James Osborn

On January 12, 2010, Google announced that a major attack launched against its network from hackers inside China (aimed at exposing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists) had prompted it to consider abandoning its Chinese operations and reconsider its 2006 agreement with the Chinese government to censor search results in the country.
“Google [...]

In the old world businesses would make it as difficult as humanly possible for consumers to move from their service to a competitors. This makes economic sense, after all… people are less likely to want to move if it involves effort, if they don’t get the equivalent service elsewhere or if something (such as a [...]

Affluence.org has been proclaimed ‘Facebook for rich people’. Every niche demographic seem to have their own social network and Affluence.org has been designed for rich people who like to talk to rich people… exclusively. It aims to bring ‘the members-only country club‘ mentality to the web but whilst this may sound like a good business [...]

Remember FriendsReunited? Back in 2000 the UK spin-off of ‘Classmates.com’  in many ways laid the foundation of today’s biggest sites. It had a business model, a growth rate to rival that of Twitter and even made a profit of £22 million in 2007 - something Facebook and MySpace are still struggling to do.  So what [...]

One conclusion can be drawn from the current economic crisis… no one has a clue what to do. From Keynesian ‘Fiscal Stimulation’ (Plowing money into the economy to sustain jobs and ride the way through the recession until things pick up again. The famous quote is ‘putting money in bottles and burying them underground’ to [...]

When mainstream media begin using twitter as a live feedback mechanism and the general public understand what is going on there is no doubt that we can say Twitter has hit the big time. Today whilst watching ‘The Wright Stuff’, a popular morning discussion programme in the UK the stand-in host (Richard Bacon) told the [...]

Following on from last week’s theme (but hopefully a little less negative and more constructive). This week is TIOTI.com (tape it off the Internet). The company is a UK based startup and tries to be a more comprehensive wikipedia for TV shows, but with a social networking layer. It started out life with a good [...]

Someone I met made an interesting point recently. When I was telling of my interest in the web industry instead of a vague look of comprehension that is common among ‘normal people’ I was greeted with an open hostility for those in the field. Although this is the first time I have seen such a [...]

Social networking is a business dominated by trends. There was Bebo, MySpace and now there is Facebook. As Facebook becomes more and more mainstream (as I write it is ranks as the 8th most visited site in the world  and its growth is outstripping MySpace ) people are already beginning to wonder what the next [...]

The Internet is abundant with sites that are bad ideas or badly executed and so I thought it was time to throw my oppinion into the mix and review a few of these sites that I think have potential.The first entrant to the list is *drumroll please*… MeOwns (http://www.meowns.com/).
Although this site stands for most things [...]