Tech News

Why I’m Glad The Kindle Fire Is Nothing To Be Excited About

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ November 18, 2011 / 1 Comment

The Kindle Fire was met by a massive yawn from the tech community over the last couple days. The early adopters found it to be slow, locked down, unflexible, bad at messaging and generally unimpressive. While some people, like Fred Wilson, found it useful for a very specific purpose, no...
Netflix, Amazon, Facebook and Why to Keep a Big Startup Private

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ October 28, 2011 / Leave a comment

Eventhough Netflix is making the right business move for the long-term their stock price is reeling. Similarly Amazon is a retail giant, a content producer and quietly (at least as far as Wall Street is concerned) establishing a cloud position that will one day make it as big in the...
The Future of Media is Here, When’s The Past Going Away?

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ October 27, 2011 / Leave a comment

Lately I’ve seen several articles that lump all the media industries together (Books, Newspapers, Magazines, Music, TV, Movies) and discuss their impending doom. The story goes that the era of commissioning, creating, publicizing, distribution, selling is coming to an end. In this post Mainstream Media world creation will be accomplished by...
On Respecting Steve Jobs

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ October 6, 2011 / Leave a comment

Note: I wasn’t going to do a Steve Jobs post. I have another post prepared about the protesters on Wall Street that’s far more interesting and informative. At the same time, I feel like every technology focused blog owes him a post of some sort today, so here is mine....
Amazon Silk: Viewing the Cloud now a Feature of the Cloud

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ October 5, 2011 / Leave a comment

Warning: this is a GEEKY post. Last week Amazon released their Fire tablet and lost in all the discussion about media players, tablet size, movie libraries and the lack of 3G was their new browser, Silk. Silk isn’t really a browser though, it’s two. Essentially, a server on Amazon’s cloud...
It’s Just a Phase

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ October 4, 2011 / Leave a comment

I had an interesting discussion with a couple friends last night and thought I’d pass it on here. First, a little background. The conversation was about the evolution from standard printed newspapers and magazines towards… well, I think we would agree that’s still being worked out. There’s a continuum between...
Foursquare, the Innovator’s Dilema and Bubbles

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ September 29, 2011 / Leave a comment

Yesterday I wrote about just how quickly FourSquare seemed to lose their competitive advantage in the location space. As I pointed out, it’s not that they’re not leading the manual “check-in” market. It’s that it’s becoming increasingly clear that the “check-in” model isn’t going to be the one that prevails...
Netflix Is Separating for Good Reasons, Just Not Your Reasons

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ September 20, 2011 / Leave a comment

Reed Hastings made a big bet a few years ago on streaming video. They setup the streaming site and the infrastructure on Amazon’s cloud then worked through all of the growing pains and figuring out how to charge for it till it was a profitable little business. They’ve since grown...
Even if Twitter isn’t For Everyone, It’s For Everyone

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ September 9, 2011 / 1 Comment

Fred Wilson noted a few days ago that there were 400M unique visitors to Twitter.com and only 100M people logged in. That implies that 25% of the people who visit Twitter.com don’t login. On top of that, there are about 40% of active users that do not tweet at all....
Personal Security for Personal Services/Business

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ August 23, 2011 / Leave a comment

I’m a little late to the discussion about AirBnB and security, but I do have a thought. For those of you not involved, the original problem was a blog post about a horrible experience from someone in SF who rented out her house. The response was on the slow side,...