Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins
Latest from Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins
Time-Warner Cable Pulls Plans on Highspeed Deployment [Blackmail as a Business]
According to reports from Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOm, Time-Warner Cable is playing hardball with their customers. As you may recall, there was a great deal of vocalized public outrcy over the prospect of tiered and capped service from the cable provider: A Time Warner Cable spokesman says the cable company was planning to roll out ...
How Can Oprah Joining Twitter Help Me?
Last week, I talked a little bit about the effect of the “big O comin’ atcha on Twitter,” and since then Heather Hopkins has quantified the increase in traffic to Twitter since her visit to the site. The Hitwise charts show a marked increase in traffic starting Friday of almost 25%, and also noted that ...
Washington DC To Get Free Mobile Wireless TV. Welcome to 1980.
When I saw the AP headline this morning promising “FREE! WIRELESS! MOBILE! TV!” I couldn’t help but think of a little pocket TV my great uncle used to let me use back when I was eleven or twelve or so (available now as a “vintage” set on eBay for about $100) The story behind the ...
What Sun’s Acquisition Says About the Cloud
The Oracle Corporation today announced today that they’d make a tasty snack of rival Sun Microsystems for the menu price of $9.50 a share, coming to a total of around $7.4 billion, according to a morning report in the New York Times. “This combination is a natural evolution of our relationship and will be an ...
Preparing Social Media for the “Big O”
As you’ve probably heard, if you’ve opened a web browser or watched CNN at all today, Oprah Winfrey is on Twitter today. This comes on the heels of a follow-count battle between the entirety of CNN and That 70s Show star Ashton Kutcher. What does it mean, though? Very simply, it means that social media ...
Even in Failure, Google Outperforms Expectations
Numerous sources are finishing their live-blogging the Google Q109 financial results, but the bulk of the information is already out in the public. The bottom line is that while analysts like JP Morgan were predicting 4% net revenue dips quarter-to-quarter, and Google were able to shave a percentage point off that, by only losing 3%. ...
SA Roundup: Nobody Wants Your Money [Twitter, Facebook]
A flurry spurned funding stories have hit the wires in the last 24 hours. Last week, we talked about the faltering IBM/Sun deal, and earlier this week, Cisco made it apparent that they weren’t planning on making a move on Sun. That apparently set the stage for more “no’s” today. Decision Time For Facebook: Term ...
Digg Caves on DiggBar Complaints
Digg made a posting to their company blog about recent changes to the somewhat controversial DiggBar. Since it’s somewhat related to our topic of the day, URL shorteners, I thought I’d take a minute to translate through the corporate speak. Given the ferocity of the criticism over the last few days, you can almost see ...
The Day I Decided to be Evil [URL Shorteners]
There’s a pervasive meme going around that continues to claim that URL shorteners are evil. It reared it’s ugly head again today when CloudAve deigned it necessary to note upstart URL shortener ow.ly’s downtime today. After a screenshot and less than one sentence announcing the news, it was clear that the whole incident was ...
How Do You Feel about #AmazonFail?
Word comes to us from the SeattlePI’s blog covering Amazon and online retail that a semi-official but detailed statement has come out explaining the whole #AmazonFail fiasco. Amazon.com employees are on call 24/7, and many began working on the problem from home. It didn’t take much digging to realize that there was a data error. ...
