After reading about IT@Cork’s recent legal tussle with O’Reilly’s over the use of the term Web 2.0 in our upcoming conference, Keith Bohanna has bought the domain Web2PointZeroConference.com!
He is auctioning it on Ebay with all proceeds to be donated to IT@Cork. The last time i checked the bidding was up to over €200! Woo! Let the bidding war begin!
Of course I couldn’t condone use of that domain for anything unethical – as Fr. Ted would say, “Down with that sort of thing!”
In a move that has stunned corporate America – newly re-branded AT&T has announced that it is to purchase Google. The price paid has not yet been released but it is anticipated to be in the hundreds of billions making this one of the largest deals ever in US corporate history.
In a statement released early this morning Irish time, Edward Whitacre, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of AT&T said:
It’s a very good deal for AT&T. The price is good, and synergies make sense. It is good news for employees as well as shareholders of both companies. Such a merger creates a strong U.S. competitor in the global telecom marketplace with the resources to substantially advance the rollout of high-speed broadband and other services and drive economic growth and job expansion.”
One of the main affects of this deal for the consumer is that AT&T’s plans for a two tiered Internet, already given tacit approval by FCC chair Kevin Martin, now look unstoppable and in fact are likely the main motivating factor behind the purchase. AT&T have also said that they will start to charge for the free wifi services which Google has been providing in San Francisco.
The Google brand will remain but Google’s two founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are, according to a joint statement, leaving the new Google to “pursue other interests” – current Google CEO Eric Schmidt will remain in place for 12 months.
I am organising a Web 2.0 mini-conference for IT@Cork for early June of this year. I have some good speakers lined up but I’d love to get Tim O’Reilly along to speak since he wrote a seminal piece on Web 2.0.
Also, the fact that Tim is from Cork originally and this is an IT@Cork mini-conference, can’t hurt!
I checked the O’Reilly Radar site and sent an email to the contact address there but i have heard nothing back so i don’t know if Tim read the email and is too busy to respond or didn’t see it.
If anyone has contact details for Tim, can you email them to me at tom@tomrafteryit.net? Or leave suggestions in the comments?
Thanks.
I was talking to Michele Neylon last night and he was in great form noting that the number of subscribers to his site had passed the 100 hundred mark – I’m afraid I punctured his balloon when I mentioned I had just been interviewing Michael Arrington – Michael only set up his TechCrunch blog reviewing Web 2.0 products last June and he already has over 15,000 subscribers! That’s right, 15,000 subscribers in less than 6 months!
I had a fascinating chat with Michael – he spoke about his background before TechCrunch, his famous BBQs, and his plans for the future. Michael really impressed me with his breadth of knowledge of what’s hot and more importantly what’s coming down the line – he was easy to talk to and generous with his knowledge and time.
As we are coming up to the American holiday season (Thanksgiving), I am going to hold off on publishing this podcast until next Monday – put it in your calendars! Oh! and for those who thought the previous interviews were a shade long, this one comes in at a shade under 30 minutes.
The online world is buzzing with the news of Microsoft’s conversion to Web 2.0!
Tim O’Reilly is quite positive about it:
Overall, leaves me with a lot of optimism that Microsoft is fully engaged with the right problems, and we’ll be hearing a lot more from them.
Michael Arrington of TechCrunch said:
After what I saw today, I despair for many a silicon valley startup. Seriously.
And Om Malik, in what has to be one of the more original posts on Microsoft’s announcement reckons:
A little nip-and-tuck, some hip-hop and a $500 haircut with highlights to hide the 40-odd summers. Its a midlife crisis you can see from a mile. Trust me!
What are they all on about? Well, yesterday Microsoft announced two new services – Windows Live and Office Live – these are not, as the name might imply, online replacements for Windows and Office (more’s the pity – but i guess that’s one cash cow not ready for the slaughterhouse just yet!) – they are more like portal sites.
Windows Live, for example, is Start.com but there’s loads more coming to it we are promised – just look at the Windows Live Ideas page.
The announcement was made by Bill Gates himself, and by Microsoft Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie – and it is being claimed as another “turn on a dime” moment (remember the last one was in 1995 when Bill realised that there was something out there called the Internet and people were using it without paying microsoft anything?).
Personally, if it weren’t for Michael Arrington’s enthusing, I’d fail to be even slightly whelmed!
UPDATE:
I just spotted the Live.com team have a blog
Further Edited to add:
Of course, if you have a Mac, don’t bother trying to view live.com – as usual microsoft’s developers live in a monocultural Windows only world – the chances of them taking over the web when they stubbornly refuse to develop for other platforms are, thankfully, small!
Yet another update:
I see Joel Spolsky has also rounded on Live.com’s poor Firefox support and DHTML issues
Susan Kuchinskas of internetnews.com, eWeek, Scoble and a bunch of others are all reporting that a Google-Sun alliance is set to announce a Google version of Microsoft’s Office suite of applications. Sun bring their much vaunted StarOffice codebase to this partnership while Google bring their experience of running massively trafficked web apps.
Google Office is a logical extension of the online Web 2.0 office apps I mentioned last week.
This development, when announced, has the capability to change radically the way people interact with their PCs (and could be an IT Manager’s dream – no more Office install or patch nightmares!).
UPDATE:
The Sun/Google announcement was a bit of an anti-climax after all the rumours. The agreement is:
to promote and distribute their software technologies to millions of users around the world. The agreement aims to make it easier for users to freely obtain Sun’s Java Runtime Environment (JRE), the Google Toolbar and the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite, helping millions of users worldwide to participate in the next wave of Internet growth
So no Google Office – at least not yet anyway! Personally, I think yesterday’s rumour explosion was a kite flying excercise and that we will see a Google Office in the not too distant future for all the reasons expounded yesterday.