This the story of a black faux-leather chair, the kind you can buy at Walmart for $99, that ended up costing me five grand. Very early in the days of Distil, my partner Steve and I hooked up with this lawyer / advisor. We’ll call him Bill (not just a pseudonym. I’ve honestly forgotten his name) Steve had worked with Bill before when Steve was getting his consulting business off the ground. We would meet Bill at the pub or hockey rink and bounce ideas off of him. He helped us with the incorporat...  show all text

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On popular Web sites, misinformation about antipiracy legislation amounted to an abuse of trust and a misuse of power.

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Hulu isn't supposed to be a success. And Jason Kilar isn't supposed to have a job. But it is, and he does. So what's next?

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Foursquare, about to celebrate its third birthday, is big but not huge. It has signed up 15 million users, hired over 100 employees and now boasts several million check-ins per day. That is impressive work for three years, but it must keep growing. To do so, Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley says the company is in the process of redesigning its mobile app for a broader audience, disassembling it and trying to put its features back together in a way that's more useful and interesting....  show all text

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Five factors to consider when choosing a Platform as a Service.

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The newly released Chrome for Android beta is a full port of the Chrome browser for desktop operating systems and is intended to eventually replace th

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Any kind of employer assistance and support stretches your training and certification dollars further.

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Football and the Internet seem to go together, but traffic figures from Sandvine suggest that people went offline when the Super Bowl started on Sunday night. During the season, it would seem people would use their mobile devices and laptops while watching the game to socialize with friends and to keep up with popular Fantasy Football leagues. And that may be true during the season, but it didn’t bear out on Sunday when Sandvine’s Better Broadband Blog reported that the Super Bowl created a “su...  show all text

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It’s beautiful, it’s addictive, and now Pinterest is having its glorious hockey stick moment. TechCrunch has attained exclusive data from comScore showing Pinterest just hit 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other standalone site in history. In fact, users are spending so much time sharing their favorite images that now only Facebook and Tumblr have more social media time on site than Pinterest. Who’s propelling its rise? 18-34 year old upper  show all text

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While I’ve always detested the iOS versus Android numbers game, I couldn’t help but notice that the iPhone 4s launch catapulted Apple past Android according to numbers from two analyst firms. Let’s start with NPD, which had good news for both companies, depending on how you looked at the numbers. NPD looked at US market figures only. For starters, iOS and Android accounted for an astonishing 90 percent of the market, according to NPD, but how that breaks down depends whether you look at handse...  show all text

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Path uploads your entire iPhone address book to its servers 8 Feb 2012 – Singapore It all started innocently enough. I was thinking of implementing a Path Mac OS X app as part of our regularly scheduled hackathon. Using the awesome mitmproxy tool which was featured on the front page of the Hacker News yesterday, I started to observe the various API calls made to Path’s servers from the iPhone app. It all seemed harmless enough until I observed a POST request to https://api.path.com/3/contacts/a...  show all text

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It is by far the lesser known of Apple’s first two big Superbowl ads. The one most everyone knows is the famous 1984 ad directed by Ridley Scott (Blade Runner) that aired during the Superbowl in 1984, just prior to the launch of the first Macintosh in January of that year.

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A research firm that measures the security effectiveness of browsers noticed something it thought might be fishy with the way Chrome was doing things. Turns out, there may currently be a privacy concern about Google's use of end user IP addresses as part of its Safe Browsing API.

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Deep-thinking, sensitive and publicity-shy, introverts are often overlooked, or worse, dismissed, by a culture that values quick action, fast talk, and showmanship, argues author Susan Cain . Charismatic leaders who can work a room are favored for

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Five ways to solve expensive problems using VMware Player.

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We’ll come back to our series on the Independent IT Life in the next post, but first … an interlude. A few weeks ago I introduced the idea of a Singularity Signal - a sort of “canary in a coal mine”, indicating that Artificial Intelligence was getting too powerful — that could happen well before computers become self-aware. In fact, I’d like to continue that premise into today’s post — the idea that computers do not need to be self-aware in order to act like they are and, in effect, to force hu...  show all text

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Just because you didn’t like Samsung’s commercial doesn’t make the stylus any less valid.

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A small DDOS attack can smash your Web site like a bug just as easily as a big one.

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Last week, we talked about the impact of the bring your own device phenomenon on IT. It’s become accepted practice in many organizations to let users bring their devices and many are choosing iOS much to the chagrin of IT. While Android comes with its own set of potential mine fields, a Network World report from MacIT, the IT track of the Macworld conference, indicated there were complaints aplenty from IT folks who are stuck supporting devices that are clearly designed for consumers. IT is left  show all text

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I have often written about how innovative Amazon is as a company. It’s probably the online company I respect the most, from its amazingly valuable (to my family, anyway) Prime service to its works-on-all-devices Kindle format. I haven’t really talked much about one area where Amazon innovates, its S3 online storage service. S3 is a service that essentially virtualizes storage and then makes it accessible through an API. As a result, S3 is a cloud storage “device” that can (and has been) baked i...  show all text

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Last week I wrote about how content is the new gold, and to push that metaphor a little further, this week I want to talk about the value of quality, custom content. I've been seeing more examples of Read more...

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Windows 8's Metro: The face of a DOA operating system. Some of my die-hard Windows friends are very excited by Windows 8 arrival later this year. Others fear that Windows 8 will be a repeat of Microsoft’s Vista disaster. Me? I know Windows 8 will be a Vista-sized fiasco. Before jumping into why I think far most PC users will still be running Windows 7 in 2016 than Windows 8, let me explain that while I prefer Linux as my desktop operating system, I don’t see Windows 8 charge into a brick wall as  show all text

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In small form-factor devices, ARM rules. The ARM processor is a concept managed by a seemingly magical enemy (ARM Holdings, Ltd.) of the biggest processor companies on the planet. Its very existence is the crux of ancient (for the computer industr

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NEWS ANALYSIS: The Android Market was kind of like the Wild West until Google Bouncer showed up as the new sheriff in town.

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Cloud Computing's becoming a permanent fixture for companies and organizations around the world.

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The big news this week is Facebook’s announcement that it would take the company public, in one of the largest offering in history, raising an expected US$5 billion in the process. As this is the largest tech IPO since Google, it is time to run the number and assess whether similarities or difference exist when it comes to base numbers. What appears there seems to justify the $75–100 billion valuation some see the company getting at IPO while providing a few points of concerns about the future ...  show all text

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