Upon opening the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday, I scanned through pieces heralding the end of HD-DVD and the death of the middle class to find a little hidden graf. Burger King joints near Las Vegas did the unthinkable. They took away our beloved Whoppers. Sure,...
I don't know about you, but I ride mass transit every day. Granted, it is the city of San Francisco, and it is one of the most connected cities in the country, but I'm sure the same axiom would hold across every urban area in the U.S. Until today,...
The Chinese Ministry of Information wants the world to know how connected their population is. In fact, it may not be too difficult for a country over one billion strong to report that 539.4 million Chinese now use mobile phones, which would trump the entire American adult population more than...
Research firm, Basex has declared 2008 the "Year of Information Overload," and to add a cherry to the top of that sundae, they say $650 billion in productivity was lost in 2006 due to email, SMS messages, and IMs. One could guess it was even higher in 2007 (no thanks...
Google's CEO Eric Schmidt seems to think he's on to something. Schmidt says he believes 90% of today's computer tasks can do just as well when housed on the World Wide Web. Of course that leaves the remaining 10%, which Schmidt notes is mainly comprised of high-end graphics processing (and...
Two pieces of news hit the wires recently. The most surprising of the two is the fact that gaming outpaced the U.S. economy by a ratio of 4 to 1 from 2003-2006. The second is the merger of two large game producers, Activision and Blizzard, in a reported $18.1...
If there's one report that you should read today it's this 50-page Power Point presentation by Lee Rainie from PEW Internet --don't worry, it's much less intimidating than it seems. In it, he goes into a full description of the present and future of digital media, the growing scores of...
If stats from U.K. music e-tailer 7 Digital are any indication by way of Ars Technica, then the answer to the headline would be, "yes." Music with digital rights management DRM is four times less likely to sell than tracks without DRM protection. Additionally, those who buy DRM-free music are...
A terabyte is a lot of data... but data needs are growing. Many corporations have a need for high-speed networks, and even with the best of broadband, you can get a respectable 150 megabits a second which is much faster than your typical consumer cable connection. Download times are...
