Tom Steinert-Threlkeld

“The hottest technology in personal computing is wireless networking,” declared gadgetry guru Walt Mossberg in The Wall Street Journal on this years first day. Speaking personally, hes probably right. Wireless access points are popping up in every conceivable location from Bryant Park outside the New York Public Library to pay services inside Starbucks coffee shops […]

WARNING: The following column is rated MA, for mature audiences. No graphic language, sex, nudity or violence, but the squeamish should skip it. In the unenlightened era of the Internet, when creativity was at such a low ebb and nothing really outlandish was going on, there was Half.com. This is the fixed-price commerce site that […]

On the Internet, latency is a big deal. The amount of time you have to wait for a response to a request you tap onto your keyboard goes a long way toward determining how satisfied you are as an Internet user. Broadband connections may be dimming our recollection of the days when Net access was […]

So theres now a genuine debate over the value of open source software. Its almost coming off like a series of sponsored events. In early May, Microsoft Senior Vice President Craig Mundie fires the first shot, at New Yorks Stern School of Business. Then, a week or so ago, Free Software Foundation President Richard Stallman […]

Not surprisingly, the Lucent Technologies-Alcatel deal got called off, allegedly at the last minute. That it took so long for the deal to unravel shows just how adrift Lucent has become in its shocking downward spiral. From the beginning, it was clear that Alcatel was the acquisitor and Lucent the acquired. Thats what 58 percent […]

Chairman John Chen last Tuesday opened what he called “chapter two” in the life of Sybase, one of the original pioneers of database systems that keep track of relationships between the statistics and content they store. He marked the occasion by moving his software company to the New York Stock Exchange, where its stock now […]

You know its going to be a long, tough dry spell for technological innovation when the search for coffee beans becomes touted as the next great “killer app.” Of course, were in that stage where wireless applications are still considered at least lukewarm, if not hot. Thankfully, the fate of the dot-coms — and the […]

And you thought the stock market turns CEOs into short-term thinkers now. Just wait five years. Reporting earnings per share every three months may be looking like a long-term, conservative practice. Gartner Research Fellow James Popkin last week predicted that the inexorable drive to “real-time” reporting of financial information within companies will lead before long […]

There may be no statistical support for this proposition. But methinks the longer a company spends talking to its customers face to face or on the line, the longer those customers will stick with the company. Ergo, the more loyal those customers will be. For instance, Ive stuck with the same Internet service provider for […]

“All politics is local.”—Former U.S. House Speaker Tip ONeill “All development is local.”— World Bank Vice President Mohamed Muhsin In the poverty-ridden province of Ningxia, the personal computing revolution — forget the Internet — has yet to arrive. While American children in rich metropolitan areas beam each other contact information on their Handspring Visors and […]