With tech-savvy entrepreneurs planning their next ventures and pulsating parties packed with digital hipsters, this year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival didn’t feel like an event on the verge of Great Depression 2.0. But underneath it all lingered the reality: Tech company valuations have tanked, venture capital has grown scarce and Americans are obsessed with […]
Category: My Writing
Author Julia Angwin talks up ‘Stealing MySpace’ at SXSW: Los Angeles Times, March 2009
For all the dirt that gets dished on the MySpace social network, very little of it has spilled about MySpace itself. But in a new book out today, and unveiled at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, author Julia Angwin unveils the somewhat tawdry story of the company’s roots in spam, porn and spyware. “When I started reporting […]
Media Companies Learn to Mash Up at SXSW: Los Angeles Times, March 2009
It’s been a few years since mashups became a hot thing in the tech industry. Companies would open their programming tools, known as APIs, to the public, and then enterprising developers would come up with new tools built on the company’s platform. Think of the way people merged apartment listings from Craigslist with Google Maps, or […]
Dennis Crowley: Foursquare Doesn’t Use Google’s Dodgeball Code: Los Angeles Times, March 2009
Several years ago, attendees at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival loved keeping track of each others’ whereabouts using a service calledDodgeball. They could enter their location on a mobile phone, and it would be broadcast to their friends. Google Inc. bought Dodgeball in 2005, but the service never took off, and the company pulled the […]
SXSW to AT&T: Free Our iPhones: Los Angeles Times, March 2009
For all practical purposes, the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, is a de factoiPhone convention. People who don’t have the white-hot Apple device often feel left out. But not this year. With so many iPhone users descending on Austin, the convention center has become an almost impossible place to make a call or […]
SXSW Lesson: How to Fake Authenticity: Los Angeles Times, March 2009
Actor George Burns is reputed to have said, “The secret of acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
In Hard Times, Freelancers Turn to the Web: The New York Times, March 2009
WITH layoffs mounting daily, the ranks of independent contractors appear ready to grow. People who have lost full-time jobs are seeking work on their own, and businesses that once hired full-timers and paid them benefits are turning to more affordable freelancers. Several online companies are easing the transition to a freelance economy for workers and […]
In-Your-Face Web Ad Formats Popping Up All Over: Los Angeles Times, March 2009
They’re bigger, they’re bolder, and soon they’ll be covering up large swaths of some of your favorite Web pages. The Online Publishers Assn. on Tuesday released several new in-your-face advertising formats designed to be both more obtrusive and interactive.
Robots in a Box: The New York Times, December 2008
The days when robots fold laundry, dust furniture or do other domestic tasks still lie in the future. But even if robots can’t baby-sit our children, technology has advanced so rapidly in recent years that our children can build robots. A variety of kits, for different ages and budgets, enable youngsters to create all kinds […]
Keeping It All in the Google Family: The New York TImes, November 2008
Keeping It All in the Google Family Nov. 12, 2008 As befits a company whose name is a play on words, Google (named for the mathematical term “googol”) has come up with playful names for its workers. Employees are known as Googlers, new employees are Nooglers and gay employees are Gayglers. Now that the company has […]