If “people who need people are the luckiest people,” what does it make people who need to find out all they can about people? Perhaps a better question would be, what does it make people who make the tools for people to find out about other people? Perhaps that question could be best answered by Saad Zniber, co-founder of Yatedo. Read more »
There are few entrepreneurs, even in the tech sector, who have the ability to create a hit product with every one of their major releases. Mike Harrington, creator of Half-Life and Picnik, is one such innovator. Interestingly enough, Harrington’s partner in co-founding Picnik, Darrin Massena, also has had an uncommon number of successful ventures, especially for his young age. Read more »
It is interesting to watch how the market reacts to a change. Sometimes, the influence of a product or service is not realized until the product or service is removed from the marketplace. Watching the market react to the shutdown of Picnik, a niche market online digital photo editing tool, has been a study in corporate loyalty and opportunism. Fans of Picnik vociferously resisted the integration of the Picnik tools into Google+. The market responded with the birth or promotion of several services similar to Picnik. One of the frontrunners to replace Picnik in the Internet zeitgeist is Aviary. Read more »
Sometimes, it is unclear what a business did before a certain point in its corporate history, even by researching the company. Sometimes, a company exists for a time before it hires an individual who turns out to have a great impact on the company; that is the type of hire that puts a company on the map! Joyce Fleck had exactly that level of impact on the Navarre Corporation. Read more »
One of the big stories in the technology sector at the end of 2011 was the initial public offering of stock for Zynga. Zynga, the creator of some of Facebook’s most popular games, was all set to leap into the business of making money off its popularity and the IPO sought to raise billions of dollars for the company. Amid news reports of other video game companies experiencing financial hardships, the Zynga IPO was viewed by many as catastrophic, with the stock losing value its first few days. While this might have made a lesser CEO cringe and get out of the game, it was nothing to Mark Pincus. Read more »
There is something awkward and fascinating about geniuses who peak at a young age. While most people work for years to accomplish all that they want, many young geniuses achieve early and spend their adult years taking on projects they enjoy, more than working for money. On the eve of his move out to San Francisco to start Posterous, co-founder Sachin Agarwal declared that he had accomplished everything he had dreamed of. That’s not bad for a twenty-eight year old! Now, four years later, Sachin Agarwal continues to redefine social media on the Internet. Read more »
Privacy rights are some of the most contentiously debated human rights. Most people in the United States and other free societies treat privacy as an innate human right, a position which comes into conflict with the views of other governments, agencies within the United States government, and Constitutional literalists (there is no explicit Freedom of Privacy guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution). As technology has improved, the debate over privacy rights has only become more divisive. That debate was what inspired Phil Zimmermann to create Pretty Good Privacy. Read more »
Learning to speak a foreign language can be especially difficult for adults. After all, adults have years, decades, of word associations to overcome when learning a foreign language. With many other languages having different word orders and verb tenses that are not used in English, adult learners are not only tasked with learning a new language, but with thinking an entirely new way. Fortunately, not every language is as difficult as learning Chinese and there are some great programs for those who want to rise to the challenge of learning a foreign language. For learning German, there is arguably no better resource than Fluenz German 1+2+3. Read more »
Fans of digital photography – especially amateurs and those who do not have a lot of money for expensive, professional photo manipulation software – have been mourning the demise of Picnik. Picnik is no longer an independent photo manipulation website, though its tools have been absorbed into Google+. For those who might not want to join yet another social network, but enjoyed the look and feel of Picnik, there is now iPiccy. Read more »
With improvements to the Internet and the rise of Internet social networks, it is becoming easier than ever to connect and stay connected with members of your family. At the same time, social mobility in the United States has made it commonplace for families to move around a lot and keeping track of how members of your family relate to one another can be a full time job. To make genealogy simple, comprehensive and fun, Ancestry.com has now released Family Tree Maker Deluxe 2012. Read more »