Planet Abell

Facebook blogged that it had gone "cash flow positive" in the previous quarter, achieving a target it had set for itself sometime next year. We didn't touch upon it in this CNBC Power Lunch interview, but I wonder what all the public companies that have a $10 billion market cap ( Facebook's imputed value ) think of the strict SEC rules about disclosure they must abide by, when a guy who is basically a grad student can get away with doing a post and no analyst telecons?

Back in '91 or '92, when I was in Boston for Reuters , I got to participate in an annual event that was legendary among journalists in the area: The Kennedys threw open up their Hyannisport compound to reporters and their families for a summer day of eating, playing and casual schmoozing. And when I say "threw open," I do not exaggerate: We had the run of the place. When Ethel Kennedy's front door is ajar and you wander in and she looks up from her paper to tell you a story or two about Bobby and point out John's favorite chair in her house, well, that says something about the manner of this remarkably gifted political family. It was like a company picnic and the entire management team was there to make us feel like family. We were greeted with a receiving line, with every hand shaken by every single Kennedy, even those whose ages were in the single digits, because it's never too early to learn about the family business. There was no pressure or spin but t...

An 'Instant Panel' discussion on CNBC's Power Lunch about recent attempts to restrict what fans can do with the pictures and videos they take at sporting events, by event organizers. Good luck with that, guys.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News , World News , and News about the Economy A hit on the NBC Nightly News, pegged to an uptick in attacks on social media sites.

I was the convenient time-zone mouthpiece, but the work on this story has been done the inestimable Kim Zetter on wired.com's Threat Level blog . So, guys, hope you liked it. Please don't drain my bank account.

2000: Half of United States households have internet access, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. Nielsen is best known for measuring the popularity of a certain other mass medium that went viral a half-century earlier. How fitting that this paradigm shift came with fin-de-siècle serendipity to a millennium that had already witnessed staggering technological advancement. Not since television transformed the world in the early 1950s had anything entered the collective consciousness as quickly or pervasively as the internet, which began its life 40 years earlier as " Arpanet ," a relatively humble military experiment. (In Wired.com style, BTW, "internet" — even "the internet" — is lower case.) Like television, experiencing the internet initially required the procurement of expensive, finicky equipment. And as in TV's earliest days there wasn't much to see. One internet service provider (ISP) even playfully reminded us of the limits of the net in a TV a...

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News , World News , and News about the Economy I've become quite the mouthpiece on digital etiquette lately — specifically the rights and wrongs of messaging when you are with people. It's all tied to Wired magazine's August issue dedicated to the subject, and I am standing in for Brad Pitt , as usual. In a recent appearance on CNBC's Power Lunch I argued that there was no sensible rationale for regulating texting from the boardroom. Not too much controversy there. But an impending hit on the Today show about texting from every place other than the boardroom spurred a good-natured mini intervention at home, where I was reminded that I'm addicted to love for my iPhone. Yes, my name is John A., and I use my iPhone all the time. And, I am not alone, I do not think: With every new mobile means of communication comes a new opportunity to shut out people in the world that's right around us and engage in some sort of conversation with ot...