Several months back I covered a new hosting service called Grid Server by Media Temple that I learned about via TechCrunch. I signed up for an account and played around with it for a few of our sites.

Today we cancelled the account. For our purposes it just wasn’t worth it. We’re going to continue using Dreamhost for all our hosting.

The Grid Server service is just not fully baked yet in my opinion. There were a few planned outages, the speed was not any better in our testing, and the back-end (while slick-looking) was just too confusing.

» Continue reading “Media Temple Grid-Server Verdict: Mostly Hype”

The other night I went downtown to take a photo of this sign:

This is Infinium’s sign that (for now) still graces a building in downtown Sarasota, Florida. The company moved to Seattle some time ago.

Infinium Labs was the former name of Phantom Entertainment Inc., the company behind the Phantom Game System. Aptly named, it was one of the biggest examples of vapourware anyone has ever seen.

The company burned through $75 MILLION dollars of investment capital with nothing to show for it, except a laptop keyboard that to this day has not materialized.

» Continue reading “The $75 Million Keyboard: Infinium’s Phantom”

In a recent lecture Google’s Larry Page was recently disclosed Google’s [super secret] plans for building a massive AI system:

“We have some people at Google (who) are really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale,” Page said to a packed Hilton ballroom of scientists. “It’s not as far off as people think.”

» Continue reading “Google Leaks Secret Plans to Build Skynet”

With all this talk of personalization and delivering content based on your preferences - I can’t help but consider the consequences.

I (and apparently a small minority of others) agree with Graywolf - I don’t want Google to make assumptions about me, who I am, or what I will like. I want to be exposed to new things, ideas, points of view, etc. Personalization, while great in theory, is not optimal in creating a diverse and open-minded society.

» Continue reading “Somewhere Out There, a Computer is Stereotyping You”

Over the past few months I found myself wanting to search for “web 2.0″ versions of many different websites just because most of the time I find that 2.0 sites are more intuitive, simpler, have useful features, and are a lot more fun to use. However there is not a “Web 2.0 search” that I’m aware of, so I decided to roll one myself using Google Co-op.

Introducing … (drum roll please) … Hype 2.0

» Continue reading “Introducing Hype 2.0: a Quick Way to find Web 2.0 Applications”