Category: Web/Tech

Tim O’Reilly comments on the recent BusinessWeek article by Robert Hof titled “Reprogramming Amazon” about Amazon’s web services initiatives.

‘ve been arguing that sites like Amazon and EBay are not just web sites, but early examples of a new paradigm that will transform the computer industry as we know it today. We start by looking at them as applications, then as platforms, and ultimately need to think about how they will be integrated into an internet-scale operating system.

I find this a lot more interesting than social networking…

Old friend Christopher Allen takes a look at all of the major social and business networking sites.

Jeremy Wagstaff has a posting pointing to a Slashdot discussion about surreptitious RFID tags included in badges at last week’s Internet Summit.

The first Slashdot posting in response cracked me up:

Cool. Politicians should be made to wear RFID’s from the day they enter office in service of the public, to the day they leave that office. “For the people, and of the people” can only be effective if the people keep a track on such people with power …

Amen to that!

John Patrick has blogged a series of summaries from last week’s Inside ID Conference in Washington, DC, including an interesting summary of John Gould’s talk on Identity in Financial Services.

The conclusion Gould that reaches re: smart cards being the ultimate solution to consumer authentication is suspect, but the facts on card not present transactions are useful.

Separately, Patrick is using his weblog to examine some privacy and trust issues as well.

I attended one of Edward Tufte’s great seminars earlier this week. One of the great quotes during the day:

Please try to use the website to send me email. I try to reserve my private email address just for spam!

See this article on Payments News for news about a recent advisory letter to US banks from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency regarding deployment of wireless networks.

David Hornik writes in Conserving Social Capital:

As social networking software grows more prevalent and an increasing number of people attempt to draw upon our social capital to make introductions, entertain business propositions, pass along resumes, etc., I believe we will all grow more guarded with our time and our relationships. If social capital is indeed capital, we will all soon be more careful about where we spend it and on whom.

I agree with David — and see another aspect as well. I’ve recently been playing with LinkedIn, one of the social networking sites that’s primarily focused on business relationships of the type that David’s discussing. (The “find a mate” sites are a whole ‘nother kettle of fish!)

I’m finding there’s just not much of a “there there” for me. Nothing that draws me back to regular usage. Somehow expanding LinkedIn’s view of my network just doesn’t get me excited — like they think it should! There’s certainly nothing there I’d be willing to actually pay LinkedIn for!

This obviously isn’t a stable situation. Something will likely emerge to make this a more useful service — a place to spend and share the social capital David talks about — or it’ll eventually just fade away.

Another current irritant of mine is Plaxo. I’m really tired of receiving those “update my address book” emails from colleagues and have taken to just deleting them. Part of this is my Mac bias showing through — but part of it is my view that using Plaxo is a negative expenditure of my correspondent’s social capital. Ironically, that’s probably just how a few of my friends feel about my “join LinkedIn” emails from me over the last couple of weeks!

Ross Mayfield and Mitch Ratcliffe are blogging away at the Red Herring conference in Monterey today and tomorrow. Better than a front row seat!

Update: Both Ross and Mitch seem to share a common opinion of VeriSign CEO Stratton Sclavos’ talk this afternoon.

This morning, Atmel announced the AT76C01, a chip designed specifically for voice over IP in wireless applications.

The AT76C901 is capable of running VoIP software, firmware enabling 802.11b (Wi-Fi®) and voice compression and decompression all on a single chip. Atmel’s VoIP chip is so integrated that it requires only an SDRAM, flash, LCD display, keypad, battery, 802.11b baseband and RF front-end to comprise an entire wireless VoIP phone.

I’m looking forward to being able to throw my current Panasonic 2.4 GHz wireless phone away and using a new wireless phone built around this new Atmel chip that makes effective use of my existing multi-node in-home wireless network — instead of interfering with it!

Doug Kaye’s latest <a href="IT Conversation interview is with Andre Durand of PingID. Doug’s interviews are really great — and you can also download them for offline listening on your iPod, etc.