant. Nuclear…
Media & Entertainment
Listen Closely: Broadcastr Brings You An Audio Guide To The Whole Wide World
8:31 am PDT • March 19, 2011
I’m a huge William Gibson fan, not least for the ideas with which his books overflow. One such in Spook Country was location-based virtual art: VR images that can only…
The Android Kill Switch: Mea Culpa
7:03 am PDT • March 16, 2011
Over the weekend I wrote a piece which argued that walled gardens were conquering the Internet, and Google’s ability to to remotely delete apps from Android devices effectively turned Android…
Ten days ago Google discovered that apparently innocuous Android apps were in fact infested with “DroidDream” malware that included an Android rootkit, with the apparent intent of creating a smartphone…
Media & Entertainment
RIM Finally Sees The Light. Unfortunately, It’s An Onrushing Train – Or Is It?
6:11 am PST • March 5, 2011
Strange things are afoot in my hometown of Waterloo, Canada, which doubles as Research In Motion’s headquarters. ShopSavvy says that someone there has been running their Android app — on…
Burning Chrome
7:23 am PST • February 27, 2011
“A good player goes where the puck is. A great player goes where the puck is going to be”—The Great One Google made a few interesting announcements this week. First,…
Quora vs. StackExchange: Why, Joel, Why?
8:00 am PST • February 20, 2011
The Q&A land rush is on. Quora, of course, has been hyped to the moon, and not without reason. Fortune magazine recently profiled five more Q&A sites, and three new…
The End Of History, Part II
8:00 am PST • February 13, 2011
The world is quaking. Egypt and Tunisia are overthrown; Gabon, Jordan, Sudan, Syria and Yemen are rocking. Some say this is thanks to Twitter and Facebook. Others, notably Malcolm Gladwell…
In Praise Of Piracy
9:29 am PST • February 5, 2011
I’ve had to think a lot about digital rights management lately. Not that I wanted to. But I recently did some eye-opening contract software development for a DRM-heavy media app,…
When The Drones Come Marching In
7:01 am PST • January 29, 2011
Way back in the 1970s, hardware-hacker hobbyists built kit computers like the Altair 8800 — and in doing so paved the way for the computer revolution that would reshape every…
The 4-Hour Body: The Real App You Are Working On Is An App Called Yourself (Review)
9:27 am PST • January 15, 2011
Tim Ferriss is a 33-year-old Silicon Valley angel investor, consultant, Singularity University advisor, and former entrepreneur who in 2007 published a book called The 4-Hour Workweek; in 2008 won Wired’s…
Can Google Get Its Mojo Back?
9:49 am PST • January 8, 2011
A spectre is haunting Mountain View. No, not bed bugs: bit rot. Google is in serious decline. I don’t see how they can deny it. They have famously always been…
The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be
7:56 am PST • December 31, 2010
My advice for the new year: go East and South, young man and woman … and investor. America, Europe, and Japan are stagnant and ponderous. More and more, in the…
It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad App World
7:02 am PST • December 24, 2010
Editor’s note: Contributor Jon Evans is an author and software engineer. He hails from the Great White North, but we let him write here anyway. Report from the app-development trenches:…
Google eBooks: Is That All There Is?
9:28 am PST • December 18, 2010
Two weeks ago the Google eBookstore finally launched, and the world was briefly amazed. Google Editions, as it was known until launch, was the book world’s Duke Nukem Forever: vaporware…
Letter From Canada: Why Is America So Furious About Wikileaks?
6:54 am PST • December 11, 2010
The most baffling thing about the Wikileaks Cablegate kerfuffle is the massive foot-shooting overreaction across the entire American political spectrum. Here in the rest of the world (okay, in Canada),…
Here Comes The Wetware
12:46 pm PST • December 4, 2010
Throw out your touchscreens, kibosh your Kinects: thought-controlled computing is the new new thing. Brain-computer interface technology has been simmering for years, and seems finally ready to bubble out of…
Can Anything Stop The Facebook Juggernaut?
11:37 am PST • November 25, 2010
So. Facebook. $35 billion valuation; 600 million users; 25% of all US Web traffic — and all that with fewer employees than Google has job openings. The inventor of the World…
Media & Entertainment
I Have Seen The Future, And It Looks A Lot Like Bump (Without The Bump)
6:00 am PST • November 20, 2010
There is something about exchanging information by bumping fists that is deeply satisfying. What I like most about the iPhone app Bump is that it’s different. Its features are nifty…
Media & Entertainment
Dear Foursquare, Gowalla: Please Let’s Stop Pretending This Is Fun
7:49 am PST • November 13, 2010
It’s a bad month to be Foursquare or Gowalla. Ten days ago, 900-pound gorilla Facebook announced Facebook Deals for Facebook Places (i,e., location-based coupons) and check-ins for third-party apps. A…
Editor’s note: Guest author Jon Evans is a novelist, journalist, and software engineer. Oh, Research In Motion. You never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. RIM was born in…
