The big music label cabal membership shrinks to three. EMI has been sold in pieces to Sony and Universal. Look for more lobbying to make back catalog copyrights immortal with few new releases outside formula pop. Expect the indie market to grow even a little faster as the old school record deal will be all but dead.
Patent insanity: Microsoft gets some DOJ scrutiny after abundant coaxing from Google and B&N. While Android device makers continue to bear the brunt of Redmond’s royalty rustling, Google is accused of violating the Linux GPL in Android. Meanwhile back in the troll dungeon, Righthaven gets another well deserved flogging.
If tablets really are consumption devices, then content is king. The $200 tablet wars appear to be confirming this before new devices even ship. This could spell much bigger trouble for the fruit cult than it’s 66% price premium.
More fodder for new wave of class warfare agitators? Apple and Oracle dominate in tech’s highest executive salaries. Naw, these companies tend to lean left, so they’ll get a pass. Will these over the top salaries cause a shareholder revolt? That’s not likely either.
New life for Moore’s Law: Changes in transistor geometry could push chip density even further.
Fans rewarded for posting Blink 182′s music on Youtube without the band’s OK.
UK could re-legalize format shifting. Hello? Congress?
Google+ hits 25 million users and….. the masses aren’t even invited.
.xxx TLD goes live and no one really noticed
Bitcoin finds interest on Wall Street.
US Patriot Act stunts the European cloud. Who knows how much it’s harmed that business here.
Following the in the footsteps of Rupert Murdock’s iPad only news mag flop, AOL takes its best shot. Just because the suits get better pay doesn’t mean they have better ideas.
Even a casual observer of tech news probably noticed that a big chunk of the Fruit Pad’s early adopters of had their email addy’s hacked. Many of those were privileged social elites who Apple has carefully cultivated as users adding a feel of exclusivity to membership in its product cult.
A group of hackers exploited a hole in an AT&T Web site to get e-mail addresses of about 114,000 iPad users, including what appears to be top officials in government, finance, media, technology, and military.
The leak could have affected all iPad 3G subscribers in the U.S., according to Gawker, which broke the story on Wednesday. Among the iPad users who appeared to have been affected were White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, journalist Diane Sawyer, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, movie producer Harvey Weinstein, and New York Times CEO Janet Robinson. (Cnet)
One again, AT&T demonstrates that it is willing to under invest in providing service ,while constantly looking to invest in expanding its footprint. While it’s a demonstration of how truly pathetic AT&T is at secuity, what really amazes me is how Apple remains unscathed. Do you really think Steve Jobs (the world’s biggest control freak) would enter into any arrangement with AT&T where Apple did not have involvement in the management of the network? Even if this can be made to stick entirely to AT&T, why did Jobs and Co. select it as the exclusive wireless carrier for a second high volume product when it’s network continues to leave it’s current iPhone users waiting? At the very least BOTH companies need to be taken to task for delivering a flawed product.
I predict that all of the elites who lost a bit of privacy will carry on using Apple’s products while bashing AT&T mightyly. The tech press will pass lots of “big, bad AT&T gas” whole remaining loyal fruit cult members. I wonder: Has Apple bought off the press or simply brainwashed them? Does any rational person really want a portable “cloud” device / service can’t even lock down an email list? AND…please tell me the .gov types weren’t using these devices for official communications.
In the earlier century as newspaper business become big business, it’s robber baron owners successfully had hemp outlawed to create a market for tree pulp newsprint. They profited handsomely. The current generation of suits at the New York Times are acting as if they’ve been smoking the hemp. Not only are they still in denial about the current realities of the news business, they also seem to be determined to prop up the dead tree edition at any cost.
Rumors are flying that there’s a battle within the NY Times on how to price their app for the iPad. Those on the newspaper side of the house apparently believe that it should be priced at $20 to $30/month to avoid cannibalizing the print product. By the way, if you want a simple tip for how to fail at business, it’s to make a decision to avoid cannibalizing your own business. When you do, you’ve just made it clear that a competitor is going to cannibalize your business for you. The folks on the interactive side of the house think that $10/month makes a lot more sense and believe that pricing it at the $20 to $30 range is suicidal. Of course, if you thought that the management at the NYT’s was really crafty, you might believe that this whole story was floated to reset the anchor price, though I have trouble believing that’s true. (Techdirt)
I’ll grant that if any paper has a chance of finding a paid online subscriber base, the New York Times is easily the most likely. I’ll also grant that the typical Apple customer is accustomed to paying exorbitant prices. My take: If the Times can do something truly remarkable for the iPad, enough of the fanboys are likely to take at $10 / month to make it worth while. Expecting $30 per subscriber is either the work of a clueless crew of elites who think everyone is as well paid as they are are or a crew of regular guys who have had way too much of the hemp. My vote goes to clueless.
As Apple prepares to enter the already crowded ebook business, competitive pressures are driving prices up – at least for Macmillan’s catalog. It’s no secret that publishers want more for electronic copies, and it appears that Apple plans to appease them. It also appears that Amazon isn’t giving in to that idea without a fight.
As of last night, Amazon stopped listing all books from Macmillan Publishers, referring searches to other sellers instead. According to the New York Times, this is because Macmillan is one of the companies that now has an agreement to sell ebooks through Apple’s new iBooks store, and asked Amazon to raise the price of their ebooks from $9.99 to $15. An industry source told the Times that the de-listing is Amazon’s way of “expressing its strong disagreement” with the idea of a price hike. Gizmodo suggests this is the first volley in an Apple-Amazon ebook war. Quoting: “It feels like a repeat of the same s*** Universal Music, and later, NBC Universal pulled with iTunes, trying to counter the leverage Apple had because of iTunes’ insane marketshare. Same situation here, really: Content provider wants more money/control over their content, fights with the overwhelmingly dominant, embedded service that’s selling the content. (Slashdot)
In a truly competitive world, more sellers should drive prices down. With the average author’s royalties amounting to a tiny fraction of retail, one would expect electronic copies that have a distribution cost near zero would be $3 to $5 rather than $10. Not good enough! The big publishers want $15. It appears that Apple is leveraging a higher price to attract publishers and the publishers will use this as leverage to force price increases from other sellers. In the end this will harm both authors and consumers. It also illustrates how current copyright laws only benefit the distributors of content who had little or nothing to do with creating it.
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