Patent gadfly Paul C. Heckel has dropped his lawsuits against many small U.S. newspapers that operate Web sites. Heckel claims to own the a U.S. patent for displaying an abstract of a story online with a link to the full story, a…
Belgian Conceptual Artist Eric Van Hove has incorporated our Theory of New Media into his Digital Golem project, his entry in the UNESCO/Iamas 2003 international new media contest entitled Digital Pluralism. Van Hove’s project, to be submitted at the 5th World Forum…
The BBC recently reported that SMS has eclipsed voice calls as the most common use of mobile phones among young people in the United Kingdom. A survey by the CCP Group, an company that underwrites personal insurance policies against loss of mobile…
The American Society of Journalists and Authors says that Ziff Davis Media Inc. recently sent a new master contract to its regular freelance writers, demanding that the writers assign, without compensation, all rights (electronic and print) to their previous work for Ziff…
‘Voice over IP‘ is long-distance telephone calls route through the Internet rather than through telelphone companies’ circuits. VoIP calls have little or no cost. Ten percent of all international calls last year used VoIP. Traditional telephone companies fear VoIP. Read Dan Gilmour‘s…
Speaking of flexible items, there’s now a cloth keyboard for the Orange SPV Mobile Digital Assistant (a mobile phone/Personal Digital Assistant). Manufactured by Ora of the United Kingdom, it uses electro-conductive fabrics and can be rolled up and pocketed when not in…
That’s Jeff Jarvis‘ neologism for the bloggers and their media, a term he used yesterday during ClickZ’s Weblog Business Strategies Conference.
Wired.com reports on some of the implications that camera-equipped mobile phones are having on media and society.
The Pioneer Corporation of Japan has developed a wearable computer with a display you can wear on your sleeve. A prototype jacket was shown in Tokyo last week. The wearable color display is composed of active-matrix organic-electroluminescent (OEL) film, a material which…
The Recording Industry Association of America and several recording companies are suing file-sharing network Aimster (now known as Madster) for abetting copyright infringements and the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals is being technohip by releasing the case’s oral arguments in MP3…
Katy Johnson won the Miss Vermont beauty pageant in 1999 and 2001 and operates a Web site that promote “character education”, abstinence, and sobriety. Tucker Max operates a Web site that promotes the opposite of character education, and he had an affair…
Sure, you’ve heard about the file-sharing softwares Napster and Grokster. But how about the friend-sharing software Friendster? A hybrid of peer-to-peer distribution and online dating application, Friendster helps you find new friends or become one. You list your interests, hobbies, favourite movies,…
Although the words Bush and Technology seem incompatible in so many ways, members of the illiterate, hunter-gatherer society known as the San Bushmen of Africa’s Kalahari Desert have begun using handheld Personal Digital Assistants equipped with Global Position System cards to map…
Azeem Azhar, entrepeneur and former Internet correspondent for The Economist, wrote in The Guardian last week, “I think that today is the best time in four years to launch a business.” Read why. Now UK managing director of 20six, a blogging company,…
If you’re the competitive or betting type and you like to read weblogs, BlogShares is the game for you. It’s a stock market fantasy game in which ‘shares’ of blogs, rather than stocks, are bought & sold. Anyone know how to ‘short’…
She gets our vote for prettiest use of Macromedia Flash on the Internet. Check out Model Federica Fontana‘s Flash FX Website, created by Arxmedia of Milan.
Community publishing has been taken to a new technical level by Stockholm’s N
Literally a higher demographic audience, 95% of passengers who tried Internet access aboard a Lufthansa airlines Boeing 747 liked this service. In mid-January, Lufthansa equipped its Boeing 747-400 Sachsen Anhalt, which regularly flies between Frankfurt and Washington, D.C., with Internet access received…
Congratulations to Monique van Dusseldorp, founder and CEO of Van Dusseldorp & Partners in Amsterdam, and co-founder of Europemedia, who has won a Vosko Award for her long service to the digital media industry in the Netherlands. A veteran Internet consultant and…
We’re pleasantly surprised to discover that our Theory of New Media has become required reading in the University of Maine‘s Computer Game Design course. Although we wrote that theory to help explain to publishers what the differences are between Traditional and New…
“This is a country who defeated Iraq in three weeks, but still can’t figure out SMS.” That was how Kevin Werbach described the U.S. in his keynote speech to the TV Meets the Web conference in Amsterdam.
“Do your friends nod off or walk away when you start talking about ASP, HTML or CPM? Is the local Starbucks still the only place you can properly brainstorm with your colleagues? Are you onto your 4th PDA?” asks E-Consultancy‘s E-Bore Test.…
After all the PowerPoint presentations I’ve lately seen at conferences, I feel compelled to hawk Seth Godin’s US$1.99 masterpiece Really Bad PowerPoint. It’s an electronic pamphlet (PDF) about what not to do with PowerPoint. It would be worth all the conference registration…
In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Courts decision backing the U.S. Congress’ extension of copyrights from 75 to 95 years, Reason magazine has published an ‘exclusive interview’ with Mickey Mouse. Among the cartoon rodent’s comments: “For almost 70 years, I’ve only…
In one of the largest ‘forced migration’ in Internet history, Comcast will forcibly migrate the e-mail addresses of the 1.9 million AT&T Broadband cable modem users from the attbi.com to comcast net domain. All because the Comcast company purchased AT&T’s broadband operations…
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) today recommended Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1 and Mobile SVG profiles be anointed standards. Vector Graphics (VG) are how Adobe PostScript and Macromedia Flash work, although those two companies each uses a proprietary version of that…
If the Internet now is universal, jokes are the universal form of content. The British Association for the Advancement of Science created Laugh Lab, a Web site where jokes are posted and rated. The funniest to more than 100,000 people in over…