April 25, 2001
MSNBC: Gadgets offering ‘convergence’ show whole can be less than sum of parts.
It is an old story that keeps getting retold. Bewitched by the promise of “convergence” — the blending of communications, entertainment and computing — and galvanized by the Internet, engineers and marketers are dreaming up a new class of high-tech Swiss Army knives.
News.Com: Compaq to wed PCs, TV.
Many major PC companies are reeling financially from the collapse of the consumer PC market in the United States. But Compaq, among others, believes the future for the home computer industry lies in consumer electronics. The change has come alongside the advent of digital media files.
News.Com: Sun to open "expanded Web" with Jxta.
Sun wants Jxta to power a new generation of services on the Internet. Jxta would provide a foundation for running programs across a host of "peers"--potentially every sort of computing device from desktops to tiny cell phones to mammoth servers.
Dallas Morning News: Microsoft engineers get help from real people.
Give Microsoft some credit for letting me watch a user stumble along, but it's all to prove a point. The software giant, based in Redmond, Wash., is known for constantly improving its products, and one of the ways that it gets there is through a rigorous regimen of usability tests.
Internet Week: A Built-To-Order Dotcom.
Reflect's value proposition--executed on the technology side by chief logistics officer Alex Zelikovsky, who also helped architect's Amazon's logistics strategy--is so-called "mass customization," or the ability for individual customers to design their own personalized beauty products.
Business 2.0: Spinning Out of Control?
This trend toward dressing (some would say disguising) advertising and public relations as news is driven by economics. A standard press release costs only a few hundred dollars to compose and distribute electronically, making the Net a low-cost distribution channel.
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