Netflix, Reed Hastings Survive Missteps to Join Silicon Valley’s Elite - Businessweek
More than iTunes or Youtube? That’s impressive.
Perhaps a real breakthrough is just around the corner.
The technology website, TechCrunch, said that Microsoft was planning to buy all Nook Media’s assets for $1bn (£650m).
Microsoft already owns 17% of Nook Media, with around three quarters owned by Barnes and Noble and 5% by Pearson.
This makes a lot of sense on one level: Barnes & Nobel never had a platform for their e-book/e-readers to stand on, so the savvy business move is to sell the assets…while they’re still worth something.
And it makes perfect sense for Microsoft to buy Nook. Despite the fact that Microsoft has had software to read digital books for decades, they don’t have a hardware product of note: Courier was scrapped before it was even released and Surface has been much less than successful.
The only remaining question is whether or not Microsoft will just gut Nook or if it will become a Microsoft product.
So the Facebook phone was such a hit that they’re now giving it away.
In spite of all those big moves, however, the company’s most important news is that it’s finally started selling the iPhone, which, unsurprisingly, lots of people have been interested in buying. In fact, T-Mobile said it’s sold 500,000 of the Apple phones since they went on sale last month.
While commendable, T-Mobile’s numbers are far behind, say, the 4 and 4 .8 million iPhones Verizon and AT&T respectively sold last quarter.
You’ve got to love how Venture Beat compares sales of half a month to sales for three months–6x the number of days in question.
APPLE IS DOOMED!!!
John Matherly, the creator of Showdan speaks truth to power idiot info-babe. Bloomberg tries to play this search engine up as a tool for only evil. John calmly and clearly explains how his search engine works: it takes data that is already public and makes it easier to find and collate. Furthermore, it exposes bad default assumptions of device manufactures. What Matherly has created here is not a tool of evil, but a catalyst for the rapid increase of computer security.
What a fantastic idea: Civil Rights Defenders have created a product that allows the government to track dissidents in the hopes that CRD can protect their people from the government.
Oh yeah, nevermind the fact that if the bracelet is removed from the wearer calmly under duress or if the limb to which the bracelet is attached is dismembered from the body of the wearer, this device is pretty much useless. I suppose those problems can be addressed in Government Tracking Device 2.0.
Genius!
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings Predicts the Future of Streaming Video
Peter Kafka, summarizing Reed Hastings’s long-term view of the future of streaming video:
The one new nugget here is a Hastings prediction, held by many other people, that we’re moving to a world where “apps replace channels.” Hastings mentions apps nearly 3 dozen times in his essay, and makes it clear that he sees Netflix first and foremost as an app provider.
I’m trying to think of a certain company in a prime position to thrive as apps replace channels. Tip of my tongue, can’t quite think of it.
Samsung?
A missing piece to the Apple puzzle.
A tale of two competitors
This is how Apple sells its laptops:
This is how HP sell their laptops:
Only one of these methods is a winner.
Yannow, Ubuntu is Open Source. Open beats closed every single time. Or so we’ve been told.
If the bleating masses out there that claim to care about Open Source really cared, they would have already sat down, wrote the necessary code and fixed the security problems.
But that’s not why so many people support Open Source. They support Open Source because they don’t have to pay money or time and yet get value from the produce.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: most users don’t really want access to the code and they don’t want true customization. What they want is a checkbox, a toggle switch to give themselves the illusion of control.
Hard cash and hard work is hard to find. Yet these are the same people that screeched on the internet about privacy concerns with Ubuntu searching instead of forking the project and removing the third-party searching.
