The Gillmor Gang — Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — explored the legacy and impact of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. @dsearls called him the Beethoven of Business, and we spent the hour and 15 minutes matching that to what I called Jobs’ ability to listen to the future. In recent years, Jobs has turned his focus on perfecting the microcomputing experience toward inventing a mobile platform that will last for decades to come.
For those of us who saw the tech revolution as a child of the space program and the music of the ’60s, living in the time of Steve Jobs has been the same kind of rare gift, swimming in real time with the giants of our history books. It’s hard to predict what will come next, for Apple or any of us, but something tells us Jobs will be there in spirit as we build on his vision. Imagine…
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We’re back with another episode of TechCrunched, a whirlwind recap of the week’s top tech news in 90 seconds (or so).
This week’s stories include HP’s TouchPad liquidation firesale, the latest tweaks to Facebook privacy, and, in sad news, Steve Jobs’ resignation as Apple’s CEO. Tune in for the details.
Here are some articles related to this week’s episode: → Read More
The web’s most popular photo sharing site is getting another update.
In a blog post this evening, Facebook — which is by far the biggest photo site on the web — has announced that it’s launching a new photo viewer that presents images that are 960 pixels wide, as opposed to the 720 pixels they’ve been since March 2010 (they were 620 pixels before that). The viewer itself is also getting an update that replaces the current black lightbox with an opaque white, which it says puts more of the focus on the photo itself. Facebook also says that photos now load twice as fast, though it doesn’t get into how it’s serving the content so much faster. → Read More
The recording industry doesn’t have the most respectable history when it comes to lawsuits. Between asking for millions for trivial acts of piracy, and asking potentially for trillions in more serious cases, they’ve shown that they’re not only completely disconnected from reality, but totally unheeding of the actual effects of their litigation. So it’s not surprising to see them tilting at yet another windmill.
Today’s target is TubeFire, a site that should be familiar to you, at least in principle. It allows you to download and convert YouTube videos to a format more easily watched offline (FLV files can be tricky). You give it the URL, it churns for a bit, and then you can download the video in MP4 or another format. Clearly this re-containering of free content is a grave threat to the recording industry, and must be stopped at all costs. So 25 of the world’s largest labels have gotten together and sued them. → Read More
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