As a freelance writer, I am working for publications including the New York Times, USA Today, Fortune.com and San Francisco magazine. Links to my most recent work are below:
New York Times: May 25, 2008
A Change in the Lineup (from the Suits column)
Peter A. Magowan, 66, has worn many hats in his life. He is a scion of the founders of Merrill Lynch and is a former chief executive of Safeway, and he is now the president and managing general partner of the San Francisco Giants.
Mr. Magowan announced last week that he would take off his baseball cap at the end of this season and hand it to William H. Neukom, president of the American Bar Association and former general counsel at Microsoft.
Mr. Neukom, also 66, helped steer Microsoft through its toughest antitrust battles. Next season, he will take up the challenge of trying to lead the Giants to their first World Series title after 50 years of frustration in San Francisco. The team has suffered three consecutive sub-.500 seasons, and is near last place in its division.
New York Times: May 21, 2008
‘The Coffee Was Lousy. The Wait Was Long.’
THE Rooz Cafe, a restaurant and coffee shop in Oakland, Calif., signals its distaste for patrons who post reviews on Yelp.com with a small sign: No Yelpers.
The sign is routinely ignored by devotees of Yelp, a San Francisco Internet company that enables average folks to write reviews of everything from restaurants to plumbers to parks.
“If you want good coffee and a comfy place to work, I’d recommend this place,” wrote Stephanie S., who gave Rooz four stars. “And the No Yelpers sticker made me laugh.”
Rooz’s owner, Steve Ranjbin, said he put the sticker up as a joke, but added that he had a complaint about Yelp.
“Yelp does not respect us as business owners,” Mr. Ranjbin said. “They don’t listen to business owners unless you’re an advertiser paying Yelp.”
Mr. Ranjbin, who said that amateur reviews can hurt his business, said some had misquoted him or called his employees names, but that Yelp had refused to take these comments down. Yelp rarely removes reviews, even when advertisers complain, preferring to let the crowd have its say.
The proliferating reviews of Mr. Ranjbin’s establishment offer a good illustration of people’s newfound love of comparing notes via reviews online.
According to Nielsen/NetRatings, 2.5 percent of all Internet users in March went to Yelp.com, and traffic there quadrupled over the last year. Yelp tracks its users through Google Analytics, and the company, which is almost four years old, said it had 9.5 million unique visitors in April, nearly double the 5 million it reported last October. There are more than 2.6 million reviews on the site.
New York Times: May 21, 2008
Using the Web to Draw in Crowds
NIKI RUSS FEDERMAN feels that her 94-year-old family business, Russ & Daughters on the Lower East Side of New York, is fighting for survival in a retail environment under assault by chain stores and generic tastes.
The delicatessen cases loaded with caviar, smoked salmon, pickled herring and homemade cream cheese, not to mention the dried fruits, chocolates and halvah at the sweets counter, signify a bastion in a battle to keep Jewish food culture from disappearing.
Ms. Russ Federman, 30, whose great-grandfather, Joel Russ, founded the store, says that business is thriving — thanks, at least in part, to Web sites that attract young cosmopolitan crowds to the Houston Street store. Those sites include Chowhound, where food lovers flock, and Yelp, which enables anyone to review a business.
“Sites like Yelp make places like us seem hip, as opposed to being seen as stodgy old-school places,” Ms. Russ Federman said.
New York Times: May 21, 2008
A Movement and a Market Converge at a Bank
FOR 14 years, Cowgirl Creamery in San Francisco has been making award-winning organic cheeses and growing — to more than $8 million in sales last year. Yet no bank had ever actively sought its business until New Resource Bank came calling.
“A bank has never been excited about us,” said Sue Conley, a co-founder of the creamery, which is based in Petaluma, Calif. “Banks just haven’t understood what we’re doing or how it might be successful. We were really taken aback when New Resource said they’d like to work with us.”
New Resource opened in San Francisco in 2006 with the theory that helping green businesses like Cowgirl Creamery would be good for its own bottom line. Peter Liu, the founder of New Resource, had worked as a vice president at Credit Suisse First Boston and at Chase Manhattan Bank, but he was also an environmentalist who saw sustainability as a long-term trend.
“Green is going to evolve from a social movement to a market opportunity,” Mr. Liu said. “There will be real opportunities for new businesses, new technologies, new products and new services that are demanded by consumers.”
New York Times: April 21, 2008
Hot Time, Living in the City
One night, not long after Joan and Bob Johnson had moved from suburban Beaverton, Ore., to downtown Portland, they saw a sign for a concert at a local church and decided to stop in. It was just the sort of urban experience that the Johnsons, who are retired, had moved to the city for.
The concert was marvelous, Mrs. Johnson said, and they stayed for the church service afterward. But the walk home was another kind of urban experience.
“It was quarter to one, and Portland was as dead as a doornail,” said Mrs. Johnson, 78. “Here were two people out walking, all alone. I could hear people ask, Have you got any money? — and I didn’t know where the voices were coming from.”
The Johnsons made it home safely, and, like many of their peers, continue to enjoy the new life that came with their move from the suburbs into the city. Many retirees and people near retirement find cities not only vibrant and full of culture, but also loaded with easily accessible services, from first-rate hospitals and doctors to grocery stores that deliver.
And as David Downs, a professor in Virginia Commonwealth University’s Real Estate and Land Development program, put it, a condominium in a downtown area “is a whole lot more exciting and invigorating, and charges one’s batteries a whole lot more, than being surrounded by geezers.”
New York Times: April 14, 2008
Despite Silicon Valley Optimism, a Disease Resists Cure
SAN FRANCISCO — In Silicon Valley, an unshakable optimism holds that the right combination of money, brains and computing power can solve any problem.
Mike Homer, a hard-charging executive at Netscape Communications in the 1990s, and his friends certainly subscribed to that belief. It is what led them two years ago to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars, along with powerful new computers, to the University of California, San Francisco, where some of the nation’s top researchers are trying to solve intractable medical mysteries.
In a cruel twist of fate, however, the group is getting a sober lesson in the limits of technology and money. Last May, Mr. Homer, 50, learned he had Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare brain-wasting disorder sometimes likened to mad cow disease. A cure has not been found.
Similar lessons, under different circumstances, were learned last year when technological search-and-rescue operations, using the power of distributed computing, came up empty in the hunt for a computer scientist lost at sea and for an adventurer whose plane had disappeared in the desert.
Yet instead of discouraging the people involved, these failures have nourished an even stronger belief that if the person in front of them cannot be cured or helped, then the technology developed or refined in the effort will at least help a much broader section of society.
Footnote: Here’s a link to UCSF’s Fight for Mike, which is raising money for the battle against Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease.
San Francisco magazine: April 2008
Lords of No Rings: After 50 years in San Francisco without a single World Series title, the Giants have now passed all the pretenders. Stay in denial if you wish, but this is America’s most heartbroken baseball team.
In hindsight, you could see trouble brewing. The moment the Giants’ final game in New York ended, the players bolted for the clubhouse and a mob descended onto the field. A teenager ran straight for second base, tearing it from its moorings. The crowd kept cops away from the fans prying home plate loose. The bullpen roof splintered beneath scores of battering hands. A small group pried off the bronze plaque honoring Eddie Grant, the most prominent Major Leaguer to die in World War I. The next day, September 30, 1957, a Daily News full-spread headline proclaimed, “The N.Y. Giants Is Dead.” Funny to most of the world—but not to these fans. Their team was moving to San Francisco.
Out west, buoyant city officials had already placed Polo Grounds sod under glass in city hall. But the rioting fans in New York, at once despondent and angry, couldn’t have cared less about the team’s new life on the ascendant West Coast. They tore the Polo Grounds to pieces, yanking out chunks of turf as if they could replant them the following spring and see their beloved team grow tall again.
Out of this agony, the San Francisco Giants were born. This year’s home opener, on April 7, will mark the team’s 50th anniversary. While we’ll celebrate its great stars, from Willie Mays and Willie McCovey to Barry Bonds, and the 32 winning seasons (compared with only 18 losers), there remains a subject so inherently miserable, it rarely bears thought or mention: The most heartbroken team in baseball is now ours, the boys in black and orange, from San Francisco.
The story was accompanied by several sidebars. (I recommend getting the magazine itself, for the fantastic layout and full page photos of the Polo Grounds in ruins, Juan Marichal clubbing John Roseboro, Will Clark dejected on the field, and Dusty Baker in tears. But I can only link to the text here.)
Pick a Curse, Any Curse: How the most superstitious of all sports handles failure. Five potential supernatural causes of the Giants’ West Coast futility, including my own favorite, the Curse of Coogan’s Bluff.
The Heartbreaks: Nine hair-pulling events that drove Giants fans to the brink of collapse. From McCovey’s line drive that ended the 1962 Series, to the 2002 meltdown that came after Dusty Baker handed the game ball to Russ Ortiz, the Giants know how to hurt a fan.
The Greatest Losers of All: Illustrator Mark Ulriksen plays “What If” as he chooses his all-time favorite Giants. Ulriksen, a frequent New Yorker cover artist and lifelong Giants fan, illustrated the story with his dream lineup including Willie Mays and Barry Bonds — with a cloud hanging over their heads.
Plenty magazine: April/May 2008
Solar Synergy: Dot-com meets green in Sun Microsystems’ Blackbox
The computing industry likes to brag about how much power it puts at our fingertips, but what it doesn’t mention are the megawatts all those computers draw off electrical grids.
Jonathan Koomey, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, announced in a February 2007 report (funded by Advanced Micro Devices) that the servers and associated infrastructures that run US data centers consumed about $2.7 billion in energy bills in 2005. That’s as much as all the country’s color television sets and more than double the amount servers consumed five years before. Because of concerns about that consumption, demand from the public, new legislation, and scarcity issues tied to maxed-out grids like the one that serves Wall Street, green technology is sweeping Silicon Valley. Visions of promising new markets have Valley investors thinking in both shades of green—ecological and economic.
Tech giant Sun Microsystems is one of those firms retooling its business around the environmental movement. “We are reshaping our product portfolio to be more energy efficient and eco-friendly,” says Subodh Bapat, a vice president and distinguished engineer at Sun, responsible for driving the company’s systems level energy strategy.
New York Times: April 9, 2008
Closing the Doors That Virtual Sprawl Leaves Open
The advent of virtualization software has made it possible for companies to use virtual computers to run various critical tasks, wringing more work from their computers. The software enables a single computer to run several different operating systems, or several copies of the same system..
Once a company has a network of “virtual machines,” its data center can run much more cost-efficiently, with fewer computers and lower power costs.
New technology, however, often brings new problems, and the rise of virtual machines also makes it harder for corporate I.T. managers to track everything the machines are doing. The risks run from security lapses to not even knowing what programs are running, which can expose companies to licensing liabilities and knock them out of compliance with some federal rules.
Release 2.0: March 2008
Virtual Worlds: The Next Generation
In a report for O’Reilly Media’s Release 2.0 entitled, “Virtual Worlds: A Business Guide,” I wrote a story on how children are growing up remarkably adept in virtual worlds. The publication is available in PDF format for $249, so the story is not available for free online.
Virtual worlds aimed at kids attract far more people than those aimed at adults. Webkinz or Club Penguin may not look very interesting to the average adult, but the six-year-old set can’t get enough of them. Virtual worlds for children are making money and drawing the backing of big media companies. And you can bet that the kids who are populating these worlds will be manipulating avatars in the grownup virtual worlds of the future.
The New York Times: March 12, 2008
Killer Statue — Psyched About the Site!
The Indianapolis Museum of Art has its own video channel on YouTube. The Oakland Museum of California reaches out to online tastemakers to help push events. The Brooklyn Museum of Art has built its own application on the social networking site Facebook, allowing people to share images of museum artwork. These and other museums have discovered social media in a big way. It’s no longer enough for a museum to put up a Web site and hope that people find it. Many museums are discovering that the Web 2.0 world lets them advance their mission online to bring in new and often younger visitors and to educate a wider audience.
“We used to engage people through catalogs, but coffee tables aren’t where people are engaging anymore,” said James G. Leventhal, director of development and marketing at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, Calif., which is focused on Jewish life and culture. “Sincere social engagement happens on computers now.”
(Copyrighted photo above by Don Pollard from a toga night in the Met’s new Greek and Roman Galleries, one of the events that the College Group at the Met organized and which is documented on the Met’s Flickr page. The photos is used here with permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)
Fortune.com: March 11, 2008
Welcome to Conference 2.0: Social media is putting an end to the passive role attendees traditionally play at business gatherings
AUSTIN, TEXAS — We’ve all been there: the dull business conference. A half-empty room of half-asleep attendees answer their e-mail on laptops and BlackBerries, while some hapless speaker lumbers through a PowerPoint speech.
That scenario is about to change, thanks to the growing ubiquity of social media. Consider author Sarah Lacy’s disastrous interview of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the annual South by Southwest Interactive Festival here. Lacy, a Business Week columnist and author of a forthcoming book on Zuckerberg and other Web 2.0 titans, drew the crowd’s wrath by asking Zuckerberg too many questions about his age and his company’s outrageous $15 billion valuation and not enough questions about issues more fundamental to how Facebook operates - things like trust, privacy, and accessibility to software developers. On top of that, Lacy interrupted Zuckerberg, seemed to flirt with him, and then grew hostile as the crowd turned against her.
And did it ever turn. Many in the audience started posting their thoughts on Twitter, a service that broadcasts instant messages, and the ire built. The crowd began hooting and jeering.
(Above photo of Zuckerberg and Lacy by Julio Fernandez, oraclejulio on Flickr, reproduced here under a Creative Commons license.)
The New York Times: March 16, 2008
Technology Makes Life Easier?
In a room packed with new-media devotees last week, Mark Cuban, the founder of the HDNet television network, emerged at one point as a digital doubting Thomas compared with Michael D. Eisner, the former chief of Disney.
The New York Times: Feb. 25, 2008
On the Internet, Everyone Can Hear You Complain 
A San Francisco start-up called Get Satisfaction is the latest online ombudsman to try to mediate customer service complaints. Get Satisfaction allows people to post feedback about their experiences with any company they choose, and it encourages companies to visit its site, www.getsatisfaction.com, to respond publicly. Since September, when the site began, people have posted complaints or comments regarding 2,000 companies, and 40 percent of the companies have answered, at no charge to either side.
The New York Times: Feb. 20, 2008
They’re Working on Their Own, Just Side by Side
CONTEMPLATING his career path a couple of years ago, a young computer programmer named Brad Neuberg faced a modern predicament. “It seemed I could either have a job, which would give me structure and community,” he said, “or I could be freelance and have freedom and independence. Why couldn’t I have both?”
As someone used to hacking out solutions, Mr. Neuberg took action. He created a word — coworking, eliminating the hyphen — and rented space in a building, starting a movement.
While coworking has evolved since Mr. Neuberg’s epiphany in 2005, dozens of places around the country and increasingly around the world now offer such arrangements, where someone sets up an office and rents out desks, creating a community of people who have different jobs but who want to share ideas.
Inspiration Strikes Only a Desk Away
Sidebar to the Coworking story above: One of the most frequently cited advantages of coworking is the cross pollination that takes place. People share ideas rather than actually drum up business.
The New York Times: January 7, 2008
Some Brand-Name Bloggers Say Stress of Posting is a Hazard to their Health
Om Malik’s blog, GigaOm, regularly breaks news about the technology industry. Last week, the journalist turned blogger broke a big story about himself. Mr. Malik, 41, blogged that he had suffered a heart attack on Dec. 28.
“I was able to walk into the hospital for treatment that night and have been recovering here ever since,” Mr. Malik wrote. “With the support of my family and my team, I am on the road to a full recovery. I am going to be O.K.”
His heart attack — and his blogging about it — raises the issue of what happens when a blogger becomes a name brand.
“The trouble with a personal brand is, you’re yoked to a machine,” said Paul Kedrosky, a friend of Mr. Malik’s who runs the Infectious Greed blog. “You feel huge pressure to not just do a lot, but to do a lot with your name on it. You have pressure to not just be the C.E.O., but at the same time to write, and to do it all on a shoestring. Put it all together, and it’s a recipe for stress through the roof.”
The New York Times: December 17, 2007
Once broke, GameStop moves up to S.&P. 500
Just over a decade ago, the company now known as GameStop was bankrupt, and analysts in the video game industry predicted that people would buy games online rather than in its mall stores.
But instead the franchise grew, pulled from its financial woes by a group of investors led by Leonard Riggio, the founder and chairman of Barnes & Noble. Spun off from Barnes & Noble in 2004, GameStop calls itself the world’s largest video game retailer.
Now the company can add a new distinction: member of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. On Thursday, after Dow Jones & Company was acquired by the News Corporation and lost its berth in that index, GameStop took its place, moving up from a midsize index.
USA Today: December 12, 2007
Watch out for the ‘evil twin’ when using public Wi-Fi
For the modern nomadic worker, few things are more enjoyable than heading to a cafe, ordering a cappuccino and firing up the laptop to get some work done. As far as anyone you’re e-mailing knows, you’re at the office.
Unfortunately, few things expose your work to greater security risks than latching onto a public Wi-Fi service. Most people don’t realize the risks, and even fewer have the ability to perform the geeky tasks that would fix it.
The New York Times: December 5, 2007
There Are Ways to Help Lassie Come Home
Who let the dogs out? And who is going to find them? Well, you can call off the hounds because a new breed of gadgets helps dog owners track their wayward pets.
Two types of G.P.S. devices are battling it out in the marketplace. Some use cellular technology, sending messages to phones and e-mail accounts that Fido has wandered outside his virtual fence. Others use radio technology, which does not require a cell tower but has a more limited range.
Fortune.com: December 3, 2007
The fate of a Murdoch-owned MarketWatch
Among the prizes that Rupert Murdoch gets when the Dow Jones deal closes next month will be a highly trafficked Web site that could boost his fledgling Fox Business Network - and it has nothing to do with the Wall Street Journal. MarketWatch.com, the fifth most popular financial site on the Web, according to Hitwise, remains a largely unexplored part of the Dow Jones deal.
USA Today: November 21, 2007
One more thing cellphones could do: Replace wallets
Instead of reaching for your wallet in the next few years, you’ll be able to pull out your cellphone and wave it over a scanner to make a payment. Convenient? You bet. Secure? Companies working on this new system say it is rock solid.
The New York Times: November 14, 2007
Personal Assistants on Call, Just Not in the Next Office
Entrepreneurs in India are trying to build a new market for the offshore services they offer: helping small businesses cope with even the most mundane day-to-day tasks.
Nantucket Today: May/June 2006
Cowgirl Creamery
(Only the first 300 words are available online; a subscription to the magazine is required for the rest)
Hand-crafted, creamy, luscious rounds of Cowgirl Creamery cheese melt hearts and palates across the San Francisco Bay Area. The oozy rich cheeses spread across homemade crackers and brick-oven bread so smoothly that it’s easy to forget that it’s made with something as ordinary as the milk of cows.
Yet the cows behind this cheese are not exactly ordinary. In many ways, they’re the secret ingredient – the Cowgirls’ very reason for being.
The cows belong to the Straus Family Creamery, a small but pioneering organic operation in the hills above Tomales Bay, nearly two hours’ drive from San Francisco but only 10 miles from the Cowgirls’ rural cheese-making operation. These coddled cows, blessed with million-dollar views, are not given any hormones or antibiotics, and their pasture is not treated with any herbicides, pesticides or chemical fertilizers.
Every other day, a tanker full of the milk pulls up outside the Cowgirl Creamery and fills up a vat, and the process of making the cheese begins.
From 1998 to 2007, I was a technology reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle. My beat changed from time to time, as I specialized in media, Web 2.0, semiconductors, and software, as well as pitching in on profiles of people inside and outside of the tech world. I helped start two of the paper’s most popular blogs, the Culture Blog and the Technology Chronicles.
My posts to the Chronicle’s technology blog, aptly named The Technology Chronicles, are listed here in reverse chronological order.My most recent stories are here, again in reverse chronological order, and including the blog posts.
Some of my feature stories include:
Where Neo-Nomads’ Ideas Percolate: New ‘bedouins’ transform a laptop, cell phone and coffeehouse into their office
Sunday, March 11, 2007
A new breed of worker, fueled by caffeine and using the tools of modern technology, is flourishing in the coffeehouses of
Monday, March 19, 2007
I was one of the first reporters in the mainstream media to write about Twitter, thanks in part to getting totally addicted to it at South by Southwest 2007. My story said: “A simple little technology has the digerati all atwitter. Make that the twitterati. Twitter, a way to broadcast short text messages to large groups of people, is growing about 20 percent a week and in only seven months is already up to 60,000 users. More than a million messages, known as “twitters” to those in the know, have been sent out. The technology, from small but cutting-edge Obvious Corp. in
WHERE OLD AND NEW MEDIA COLLIDE
March 16, 2007
Two worlds collided at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival this week. Online media of all sorts is coming of age, and the festival was one of its biggest defining moments. The event aims to bring together new technologies and their practitioners to spur innovation. While the mainstream press was barely present, the conference-cum-weeklong-party was more thoroughly reported on than some national political conventions. And central to the whole movement are companies from the Bay Area, ranging from San Francisco news aggregators like Digg.com to giant video-sharing sites like Google’s YouTube.
DIGITAL UTOPIA - A new breed of technologists envisions a democratic world improved by the Internet
Sunday, Nov. 5, 2006
Behind the random silliness of YouTube videos and the juvenile frivolity of MySpace Web sites lies a powerful idea: Everyday people are using technology to gain control of the media and change the world. At least that’s what a new breed of Internet technologists and entrepreneurs want us to believe. The new Internet boom commonly referred to as Web 2.0 is really an exercise in digital democracy. Dubbed Digital Utopians by some, and Web 2.0 innovators by others, this latest wave of tech gurus champion community over commerce, sharing ideas over sharing profits.
Nov. 6, 2006
Although I was raked over the coals for this blog post, which was supposedly inconsistent with the Digital Utopians story that ran the day before (see above), I remain proud of the way we deflated a little of the bubble that is growing around Web 2.0. Witness number 2 on the list: “This is not a bubble. Hot parties, overheated PR pitches, and five or six dozen social networking sites are just healthy indicators of a new boom.”
Valley’s ‘Mr. Web 2.0′ seeks next big thing - TechCrunch blog ruffles feathers on the Internet beat
Dec. 6, 2006
Michael Arrington’s influential blog TechCrunch — where startups get pimped and big news sometimes breaks first — has vaulted him into the post of “Mr. Web 2.0,” a kingmaker among
Do they have a good marriage? You can take that to the bank
June 4, 2006
He’s tall, has wispy red hair and is given to wisecracks. She’s shorter and more serious, with dark hair and a dark complexion. But don’t mistake Herb and Marion Sandler for a study in opposites. Instead, this couple, now in their 70s and making headlines for selling Golden West Financial Corp. to Wachovia Corp. for slightly more than $24 billion in cash and stock last month, achieved extraordinary success by working as a team.
Microsoft’s CEO: Fight continues - Ballmer says Google tough search foe but not unbeatable
May 12, 2006
Steve Ballmer, the excitable and often combative chief executive officer of Microsoft Corp., came to Silicon Valley in a somewhat conciliatory mood Thursday, tipping his hat to archrival Google Inc. for building a powerful lead in Internet advertising.
Jan. 25, 2006
When Steve Jobs sold Pixar to Walt Disney Co., I wrote a profile of the man, even though he wouldn’t speak to me (or most other reporters). My story said that, “In the wake of Disney’s blockbuster acquisition of Pixar, Steve Jobs brings his quest for perfection to an even grander stage. He is the largest individual shareholder in the storied Walt Disney Co. And he remains the head of Apple Computer, the revolutionary computing company he founded and later reinvented as a digital music powerhouse. Not bad for a man who was considered washed up 20 years ago and was battling cancer a mere 18 months ago.”
STEVE JOBS: Live blogging from the Macworld floor
On the floor of Macworld Expo 2007, I live-blogged Steve Jobs’ keynote speech in which the Apple CEO first unveiled the iPhone.