The nuclear situation in Japan is now starting to rattle markets that were previously prepared to shrug off the disaster in the context of global economic recovery. At this point, I still believe that the issue is short-selling by hedge funds rather than any indication that the disaster will impact global economics in the longer…
The earthquake in Japan and the related threat of nuclear reactor problems are surely the headline items for today. The human scale of the disaster isn’t even known at this point, but many of even those who have survived uninjured face a difficult future. Homes, businesses, and infrastructure have been severely damaged, and the consequences…
We’ve got a number of interesting points to end our week, and monetization issues are at the heart of them. Let’s get moving! Google is taking some steps that show how hard it is to be a portal player. First, it’s letting users block sites in search results, and second it’s classifying gmail to facilitate…
Nobody can say that the tech space isn’t moving at frightening speed, and that may be true on the business side as much as with the technology itself. We’ve got two stories of stunning shifts in the tech business landscape, and while neither are confirmed at this moment, there’s certainly a level of plausibility that…
Politicking over the net neutrality rules continues, with the House holding a hearing on the matter. It’s pretty hard for the House to overturn an FCC order without enacting legislation, and that’s not going to pass the Senate or a Presidential veto, so the whole thing is clearly an exercise. The real test for the…
It’s obvious that the big question this week, politically and economically, will be what happens in Libya. Politically, the situation poses a kind of double threat. First it’s a continuation of a kind of Middle-East-domino problem that might or might not result in democratic sweep of the region. Second, the turmoil puts western governments in…
The most interesting set of tech developments today relates to cloud computing positioning and services. At the Enterprise Connect conference, Salesforce and Global Crossing both made cloud announcements, and both had what I see as a common thread; create a SaaS cloud service and build a platform-as-a-service offering around it. Salesforce did this based on…
Juniper made a second major announcement in two weeks, this time its PTX MPLS-optical supercore switch. The product’s roots probably lie in early interest (“early” meaning the middle of the last decade) by Verizon in a new core architecture for IP networks that would eliminate the transit routing that was common in hierarchical IP cores. …
The big news today is Apple’s new iPad announcement, an event whose usual Apple drama was upstaged by a surprise visit by Steve Jobs. The essence of the announcement was familiar; iPads are making us smarter, healthier, richer, better looking, and so forth, and that’s from the first version. Now look what’s going to happen! What is…
The Internet has proved disruptive to a lot of traditional business models, and possibly none more than the retail model. Recent numbers from Forrester say that online retail sales will hit nearly $280 billion by 2015, and I think they could easily top $350 billion. While this is small potatoes in absolute terms, the online…