I hear from a reader that Xdrive, the online storage service recently bought by AOL, is not performing well: Xdrive has been basically non-functional for at least the last 4 days, and a customer service email says they have no idea when their “major upgrade” will be fixed. As I’ve recommended Xdrive in the past, … Read more
If it was from any other company it wouldn’t really matter, but Google’s Desktop Sidebar is important, not because it’s particularly new, but because it undermines the primacy of the browser. Loose Wire ‘s WSJ.com column in June looked at desktop widgets like Konfabulator and Klips before, as well as existing sidebars like the Desktop … Read more
It’s interesting to see how Rupert Murdoch has come around to the Internet, although it does have something of the feel of the late 1990s to it: Bloomberg.com reports that News Corp., the fourth-largest media company, is in talks to buy a controlling interest in an Internet search engine as the company seeks to build advertising … Read more
Was the story that News Corp nearly bought Skype for $3 billion really true? British paper the Independent on Sunday seems to think so: According to well-placed sources, Skype entered into talks with News Corp over a potential $3bn sale. This would have made a massive profit for the two founders and their backers – … Read more
You probably knew this, but the Blessing of Loose Wire strikes again: Yahoo! buys Konfabulator, a widget manufacturer I wrote about in a recent column: Yahoo! has bought Konfabulator, the software that brought widgets to the Mac and latterly to Windows. Apple has since developed its own widget environment, Dashboard, and integrated it into the … Read more