Category: Web 2.0 (News)

Free Drinks and Crap Tech Pitches This Week In San Francisco

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Those of you in San Francisco this Tuesday (Sept 9th) might want to swing by the House of Shields (39 New Montgomery St) at 10pm, where Smack My Pitch Up is being held. Get enough VC’s, investors and entrepeneurs in town, you’ll get people pitching business ideas around like poor baseball pitches. ‘Smack’ is no different, but willbe looking for the most terrible ideas in tech possible. Prizes include a grand prize of $50 (in non-sequential, used single dollar bills). Bonus prizes will be available for best URL containing a pun (or a pub), most creative misuse of grammar and

Watch Out Twitter Investors – Here Comes Identi.ca

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My old Warrant Officer always used to say (in that low voice of menace) that you should never just state a problem, but state a problem followed promoptly by “here’s what I think we should do.” So if Twitter is Fail-Whaling, then we need another service. Lots of people have said it needs to be de-centralised, that it needs to be replicabla,e it needs to e open-source, using as many standards as possible, Evan Prodromou has done just that. Welcome to Indenti.ca.And yes that does point to my account there, and not the top, because the site is still in

Mowser Lives! Again! Bigger Future for the Smaller Renderer

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Congrats to Mike and Russ for finding a silver lining to the Mowser experience – namely the purchase of the technology by the dotMobi folk. The implications of the technology are discussed by Charlie far better than I could even summarise, so head over there to get the tech details, but I just want to say that there’s very few companies actually get to the point of a decent exit, as opposed to shutting up shop, which appeared to be the case with Mowser last month in the face of rising bills. So to have any exit puts Mike and

Twitter Japan Is Here, as is Twitter Monetisation

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Congrats to Joi Ito and the team at Digital Garage on the launch of Twitter Japan. While it’s still part of the core Twitter group (i.e. it is not a separate island of users), the nationalised interface should provide a much easier Twittering experience compared to the hoops that people went through at launch. I also never knew that Tokyo is the world’s most Twitterable city (made up word alert!). But what caught my eye is Toyota, or specifically the advert for Toyota in the top corner of the web interface (which leads to Toyota’s Twitter account, not a Toyota

Microsoft’s Live Mesh: Some Thoughts

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So last night (or 5am for us Brit’s, what great timing) Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie unveiled Live Mesh, the 10,000 user beta of some of the ideas talked about at Mix08. In essence this is the start of Microsoft’s journey into cloud computing and ‘Somethng-as-a-Service’ facilities. The beta is now currently full up, but those signed up to will get an XP/Vista client, access to 5gb of online storage, and sync between desktop PC’s and the online ‘Live desktop.’ Currently file and folder sync is available – drop a file in any one device into the live folder and it is

Scottish Gamers Realtime Worlds Garners Second Round Funding

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Many, many moons ago, in that strange period between stopping at University and moving into the small enterprise and technology space, I interviewed for a position at a development house at Dundee. I’ve no recollection who it was, nor if they are still around, and I never went for it as the public transport links didn’t make it work out, but the rise of Dundee (and to a certain the whole of the Scottish central belt as well) is a delight to see. Congrats then to Realtime Worlds, who’ve raised a second round of $50 million (US) to continue their