Oil Companies As Suppliers Of Fresh Drinking Water

Water is as precious as oil if you’re thirsty (and China for example has no drinking water left, everything has to be boiled) - so who do you turn to for fresh water? Maybe oil companies.

Environment & Energy Daily’s Greenwire makes the point that while oil companies are urged to enter into alien industries such as solar and wind power, their more natural target might be the water they’ve long been accustomed to drilling through.

distributed opportunities

It’s hard to seize the world by the lapels when it’s wearing a t-shirt. But this is usually the only way opportunity can be seized when it presents itself - crudely, with no handles.

Seth Godin tells the same story, in terms of wanting to grapple with the world using the handles you know. He managed at least to come away with the t-shirt.

Apple versus AT&T

Cringely last week on Apple and AT&T: “Steve always hurts his friends to see how much they really love him, so AT&T probably should have expected this kind of corporate body blow.”

Cringely Writes Even Bigger Than Google Schemes

Ah, Robert X. Cringely - surely no one envisions bigger than he does when it comes to corporate strategy? He’s at it again, peeling back even more layers of the supposed secret Google plan for world domination liberation, and he reveals a scale of ambition so audacious that it could just be true.

Music Biz Loosens Up

Take the business model known as FREE (try selling THAT to the hard-bitten “realists”), add a better distribution system than anything ever developed by the labels, and see what’s happening to the music industry now.

Apple, Google, Cringely, And Carr

Today Robert Cringely has been goaded into writing about the future partnership of Google and Apple, from a piece on Wednesday by Nicholas Carr that purported to describe the architecture of said partnership.

Ah, but not so fast, says Bob. You’re forgetting the twisted nature of people, and anyway if it were that simple everybody could write about it. It’s much more complicated than that…

Long Tail Fat and Thin

We love the long tail in my neighborhood, but arguments against it have produced a quote that makes me laugh from the sheer resonance of the words: “It’s the short fat part of the tail that matters.” Read on for two simple illustrations of the right and wrong way to view this famous tail…

Cringely Follows the Money

Robert Cringely concluded his three-part tale of political corruption and corporately veiled greed in his story, The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen. The US telecommunications industry, particularly in its Internet service, has been degraded from a world leading system to a backward mediocrity that can’t compete globally - all in less than two decades.

Those Terrible Telcos: America’s Internet Shame

France now puts America to shame in online competitiveness and capability. We are the poor man of Internet capability, and China is planning to pass us. Thanks to the telcos, and the government. Read all about it…

Us Chickens and Those Telcos

Cringely touches a nerve common to us all this week talking about those telcos and their prices, and their lousy bandwidth (and don’t even ask about service).

Ten years ago, the United States had the fastest and cheapest residential Internet service in the world. Today U.S. residential Internet service, especially broadband, is among the slowest and […]

keep looking »