Whether your goal is to reduce oil imports, lower carbon dioxide emissions, or just save money, geothermal heat pumps MAY be an answer for you. In many places and under many circumstances, this heat source makes economic sense without any need for subsidy (although, in...
Newly formed Frontline Wireless, LLC has a star-studded team behind it including former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, Jim Barksdale of Netscape fame, and super-VC John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins. Frontline has proposed a plan to the FCC for the use of 10MHz of the 700MHz...
Whether you're an old hand at the new, new thing or a relative Internet newbie just using the Internet for email, shopping, eBay and Google, this post might be interesting to you. What's happening is that the tools of Web 2.0 like blogs, RSS (don't...
The distinction between blogs and other types of website is quickly fading. This is very good news for non-technical people who want to have a website because the blog services like TypePad which I use for Fractals of Change are both very easy to use...
If broadband is good, wideband must be better; right? Well, maybe. Yesterday an AP story carried on Forbes.com reported that Comcast CEO Brian Roberts demoed a cable modem providing downloads at the blazing speed on 150 megabits per second. Comcast’s standard offer around here offers only 6 megabits today...
Recently I blogged There Won’t Be Any Landlines in 2013. Like many of you, Phil Leigh, the President of Inside Digital Media, is somewhat skeptical of my claim although he does think that T-Mobile’s announcement of a nation wide rollout of its WiFi-capable cellphone is significant. He interviewed me...
It started with a post by CmdrTaco on Slashdot saying: “replicant108 wrote in to give us Tom Evslins fascinating account of working for Microsoft in the early 90s.” All of a sudden traffic skyrocketed to over 100x the normal hourly volume for the Fractals of Change website....
In a comment on my post on Bill Gates’ management style, reader Kempton asked:“..do you think has billg got mellow out a little as he aged, got a great wife and partner, and also kids? He still seem quite geeky but I sure hope with age, he got mellow out...
There is a The Wall Street Journal story today about T-Mobile’s plan for a national roll-out of Hotspot @ Home - its WiFi enabled cellphone service. Currently, according to The Journal, phones from Nokia and Samsung can be used with both traditional cellular towers and some WiFi hotspots; the...
You could always tell which group had a meeting in the room before your meeting by the smell. Marketing slime a term of affection were just as smart and tough as developers; they just smelled better – both the men and the women.Meetings DID NOT start with chit-chat. ...
Back when I was tomev at Microsoft (1992-1994), billg managed to a large degree by bullying. Even in conversation, btw, people at Microsoft were known by their email names. I didn’t report directly to billg; but, during much of the time I was there, I...
Facebook is a wonderful example of the next wave of blockbuster new Web apps. Didn’t realize that though until I read Andy Kessler’s interview with 22 year old Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who is reputed to have already turned down a billion dollar plus offer for the site from...
Just as surely as Apple didn’t reinvent cellular service with the introduction of the iPhone, it DID accelerate the changes taking place in the music business by the deal it announced today with EMI for the electronic distribution of music WITHOUT copy protection aka DRM or digital rights management. ...
Nerds are used to long hours. But the long hours you spent getting a program to work are nothing like the hours you’ll have to put in if you start a company and have employees. If you’re not prepared to work twelve hours at least six days each week...
Mary’s training a puppy. She’s taking the job very seriously and doing it well. Both of us think that we should have taken as disciplined an approach to managing people in our entrepreneurial days.The toughest thing for an entrepreneur to learn is that most people want to be led....
The big Internet news recently was almost ignored in all the hullabaloo about Viacom suing GooTube. A coalition of Microsoft, Google, Dell, Hewlett Packard, Intel and Phillips have been urging the FCC to allow frequencies in the 700MHz spectrum which will become available in 2009 to be used for highspeed...
Just announced Skype Prime allows you to charge a caller for speaking with you. All calls start out as free and then go to a paid basis when and if the caller agrees to the rate you want to charge. Rates can be either on a time basis...
A New York Times story this morning is full of gushing praise from environmentalists for the promise by private equity funds Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company and the Texas Pacific Group for promising to scrap plans for eight coal-fired plants at Texas utility TXU Corporation which they are proposing to...
Streaming video is what we - a generation of TV viewers – grew up with. You watch what is broadcast when it’s broadcast as it’s broadcast. You blink; you miss something. Something disrupts the signal; a fragment of what you’re watching is gone forever. Doesn’t matter whether the...
It’s very interesting that people have virtual lives with virtual money in the meta-space of Second Life. It’s much more exciting that the Web is starting to have a profound effect on people’s real lives. That’s only possible because broadband, always-on communication is now available to a critical...