Tom Foremski
Latest from Tom Foremski
What Happened to Bitcoin?
Bitcoin is a very interesting virtual currency that uses advanced cryptography to create and maintain the value of the currency. Benjamin Wallace at Wired Magazine has an excellent report on “The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin.” One of the core challenges of designing a digital currency involves something called the double-spending problem. If a digital ...
MediaWatch: The 154 Year old Atlantic Magazine’s Digital Transition
The Atlantic Magazine celebrates its 154 year anniversary this year and it also chalks up another rare achievement: it has crossed the digital divide and now makes more revenue from its online operations than print. Jeremy Peters, at The New York Times’ Media Decoder reports: “When I started in ’08, digital was 9 percent of ...
Happy 40th to Intel’s First Microprocessor – The Start of the Digital Revolution
Intel today celebrates the 40th anniversary of its first microprocessor — the 4004. It was a 4-bit chip, puny by today’s standards but revolutionary at the time because it was the first commercially available programmable microprocessor. Compared to Intel’s current Core microprocessors (995 million transistors), each of the 2,300 4004 transistors used 5,000 times as ...
Summify: Finding a Place in a Crowded Market
I met with Mircea Pașoi, co-founder of Vancouver-based Summify, a service that helps people deal with information overload by figuring out the top news stories for the day based on their peer groups on social networks. This is an increasingly crowded field: Flipboard, Techmeme, Zite, Paper.li, Percolate, My6sense, Genieo, (and our recently launched Silicon Valley ...
If Steve Jobs were Looking for Funding Today He Wouldn’t Get it – He’s a Marketeer
I watched the PBS documentary on Steve Jobs last night,“One last thing” and it was well done, mixing a fair bit of the good, the bad, and the ugly about the life of the man. And there was a lot of praise for the “marketing genius” of Steve Jobs. Then it struck me: If Steve ...
Geeks On An Airship – Don’t Call It A Blimp!
Thursday I spent a very pleasurable day with a great group of people, many of whom I’ve known for years, such as: Jeremiah Owyang, Kristie Wells, Shel Holtz, Ross Mayfield, Ben Metcalfe, and Chris Saad. We were part of a larger group of geeks, bloggers, and marketers helping Airship Industries come up with a marketing ...
MediaWatch: TriplePundit Merges with Sustainable Industries
San Francisco based green business media publishers TriplePundit and Sustainable Industries have announced a merger designed to combine their readership and resources to build a powerhouse media company. Both brands will remain intact for the foreseeable future, and both digital platforms will continue focusing on their distinct voices, offerings and audiences. Efficiencies will be realized ...
PressPage: A Quick And Effective Corporate Social Media Newsroom
I met with PressPage earlier this week, a Dutch based startup that offers a quick and effective way for companies to transform their newsroom into a social media hub for journalists and customers. I spoke with Bart Verhulst, CEO and with Sébastien Willems, chief developer, who said that an inspiration for their service was my ...
Crowdpark Bets on Social Wagers, VCs Bet $6m
I recently spoke with Crowdpark, an interesting startup that allows Facebook users to wager virtual currency on football games, elections, or anything they want. The company is based in Berlin, Germany, a hot city for startups because of the low living costs and the high number of young, urban, early adopters. Most successful German startups ...
The Coming Flood of Internet Domain Names – Will Corporations Pony Up?
AdAge columnist Judy Shapiro writes that ICANN’s new program, which allows any word to be used instead of .com or .org, etc, will create “one of the biggest changes on the Internet in a decade.” She writes: With ICANNs New gTLD Program to commence January 2012, the doors will be thrown wide open and virtually ...