September 2011
19 posts
Twitter Adds More Ads To Timelines →
Peter Kafka, AllThingsD:
Coming to some of you, in about a month: Ads in your Tweetstream, from Twitter accounts you don’t follow. This is technically an extension of the ad product Twitter started selling a month ago. That one helped marketers place ads in front of users who were already following their brands’ Twitter accounts. The new twist to the plan will let advertisers place ads in...
August 2011
21 posts
U.S. Files Complaint to Block AT&T, T-Mobile... →
Bloomberg:
In the complaint filed today in federal court in Washington, the Justice Department is seeking a declaration that Dallas-based AT&T’s takeover of T-Mobile, a unit of Deutsche Telekom AG (DTE), would violate U.S. antitrust law. The U.S. also asked for a court order blocking implementation of the deal. “AT&T’s elimination of T-Mobile as an independent, low-priced rival would...
3 tags
Bloody Thursday: Google Deadpools All Slide... →
M.G. Siegler:
This means both the Slide products before Google’s acquisition of the company a year ago, and the newer ones that the Slide team has been building within Google for the past year. Yes, it includes the newer products like Disco, Pool Party, Video Inbox, and the just-launched-last-week Photovine. They’re all dead. The lone exception is Prizes.org (which we covered here), we’ve...
Glorious Madness
America has a love of the entrepreneur. Sometimes this is expressed as a seeming love of corporations, of big business, but in truth our Great Defining Myth is that of the iconoclast. The lone inventor with the revolutionary idea who’s dismissed as a crackpot and crushed by The System might as well be our official National Tragic Romantic Figure. In reality when one, or even a handful, of...
Lift →
ReadWriteWeb covers this forthcoming social service in their typical way when they describe it as “the Next Social Network from the Founders of Twitter,” and by “ReadWriteWeb’s typical way” I mean “getting crucial details utterly wrong.” The former Twitter founders in question—Ev Williams and Biz Stone—restarted their umbrella company, The...
Pod Cars at Heathrow's Terminal 5 →
Jim Witkin of the NYT:
The electric cars have no visible accelerator or steering wheel; rather, they are completely automated and travel along a dedicated guideway. My only input consisted of a button push, which indicated my destination.
The system is an example of “Personal Rapid Transit,” which the futurist in me finds immensely cool—and, with all due respect to the...
Groupon Doomed by Too Much of a Good Thing →
Rob Wheeler, Harvard Business Review:
Groupon’s fundamental problem is that it has not yet discovered a viable business model. The company asserts that it will be profitable once it reaches scale but there is little reason to believe this. Unlike the very few successful companies that scaled before they were profitable, Groupon’s business model does not benefit from significant...
A passing thought on the Grid 10
Imagine a tech startup CEO watched Minority Report a few times and thought, “If only I could put that on a 10-inch screen!” Then he drank tequila shots until he became convinced that, by God, he could put it on a 10-inch screen.
Seriously, it’s the only possible explanation for the Grid UI.
“Over the past two years, would you have gained more knowledge by reading [Dan]...”
– M.G. Siegler
What Nokia's Stephen Elop is thinking, but will...
“The people who thought we should have gone with Android can suck it.”
Who is TabCo? →
That’s the question being asked by a viral campaign that’s been going around for a couple months, which oddly seems to have mostly on the radar of desperate Nokia fans believing that “TabCo” was a new project for a MeeGo tablet. (Oh, Nokia nerds. By the end of the decade these guys are going to be like Amiga fans. “There’s still nothing on the market as good as...
Ebooks, pricing and utility
A friend online described the lawsuit against Apple and major publishers for “ebook price fixing” as ridiculous, and I agree. He’s also argued that we (consumers) tend to underestimate the price that goes into producing ebooks, and I also agree; the expenses for editing, typesetting, proofing, marketing, and—oh yes—paying the author don’t change based on the...
BBEdit-Markdown Extensions
The other day I was bugged by the fact that while I had a way to convert Markdown to RTF, I didn’t have a way to convert RTF to Markdown. I had all the tools, theoretically—so it should be easy, right?
As it turns out: not so much. RTF and AppleScript don’t get along very well, and no matter what I did in Automator I couldn’t get it to pass the clipboard as raw RTF data...
A patent fight against Android, or "Look and Feel...
I’ve been reading—and trying to follow, with only limited success—the various fights going on between Apple and various companies, and there seem to be three categories of fights.
The typical fight between big companies, such as the (now concluded) one between Nokia and Apple. These are usually based on fairly technical patents “invented” by the companies in...
Gamification is Bullshit →
Ian Bogost, at the “Wharton Gamification Symposium”:
More specifically, gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is videogames and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway.
For those unfamiliar with “gamification,” it means...
Cattle Guards
Suppose you are a big—very big—company, and you want to enter a new market. But you don’t actually have direct interest in this market as a profit source; you want to enter it because you realize that to protect your existing business (one you’re overwhelmingly dominant in), you have to be a major player in this new space.
So you either buy a company in that space or you...
“Above all, there is nothing provocative or daring in the antiheroic attitude...”
– Robert Lloyd (LA Times)
Push Pop Press acquired by Facebook →
“Last year Push Pop Press set off to re-imagine the book,” chirps the press release. “There are no plans to continue publishing new titles or building out our publishing platform that was in private beta.”
Translation: “Do you like my hat? It’s made of money!”
“Both Push Pop Press and Facebook share a passion for improving the way we share and...
Do rotten Apples make good cider?
Christina Larson’s article for Foreign Policy not only features the link-baiting title “Red, Delicious and Rotten,” but the over-the-top subhead “How Apple conquered China and learned to think like the Communist Party.” There are some interesting tidbits in the article: the accusations that Apple is a luxury brand in America have, however long-held and cherished by...
“We’re going after Lodsys for sure, but understand the ultimate target is...”
– Mike Lee, on uniting independent developers against patent lawsuits 