Olivier Travers

Q&A with eBay CEO Meg Whitman "Whitman: The biggest threat that I saw from both Amazon and Yahoo was: Were they going to figure out how to focus on the community and help the community be successful? Because the community builds these businesses. The only reason that I began to get a little less nervous [...]

The Idea of Ideas and One Reader’s Thought on How the Web Might Pay for Itself "The argument against it has always been that it costs VISA 25 cents to bill someone, so there’s no way to bill for micropayments. But surely there are ways to address this. For example, (what if) no individual is [...]

Web Voice is back online The problems with Blogspot are now solved.

Why Acquisitions Fail "Picture this, you are one of 600 firms in your software industry niche, and you decide to sell the company. You are thinking

Lucked Company So everyone’s not fucked after all? Will a more balanced point of view raise the level of intelligence demonstrated in the forums? Most people that post at Fuckco would make a Slashdot troll flame-baiter look like a genius in comparison.

Enter the Decentralized Zone "The IT workers of any organization larger than 50 people are now in an impossible situation: They are rewarded for negative events-no crashes or breeches-even as workers are inexorably eroding their ability to build or manage a corporate sandbox."

The Internet is Not Television "The genesis of this essay as a letter to an editor of Wired Magazine in which I observed that there were serious errors of fact in their cover story and that the errors had consequences in reinforcing misunderstandings about what the Internet is. Unfortunately, these myths feed into a "common [...]

The Inktomi Search Engine: From wired to tired "The fundamental problems with the Inktomi search engine all stem from its roots. The fact is that Inktomi is not a search company, they merely have a software solution that enables cheap computers to be clustered together, the Search Engine was created out of a desire to [...]

Vivendi Universal will buy MP3.com For $372 million or at a "66 percent premium over MP3.com’s Friday close of $3.01". Cash burning their pockets like we’re back in 1999. 06/29/01 update: Yahoo Buys Up Web’s Biggest Music Video Collection (for $12M). 07/23/01: Vivendi Universal reports revenues rise (but VU Net bleeds ink). 07/10/03 update: Vivendi [...]

Be Careful Lefties: You might turn French "The French seem to believe, like many American Leftists do, that Capital and Labor are engaged in a zero-sum War, and that most pro-business, pro-economy measures are poorly disguised scams to screw workers." So true, so sad. If only we could keep our quality of life and get [...]