60 minutes on Sunday presented a report on a worm virus lying dormant in millions of computers worldwide awaiting instructions from China or Russia or wherever it was hatched that could instantly bring down the web. This morning, CNN reported that this virus has a name: “Conficker.” CNN also reported that it may go “live” […]

Is the ad-supported business model for web sites dead again? The Economist thinks so in a short piece in its latest issue . According to the article the naïve hope that eyeballs would attract advertising revenue led us to the dot.com crash. Now the fact that there aren’t enough advertising dollars to support websites is […]

Nokia and Obopay just hooked up. Nokia, of course, is the handset giant at least outside of the US. And Obopay is a pioneer in mobile phone technology for doing person-to-person payments.
Nokia just bought a piece of Obopay. In announcing the transaction, Nokia’s director of strategic partnerships suggested that doing payments on mobile […]

My folks are visiting from Chicago. My Dad, Harry M. Peterson Jr., 86, is, among many identities, a war hero, entrepreneur, comedian, lover of the arts, author, husband, Rotarian, and all around great guy. Throughout his life, he also has been a tinkerer with new technology, being one of the early adopters of plastic bottling […]

There’s some irony in one of the first major daily papers going down the drain being a major daily in Seattle with San Francisco close behind. The Hearst Corporation couldn’t find a buyer for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and plans to build an online property from its ashes. Tomorrow, St. Patrick’s Day, 2009, is its […]

Long airplane rides are great for catching up on my reading. But instead of putting my nose in the latest John Grisham novel, I opted to flip thru the March 9th issue of Fortune instead which carried the cover story, “How Facebook is Taking Over Our Lives.” It wasn’t all that fresh in terms […]

So, there are now a zillion articles on social networking and how to make social networking a useful business tool, with most of them sort of beating the same drum: powerful channel, good marketing opportunity, great way to harness word of mouth advertising, customer referrals, and stuff like that. In other words, sort of long […]

Rasmussen reports say that nearly one in three Americans (29% to be exact) belong to social networks, with more than half of those under 30 and 45% of those 30 – 39 belonging. And, the majority of those who use social networks use them primarily for personal activities (88%).
Not such a newsflash.
That means […]

In a move to monetize its site traffic, Yahoo has announced it’s going to start making its own short clips. In a reversal of its prior strategy, Yahoo is making original video content to appeal to segments of its audience that represent its biggest users, e.g. mothers. It is getting “famous” hosts to anchor these […]

As I was cleaning out files the other day, I got to wondering if folks around the country are cleaning out their files like I am right now. A long-time friend of mine in the consulting business is reducing her number of offices from 7 to 3 and was cleaning out files over the past […]