Rose Cantine

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 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 [...]

Farhad Manjoo, Salon’s tech columnist, did quite a bit of research and showed that Macs are indeed cheaper than PCs. Moreover, their eBay resale value is higher:
Even for computers, brand matters. This week I compared prices of several machines from Dell, Gateway and other PC vendors against Apple’s lineup of Macs. In most cases comparable [...]

In the past few weeks, I have attended two conferences, Mobile 2.0 in San Francisco and Nokia’s Mobile Mashup in Palo Alto, on the supposedly new world of mobile Internet, a paradise where everyone can use these incredible applications on their mobile phones AND access the Internet in all its glory. Unfortunately we’re stuck with [...]

Walt Mossberg says that the amount of control that US cellular operators have over handsets and applications is terrible for innovation:
So it’s intolerable that the same country that produced all this has trapped its citizens in a backward, stifling system when it comes to the next great technology platform, the cellphone. A shortsighted and often [...]

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 [...]

Orange, Apple’s exclusive partner in France, is required to sell the iPhone unlocked, if requested by a customer. The reason: French law prohibits the tying of a device to a cellular service. Operators can sell phones for a lower price if they subsidize it, but if the customer just wants the phone, they have to [...]