Berlind's Testbed

Farewell to ZDNet (and CNET)

David Berlind — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 17:06:41 +0000

If you were an auditor asked to examine the human resources records of CNET (parent company to ZDNet), you’d discover that even though the company was officially founded in 1992, that there’s a handful of employees whose hire dates actually precede that year. My colleague Dan Farber is one of them. Former MacWeek editor [...]

With Office Live Workspace in play, Microsoft’s Web-competitors (Google, WebEx, Zoho) speak

David Berlind — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 21:48:50 +0000

It was just a couple of weeks ago that Microsoft finally released the beta of Office Live Workspace (OLW) — an offering that many see as as Microsoft’s response to the pressure its flagship Office suite is getting from browser-based competitors such as Google (with Google Apps), WebEx, and Zoho. Although OLW does in fact contain [...]

Demo: ClusterSeven’s Enterprise Spreadsheet Manager tightly monitors spreadsheet integrity

David Berlind — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 14:49:16 +0000

How many times have you stared at the bottom line of a spreadsheet that’s full of formulas knowing exactly what figures should be there, only to find that there’s a different set of numbers staring back at you than the ones you expected. You know there’s an offending cell somewhere, but the spreadsheet is [...]

Google Apps ‘founder’ Rajen Sheth: We dialog with users through new code

David Berlind — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 04:38:18 +0000

Last week, while in California, I had an opportunity to sit down with Rajen Sheth — the man at Google who is credited with coming up with the idea of Google Apps. That interview, along with a demo of some of Google Apps’ more novel features, can be viewed in the attached video. When most [...]

Chartered to protect the henhouse, has the FTC turned into a fox?

David Berlind — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 23:47:27 +0000

I rarely get e-mail from the USA Today’s Byron Acohido (who from time to time interviews me for my opinions on tech). But today, Acohido drew my attention to a story that he has co-authored with Jon Swartz under the headline FTC under fire as credit bureaus sell consumers’ data. The story draws attention to [...]

Google’s GMail product manager: ‘User data should never be held hostage’

David Berlind — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 20:22:32 +0000

Last week, while in California, I made the rounds, capturing on video as many interviews as I could with interesting people that would be fun to hear from. One of those was Google Gmail product manager Keith Coleman who, in the attached video, gives us a status update on where Gmail has been, where [...]

Google/OpenSocial’s director of engineering David Glazer unplugged: ‘Shindig is live’

David Berlind — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 22:14:04 +0000

While at Bebo’s launch event yesterday in San Francisco, I had a chance to catch up with David Glazer, the director of engineering at Google who is overseeing the evolution of the OpenSocial framework that the company announced on November 1, 2007. You can see the interview in the attached video (above). Bebo claims to [...]

With tech titan support, Green Grid to help datacenters go green with measurement standards

David Berlind — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 07:43:59 +0000

With so many tech vendors claiming their solutions to be green and looking for a leg up with customers wanting to be more power efficient with everything from their servers right up to their entire datacenters, one big problem in the industry is a lack of standards on how “green” is meaured and what the [...]

Bebo CEO Michael Birch Unplugged: Facebook apps now run on Bebo, OpenSocial support next

David Berlind — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 02:38:20 +0000

I’m in San Francisco this week making the rounds and, as luck would have it (this was not part of our original plan), Bebo.com was running a launch event while we happened to be here in the city. The event took place at the Metreon right in the heart of the city. So, this [...]

Give Mother Earth the holiday gift of freecycle.org. I have.

David Berlind — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 20:50:50 +0000

Taking care of the planet seems like such a big job that sometimes, it seems like it’s relatively impossible for us to really make a difference on an individual level. You hear about big issues and how, for example, if we all lowered our carbon footprint by just a little bit, the cumulative impact [...]