Rose Cantine

Not a day goes by without some kind of revelation about what’s being done with our user-generated content and our personal information on social networking sites and blog networks. The scandal around Facebook’s Beacon project, whose aim is to track and broadcast what Facebook users are doing on the Web, forced Facebook to back down.
In [...]

Deloitte’s annual media consumption report says 66% of Internet users would click on more online ads if they were better targeted to them, younger users don’t mind ads as much as older users since they are less likely to pay for content. What must surprise and annoy video portals like YouTube is that people hate [...]

Not exactly a business you can do in your pajamas and quite hazardous but fascinating and rewarding if you are up to it: opening a restaurant in Kabul (Afghanistan). A number of foreign women have opened restaurants in Kabul according to Women’s eNews, offering Thai, Mexican, Filipino, Indian and other kinds of cuisines to residents. [...]

Cory Doctorow has written an excellent piece about how Facebook suffers from exactly the same dilemma suffered by earlier online social networks: when everyone’s on, it’s not cool anymore. And worse — you’ll need to “defriend” people. Oh how to do this without offending people? You can’t. Here’s an excerpt from Cory’s article:
You’d think that [...]

Here’s an excerpt from a post on Marc Andreessen’s blog about the rise of Hollywood owner-entrepreneurs who don’t need the old studio system to bring their works to the public:
“The world is about to change,” Frank says. “Anyone with an Apple computer can make a movie now — it’s never been a more democratic medium. [...]

Here is a screenshot of my Facebook newsfeed dated 10 November 2007. Pay attention to the California Car Insurance sponsored ad in my feed. Is this all Facebook can do - insert stupid irrelevant sponsored ads about California car insurance to a person who lives in Amsterdam?
Facebook is purportedly worth $15 billion. If my company [...]

Microsoft launched a unified communications platform (merging email, instant messaging and telephony) that Business Division President Jeff Raikes claims will put an end to telephone tag:
“The era of dialing blind, the era of playing phone tag, the era of voice-mail jam…that era is ending . . . I don’t want to get in touch [...]