rant

Update: May 15, 2012 In the wake of this article, Christiane Vejlo's English-language account was posted on Reddit, and Dell has apologized on its Google+ page for hiring Mads Christensen to speak at its Copenhagen summit. "Dell sincerely apologizes for these comments," they wrote, saying also, "[g]oing forward, we will be more careful selecting speakers at Dell events."

Update: 11:31 a.m. PT

A lot of women in tech, including me, don't like to spend a lot of time talking about being a woman in tech. In fact, on a panel of … Read more

Steve Jobs is famous for borrowing a phrase that may or may not have originated with Pablo Picasso: "Good artists copy, great artists steal." He said in "Triumph of the Nerds" that Apple "has always been shameless about stealing great ideas."

Yet in recent years, Jobs was outraged over Android's similarities to iOS. He branded HTC thieves and said he was "willing to go to thermonuclear war" against Google over what he called "grand theft Android." Now, CEO Tim Cook seems to have picked up Jobs' outraged-victim torch, saying … Read more

Video is moving to the Web in enormous leaps; the promise of online video seems to be at our doorstep. Millions are cutting the cord, beloved television shows are returning through the seemingly divine intervention of online distribution, and people are consuming Web and mobile video in increasingly staggering numbers.

But all that video consumption is saddled with a burden that's keeping it from reaching its full potential: the ads just haven't caught up.

You all know the problem I'm talking about, and yes, you've seen it on our own site -- on videos hosted by … Read more

As I write this column, I'm on my seventh day of waiting for a Nordstrom package to arrive, and I am fuming. My order was received April 6, it didn't ship until three days ago, and it's still not here. And all I can think is, "I wish I'd ordered that through Amazon."

That's the sentence that should, and probably does, strike fear into the heart of any company doing e-commerce retail today. So why is Amazon still one of the few companies successfully executing free and timely shipping?

"Free shipping is … Read more

There's a lot of speculation today about why Facebook would spend $1 billion to acquire the uber-hip photo-sharing app Instagram. To some, it seems obvious; to others, it's the biggest sign yet of a growing Web bubble. To me, it just raises question after question, and the biggest one is "why." What does Facebook gain from buying Instagram? Let's look at some of the possible reasons, shall we?

Users: Instagram has 30 million users and a potentially huge influx of more, thanks to its recent expansion onto the Android platform. Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom says … Read more

Wal-Mart this week ushered in a high-profile outing of Hollywood's UltraViolet scheme for digital streaming of movies and TV. And it's the same old song it ever was: complicated, restrictive DRM with a big side helping of "pay me again."

In theory, UltraViolet gives you an easier--or at least, legal--way to digitally stream your movies to multiple devices. The UV standard, developed by the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem, offers dizzying promises of an easy-to-access digital library, "total freedom" to view your UV-enabled movies on any device, and future-proof DVD buying where every disc includes … Read more

Recent weeks have seen a lot of (overdue) talk about privacy and technology. There was the flap over Path and other mobile apps uploading your phone's address books to their servers without your permission. A follow-up story noted apps might be able to slurp up photos and their location data on iOS, too.

There was the discovery that Google overrode some cookie settings in Safari in order to track users for ad serving. And Congress is still figuring out a response to last fall's concerns over software on phones that could share your location or other data without … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Sound bars have gotten cheaper, and they sound better and have more connectivity than ever before. Now, apparently you can snap them in half, even if you never wanted to.

Panasonic and Samsung both had "splittable" sound bars here at CES 2012 and I felt like I saw more of them on the show floor. The idea is you can split the bar into two speakers, place them on a stand, and create a more traditional 2.1 speaker system.

It's a nifty-looking feature, but it doesn't solve a problem anybody has ever had with a sound bar. I get plenty of reader mail about sound bars, but nobody has ever asked about a sound bar that can transform into separate speakers, probably because when they bought a sound bar, they wanted a sound bar.… Read more

It's a pretty old story. At some point, when your team is up by 20 or 30 points headed into the fourth quarter, a little complacency sets in. You get cocky, thinking you've got it in the bag. You bench your starters and let the new guys with the big ideas start trying out some new things. You start tinkering with the formula, running some new plays, maybe even showing off a little.

And that's exactly how you end up in the losing column of the greatest comebacks of all time wrapups that will inevitably include the … Read more