Rafe's Radar

Selling the Apple II: Three true stories

When the Apple II first came to our store, Computer Connection, it really didn't move at all. The little putty-colored console wasn't especially powerful or capable. Our store was in the middle of San Francisco's financial district, and the businessmen who came in to look around were, for the most part, more interested in the Northstars and Cromemcos that ran CP/M.

There were three key events that changed things for me, though:

The spreadsheet
Dan Bricklin's spreadsheet, Visicalc, saved my job. It took next to no time to show financial guys how this little app more

Reporters' Roundtable: Google Glasses you can buy today

It is the coolest tech demo we've seen this year: Google's Project Glass, which is an effort to create a glasses-based heads-up display for the real world.

With the Google glasses, you look out a window and get a weather report overlaid on your field of view. Look at a product and get information about it. Look at a bus stop and see when the next bus is arriving. Share photos. And maybe even look at a face and get the name that goes with it. Who wouldn't love that?

If you can't wait for Google to launch its augmented-reality product, I hope you like snow because Recon Instruments makes a heads-up display product just for skiers. Today, I'm talking with two guests about Google Glasses, the Recon products, and personal augmented-reality in general with:

Martin LaMonica, senior writer for CNET News
Dan Eisenhardt, CEO of Recon Instruments

LogMeIn launches Cubby: File sync and share done right

Dropbox. It's the Apple of Web storage companies. It's got a clan of fanboys who swear by it. And for good reason: It's simple to use and has some strong features. It's also one of the least flexible products among its competitors.

Holdouts (like me) who want the capability to sync files outside of Dropbox's walled garden -- the Dropbox folder on your desktop -- have to look to other products. Likewise, people who want to store or sync more than 100GB of files.

Personally, I've been using SugarSync, which does two things right: more

Vic Gundotra: How we claim 170M Google+ users (Reporters' Roundtable)

Google launched a redesigned version of the social network Google+ this morning. In the blog post announcing the upgrade, Google Senior Vice President of Social Vic Gundotra wrote, "More than 170 million people have upgraded to Google+." What does that really mean? Are 170 million people using the social network the way they use Facebook? I talked to Gundotra, as well as VP of Product for Google+ Bradley Horowitz, on a special Reporters' Roundtable interview this morning.

When I asked Gundotra how many people are using Google+, he deftly told me I was looking at it wrong. "You have to understand what Google+ is," he said. "It's really the unification of all of Google's services, with a common social layer."

Wavii groks the news so you don't have to

Has Techmeme met its match? Or Flipboard? New semantic news analysis company Wavii is launching its automated, personalized news "feed" app today. It's a more modern and more pretty, deconstruction of the overwhelming news barrage we're all buried under. Wavii CEO Adrian Aoun's pitch: "Facebook is good for keeping up with friends, but it's kind of annoying that you can't keep up with your world this way."

Wavii is a smart timeline of the news. Its core value is that it runs its semantic engine against several hundred news feeds and is able to determine more

The only thing hotter than Instagram? Pinterest

I wanted to do a comparison of other companies that are likely big acquisition plays, like Instagram just was today for Facebook. As I was constructing my list, it became clear that while there are a lot of very good companies that could easily get acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars, few have the same, critical values that Instagram has. And not just to Facebook. There's really only one startup that emerges as most Instagram-like: Pinterest. All the others are battling for position as distant followers.

Facebook bought Instagram, it appears, because it offered a unique combination of more

Why Facebook plunked down $1 billion to buy Instagram

Facebook, the largest photo-sharing site (and social network), announced today that it's buying Instagram, the wildly popular mobile photo-sharing app for smartphones. Quick analysis pegs this as a very strong tactical and strategic move for Facebook.

The key win for Facebook here is mobile engagement. Instagram has rocketed to 30 million users in under two years. Facebook has had a mobile app for years but it doesn't have the user love that Instagram does. By acquiring the best-of-breed mobile app -- at least in terms of audience development -- Facebook both takes out a future competitor and grows more

Brian Wong mines happiness (Startup Secret 55)

"It is easier to mine happiness than create it."

--Brian Wong, CEO, Kiip

The concept behind Brian Wong's company, Kiip, is, in my estimation, brilliant. Kiip is a mobile game advertising company, but with a unique twist. It doesn't pop ads up while you're in the middle of a game, or nag you while you're waiting for a level to load. Rather, Brian sells advertisers the opportunity to reward players when they have accomplished certain things, and he makes a set of utilities that developers can use to offer up their players' accomplishment moments to marketers. more

Reporters' Roundtable: The big mess at Yahoo

The news of Yahoo has not been good of late. A patent lawsuit against Facebook turned tech commentators against the company. And then Yahoo announced a massive 2,000-person (14 percent) staff layoff.

Is it all part of a new Yahoo strategy? We'd all like to hope so, but new CEO Scott Thompson has not revealed how these moves serve a broader purpose.

Where does Yahoo go from here? Can it bounce back? Can it co-exist with Google, Facebook, and the rest of the Web?

Our guests today are:

Charles Cooper, executive editor at CNET News.
Kara Swisher, co-executive editor of All Things Digital.

When Facebook goes public, an event we expect next month, it will make a lot of young employees very rich.

Billions of dollars of stock (back of napkin: $10 billion) will be distributed to thousands of employees. Some midlevel workers will find themselves sitting on windfalls of millions of dollars. What are they going to do with that money? At least three new Internet wealth management companies will be angling for the business of these newly rich -- not to mention every Wall Street brokerage firm and money manager in existence.

Even though most of the stock going to Facebook more