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by Kevin Maney, Blogger, Tech Observer, Portfolio.com
Reports, rumors and innuendos are bouncing around the Web that Google may not want to cut an advertising deal with Yahoo after all. This before there is actually substantiation that Google and Yahoo are crafting an advertising deal, which was something of a rumor and innuendo in the first place, allegedly planted to let Microsoft know that Yahoo had options.
Google is allegedly worried about ticking off Washington officials who might think that if Google is playing ball with Yahoo, Google has become an antitrust violator that must be terminated. As if Google isn’t already close to monopoly power in search. It gets 67% of all searches, and that share keeps growing. Google worrying that a Yahoo deal will push it over the brink in antitrust is like Kim Jong-il worrying that if he puts on a party hat he’ll be considered crazy.
by Kevin Maney, Blogger, Tech Observer, Portfolio.com
Lots of interesting debate about this week’s Pulitzer Prizes and what they say about the newspaper industry. On Gawker, Nick Denton very smartly says that “the newspapers’ Pulitzer-chasing is most damaging because it distracts newspapers from their real challenge. Rather than impress colleagues with the seriousness of their reporting, U.S. newspapers need to engage a readership that is drifting off to television and the Internet.”
by Kevin Maney, Blogger, Tech Observer, Portfolio.com
Starbucks is turning to social networking and hoping its customers will help it out of its current slump.
But maybe Starbucks has a problem it can’t solve with technology or anything else. I had lunch the other day with iconoclastic economist and author Tyler Cowen. We got talking about Starbucks, which Cowen suggested has been so successful in large part because of an aura it created–not because it ever had better coffee. Starbucks was a cool new thing, he said, and it grew rapidly to take advantage of that image. But the rapid growth now becomes Starbucks very undoing–because by definition, if you’re huge and omnipresent, you can no longer be the cool new thing.
The Japanese have one view of robotics–researchers there constantly work at making robots that are like humans (Honda’s Asimo) and humans that are more like robots.
Colin Angle, CEO of the most successful consumer robot company, iRobot, operates on a different vision. He believes that trying to build a humanoid bot is a waste of time. Instead, we’ll have teams of special-purpose robots that work together.
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