Quoted: I admit it. This weekend I attended the 2008 BrickCon conference targeted at Adult Lego Hobbyists (ALHs). The conference lasted for essentially three full days from Friday to Sunday. I even took off work on Friday. Super nerdy? Yes. But before you judge… hear my story. I always loved Lego as a kid. What’s not to love. And when my kids started getting

Quoted: Bitwine, a service launched in late 2006 that lets people ask questions to experts for a fee. Originally the service was tethered to Skype; more recently it began letting users connect to experts via Skype, other VoIP service, or normal phone lines. Experts can charge their clients either by the minute or a simple flat fee. Clients pay by PayPal and

Quoted: Congress is finally understanding the reality of the Yahoo-Google search deal, and what it means for the state of search competition in general. It’s not about price fixing advertising rates, it’s about neutering the second place market participant. As I wrote on September 27, the current deal between Yahoo and Google will inevitably lead to the decline

Quoted: Star Wars may have taken place a long time ago and a galaxy far, far away, but the first two episodes of The Clone Wars managed to take us back to the feelings of possibility, excitement and, yes, mild embarrassment over the corny jokes, more successfully than you may have expected for an hour nonetheless. It may not have been "your new favorite show,"

Quoted: September 4th 2008 marked Google’s tenth birthday. That means that during 2000 and 2001, when all the air was being let out of the dot-com bubble, Google was in its infancy. That was a good idea that survived the bleakest time for high tech companies.

Quoted: A scantly known startup out of Chicago called Earthcomber has filed a rather absurd patent infringement suit against Loopt, a location-based social network with a substantially higher profile in the Valley and elsewhere.

Quoted: Stopped by the annual open house at Intel Research Seattle yesterday afternoon and saw lots of interesting projects. Here are a couple videos I took while making the rounds. In the first, below, Louis LeGrand of Intel Research shows a robotic arm that uses a camera and an electric field to sense an object before grasping it.

Quoted: It’s time for media and advertising to join other industries that are battening down for an oncoming recession, according to Gawker Media founder Nick Denton. He’s cutting almost 15 percent of his workforce, or 19 of 133 people. Denton is worth paying attention to, because Gawker is one of the most successful new media companies around.

Quoted: Social networking site Friendster just announced that it now supports applications built on competing network Facebook’s popular platform. Friendster already supports apps built for OpenSocial (the Google led effort to make all social sites compatible), and the announcement is significant because signals that Friendster is the first network to support