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Thursday, December 23, 2010

Google's big problem

Gigaom presents An intriguing article aims at analysing Google's true difficulties, in the search giant's search to redefine itself in an evolving world. Not without weaknesses, but broad-perspective analyses by intelligent people are always worth a reading in my mind, if only for the brainstorming effect.

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Is microsoft's 1.5 million windows 7 phone sales a real positive marker ?

Is  Microsoft's 1.5 million windows 7 smartphone sales a real positive marker ? an interesting critical article from the street argues otherwise, in a rather convincing way. we want the activation data, microsoft !

Monday, December 13, 2010

Why Amazon is so hard to cyber-attack and what it may mean in the long run

I've been refraining from writing about the  wikileaks affairs so far, mainly because I tend to believe that the famous saying ascribed to former chinese prime minister, Zou Enlai , regarding the french revolution, is very relevant to this immensely complex matter.

 It is too soon to say what is the impact of the matter, and its analysis - the analysis of all things related - require time. After all, it isn't as if there aren't other interesting things to think or write about, and the real shortage is in time, not ideas or interesting bits to mention.

But one story of the wikileaks incidents has caught my eye, and is worth mentioning in my mind - Amazon's clear ability to stand unharmed, despite cyber attacks by wikileaks-angry-supporters. Amazon's choice to join others and cease supporting hosting services to wikileaks, a decision which is in itself deserving a post or several, has brought the attention of cyber attackers, who apparently did not analyze the size of their challenge.

Amazon, planned and built for the huge workloads of the shopping seasons, is  not the usual cyber-victim. As the CNN story telling of Amazon's durability, describes so nicely: "The holiday shopping season essentially is a month-long DDoS attack on Amazon's servers". And thus, the avengers had to seek other targets, of a smaller capacity, and leave the giant array of Amazon's free to serve its buyers.

But what interested me here wasn't just the technical reasoning of huge-is-a-winner (which could have been phrased otherwise as hackers are just bullies - they harass only the little ones), but the interesting image whose initial bits get drawn out of this - it might just be that wikileaks and its like may jeopardize nations, but remain quite unobtrusive and even powerless against corporations . And this isn't happy news.

Sunday, December 5, 2010

what went wrong ?!?

The entrepreneurs of various startups shared with signal vs. noise the reasons why their ideas didn't make it. For example, Brian Mulloy, CEO of Swivel, a site where people shared reports of charts and numbers, which had thousands of registered users, but less than ten paying ones. shared the difficulty of making a truly functional product:
"there are so many details that go into turning an original idea into a product, most people don’t realize that. You can spend a lot of time on that. In fact, to the point where a year goes by and all you’ve done is that you’ve fixed a bunch of bugs. So you can either scale back the features and only support a limited set of functionality, or scale up your team to support all of those things."
Definitely worth reading for anyone aspiring at taking a shot with an idea.

הכרמל הבוער במבט מלווין


הודות לטכנולוגיה, אפשר לראות שלא רק בעתלית, אלא גם בקפריסין צריכים לסגור חלונות ודלתות.