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“If you, an average caffeine consumer, see your peers enjoying “an even better in-store experience” and “shopping online while enjoying their beverage,” as the press release predicts, won’t you want get on board, too? Won’t you want to feel the rush of a million blinking gadgetry advertisements, the miniscule text scrolling across your pager telling you that you got that house, the smart snap of the Enter key being hit? To get all those non-geeks thinking that it’s fun to get online when they’re not at work, that it’s okay to incorporate the Internet into every aspect of their lives, Microsoft has to demonstrate its wares in a safe, non-threatening, non-technical environment. What better place to begin, then, than amid the tasteful lighting and woody hues of a Starbucks, conveniently located on every single corner of every single American city?”

“”It’s like a virtual girlfriend, but it happens to be Pamela Anderson,” Eruptor founder and CEO Brad Foxhoven said. “If you don’t take care of her she goes to bed, gets sick and is hated by everyone.””

“The company also touts “PortaPimp” and “PortaHo” games, where pimps and hookers fight each other for money.”

“THE rivers of electronic information gushing around the world?s companies ought to reveal a lot about how people communicate within these organisations. But until now the very volume of data involved has defeated attempts to analyse it. A group of Finnish academic physicists has, however, developed some nifty software to help with the task.”

“The main sifting technique employed is called a self-organising map. This projects the convoluted network of different types of communication between individuals on to a plane (see diagram). It does so by repeatedly adjusting the position of the individuals in the map, in order to minimise the distance between those whose communications have most in common. The trick behind this process is to find a mathematical formula that measures these distances efficiently, since the types of communication can be very different in nature. Dark islands on the map show clusters of individuals who are working strongly together. Weak bridges of communication link some of the islands. And deep channels of silence isolate certain islands entirely.”

“While it’s of dubious value for daily use, Facemail can be a lot of fun. I wrote a facemail in which I had a character wink every few words and stutter. “I I 😉 I I I feel buh buh bugs crawling 🙁 under my skin. :-(” I wrote. The face stuttered, twitched, made strange faces, and looked deeply disturbed. I sent it to a friend who sent me back his own crazy Facemail. It was pretty cool.”

“But what will be the ultimate legacy of Java? The anti-Microsoft crowd said that Java would allow Sun to finally make inroads against Microsoft’s dominance of the desktop. But in the final analysis, Java was nothing more than a ploy to capture the public’s interest and, in so doing, boost Sun’s stock price. And it
worked marvelously. Java’s introduction in 1995 marked the beginning of what was essentially a five-year climb in the price of Sun’s stock: $1,000 invested in Sun on July 1995 would have been worth $18,535 at the close of trading on December 30th, 2000. Now that’s the power of Java.”