platforms

Squawk Box January 25

January 25, 2008

This morning's Squawk Box was particularly lively.  We had a great cross section of people on the call including regulars Randall Howard, Jim Courtney, Howard Thaw, and newcomers Brad Dixon, Gernot Ross, and Nick Desbarats. We discussed the situation with Scrabulous, Facebook's platform and the businesses it has spawned, Microsoft's earnings results, and Sprint and [...]

Squawk Box Jan 25 [ 25:08 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
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Microsoft to join Dataportability.org?

January 23, 2008

Rumors are flying this morning that Microsoft will join DataPortability.org, the working group thinking through data portability issues.  That would be good news, although at this point there are plenty of joiners, but only small amounts of activity in the work group forums on Google.  

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Squawk Box Jan 18: Sun, Hasbro and more

January 18, 2008

This morning we recorded another SquawkBox with Randall Howard, Howard Thaw, Jim Courtney and myself.  We talked about  Sun's acquisition of MySQL this week for a cool $1 billion.  What's Sun's game here?  Speculation runs the gamut from building enterprise applications to compete with Oracle all the way to cloud computing a la Amazon EC3.  [...]

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Thumbs down on Breakup

January 16, 2008

Breakup is a new Facebook application that tells you when you've been removed as a friend.  Big thumbs down, I'm afraid.  Part of the appeal of Facebook as a social network is that you don't have to tell people that you've ignored, unfriended or blocked them.  It's one of the privacy guarantees that Facebook makes [...]

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Simple solution for Facebook feeds

January 16, 2008

What the right hand gives, the left hand takes away.  At least it seems that way in the world of Facebook's schizophrenic support for developers using the News Feed.  A few weeks back, Facebook made it possible for developers to add stories to users' news feeds even when the user doesn't have that application installed.  [...]

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Voxeo announces Designer 8

December 21, 2007

Voxeo has just announced the Voxeo Designer 8, a new call control designer for their hosted platform.  I haven't used Designer 8, but other similar tools include ThinkEngine's CallFlowDesigner, Telephony2 CallButler (which integrates such a tool), and Angel.com.  The pioneers in this space were Pronexus with their VBVoice.   All allow scripts to be created, graphically, which can then [...]

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Gird your loins, men. It's WAR!

December 12, 2007

The die is cast, the gauntlet thrown… pick your melodramatic metaphor kiddies, but one thing is clear from this afternoon's announcements by Facebook and Bebo — it's war on OpenSocial.  Mark Z and his team have correctly judged that OpenSocial is a threat to their burgeoning platform, and have decided that the Facebook API, architectures, [...]

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De Facto or De Jure… does it matter?

September 2, 2007

Ivor Tossell's August 31 piece in the Globe and Mail summarizes the open social networks vs Facebook debate.  Titled Why I Believe Facebook's Days Are Numbered, Tossell sees Facebook's closed network, and the mostly uninteresting applications developed for the Facebook API so far as signs that that the Facebook fad will come to an end.  He [...]

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Pulver on Facebook platform

June 26, 2007

Like many of us, Jeff Pulver has been playing with Facebook recently.  He writes: As more and more software developers integrate their applications with Facebook, Facebook has become that much more valuable…especially when the third-party applications add to the overall end user experience. It might have been a moment of sheer Genius or Madness when [...]

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It’s not a baby, Reid. It’s an API.

June 25, 2007

Reports are that LinkedIn will provide an API, opening up to developers a la Facebook.  It may take nine months to do it.  In my opinion, that may be too long to wait.  Facebook has momentum now, and with their API, are capable of exerting extreme competitive pressure on LinkedIn now.  Example: some months ago, [...]

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