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Let's start with this: Jonathan Schwartz knew that the sale of Sun Microsystems was inevitable.

Schwartz, you may recall, was Sun's last chief executive--the guy who, in 2006, inherited control of a trailblazing company that had seen better days. He was full of personality until his departure, which he announced in a haiku tweet, but he acknowledges that there wasn't much he could have done to reverse the slide that eventually led to Oracle's 2009 deal to buy the company for $7.4 billion.

Could Schwartz have slowed Sun's decline? Sure. But stopped it? Not … Read more

Let me tell you a story about Richard M. Nixon and the Cold War--and yes, I promise it's relevant to a blog post about Google's controversial move to integrate its Google+ network deeply into the Google search engine.

In October 1969, President Nixon secretly elevated the U.S. military to full global readiness alert and ordered bombers loaded with nuclear weapons to fly near the Soviet border. If that sounds like an impulsive and dangerous move--well, that's because Nixon wanted the Soviet leaders to believe that he was so impulsive and dangerous that he might do anything. … Read more

Week before last, Google fired its biggest salvo yet in its battle with Facebook to be the world's most important Web site: It began rolling information from its Google+ social network into the results at its namesake search engine.

I'm not sure how the average Google user feels about this development, but the response of the Google-watching blogosphere has been overwhelmingly critical. Search expert Danny Sullivan has done an excellent series of posts, saying that Google is playing favorites by emphasizing Google+ over rivals such as Facebook and Twitter. Sarah Lacy of PandoDaily argues that Google has violated a promise … Read more

LAS VEGAS--There are pedometers all over this year's CES (a few of them being tested simultaneously on my own hip), and while there's nothing particularly special about the $25 GeoPalz pedometer for kids in terms of the pedometer itself, its reward system has a few tricks up its, er, shoe clip.

The family-owned business, out of Boulder, Colo., has been working on the motivate-kids-to-move gag since 2008, and features a step counter that converts into online points for prizes such as books, CDs, and sports equipment.

This week, GeoPalz is taking the motivation game a step further by … Read more

LAS VEGAS--If you've been pining for a continuous heart rate monitor that doesn't strap onto (and continually pinch or slide down) your chest, the new company Basis Science may have just the solution for you, and it doubles as a sleek little watch.

The Basis Band, one of this year's dozen or so CES Health and Wellness Innovations Awards honorees, is equipped with multiple sensors that track not only heart rate (using optical blood flow sensors) but also activity level (via 3D accelerometer), calories burned, and temperature and galvanic skin response.

The water-resistant black or white band … Read more

At first, I admired the new version of smartphone social network app Path more than I liked it.

When Path 2 premiered at the end of November, I thought it had one of the prettiest, most clever user interfaces I'd ever seen on any piece of software, for any type of device. I also bristled, however, at the cap it placed on your social network: It let you friend a maximum of 150 people, who were supposed to consist only of loved ones and close friends. The limitation seemed artificial and pushy, and I was skeptical that my loved … Read more

It was a little like learning that an old friend had passed away without me knowing about it.

I recently tried to log in to my account at Threadsy, an extremely clever Web-based service that wove multiple Gmail accounts, Facebook, and Twitter into one interface that let you handle all your communications in one place. When I did, I got a message: "threadsy will be shutting down on November 2, 2011. We have been honored to serve you, our passionate community."

Wow. For a few months, Threadsy--which debuted at the TechCrunch 50 conference in September 2009 … Read more

Shortly before Christmas, teenager Ben Breedlove, creator of the YouTube channel BreedloveTV, posted a two-part video about his lifelong heart condition, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. It was the high school senior's most serious video and would prove to be his last.

On Christmas morning, while playing with his younger brother in the family's backyard, Breedlove succumbed to the condition that causes a thickening of heart muscle, went into cardiac arrest, and died.

In the days following, Breedlove's final two videos--in which he does not say a word but cycles through a series of flash cards to the music "… Read more

'Tis the season to be jolly. And a lot of us are during the holidays, if statistical analyses of our tweets provide sufficient measure.

But overall happiness appears to be on a gradual decline since 2009, according to a University of Vermont analysis of some 46 billion words tweeted by 63 million users since 2009.

The team compared a wide range of words and phrases--including hahaha and lol--to "happiness scores" of the 10,000 most common English words. Words such as happy and laughter appear at the top of the 1-to-9 scale, while terrorist gets 1.30.

Not … Read more