Stories by: Larry Borsato

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Information overload on the Web and sifting tools 01 September, 2008 10:09

"... knowledge is doubling every ten years."
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Which platform: Cathedral or open source? 18 July, 2008 10:29

Have you ever experienced a software bug and thought to yourself, "I could fix that"? If you could, would you? How could that even be possible?
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How does a developer decide on a mobile platform? 09 July, 2008 16:33

I'm developing mobile applications -- for the iPhone. Considering all of the mobile platforms available to programmers, why would I select the development platform for the Apple device when I could have chosen Symbian, BlackBerry, or Android?
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The Internet needs more redundancy 23 June, 2008 16:04

A couple of weeks ago my website went down. Nine thousand other Web servers also died when The Planet, a large hosting service, experienced an electrical explosion and fire in one of its facilities. Because it was an electrical fire, the local fire department refused to let the company activate their backup generators for fear of further damage.
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Nine lessons from the first Internet bubble 29 May, 2008 11:44

A decade ago I was working for Bay Networks in Santa Clara, California. Bay Networks was number two in the internetworking hardware market, with annual revenue of about US$2 billion. Bay was bought in 1999 for $9 billion by Nortel Networks, a telecom hardware manufacturer on an acquisition spree. Faced with a very different corporate culture, I chose in 2000 to accept the position of Director of Vertical Marketing at a small e-commerce startup named Enigma in Boston, Massachusetts.
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What if Microsoft bought Facebook? 29 May, 2008 10:47

Microsoft has decided it doesn't want Yahoo anymore. It apparently just wants to make a deal for the profitable part -- search advertising. After all, they're desperate enough to increase their market share that they are going to pay people to use their Live Search. Of course that would still leave Google as the market leader.
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How does a developer choose the right platform? 23 May, 2008 11:07

There are social networks like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and OpenSocial. There is the iPhone SDK, Google's Android, and RIM's BlackBerry. There are communications tools like Twitter, Jaiku, and Pownce.
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Who owns 'public' content? 12 May, 2008 09:10

Every day people put virtual truckloads of information into the public domain. Books are published. Newspapers printed. A lot of that ends up on the Internet as well, along with the words of bloggers and other online denizens. All of these people make content public so that others can hopefully benefit from it.
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'Free' can disrupt your business 01 May, 2008 14:19

The other day the Encyclopedia Britannica announced that it would now be free for Web publishers -- bloggers, webmasters, or writers. You could pay US$1400 for the 32-volume printed set of books, or you could pay for the online service, but the fact is that competition is pretty stiff when you can get much of the same information for free from Wikipedia.