Scot Petersen

Many of us will give up some conveniences of daily life to stop terrorism. Living without skycaps and waiting in line for hours are trivial nuisances when compared with the possibility of boarding an unsafe plane. But what about retinal scans, fingerprints and government ID cards? How far are we willing to go? The government […]

On my 5-year-old sons dresser, there usually stand, in order, small metal statues of Chicagos Hancock Tower, the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower and the Twin Towers. He and his brother play with them daily, often engaging Lady Liberty and the Twin Towers in casual conversation or in hand-to-hand combat. Then, the Twin Towers […]

In this long national nightmare known as the Microsoft-DOJ case, weve learned not to count on the software company from Redmond, Wash., to do the right thing. Now is the time to change that perception. We wanted the company to settle out of court before the case went to trial. Even before that, we wanted […]

Lawrence Lessig doesnt appear to be a happy man. I dont know him personally, and Im not saying hes depressed or anything. But the cyber-law expert is unhappy about a lot of things, starting with his profession and all the way up to the chiefs of American business, about what is happening to the Internet. […]

Now that were in September, its “officially” back-to-school time, though it seems like weve been gearing up for it for months. The July-August advertising blitz weve been subjected to now rivals only the urgency of the year-end holiday rush. Its as if no self-respecting student could live without a new computer, software, stereo, TV and […]

As Rudyard Kipling said, “if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs. … Yours is the earth and everything thats in it.” In present-day terms, “everything” may not be a wise investment. But “something” is what a force of nature named Andrew “Flip” Filipowski is busy building out of the […]

We knew the Internet was going to change everything. We just didnt know by how much. Its not exactly what we had in mind, but the future is here, now. So we might as well deal with it and make the most of it. Some technology companies already are. Whereas a company like Microsoft is […]

In this summer of our discontent, its hard to see any sign of the drastic cuts corporations are making in business travel budgets. The last plane I took met the “very full” standard set by the flight attendants, at one point there was a line 20 minutes long to get into the bathroom, and I […]

Its difficult to be optimistic about much these days. I dont need to go into the gory details. Yet I just returned from a place where the future is bright, the bandwidth is plentiful, and everyone is plugged in, online and interacting. The place was the CTAM Summit, held in San Francisco. The participants were […]

Part 2. Last week, I tried to explain why I think so many online businesses have been failing: I attributed the failures to a lack of consumer demand for Internet-based services when traditional retail and service outlets serve just fine. In other words, consumers have let us know what it is about the Internet that […]

Part 1: the post-mortems continued this month in the wake of the latest high-profile dot-com failures, including online grocers Webvan and HomeRuns. Some observers have speculated that the closings of these ventures were particularly cruel in that, unlike other dot-bombs, the grocers at least offered some real value and convenience to their customers. That may […]

You may be set to embark on your summer vacation. Its a time to get away from the things you deal with the rest of the year. Heres my list of things to do or not do: Get away from your computer. Do you ever get the feeling that your world exists only inside 1,024 […]