Friday, July 23, 1999

Scott Rosenberg: Boom or Bubble? "As executives and financiers like Yahoo's Tim Koogle, America Online's Bob Pittman, Softbank's Masayoshi Son, Amazon's Jeff Bezos and John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins stepped forward to detail strategies and rate competitors, the room became suffused with a strange mixture of giddiness and paranoia, self-confidence and insecurity -- the heady psychic brew that fuels most Internet companies today."

MSNBC: From Hack to Honcho. "Dave Kansas, founding editor of TheStreet.com, may be the patron saint of journalists. One day he’s a work-a-day reporter for The Wall Street Journal; the next he owns several million dollars of shares in a public company."

InfoWorld: Microsoft execs hint at Web-enabling Windows. "We will have symmetry between rich clients and [the] server," Gates said. "No one has made it easy to write those applications." I'm so confused!

More news from ZopeLand. We have the main News page working over there now too. Both of our news flows are going thru Linux. The next step is to switch www.scripting.com over to Linux. This should be happening soon!

Microsoft's Charlie Kindel on Apple's AirPort. "I love what Apple's done with their wireless thing for the iBook. Very smart."

Wired: Compaq Awarded Key Patent. "Compaq engineer Adrian Crisan developed the energy-harnessing design in which keys are outfitted with magnets and wire coils. When each key is pressed, the magnet-coil interaction produces a tiny current. The energy from each stroke is stored in a capacitor that feeds the built-up electric charge to the computer's battery."

Wired: "In the tight-knit world of Net start-ups, just about everyone gets a chance to strike it rich. Unfortunately, that includes journalists."

Jeff Walsh, formerly of InfoWorld, on the Chris Nolan controversy: "At InfoWorld, we were specifically forbidden to invest in any tech stocks. If the Merc had no such policy, then it seems to be their fault, not Nolan's. You can't decide something is a problem and then punish previous offenders. Am I missing something or didn't they have such a policy? The stories I saw so far haven't specifically said." jeff@oasismag.com.

News.Com: Net Messaging Standards War Brewing? "Right now, some companies--including AOL--have Internet messaging applications that only allow people with the same software to communicate with each other."