January 2012
37 posts
Hollywood Still Hates You →
Matt Drance:
[Hollywood] continues to punish the people who play by the rules with an insufferable customer experience. This is the sole reason piracy is up and profits are down: because doing it right totally sucks. And that’s apparently how the studios want it.
High Schools Are Step One Of Two →
mckaythomas:
MG Siegler in his latest TechCrunch article posits that although Apple’s new iBooks strategy is admirable in its effort to fix problems in public high schools, that it’s not realistic and that their market strategy should revolve around colleges and college textbooks.
On the surface, which seems logical enough, his argument is sound. But It ignores the one, HUGE driving force in...
C.Y. Reid: In Favour of iBook Author →
cyreid:
This post is about something that irritates the living hell out of me, almost as much as people who see ebooks as a bad and terrible thing, despite the fact that they have got so many people reading who wouldn’t normally read.
It’s called iBook Author, and some people don’t like it.
At first,…
Piracy is Part of the Ecosystem →
smarterbits:
Frédéric Filloux:
Today we have entertainment products, carefully designed to fit a global audience, waiting months before becoming available on the global market. As long as this absurdity remains, piracy will flourish.
Piracy is a legitimate issue that needs addressing, but content providers also have their part to play. People are willing to pay for content, but they must be...
Katy Perry's Perfect Game →
smarterbits:
NPR’s Zoe Chase:
If you listen to commercial radio, this is not news: Katy Perry had a huge year. She went No.1 five times. She was the most played artist on the radio. But the record industry is so weird, it’s hard to know whether this kind of success translates into huge amounts of money.
So we asked.
Fascinating look at exactly how, and how much, music studios actually earn...
3 tags
iTunes U needs more attention
I am sure by now that most people are sick of hearing about the Apple Education event but here comes another post.
I am in my final year of University at the moment, so a lot of the new stuff introduced will not stick with me. The new things for iTunes U however, will stick.
I have too broad an interest. I have been very interested in computing and Languages, even though I am an Aeronautical...
“This is another case of people acting surprised and/or disappointed that Apple,...”
– John Gruber - Daring Fireball
Apple's announcements further iPad revolution in... →
Fraiser Spiers:
Apple already revolutionized education when it invented the iPad. While iBooks textbooks are a bridge from the past to the future—and we do need a way to get to the future—they are not that future. If Henry Ford had been an educational publisher, his customers would have asked for electronic textbooks instead of faster horses.
He would know with his background. I especially...
Kill Hollywood, Not Movies
parislemon:
The fallout from the failure of SOPA and PIPA is just as interesting as the main topics themselves. First, many on the web with loud voices are finally waking up to how corrupt the lobbying/political system is in this country. Second, directly-related, there’s a quickly growing anti-Hollywood sentiment.
The most forceful stance has to be Y Combinator putting out a new RFS (Request...
Coyote Tracks: The enemy of my enemy →
chipotle:
Yesterday a huge file sharing site, “Megaupload.com,” was taken offline due to a criminal conspiracy indictment. Do the copyright wars have a new martyr? At first glance, maybe! Everybody gets to blame their favorite villain: the evil media industry, the draconian federal government, or both. It…
Kill Hollywood →
Y Combinator:
Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline. But this is not an ordinary industry. The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a...
When Labels Become Prisons
biglovelittlehouse:
My sister and I LOVED Legos growing up. At one time, I took inventory and estimated that we had accumulated about $2000 worth. I can still hear the sound they made when we’d dump the buckets onto the floor. I can still feel that horrible feeling that can only come from stepping on a “two piece, thin”. Yes, we had names for the different sizes and shapes. As we’d put together...
Squashed: Dumb Metaphor Friday: "Growing the pie" →
squashed:
The conservative criticism of redistribution is a claim that conservatives would rather expand the (economic) pie than ensure that it is divided evenly among everybody. The theory is that everybody then even the guy destined to have a smaller piece comes out ahead, even if the pieces aren’t the…
A Technical Examination of SOPA and PROTECT IP →
A Must Read…
Mute Means Mute →
bigweek:
Dan Benjamin for Hivelogic:
So when the alarm still goes off at 6am, I’ll realize I should have known that the mute switch won’t behave like every other mute switch I’ve used. All my other phones and devices mute and stay muted when I tell them to. But not the iPhone? This is how most people want the iPhone to work?
Wow, he makes a great point.
Google, what were you thinking? →
Mocality Blog:
Kenya has a comparatively well-educated but poor population and high levels of unemployment. Mocality designed our crowd sourcing program to provide an opportunity for large numbers of people to help themselves by helping us. By apparently systematically trawling our database, and then outsourcing that trawl to another continent, Google isn’t just scalping us, they’re also...
Avast Hassles Macgasm →
Avast, what the hell are you doing?
parislemon:
In response to my previous post, Charlie Knoles has found a potential hole in Hollywood’s brilliant grand plan:
@parislemon meanwhile there’s a 28 minute window to download via BitTorrent. Idiots.
— Charlie Knoles (@rollinia) January 6, 2012
Innovation, Hollywood-Style →
parislemon:
Get ready for this one — it’s huge. In fact, you better sit down.
You know the 28-day window* that studios now impose between when a DVD goes on sale and when it can be made available to rent?
It’s about to made 56 days, reports Peter Kafka.
Boom.
Hollywood is saved. DVD sales are going to flow like wine again. Everyone will be drunk. Glory days.
*sometimes known as “the...
Why do we pay sales commissions? →
9-bits:
So we did it, and no catastrophes struck us. No earthquakes. No plagues, and no one quit. In the year since we dropped the commission system our sales have gone up. In fact, four of the last five months have been record months.
Fog Creek describes the pitfalls of paying salespeople commissions, but misses my favorite argument: Commissions give salespeople a skewed value system. Sales...
domics:
Can’t stop laughing!
"Clopen"
parislemon:
This is a great post by Danny Sullivan. For those of us caught up in the iOS vs. Android battle, it can be easy to lose sight of the simple, bigger picture.
Android may be “open” in the fact that other companies can use the source code and users who so desire (and know how) can root it. But from a pure consumer perspective, the Android phone ecosystem is often anything but open....
The PostSecret iPhone App Is Now Closed →
This is saddening that it had to go down this way.
/via Stephen Hackett
December 2011
47 posts
Three Mantras from the First Two Years →
Fraser Speirs goes over three mantra that have guided his thoughts about technology in schools. I wish that when I was at school, we had anything near this level of care. This does make me happier for the future though, and I hope that it spreads.
An Update to the Ocean Marketing Thingy... →
That was quick.
Just Wow... →
How can anyone fuck up customer service so much? This post on Penny Arcade chronicles how it was done. I am amazed by how out of control this became very quickly.
