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….
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.
Sam Gustin says: The commercialization of Twitter continues, for companies other than Twitter, at least. Twittertise (get it? Twitter + advertise) allows users to schedule their updates for a certain time. This is a new twist for Twitter, which is supposed to be all about what you’re doing “right now.”
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.
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.”
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.
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