David Davis
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Recent Articles
Apple Fights for Its Bite
April 26th, 2012
After the Justice Department charged Apple and five publishers on April 11 with conspiring to fix prices on e-books, three of the publishers immediately settled. Apple, however, vowed to fight, portraying itself as a hero working to break Amazon’s monopoly on e-book sales and end its practice of underpricing e-books.
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Not the Usual Bedtime Story
April 19th, 2012
As the Internet grows up, more things we once thought amazing have become ordinary or even antiquated. I was reminded of this in a recent conversation about a decidedly non-Internet topic: bedtime stories.
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Tracky: the Tie That Binds
April 12th, 2012
You have to admire the chutzpah of local startup Tracky. Most startups try to reach new markets by creating unique products, but Tracky, created by Las Vegas entrepreneurs David and Jennifer Gosse, instead tackles a highly competitive market head-on by creating another site for managing shared projects.
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3-D Printers Reshaping Our World
March 22nd, 2012
Some of the once-futuristic devices from Star Trek now seem quaint (our cellphones, for example, are already much smaller than the show’s communicators). Recently, another device has started to become available for the average person: the replicator. The MakerBot Replicator (yes, that’s its real name) is a 3-D printer that can make small objects of any shape. Industrial 3-D printers have been around for a while, but the Replicator is one of the first specifically designed for home use.
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Starting Up, Letting Go
A car with no driver may be rolling past you soon. And that’s a good thing.
March 15th, 2012
Last June, Nevada passed the nation’s first law permitting driverless cars on its roads, and the law took effect March 1. At first, the impact will be small. We may see a few cars with red license plates driving around with “drivers” who are busy texting on their phones, but not much else. However, the technology could grow into an industry. And Nevada could put itself at the forefront.
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New iPad Is No Big Deal
March 15th, 2012
Is it just me, or have Apple’s recent product announcements gotten significantly less exciting than when Steve Jobs was around?
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Fitness Helpers for the Truly Wired
March 1st, 2012
An old management adage says “what gets measured gets done,” and with the evolution of electronic sensors and personal computers, many people are discovering that measuring themselves is a great way to keep motivated. The Koko FitClub in Henderson uses this idea in its computerized SMARTrainers.
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The Death of Righthaven
February 9th, 2012
Righthaven, you may recall, is the Las Vegas company that started suing websites for posting clips of articles from the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Righthaven filed these lawsuits without notifying the website owners, and without giving them any opportunity to remove the offending content. The company hoped the threat of expensive litigation would motivate site owners to settle quickly, and the strategy worked—for a while.
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Putting a Lid on the Internet Soup
January 26th, 2012
The Protect IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) were crafted to make it easier to combat Internet piracy, but as the bills wended their way through Congress in recent weeks, many in the Internet community—from giants such as Google to dorm-room startups—have seen them as a threat to the very essence of the Internet.
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Media
Old Media, the Wild Web and the Meaning of “Free”
January 26th, 2012
After Google, Wikipedia, and tens of thousands of other websites protested the proposed Protect IP and Stop Online Privacy acts (PIPA and SOPA, respectively), Brian Greenspun, a Las Vegas newspaper publisher who includes himself among those “struggling in the media business,” responded by pointing out that the Internet is not free. His column in the Jan. 22 Las Vegas Sun does not specify whether he means “free as in beer” or “free as in freedom,” but his comments suggest he means free as in beer. Which means he starts his argument by completely missing the larger point.
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