The internet economy continues to fascinate me. There are sites and services that have become hugely popular, but haven’t been able to translate that popularity into cash flow. Take Facebook. It claims 250,000,000 members, yet nowhere near the income that matches its ubiquity. If not for the infusion of money from investors and venture capital […]
I’ve had John Marshall, the King of Collectible Records, on my radio shows many times in the last 20 years. He has appraised hundreds of old vinyl albums on air for listeners. Considering that these records were just sitting around gathering dust, and were probably bought for less than $10 originally, people were happy to […]
I had another conversation with NY Times personal tech columnist David Pogue yesterday on KIRO/Seattle. We began talking about Twitter, which had suffered a denial-of-service attack that took the site down earlier in the day — and because he was sitting in his office autographing 1,500 copies of his new book, “The World According To […]
The US Postal Service may lose $7 billion this year, which may mean the closing of 1,000 post offices across the country and the elimination of Saturday delivery. Here’s a more radical suggestion: we don’t need daily residential mail service anymore, so cut it back to every other day. With e-mail and texting and cell […]
In discussing a “public option” for health insurance, a lot of critics claim that letting the government compete with private industry will kill the insurance companies. But our history of public vs. private proves them wrong. Take the post office, which doesn’t get the credit it deserves for taking your mail from your house to […]
My favorite story of the last week sounds like the plot of a horror movie. As reported by Fox News, a company in Maryland, under contract to the Pentagon, is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find — grass, wood, even dead bodies. It’s […]