Molly Rants

Pay-per-use bandwidth? Not without some ground rules

Update: May 17, 2012 Do I get results, or what? Less than a day after this column posted, Comcast announced it would ditch its 250GB data cap in favor of a 300GB cap with the option to buy additional 50GB chunks for $10 each. Not bad, although it's amusing timing given their current fight over Net neutrality and cap-free Xfinity on-demand streaming.

Bandwidth caps, the death of unlimited data plans, throttling, "data hog" accusations...I get it. Pay-per-use bandwidth is inevitable: the end of unlimited Internet access is at hand. Bandwidth is a limited resource, especially on wireless networks, more

Dell apologizes for hiring sexist summit moderator

Last week, I wrote about a Dell summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, where the moderator of the event, Mads Christensen, "entertained" the crowd of IT professionals with a barrage of sexist jokes, and exhorted them to go home and tell their wives to "shut up, bitch."

This week, Dell posted an apology on its Google+ page, saying the company would be "more careful selecting speakers at Dell events."

The apology comes weeks after the actual event, unfortunately, after my column and tech blogger Christiane Vejlo's English-language post made it onto Reddit this past weekend. (Vejlo, the only journalist invited to more

Why we need to keep talking about women in tech

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 female journalists I was more

Dear Tim Cook: Apple is not the world's tech inventor

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 in Apple's earnings call this week that the rest more

For digital video to live, the 30-second pre-roll ad must die

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 more

Can't someone please fix online shipping, already?

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 the direction we'more

Seven years of Buzz Report: A retrospective

This week, my Web video series, the Buzz Report, is officially over. I don't know of a longer-running Web video series: it started on May 23, 2005, and lasted until this week, April 12, 2012. That's a pretty serious run. And although I know many of you are really upset about its passing (yes, I'm reading the feedback), I want you to know...I loved every minute of it.

Sarah Harbin, Buzz's producer and editor since 2007, and I tried to come up with some of the best moments of the past seven years and compile more

Facebook buys Instagram...but for what?

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 he thinks more

Girls Around Me and the end of Internet innocence

Moscow-based I-Free and its app Girls Around Me crystallized the online privacy debate this week, and, I suspect, will begin the end of our long era of digital naivete.

It's as though the online community has been living in the Garden of Eden all these recent years, and we're all taking a bite of the apple all at once. There are consequences to our behaviors: companies that rely on our data to make their money are not going to suddenly start protecting that data. It's time for you and me to get serious about what we put more

UltraViolet: DRM by any other name still stinks

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 cloud backup.

The reality more