Rafe's Blog

Calendars for everyone

Trumba, presenting here at PCForum, is a very slick consumer-grade site for keeping calendars up to date.  It lets you manage the calendar for a little league team, for example. You can have multiple contributors to the calendar, and users can subscribe to changes, synch the online calendar with their Outlook calendar, etc.  It looks like a very, very slick tool that can help families and small groups coordinate schedules. I’m looking forward to using it to share my calendar with my wife, and I’m going to tell her string quartet about it too.

Problem: Money. They want to charge for it (under $50 a year). This might work for professional organizations, but it’s a dicey prospect for consumers.  Yahoo Calendar offers some (not all) of Trumba’s features, but Yahoo is free. (Another potential revenue stream: targeted ads.)

See also: Upcoming.org. And Evite. Also see commentary on the EVDB presentation, which followed Trumba at PCForum.

Yahoo acquiring Flickr

Jerry Yang in a talk with Esther Dyson at PC Forum. Esther prodding him to announce: Yahoo is acquiring Flickr.

Esther: Are you going to stick them on as an appendage or suck their DNA?

Jerry: hope they become part of our DNA.  There is a great community of Flickr users, and we want to understand the community and help them grow.

I do too. Flickr is a fantastic service.

Jerry also said he doesn't want the Flickr community to feel neglected. The question is, do the Flickrers want Yahoo's attention at all?

Heading to the Forum...

On my way to PC Forum tomorrow.  I'm hosting a panel on Tuesday called "Presence in the Enterprise." 

PCF is sure to be one of those conferences that's blogged to within an inch of its life. Nonetheless, I hope to do some reporting/blogging from the show myself.

I mostly just hope that the bloggers in the audience have nice things to say about my panel...

The converging security market

Security products are getting integrated -- the latest suites have anti-spam, anti-virus, anti-phising functionality, and more. This is the beginning of convergence in the industry, says News.com. In the future, security will be built into networking software and equipment. Is this good? It is if it gets people to apply security technology, but it's not if the security tools in these converged products are weak -- "best of breed" technology often gets diluted when it becomes a checkmark item on a bigger product.

From my "Business Buzz" on CNET.com - work.cnet.com.

Dell trashes "whiteboxes."

Dell exited the "whitebox" (unbranded) PC business recently. This does not mean the no-name PC is dead. There are many great PCs from small, boutique vendors. Value-conscious PC buyers should continue to shop around.

From my "Business Buzz" on CNET.com - work.cnet.com.

I love my Brother

Just picked up a $200 Brother MFC 5840CN inkjet all-in-one.  There are many color print/copy/scan/fax machines out there, but surprisingly few that are easily networkable. This one is. It's easy to set up the PC software on networked machines, easy to get the Brother working the network, and even easy to scan to networked computers. Easy easy easy. I was going to get an HP 7410, but CNET user reviews of the software scared me away from it.  I'm happy I went with the Brother.  I just wish it didn't look so much like a collection of leftover parts from Beige Plastics, Inc.

A CNET review of this product is forthcoming.

Firefox keeps looking better

I am this close to making Firefox my default browser.  (I use it a lot, but not all the time.) Two things are pushing me even closer to making the transition complete. First, Yahoo just announced that it's not going to develop any more tools that work in IE only -- they're going to support Firefox just as much as IE. Watch as other major sites and tools follow. Second, the recent swelling of support for the collection of technologies called Ajax indicate that you don't need IE to do amazing application-like things.  Google Maps is a major threat to Microsoft Streets & Trips, for example.   No wonder Microsoft is pushing forward with IE 7.

From my "Business Buzz" on CNET.com - work.cnet.com.

When will the search bubble burst?

It's like 1999, in a way. There are just too many great companies operating now that give users new ways to find data or information on the Internet. One of my favorites is Answers.com (a service of Gurunet). An interesting interview with CEO Bob Rosenschien is here. Also, I covered a very slick consumer search tool, Dulance, here.

From my "Business Buzz" on CNET.com - work.cnet.com.

Cingular & Verizon share photos

File this under, "Shouldn't be news, but is." The two biggest US cellphone companies now let users send photo (MMS) messages to each other on either network.  SMS traffic took off when US mobile carriers finally enabled cross-carriers messages. Phone messaging could rocket up now, too.

From my "Business Buzz" on CNET.com - work.cnet.com.

Subscribe to Office

You don't buy software from Salesforce.com; you rent it over the Internet. Would the same thing work for basic productivity tools, like Office? Theoretically, yes, even though there are many problems still to solve. But it's safe to predict the end of the CD ROM and DVD as a software distribution medium. Give it five years, tops.

From my "Business Buzz" on CNET.com - work.cnet.com.