Tech

Comics Publisher Has Lousy Rep with Freelancers

The small comic book publisher Bluewater Productions keeps getting an enormous amount of mainstream media attention for publishing cheezy comics about celebrities and other public figures, like its upcoming biographical book about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg: Bluewater Productions Inc. is doing a "giant-sized" 48-page bio-comic that will explore the question, "Who is the real Mark Zuckerberg?" The company said it had good success with comics like its "Female Force" series featuring women ... (read more)

2010/09/28

Former Sun CEO: Steve Jobs Threatened Patent Suit

Former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz began a new blog three weeks ago called What I Couldn't Say to "put context around some of the decisions I faced at Sun," now that he's free from the corporate obligations to watch his words. Schwartz writes today about tech company patent wars, revealing a 2003 meeting where Apple's Steve Jobs threatened Sun over patents: In 2003, after I unveiled a prototype Linux desktop called Project Looking Glass*, Steve called my office to let me know the ... (read more)

2010/03/09

Gawker Takes Shots at Company's Early Skeptics

In a post bragging about how great Gawker Media is doing, company marketing strategist Erin Pettigrew takes shots at a few bloggers who were skeptical seven years ago that a professional weblog network would make money: ... when the controversial Gizmodo launched (laying the foundation for Gawker Media), the self-important digital punditocracy debated this 'commercial experiment' in blogging as a viable, interesting, useful, or scalable business: Dave Winer: It's such a stale idea. The Web is ... (read more)

2009/09/03

Leo Laporte is Bleeping Sick of Michael Arrington's Bleep

There was some unexpected drama this weekend when Leo Laporte, a longtime technology journalist well known for his work on TechTV, flipped out during a live Internet broadcast after his integrity was questioned by TechCrunch publisher Michael Arrington. Laporte has a reputation for being genial and non-confrontational, making it all the more amusing to see him drop a bunch of F bombs and kick the entire Gillmor Gang show off the air. After Arrington apologized the two mended fences, but I'm ... (read more)

2009/06/08

Indian Teen's New Blog Crunches Numbers

Yuvi Pandian's a 17-year-old in Chennai, India, whose interests in statistics and tech have combined, in true "you got your chocolate in my peanut butter" fashion, to form Stat Bot, a blog that crunches numbers to produce graphs, pies, and other visualizations of our sad corner of the web. I discovered Pandian today when he turned up in my Meme13 feed. In the four weeks since he began the site, Pandian has shown us how Digg headlines have changed over time, which Twitter clients are favored by ... (read more)

2008/05/28

Exclusive: Techbloggers Have Sold Their Souls

On WebProNews, Robert Scoble demonstrates why the leading techblogs are becoming less critical and more susceptible to hype -- they're bargaining with PR flacks for exclusives: I've noticed that PR types are getting very astute with dealing with bloggers lately and getting their wares discussed on TechMeme. First they'll call Mike Arrington of TechCrunch. Make sure he's briefed first (Mike doesn't like to talk about news that someone else broke first, so they'll make sure he is always in the ... (read more)

2007/10/18

Cluetrain Derails in Blacksburg, Virginia

One of the best-known techbloggers was embarrassed Monday when he sent the following private e-mail and it was published by the recipient: From what I gather so far (and info is incomplete), most of the cell phones in use by students at Virginia Tech, and the system they used as well (much more feature-rich than phones provided by big carriers, and user-programmable to boot) were provided by a company in New York run by my friend ... . I think what they're doing is critically important: helping ... (read more)

2007/04/19

Intel's New Chip: More Important Than Cancer

Robert Scoble, the former Microsoft blogger who's now a exec at podcasting startup PodTech, recently engaged in the following exchange with one of his readers: Reader: You think Intel making a smaller chip is more important than cancer? Scoble: having cancer is important to THAT ONE PERSON. Intel chips change the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Scoble, the 86th-most-linked blogger on the planet, is angry that more blogs don't link to him, so he made an example of the tech site Engadget ... (read more)

2007/02/05

Steve Gillmor's Got My Attention

Steve Gillmor parted company with ZDNet and shut down his InfoRouter blog a few weeks ago, stating afterward on his personal blog that there were "real issues, some of which I can't discuss except by indirection." I was upset to see InfoRouter shuttered, because I've come to appreciate Gillmor's bizarre takes on Web 2.0, which read like tech magazine hype filtered through Dennis Hopper. Cracking open the story lines: engaging Hollywood and the record business. Not by embarrassing or attacking ... (read more)

2006/08/14