Author: Rick Klau

So it’s now official: eBay bought Skype for $4.1 billion. That’s a lot of money, and probably buys at least a significant percentage of Estonia (economic peaks notwithstanding). Ross thinks that eBay bought Skype for the conversations this will facilitate; I have a slightly different take, though it’s more an elaboration of Ross’s point than…

If you haven’t read this month’s Inc. Magazine, you’re really missing a great cover story — it details the sale by German publishing giant Gruner + Jahr’s sale of Inc. and Fast Company to Morningstar founder and CEO Joe Mansueto. It’s a great read, and really gives you an eye into the magazine business. The…

On the airplane back from New York today, United had an “exclusive” preview of NBC’s Three Wishes show. It debuts in two weeks, and all I have to say is that the tissue industrial complex is sneaky. I mean, they had their own cable channel (Lifetime), but that apparently wasn’t enough. Now they’ve gone network,…

Absolutely fantastic article over at the IEEE website about Urban Telephone and Video, two entrepreneurs who’ve delivered the “triple play” (phone, TV, Internet access) to households in the Bronx for $99/month. (Hat tip: Techdirt.) Here are two guys (Doug Frazier and Stuart Reid) who sum up their business strategy with a local saying: “An old…

Just updated the application running this weblog to Movable Type 3.2. Will be updating you over the next couple days over comments, thoughts, etc. The UI is quite slick, there’s a lot of polish that went into this. Stay tuned…

MSNBC reports on this troubling scenario over at FEMA’s website — namely, that you must be using Internet Explorer 6 (available on the PC only) in order to file a claim. The shockingly, jaw-droppingly, appallingly incompetent actions of FEMA and others last week were bad enough. This is just plain stupid: When reached Tuesday afternoon,…

It’s been hard to comprehend the enormity of the devastation in New Orleans this week. The Red Cross has already collected an enormous sum of money, and is marshalling thousands of volunteers and tens of millions of dollars to help in the relief effort. At FeedBurner, we wanted to do something to help support this…

I swapped SMS messages with Ernie last night, and all was well (relatively speaking, of course). But according to the most recent post at his blog, a friend of his relays that things are getting a bit hairy: NEWSFLASH: Making a break for it. At this point he is looking to escape the city –…

Seth Stevenson, whose Ad Report Card is a consistently great discussion of good and bad advertising, just wrapped up a week in Amsterdam. And wrote about it. I want his expense account.

Geek alert: Joe, our excellent IT guy (seriously, he’s the best IT director I’ve ever worked with, and no, I’m not just saying that) recently set up our phone network using Asterisk, an open source PBX system. I’d remembered Joi setting up his Asterisk system a while back, and hadn’t really given it much more…