Coop's Corner (CNET)

Facebook COO on redesign: Still figuring it out

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, says the company's still not sure why the recent redesign process irked so many of the Web site's users.

"In terms of what went wrong with the redesign, we don't know yet," Sandberg said during a Q&A session at the Global Technology Symposium held Thursday at Stanford. But she added that the percentage of users giving the redesign a thumbs down was smaller than previous changes to the site.

"As a percentage of our users, this one is much less than before,&… Read more

Search start-up edging close to prime time?

Edgios, a little-known search start-up, may be about to come out of its self-imposed shell.

The company, which has offices in the United States and Serbia, has received extensive advance coverage--especially on Serbian developer discussion boards prior to its official launch.

Edgios has been alpha testing its software since the fall. However, Steve Jurvetson, a managing director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, one of the company's major venture backers, today dropped a broad hint that the coming-out party may be near.

In a presentation he delivered on the history of technology innovation at the Global Technology Symposium on Thursday, Jurvetson … Read more

Does D.C. get energy independence? Pickens is of two minds

PALO ALTO, Calif.--T. Boone Pickens offered qualified support Thursday for the Obama administration's plans to reduce the nation's reliance on imported energy but said Washington's track record doesn't fill him with a lot of confidence about the will of the political class to get the job done.

"We have to get a plan going," said Pickens, who made his comments at the Global Technology Symposium at Stanford. He is the founder and chairman of BP Capital and has been promoting his own plan for energy independence since last year. The so-called Pickens Plan … Read more

Blogging for dollars: Church-state line still valid?

When Ted Murphy started PayPerPost (now called Izea) in 2007, he immediately raised hackles by proposing that companies pay bloggers to post items about their businesses.

ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick described Izea as a "Search Engine Optimization scam that threatens to torpedo the reputation of the already widely questioned blogosphere. It may also be a perfectly fair way for small time bloggers to make a living, depending on who you ask."

"None of us are pure and there are few firm lines established regarding what is and is not acceptable when you're trying to make money … Read more

IBM's new sales pitch: We want to sell you less

Dell beat IBM to the PR punch, but does it really have the technology jobs to beat Big Blue in the server competition?

On Wednesday, Dell made a splash with a massive introduction of servers, workstations, storage arrays, and yes, even services. The message to corporate IT buyers was that yes, Dell understood their needs and could supply a variety of sophisticated hardware and software for the modern data center.

Has Michael Dell finally figured things out? Is this is the start of a dramatic assault on what has been the near-exclusive preserve of Hewlett-Packard and IBM? I wish him … Read more

Ubuntu planning move to the cloud

Add Canonical to the roster of companies offering technology to help enterprise customers build their own cloud-computing setups. But unlike most of the better-known players in this nascent market, the twist here is that the technology will be supplied by an open-source shop.

Canonical is best known as being the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu operating system, a computer operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux. With 8 million to 10 million users, Ubuntu has enjoyed success in no small part because of its ease of use.

Next month the company will offer the first details on plans to roll … Read more

Imagining the end of high-cost computing?

For more than two decades, personal computing has been anything but inexpensive. To be sure, prices for the average computer have dropped substantially since the 1980s. But with the exception of the occasional bargain or bare-bones configuration, the price of a good computer system still takes quite a bite out of the family budget.

That iron calculation no longer applies and shoppers can now find low-end systems in the $300 range running Celeron or Sempron processors. But the more intriguing development is the emergence of Intel's Atom chip and what it might suggest about the Netbook's ability to … Read more

Dan Rosensweig to be named Guitar Hero CEO

Update at 6:10 a.m. PDT March 23: Activision makes it official.

Quadrangle Group partner Dan Rosensweig will be named CEO and president of Activision Blizzard's Guitar Hero franchise, CNET News has confirmed.

The pending appointment was first reported Sunday evening on AllThingsDigital. Rosensweig's appointment will be announced Monday morning, according to people familiar with the decision.

Rosensweig spent 18 years at Ziff-Davis in a variety of senior sales and publishing roles, the last one as CEO of ZDNet, before its acquisition by CNET Networks in 2000. He then served as CNET's president before becoming chief … Read more

Note to NBC's boss: Dude, try watching your own channel sometime

On a day when IBM's reportedly mulling a buyout of Sun Microsystems, Uncle Ben Bernanke decides to print another $300 billion or so, and Congress gets a chance to throw spitballs at the weasels at AIG, there are better things to do than mock NBC's Jeff Zucker as an empty suit.

But after reading the synopsis of Zucker's remarks Wednesday criticizing Jon Stewart for eviscerating the goofs who predominate on CNBC, it's not even fair. How can one resist?

I don't want to prejudice you (just yet) so here's how BusinessWeek reported the story:… Read more