Peter Coffee

A person might reasonably wonder about a headline like “Small Business Use of Internet to Grow Slightly.” My first reaction was something like, “Perhaps, but does a business that does use the Internet effectively stay small?” If I survey “small business” use of the Internet in Year 0, and again survey “small business” use in […]

My presentation of 25 Killer Applications of All Time is live — and yes, I know about the VB screen wrongly showing the DOS rather than Windows version of the product. Oops. Other comments and nominations are welcome.

Now that youve got it, what are you going to do with it? Thats the question I find myself wanting to ask any number of groups of technology users and providers as our smoothly polished fantasies of the 80s and 90s turn into the roughly hewn realities of the 00s. In application development, developers have […]

A small or midsize business can take some pages from the playbooks of the biggest companies when it comes to going into the market in search of either goods or services. The SMB need not settle for overpriced off-the-shelf offerings but can send out an RFP (request for proposal) that invites a supplier to apply […]

IT people spend much of their time—and invest much of their credibility—putting numbers on things that might or might not happen. Security threats might appear in the wild, or not. Disasters might justify costly contingency planning and backup systems, or not. But year-end peak loads on financial systems, not to mention “Cyber Monday” and other […]

Have you ever seen one of those bumper stickers that says, “The worst day fishing is better than the best day working”? Thats how I feel when I look at todays PCs. The worst PC you can buy today is a great piece of gear, better than what you could buy at any price not […]

As any reasonably experienced photographer can tell you, a tightly framed long-lens photo may suffer from shallow depth of field. Developer tools and application platforms represent a similar trade-off: Its traditionally been hard to zoom in on part of a complex application, or to achieve tight management of a particular slice of an application stack, […]

An announcement due out today from MIT will report initial results from work with “III-V compound semiconductors”: composite materials, in particular indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs), which have shown the ability to handle 2.5 times the current of silicon devices and to provide high performance at voltages as low as 0.5 V in devices on the […]

Sure enough, I no sooner a United Nations study re-affirms something I said four years ago — and that I reiterated just this past October. When you look at the value that’s in real Web content, and at the ease of packaging that content in presentation-neutral formats that let the client device decide how to […]

This is really and truly my 116th blog post, but it looks instead as if I’m brand new to this medium — because the history of my comments across two preceding eWEEK Labs blog platforms is regrettably being left behind as part of the move to this new venue. My past comments remain accessible on […]