April 2005 Archives

The health care industry got a shot in the arm today with IBM's announcement of an 8-year, $402 million partnership with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. The company claimed that this will be a model for how the health care industry can use new technology. The news comes on the heels of poor earnings announcement by IBM earlier this month. While IBM is licking its fresh wounds, it is aggressively pursuing and expanding into lucrative sectors to breathe life into its ailing earnings.

This is good news indeed. Continue Reading...

The announcement was made today of the $3.4 billion take-over of Macromedia by Adobe. I was a bit surprised at how expensive Macromedia was, but then again this is one of the success stories of the Internet age.

 Interestingly enough, these companies have crossed paths of sorts before. Nearly a decade ago, Adobe had a chance and declined to acquire FutureWave, which later on merged with Macromedia and its flagship product, FutureWave, became what is know as Flash today.

 Besides Flash, Macromedia has a full spectrum of Web products to offer Adobe. There's ColdFusion, a mature server-side Web application product, DreamWeaver, a superb Web page design and layout product, and FireWorks, a versatile image creator and editor geared mostly for the Web. Continue Reading...

A few days ago I had a discussion with our managing editor for our company's Web site about how crawlers discover and index pages. He was convinced that search engines can somehow find hidden pages on a Web site even if there are no links to those pages. I, on the other hand, wouldn't be persuaded. How could search engines crawl a page if they don't know the page's name and location, i.e. Continue Reading...

It's a classic tit-for-tat. In a move that is nothing short of an act of reprisal, GM announced today that it will indefinitely suspend advertising in Los Angeles Times. GM cited "factual errors and misrepresentation" for its decision.

 The move comes two days after an LA Times columnist criticized the auto-maker for pushing its gas-guzzling SUVs rather than investing in hybrid technologies. Perhaps the columnist went too far by calling for the impeachment of two GM executives, but GM's action is just plain childish.

 It's a free press. Continue Reading...

I wasn't sure if this was an April fool's joke when I logged in to my Gmail account and saw my total storage at 1324 MB. It had been 1000 MB (which by the way, is not exactly 1GB) since its inception. But then something stranger kept happening. The next couple of times that I logged in during the day, I noticed that the storage limit was increasing. Continue Reading...