Network

Google Wave is another grab for the Holy Grail of collaborative computing. But, will it be more successful than previous attempts?

Twitter's the talk of the Web this week, with word that its latest round of funding could be worth as much as $100 million. That'd bring the company's total value to a whopping $1 billion -- an awful lot of zeros for a startup based on brevity.

The yearly Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco is a great place to catch up on not just the chip giant's plans but also the entire trajectory of the PC and consumer electronics industries. Dominating the 2009 show were the usual announcements and demos of "smaller and faster." If this year's gathering saw any significant difference, it was Intel's vision of x86 IA (Intel Architecture) chips everywhere, in PCs, mobile Internet devices, phones, TVs, set-top boxes--you name it.

Gmail was out this morning...again. The outage affected only a small percentage of Gmail users, but in the wake of Tuesday's Google News outage the lack of reliability from Google isn't helping justify the business case for embracing the cloud.

Because it's free, easy to use, offers tons of storage space, and has a wide range of features, Google's Gmail is one of the most popular e-mail providers. Thanks to Google Apps, you can even use it with your own domain name. But if you're still using the plain, uncustomized version of Gmail, you're missing out on some fantastic capabilities. Here are my three favorite ways to improve Gmail.

Seven years ago, this blog you're reading now was an online column offering advice on such things as traveling with a PDA in lieu of a laptop. On that particular topic, I wrote that accessing the Internet on a PDA was like "driving cross-country in a Pinto with a cracked windshield--painfully slow and monumentally irritating." One of the main options for checking e-mail on a handheld, I explained, was to connect the PDA to "a dial-up modem and a landline connection."

I may post a blog entry three times a week, but I'm still an old newshound at heart. My soul is covered in newsprint. Scratch my skin and I bleed Indian ink (mixed with finely aged Scotch whiskey). As print publications keel over left and right, that makes me a member of an endangered species.

Now that Facebook has hit the 300 million members mark and shown that its free service can rope in dough, we have to wonder what will happen to the social networking giant 10 years down the road. Here are five possibilities for the future of Facebook.

Do you have a network in your small office or at home? If so, you probably found setup easy, but now you could use some assistance in managing and troubleshooting the network, as well as in getting the most out of it.

Google's new Fast Flip news-er interface is a bit of a puzzle. It doesn't seem very fast and also doesn't flip pages, but slides them across the screen.