Business currents

So Ben (Bailout) Bernanke has been testifying before Congress the last couple of days, predicting a possible contraction in the first half of the year. Lovely. Though considering the Fed's predictive track record, I wouldn't hit the panic button just yet.

How all of this economic upset is going to affect e-commerce obviously continues to be the big unanswered question on Wall Street. Piper Jaffray just came out with the results of a survey of 200 consumers which, among other things, suggests that the grim spending outlook for the remainder of this year will be, well, grim.

These … Read more

My first cell phone was made by Motorola. It will probably be my last.

The dilemma Motorola faces is that my experience is multiplied over and over, to the point where (rightly or not) millions of people just don't believe the company's still on the hip edge of technology. That may not reflect the entire story--I'm sure Motorola's got cool stuff in the labs--but perceptions matter even when they're not always true. Motorola has a history of having a hit phone and then going through a terrible drought. And right now, it's suffering through … Read more

So I'm puzzling how to make Twitter more useful to me. Up until now, it's been the equivalent of a school science project. Interesting, but random.

Random in terms of what some twits tweet about. The good stuff is quite good. The bad stuff is a waste of time. Twitter's good, but there's a way to make it great. All we need is a smart developer or two to take it to the next step.

Over the course of any 24-hour period, the dreck outweighs the interesting feeds by a 70-30 margin. Of course, this is … Read more

Forget April Fools' Day, there's real stuff to mark April 1, 2008. Thanks to MUNI, the mechanized joke which is supposed to function as a transport system in San Francisco, I'm late to the game. Anyway, kudos to Anil Dash and the other folks who have weighed in on the April Fools' hijinks. Some are funny, a lot are lame, and most are confusing. (Full disclosure: News.com wiseacres posted a few as well. I think they were OK, but you can judge yourself.)

But if you want to mark the occasion, I would offer two anniversaries for … Read more

Personal digital assistants, cell phones, smartphones--whatever you want to call them--keep getting smaller, thinner, and lighter. Congrats to the engineers who keep coming up with this stuff, but I'm going blind trying to keep up with them.

My tired eyes could use a break, though I know this is the equivalent of tilting at windmills. We get older and our bodies inevitably start betraying us--sometimes sooner, sometimes later. But if the inventors of tomorrow's gadgets are going to continue to think small, they've also got to start thinking big. From a purely design perspective, Apple did a … Read more

Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved a $267 million loan to a Denver, Colo.-based company called Open Range. The idea: build out broadband service for 518 rural communities in 17 states

The loan represents one of the federal government's biggest ever public-private investments in broadband service. Considering Uncle Sam's miserly approach, to date, that's not saying much. But here's what caught my eye: Those without service will have access to broadband and other technologies for the first time in their lives.

Give me a break!

They must be kidding, right? Over … Read more

My wife's family back in Brazil is going to love this. Starting, well...now, Craigslist is available in Portuguese, French (both Quebecois and Parisian, naturalment), Italian and German.

Until now, the service offered support in English and Spanish.

In the blurb posted on his site, founder Craig Newmark writes, "The programmers inform me that Basque, maybe Klingon, are next."

Tres drole, amigo (I wish I knew how to say that in Klingon.)

Ray Ozzie is one of the most well-respected computer scientists around. He pioneered innovations in groupware software during previous stints at Lotus and Groove and now is working to bring Microsoft's technology strategy more in step with the demands of the Internet age as its chief software architect.

So when the man speaks, it pays to listen. Ozzie piqued my attention recently when he offered a provocative rumination on the suitability of current operating systems and client machines during a recent interview with Om Malik.

The geeks know Twitter but most folks don't, and that's one reason why Facebook was able to persuade Hong Kong rich guy Li Ka-shing to pay at least $100 million for a piece of the company.

As long as Facebook can make the case that it's the hippest of the new, new things out there in cyberland, fine. And for the time being, it's probably got little to worry about. The OpenSocial Foundation--my colleague Caroline McCarthy calls it "The Justice League of social media"--is still a concept waiting to materialize. There are a … Read more