Anybody who has ever applied to a US university has at least heard the name of the US News & World Report. Their website of the US educational institutions’ rankings is the most comprehensive and authoritative one. To give you a flavor, the US News ranking for business schools is equally, or maybe even more...

Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond are truly the founding fathers and patriarchs of the Free/Open Source movement. The fruits of this movement are well-known even for the non-geek audience. They include the Linux operating system, Firefox browser, OpenOffice suite, MySQL database, plus a plethora of PHP-based content-management systems like WordPress and Drupal which...

When Google first launched GMail, it fundamentally changed the free, web-based email service arena. The “big” players back then, Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft’s Hotmail were only allowing up to 5MB of storage, forcing users to spend more time on cleaning up their inboxes than actually using the e-mail service. Then there came Google with unimaginable...

The much awaited first software update of iPhone is out! One of many novel things about iPhone, setting it aside from the CellPhones 1.0, is that it is supposed to be frequently and significantly improved through a series of software updates. This first update is not that exciting - just a collection of bug-fixes, but...

Now that I am an AT&T subscriber for my cellphone service (thanks, iPhone!), I decided to try some of the other goodies that AT&T has to offer, as well. I am part of the large [anti]social class of people who get physically uncomfortable if they can not access Internet for an extended period of time...

Kijiji US is eBay’s attempt to bury Craigslist. It has been buzzed about for a while now, but I received an e-mail announcement, from eBay, only this morning. I guess, it is official starting today. Kijiji is wrong on many levels, as in - it should have never existed in the first place wrong. An...

Drupal is the bestsocial web community management software in existence, period. I dare make a blunt statement like this, because I have seen/worked with many “CMS” (oh, how much I hate this bloated abbreviation) systems, including couple I architected and lead the implementation of and I insist - as imperfect as Drupal may be, it...

Several “iPhone simulators” have been published on the Web, lately, that claim aiding web developers in creating iPhone-compatible web applications. Beware of them! Aside from a bunch of other issues, they do not display text and graphics the same way (size, proportion, layout) that iPhone does so you may fall in false confidence and when...

Good news on the iPhone’s bluetooth support front: you do not have to buy the $129.00 Apple headset of questionable wearing comfort. Third-party bluetooth headsets seem to be supported just as well. We had no trouble hooking up a much cheaper, yet nicer Motorola H700 headset with an iPhone. Apparently, headset model is one of...

There’s been plenty of whining going on the Net about “iPhone does not do this” and “iPhone does not do that”, so I am not going to bore you with all the known shortcomings like: half-ass (even less) bluetooth support, no Flash support, yadda, yadda, yadda. You’ve heard it, you know it. However, having been...

The confusion is over - Apple revealed the secrets of creating slick iPhone applications. When Apple announced iPhone in January, this year, the shocking news and the source of much speculation became the alleged lack of third-party application support. An intelligent cellphone without Java/J2ME was so unusual that for a long while it gave Apple-haters...

OK, I am not a marketing guy. I know how to use Porter’s Five Forces analysis, and I always happily escape to it when I have no real idea about the subject matter, but that’s about it. Being so ignorant in marketing, I used to share the general misconception that pretty, female face can sell...

Steve Jobs announced the availability of Safari 3.0 Public Beta during yesterday’s WWDC Keynote. For audience at large the biggest news about the release was that it is now available on Windows, as well. However, apparently there is a “hidden” (well, unpublicized) new feature that is just as exciting for Mac geeks like moi -...

You might have noticed that I have not been blogging quite so frequently, lately. Part of the reason has been that we were breaking nights launching BuzzMonitor. I am happy to report that it is live now at [buzzm.worldbank.org]. BuzzMonitor is a nifty Web 2.0 tool conceived by Pierre-Guillaume Wielezynski that allows you to create...

Apple is undoubtedly a leading innovator in the industry (if you wonder which one – both), and so is Google; so expectations from the announced integration of AppleTV and YouTube are very high. Whatever may your (or my) feelings be about YouTube, it is certainly a defining phenomena in Web 2.0, and bringing YouTube to...