The year of hope and change is certainly off to a grim start in the tech world. Last week alone saw layoff announcements from stalwarts like Intel and Microsoft, as well as Web 2.0 companies like Digg, just to name a few.
Mel Brooks said the hardest thing to do was to make a person sitting alone in a room laugh out loud. Laughter is social, and that’s important to consider as watching online video on your laptop or handheld device with headphones can be a pretty isolating experience.
Sure, most of us can get pretty fired up over the thought of a monthly 250GB bandwidth cap, but what about the companies that provide online video services? After all, as Om Malik pointed out, the cap isn’t about excessive bandwidth usage as much as it is about stymieing online video sources like Hulu, Netflix and Amazon.
Man, there’s been a lot of comics-related news this week. Marvel Entertainment is keeping it going with its serious push into online territory. Marvel just hired former Sony Pictures Digital EVP Ira Rubenstein to head up its new Global Digital Media Group. With big budget high-profile motion pictures like Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk on tap for this summer, what does Rubenstein have in mind for online?
I spoke with Rubenstein yesterday about his plans. Since he just started his new gig, he wouldn’t get too specific about budgets or plans to launch dedicated web series, but he definitely has the Marvel faithful in mind.
During a recent earnings call, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said that his company will “work with Apple” to ensure that Flash apps would run on the iPhone. This after Steve Jobs publicly dissed Flash as being “too slow to be useful” and its stepsister Flash Lite as “not capable of being used with the Web.”
But like Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction,” Flash is not going to be ignored.
Next year’s switch from analog to digital TV broadcasts could produce more noise than signal, disrupting service for millions of people even if they have the proper converter box, according to a new study from market research firm Centris.
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