Technology companies not immune to financial crisis

It seems to have taken a while but the financial crisis has become a reality for the technology sector in the US, even if they initially thought themselves immune. The battering their share prices have been getting recently, if nothing else, will have finally opened their eyes. For once, tech companies are being told to reign in their spending (don’t burn through all that VC cash too quickly…) and focus on making a profit. A novel idea for a lot of tech companies who got funding on the basis of a good idea but the absence of a business plan…

• Welsh wizard warns of hard times in the Valley (The Observer)

Who is Mike Moritz?

• Adventure Capitalist (BBC)

What did he say?

The Next 5000 Days

The “Predicting the next 5,000 days of the web” presentation by Kevin Kelly is an excellent place to start when trying to get a summary of the history of the web, where we are today and some ideas about where all this is going in the future. Get ready for some very large numbers…

It was very interesting for me because I realised that it ties together a lot of the articles and ideas that I have dealt with recently.

Starting with Google’s pronouncement that there are now over a trillion unique URLs on the web, Kelly’s assessment of how much work was involved to create the web as we know it today (“the web of pages”), his “One Machine“, the semantic web (“the web of data”), cloud computing… He packs it all into an easy going 20 minutes.

Fossett plane found

I’ve previously written about the disappearances of Jim Gray and Steve Fossett, and the role of people and technology in the respective searches, both of which have up until now proved fruitless. Fossett’s plane has now been found in the last few days, after a hiker found some of his possessions. Low tech, but it may provide answers at last…

• The Guardian : Wreckage found by hiker on remote California mountainside confirmed as Fossett’s plane