Tag: AI

The Rise of the Virtual Mall: Celebrating eBay 30 years of ecommerce

September 3rd, 2025, is the 30th anniversary of Ebay and I say I am impressed with the site. It is has been the place that has been in the shadow of Amazon but it still manages to survive.

Ebay was one of the few internet companies from Web 1.0 that were actually successful and still has an influence.

As a seller, I raise my glass to praise it. There is something unique about eBay. It is not like other sites. While the bidding is no longer the main aspect of the site, the community is still on top and we should celebrate their accomplishments for keeping this part of Web 1.0 still here and kicking to remind of the older ethos of the internet age.

Nvidia’s GeForce Now is the future of mainstream gaming

There will always be room for tinkers working on their gaming pcs; the age however of everyone having to shell money on them is going to give way to cloud streaming games.

I have talked about Nvidia’s GeForce Now many times on here. I think that the service is great for those who have great internet connections and lots of bandwidth. With an internet connection, you do not have worry about the system requirements only the strength of your internet connection and to a lesser extent, the location of your router and bandwidth usage. Such requirements are easier to deal with than the arcane internal structure of computers.

The Strength of Nvidia GeForce Now

The main strength is the ability to play any device you have. This is a major change which will bring more opportunities for different kinds of gamers. One of the issues we have with our gaming industry right now is that there is genre orthodoxy. You simply cannot be syncretic like in the past; your game has to be certain way or have a certain style.

This is where the RTS genre began to stumble after the release of Empire Earth. There was no sense of how the genre could move on with Starcraft breathing down its neck. Starcraft II, while a great game, would ossify the genre and prevent it from growing here. There were many experiments and crossovers such as Activision’s Battlezone series. Such experimentation is rare now.

This is what Nvidia GeForce Now can bring to the table.

What we need in the gaming space is an opening up of the player base. Sometimes we are too arcane in the way we talk about our games. Sometimes we need new perspectives to help innovate. This isn’t to say that our traditions are not important, but we need to take our time to invite newcomers.

This is the only way that the industry can truly start being healthy again. New perspectives will beget risk but no great artform was able to change without someone taking the first step in an uneven river.

The Google Empire: Why we need more search engines other than Google

The usage of “network” effect to basically dismiss calls for other search engines or any other institution is a common phrase. The people who use it to say there is something transhistorical about Google and that people should be just accept Google. The thing that Google has is the ability to just control the access to information and also installing their search services on every Android device here. Microsoft got in trouble for the same thing, but now they are basically the underdogs here in the search space with Bing, which is good but is basically unable to gain traction because Google keeps people within their systems. This means that people only see Google and not other competitors.

I use Google’s products as they are not incompetent at making email services such as Gmail. However, they are often used as the only service and the “nerds” or power” users are trying to use other products. For example, think about DuckDuckGo or other search engines such as Bing as I mentioned earlier. However, Bing is the only one that is capable of challenging Google. In the early 2010s, its market share was higher than it is now but it is unable to get beyond a small percentage.

We need more search engine choices.

Why is that we allow people to congregate in the “best”

This best is being propped up with all sorts of trickery and manipulations. The most important thing that can happen now is that we need to break up the app stores of both Google and Apple. This duopoly has allowed for the ossification of many aspects of the internet. It has led to the decline in the quality of desktop sites. Previously, desktop sites had all their charm and qualities. Now it the same throughout and it is not interesting now. Even the corporate sites, the front page of a company’s brand have become little more than portals to their social media sites.

We need competition and while we may have alternatives, we do not currently have competition.

Search engines should be an area of competition and growth and not beholden to only one company. The internet is a space without any limit in space only bandwidth. We should have many choices.