Last Friday, Open Business, in collaboration with Bookmooch and Magnatune, held the inaugural MiniBar, a geek social meant to rival SF’s CC Salon. It was a whole lot cooler than most techie meets, being hosted in a warehouse bar off Bricklane and having actual DJs and everything.
Here I am with Open Business Hannah – you [...]
Categories: business, freeculture, networks
This fortnight’s column for openDemocracy tries to add something useful to the commentary surrounding Novell’s recent Faustian pact with Microsoft. In particular, it asks whether either the deal’s nod to non-commercial developers or Moglen’s threat to legally fork FLOSS with GPL v3 are predicted by Lawrence Lessig’s recent, controversial, “two economies” theory. My thanks to [...]
Categories: business, development, freeculture, law, opendemocracy
A little story that might be of interest to the “Piracy funds terrorism” crowd…
BBC news reports allegations today against Silvio Berlusconi and his lawyer David Mills that Mills, the estranged husband of UK Culture secretary Tessa Jowell, set up a network of offshore companies for the former Italian prime minister:
“Prosecutors say these offshore companies were [...]
In all likelihood, the Gowers Review of intellectual property is already written. But, as it bounces between government departments for consultation, what it is going to say is still very much up for grabs. Which makes it all the more important, if you believe copyright in sound recordings shouldn’t be extended from 50 to 95 [...]
Categories: business, censorship, law, music, politics
Classic clip from this week’s UN internet governance forum in Athens. Art Reilly, Cisco’s senior Director for Strategic Technology Policy, wriggles just a little under questioning from the audience about Cisco’s business dealings with the Chinese authorities, who use Cisco routers to filter internet traffic passing through the “Great firewall”.
My favourite part is the exchange [...]
Categories: business, censorship
It had to happen. After months waiting for my Second Life contact to get around to writing a piece for openDemocracy on theories of innovation in virtual worlds, I have been forced to rehash his thesis in the New Statesman:
“Those who have not yet heard about Second Life, the online virtual world, can’t have read [...]
Categories: business, design, games, networks, newstatesman
This fortnight’s column for openDemocracy is on the fate of “professional journalism” in the new media age. Since newspapers generally devote forest-loads of copy to their own fate at the hands of the internet, this is a topic I’ve steered clear of for a number of years. But here’s my tuppence worth.
[...]
Categories: advertising, business, freeculture, law, media
Missed this news when it broke last month, but intrigued to hear today that Google has inaugurated it’s own political action committee (PAC) to support candidates seeking electoral office in the United States. According to Google’s chief communications bod Ricardo Reyes, Google will use the PAC to lobby on issues such as net neutrality. This [...]
openDemocracy’s Deputy Editor, David Hayes, points me to this excellent article from The Nation, which predicts that media megacorps will use the new web 2.0 environment to pollute our mental space in ways we cannot yet imagine:
“Advertisers are harnessing technology that targets and follows Internet users on their journeys through cyberspace, collecting data and tracking [...]
Categories: advertising, business, media, networks
It’s been a while since anybody posted here. Sorry. After the New Statesman gave away my column for advertising space last week, I was put into an enchanted sleep deep in a forest in Somerset, a spell which could only be broken by Google buying YouTube.
Categories: business