Salon.com > Mary Eisenhart

Domain names from paradise

Mon, 17 May 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Can an Internet domain name registry and an enterprising prince transform a remote South Pacific island kingdom into a player in the information economy -- without compromising its traditions or its natural beauty? Tonga is about to find out.

Crown Prince Tupuoto'a is spearheading the tiny nation's technological transformation and driving changes that could amount to a complete reinvention of the kingdom's economy. Already the Oxford-educated prince has begun funneling revenues from domain registrations into an Internet-based distance learning program -- opening the doors to education and career possibilities that were previously inaccessible to the islanders. And now Tupuoto'a, who personally greets visitors to Tonga's tourism Web site, plans a wireless cable system to bring faster Net access to the islands.

Social engineering, Web-style

Mon, 19 Oct 1998 19:00:00 +0000

People love using computers to socialize; that's been evident since the days of the Commodore 64 BBS two decades ago. The lure of what's now going by the name of online community -- whether to discuss a common interest, sling scurrilous insults or battle aliens -- has long been sufficiently compelling that people would brave downright hostile technology for the pleasure of hanging out with each other.

Few have spent as much time in the trenches of community, online and off, as Cliff Figallo, Salon's director of community development and author of the new "Hosting Web Communities." After spending the early '70s living on the Farm, a Tennessee commune, he worked for two years directing nutrition and potable water projects in Guatemalan villages. The resulting experience came in handy in the mid-'80s when he helped set up the Well, a particularly active and long-lived online community, and served as its director.

After six years in that hot seat, Figallo helped develop AOL's first Web chat interface, Virtual Places, then co-designed and managed online discussion for IBM's Deep Blue vs. Kasparov chess event.

How Palm beat Microsoft

Thu, 17 Sep 1998 19:00:00 +0000

"The thing that disappoints me the most about Bill Gates and Microsoft is not so much their ethics as the fact that they have no class. It's just so disheartening," says former Palm Computing president Donna Dubinsky, with an air of perilously overloaded patience.

Dubinsky, who recently left 3Com (Palm's corporate parent) with fellow Palm founder Jeff Hawkins to launch the start-up JD Technology, is speaking on last month's Hot Chips panel at Stanford, addressing the general theme of "Confronting the Microsoft Challenge." Antitrust attorneys and representatives of a long line of companies bested by Microsoft, each recounting tales of skullduggery and sharp practice, have preceded her.

Competing with Microsoft has been something of a career for Dubinsky, first at Apple and then at Claris before launching Palm. But the last straw was the Palm PC episode.

Dubinsky and Hawkins founded Palm in 1992, one of the myriad start-ups launched to fuel an anticipated boom in pen-based personal digital assistants. Their flagship product, Graffiti, ran on most of the PDA platforms of the time. Graffiti solved the perennial handwriting-recognition problem by deciding it was easier to train the user to learn a stylized script than to train the computer to recognize handwriting. Graffiti met with enthusiastic acceptance but failed to hold on to its investors amid the collapse of better-funded companies such as Go and Eo and general chaos in the marketplace.