Mike Seidle ...notes from the road

Firefox, the open source successor to Netscape continues to win over market share in a big way. Oceania and Europe lead the trend (as they have for many internet metatrends). So how big is it?

According to XiTi Monitor (a web metrics service):

When one of the people who built a business on top of one of the only real commercial successes (SSL Encryption and Certificates) in encryption speaks, content owners should listen. Mark Shuttleworth has posted an article to his personal blog that lays out why DRM doesn't work. In fact, he's downright delighted to tell the music, movie and content industry that their business model simply cannot make it:

Paul Graham, technologist and author recently released an essay on why Microsoft is dead. Dead? Yes, in the sense of losing relevance - they no longer define the standards the way they once did. Companies aren't afraid of competing with them. Why? According to Paul:

Everyone is interested in reaching "the little screen" but one has to question that it really is going to be worth what eMarketer claims it's going to be. The media has a long way to go - unless you count web content served to phone browsers. Regardless - phone users are going to face an increasing number of advertisers trying to reach their mobile phones:

One of the projects I work on at Indy Associates is MySchoolAlert - a tool we designed for schools that have problems communicating with parents.  Modern parents communicate with email, cell phones and text messages.  Modern schools are still stuck trying to use either telephone trees or auto dialers - both of which don't work well with voice mail.  Enter MySchoolAlert:

If you live in Britain, Microsoft is asking for your help making your data harder to access and getting more leverage to force you to buy their software. Microsoft has been fighting to prevent the adoption of the the OpenDocument file standard for storing word processing files, spreadsheets and other common files. OpenDocument is not controlled by a single company and ensures data will be accessible for years to come: