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So back in the summer when I got asked to speak at two conferences in Bangkok I made a wager with myself. First that the weather would be brutal in the USA starting late fall so why deal with that…I was right. That decision led me to go to where it wouldn't be nasty. Australia and work from there. The weather was great. Food very healthy and the Internet in all three towns I visited was just perfect. That then led to why go home for two weeks when I already was going to be in Europe for the holidays to catch up with friends I only see a few times a year in France, Portugal and the UK.
My second wager was that the time surrounding Christmas and New Years would be absolutely brutal on the news front. Christmas and New Years both fall this year on a Wednesday. That means no one really seriously is thinking work on Monday or Tuesday. Heck for many, the world of work ended sometime last week. So, I closed the agency last Friday, giving everyone on the Comunicano team a six day holiday, and basically 9 days off over a two week period. And they deserve it. With an all virtual team I can see them working when others are done for the day. Put simply, a virtual workforce gets things done. Giving the team a break before CES also is deserved. The team works hard, and deserves a break.
Oh, and being in Cascais, Portugal–great people to hang with, hit or miss weather–but who cares, amazing wine, food and yes, both mobile and broadband…that mean's I'm "staying connected."
Merry Christmas….to all and to all a good year! So…now onto what passes as the news for today. It's so light, there's no need to comment…so just read it.
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There will be a record number of tech market IPOs in 2014 according to the most recent 451 Research Tech Corporate Development Outlook Survey published by 451 Research. The 451 Research survey respondents project that 2014 will be a post-recession record year for tech IPOs as the three major U.S.
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While the world continues to wait for Apple to buy an enormous and powerful company with its stockpile of cash, the tech giant just keeps quietly snapping up smaller ones instead. The latest: BroadMap and Catch, two completely different tech companies that focused on mapping technologies and productivity, respectively.
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Some five years after buying media identifying service Gracenote for $260 million, Sony is selling it off to Chicago-based media company Tribune Co. for nearly half that. The two companies today announced a $170 million deal that gives the Tribune Company's Media Services group Gracenote's technology and database of 180 million music tracks and videos.
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As an adult living hundreds of miles from your point of origin, you are faced with an annual dilemma: Open the brown box and all its contents now, or wait for the morning of the 25th. Oh, you know what you should do. But you're a dad-blamed grownup now.
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Overseas, Facebook has worked with a number of carriers to bring free access to the social network for those who don't otherwise have data plans for their phones. Now a T-Mobile subsidiary is trying to see if the same thing works in the U.S.
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On Friday, BlackBerry delivered its Q3 financial report, and the numbers weren't pretty. But lost inside all that data was yet another worrying development: BlackBerry's current predicament has forced the company to abandon work on two unreleased smartphones.
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Now CEO Meg Whitman is taking another stab at the crowded mobile-phone industry as she tries to turn around the company. She is searching for new areas of growth amid declines in desktop and laptop computer sales, which make up HP's largest business unit.
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The Walt Disney company has announced today that Square and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has been elected to the company's Board of Directors. Dorsey will serve as "an independent director," and stand at a meeting in March of next year.
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A consortium created by Apple Inc. (AAPL), Microsoft Corp. and other technology companies to acquire $4.5 billion of patents from Nortel Networks Corp. in 2011 is holding discussions to sell a portion of those patents, according to people with knowledge of the plans.
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Credit: Reuters/Mike Blake A cable truck returns to a Time Warner Cable office in San Diego, California December 11, 2013. Its stock price increased more than five fold and it returned more than $9 billion to its shareholders in dividends and stock buybacks, on top of a $10.9 billion dividend at the time of the split.
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If you're waiting for an official version of WebRTC to revolutionize your customer service, don't. The wait may be long, and real-time communications can be done today. WebRTC is a proposed technology standard poised to change the world. It will potentially disrupt voice, video, and mobile communications, and dramatically affect how we interact with the web.
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Thank you all for voting in our annual Startup of the Year poll. The results are in – here are the favorite startups from our shortlist: #1 Fieldoo What sport has over 250 million players worldwide and an industry worth a huge €20bn? Football.
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