For those of you with Office 2007, my original feed may reflect 1/1 dates in all posts.   Most likely that you are scribed to the google  atom feed

Filed under: Internet, Blogging, Windows Mobile, Shareware

It's getting mainstream attention; here's an article from the BBC.

business models firefox flock ie7 internet apps lindex maxthon paypal secondlife social networks Technology thin client vertical search webphone web products

Richard MacManus, over on Read/WriteWeb has an extremely comprehensive must read post on his forecast for what will be hot in 2007.

Paul Kedrosky may not have a clue about the power of Blackberry (hence no need for Blackberry 2.0), but he does know the stock markets… very well. He has been calling for a comeback of the technology IPOs in 2007. And he is right about that. We are beginning to hear rumblings of many companies looking to tap the IPO markets. For instance, Michael Arrington is reporting on a possible IPO for NetSuite, which is looking for a $1 billion valuation.

Somehow, Christmas seems to have caught up on me by stealth, this year. We're only a few days away from the big day, yet I'm still here in the office, coding some changes into our Movable Type templates to make all our blogs more friendly to the search engines. The building is getting strangely, quiet, and I suspect there will only be a tiny handful of us here by Friday. Perhaps I can get some serious work done now...   Technorati tags: work, christmas, holidays...

RIP DMOZ: 1998-2006

aka Open Directory Project
aka Netscape Open Directory
aka directory.mozilla.org
aka NewHoo
aka GnuHoo

Peter Da Vanzo: Is DMOZ Dead?

Barry Diller keeps talking about Ask as the “glue” of his empire and more specifically about the importance of local. Ask and the new AskCity are thus in the hot seat. ClickZ has a piece today about the forthcoming introduction of financial and real estate data into AskCity.

PaidContent points to an article in AdAge about the supposed Top 10 “major media” acquisitions of the year. Here’s the list:

Robocommunity has an interesting interview with WowWee CTO Davin Sufer. If you've been living under a rock, or perhaps you just don't have kids, then perhaps you're not familiar with WowWee robots. Heck, I have a daughter that is too young to play with robots, yet I'm familiar with WowWee's cool robots. You can't miss them if you walk into Bed Bath & Beyond - or maybe it was Linens and Things. I always confuse those two stores.

In any event, one of those chain stores has the Roboraptor robot on display with a button that activates its eerily lifelike and some might say "creepy" moves. When I first walked past one, I backed up and said to myself "What the heck is that?" Of course I shoved an 8-year old kid out of the way so I could play with it. I'm kidding... Pretty amazing animatronics technology that you used to only see in Disney World or other amusement parks. Now you can have an animatronic robot in your own home!

Some interesting questions are posted by Robocommunity, including, "Our readers really want to know what evil genius comes up with the packaging for WowWee. We even came up with an unpacking guide! Really... bolts? ;-)"

A good question indeed... Those raptors must be mighty dangerous to have them bolted in! ;)

Another interesting question posed was this:
Question: Let's get into some more specifics. What plans do you have for future sensors, servos, software, etc.?

Partial Answer: As far as sensors go, think more intelligent with higher range. We've also been working on new and fun ways for our products to interact with people and each other. We've been adding memory and building engaging personalities.

Go check out the full interview for more.

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Today I walked past a classroom and noticed an MP3 player left on thepiano at the front of the room. For some reason it reminded me of anabandoned pen. We're used to seeing pens lying around, but there wasa time when they were expensive and highly prized.

The NYT takes a look at Google efforts to take market share away from eBay’s PayPal. The two are in a battle for the right to process credit card payments of companies looking for an alternative to merchant accounts.

Personal Update: I’m taking some time off from daily posting until January 2nd, 2007, much to Ms. Mojo’s relief. There may be some things I just can’t resist. Just don’t expect daily posts. Cheers,RobinI did a post on the /.

«Enterprise VoIP Planet: Virtually all telephone calls cross boundaries between carriers. The advent of VoIP makes this an even more complex undertaking, since those boundaries sometimes are between different types of technologies. It also isn't simple in the all-VoIP world, since calls must cross boundaries between different Internet protocols, such as the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and H.323. In most cases, these calls must reach beyond Internet protocol-based networks and find endpoints on the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Conversely, calls starting on the PSTN must find target devices using VoIP. This complex piece lays out some of the concepts and protocols used for PSTN/VoIP calling. The key process is Electronic Numbering (ENUM). Key subsystems include the International Public Telecommunications Numbering Plan, IP Address, Uniform Resource Identifier and the Domain Name Service.» source.

Related intersting topics.

This is a technical overview of the CouchDb distributed document database system. This overview is intended to give a high-level introduction of key models and components of CouchDb, how they work individually and how they fit together.

There is a lot of discussion about usage models lately; and more than one view on how to detect, elicit, construct and create them. I have been working for about 30 years in this area, though it keeps changing names....

Divine Wireless charges 8p per minute for access to The Cloud, BT OpenZone, and Surf and Sip: The company is aggregated 15,000 locations across the UK into a metered network. The tariff runs £4.80 per hour in intervals of 8p per minute; this is still cheaper than OpenZone's £6 per hour walk-up rate, which is also the minimum time you can purchase from OpenZone.

In a country without chewing gum, can one be free? With Singapore poised to offer Wi-Fi nationwide, and with a free, low-speed versions being offered for a long initial period, it's somewhat interesting that a youth was charged with (and admitted to) "wireless mooching." He picked a bad time and place to get bored. The Straits Times reports that 17-year-old Garyl Tan Jia Luo said he was locked out of Internet access by his mother--who thought he was spending too much time online--and accessed an unsecured network while outside at 3 am. The mooched-from neighbor confronted Tan, and, after an argument, called the police.

Virtual Server 2005 is a solid first effort in Virtualization for Microsoft, and with System Center Virtual Machine Manager in the pipeline and the Hypervisor on the horizon, MS is clearly looking to make a dent in the dominent position of VMWare in the virtualization space.

As 2006 comes to a close, a number of major search providers have released their top search queries. Even though the results may be heavily doctored, they’re still valuable insights into the PPC industry.