Most Americans now have mobile phones, and a Nielsen Mobile report last year found that nearly one in five of us have cut the cord, abandoning our landline service entirely.
Is all this talk about getting consumers to pay for the news they read online really a front for something else?
The news that President Obama has formally nominated Julius Genachowski to chair the Federal Communications Commission has been received with something slightly short of euphoria by a large portion of the broadcasting and telecommunications sector. Over the last eight hours Ars Technica has been deluged with statements of pure, unadulterated happiness about the pick….
IBM has a habit of being a beacon during economic calamity. Of course, its earnings yesterday helped everyone feel for at least a moment that the world wasn’t coming to an end. But that pales in comparison to IBM’s feat during the Great Depression. Hopefully, we’ll see more of the same from the company.
Yeah, it’s silly season, all right.
At a press conference this morning, a top aide to GOP presidential nominee John McCain was asked about the candidate’s computer illiteracy, the subject of a recent attack ad by the Obama campaign.
Bill Gates doesn’t get a lot of credit these days for being a visionary. But when it comes to his relationship with Facebook, he may still be a step ahead of the rest of us.
Kevin Maney smacks his head: While you’re lusting over a new iPhone, think about this: Why can’t you watch free, regular, over-the-air TV on your phone? Isn’t that what you really want — not these bastardized TV offerings that you have to pay for, like AT&T’s Mobile TV and Sprint’s MobiTV?
Blaise Zerega misses $4/gallon gasoline: The Segway is a huge success–as a technology product. But even as high gas prices have increased sales, as reported by WSJ today, it’s hard to term it a business success. And for that reason, greentech start-ups and their backers ought to examine what’s gone wrong.
In Microsoft’s never-ending search to bloat its software with bells and whistles of questionable use, the company now wants to add touch-screen capabilities to Windows. Raise your hand if you’ve been dying to navigate on your laptop by touching the screen? Anybody? Anyone at all?
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.
What do Cliff Stearns, John Shimkus and Fred Upton have in common? They’re all members of the House Telecommunications Subcommittee, and they’ve each publicly accused Google of having “duped” the Federal Communications Commission by “gaming” a recent multibillion-dollar auction of wireless frequencies, shortchanging federal coffers. They also have this in common: Each has received more than $100,000 in campaign contributions over their careers from telephone and cable interests locked in a battle with Google over the use of those frequencies.
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.”
Jordan Golson can’t be happy: Nick Denton has cut the amount of money he gets per thousand page views to $6.50 from $9.75. That’s a 33% pay cut, on a per-page-view basis. What about on an absolute basis?
Well, the page-view rate is set on the basis of the previous quarter’s page views. Total Q4 page views were 9,132,723, while Q1 page views rose 34% to 12,234,604 . The 33% cut matches the 34% rise in page views, right? Er, no.
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