Opinionated

Unfortunately I cannot be in Vancouver for the conference. I write this from Cape Town, venue of last years fall ICANN.
I want to disclose a couple of things upfront. Those who know me will know I am nothing if not strongly independent in my views. However disclosure helps those of a more suspicious mind know [...]

I have been meaning to post on this for a while and didn’t do so because I wanted to wait for the dust to settle. This seems like a good time.
My old company Easynet has been acquired by BSkyB for something around $375m. I was co-founder of the company, in 1994, with my friend [...]

I take the family to Cape Town each year around Thanksgiving. We have a home here - in St James, overlooking the Indian Ocean. My Wife, Gené is South African and the children’s grandparents and an Aunt live here.
This year is no exception and we set off on Saturday morning at 5.30am. We [...]

Russell Beattie ay Yahoo has a lengthy post about RealNames. It’s a generous and thoughtful piece. Thanks for the link Russell.
There are a couple of things worth knowing.
Firstly RealNames didn’t really crash in the bubble. At least not directly. We were profitable and growing fast (about 120% a quarter back in Q1 2002.
Secondly, we had [...]

Google launched GoogleBase last night. What a disappointment. Whilst Google Reader clearly points to somebody at Google “getting” the importance of edge published content and real-time indexing, GoogleBase is a throw back. Basically a dumb flat-file database system for the world to throw content into. It’s actually embarrasing for the whole of Silicon Valley. [...]