As everyone knows, Facebook schooled the web last week, and expanded its territorial ambitions to the world of media. Launching with partners in print, music, and video, Facebook’s latest update pushes toward a world where consumption’s default has been switched to sharing, and social discovery sits not on the periphery of the media experience, but permeates it.
Zuckerberg presents this… → Read More
How is the New York Times doing with the new digital paywall it put up last March? We found out a few details today when the New York Times announced second quarter earnings. All together, the New York Times counts a total of 1.1 million digital subscribers, but only 281,000 of those are currently paying (756,000 are existing print subscribers who get digital access with their existing… → Read More
I’m beginning to think that the old phrase “think globally, act locally” has become an appropriate slogan for Web 2.0. (Or perhaps an alternative might be “think global, try to monetize the sh*t out of local”.) With the rise of location-based services like Gowalla, Foursquare, and Facebook Places, local-friendly deal sites like Groupon, LivingSocial and Yipit, and local-happy news services … → Read More
It begins: the first Android media player worth a hoot is coming from Samsung around CES time. The 4-inch device has front and rear cameras and – get this – a removable battery. It will run Android 2.2 and includes Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a MicroSD slot. This looks totally like a hackers dream. I’d buy one just to mess around with it. A few more specs after the jump. → Read More
Buying a digital book for your iPad is a very odd experience. If you fire up iTunes, you can find music, movies, apps, even audiobooks, but there is no category for digital books. You need to first download the iBooks app, and then buy books within that app. So it is like a marketplace within a marketplace that also happens to be a reader. The Kindle app also works that way. It is… → Read More
If newspapers came with warning labels, they might look something like the ones Tom Scott came up with. The British “geek comedian” created warning stickers you can print out and put on newspapers (PDF below). They include:
Warning: This article is basically just a press release, copied and pasted.
Warning: This article contains unsourced, unverified information from Wikipedia. → Read More
It can be argued that this has been the Decade of Piracy. Whereas media piracy existed as a scourge for millennia (Bach was totally pissed when PrisM posted the pre-release sheet music to the ‘Das Wohltemperirte Clavier’) the rise of the MP3 and other media compression formats – not to mention the release of the iPod in 2001 – brought piracy into the mainstream. I knew we were in trouble when, in… → Read More
Been wondering exactly when you’d see a Blu-ray drive in your new Macbook or iMac? Well, if the emails that have been leaking out from Mr. Jobs have been any indication, you’re not going to see them at all. → Read More
In case you still had any doubts that Yahoo and AOL are pursuing the same strategy when it comes to building a media brand online, all you have to do is listen to the two executives running the respective content businesses of each company. Yahoo Media VP James Pitaro and AOL Media president David Eun were both on a Future Of Media panel together in New York City today, but they sound like they… → Read More
Kenwood Japan has announced [JP] the AS-iP70 today, a swiss army knife of sorts for various media. The device serves as a dock for your iPhone or iPod but can also be used as an AM/FM radio, music player, alarm clock, and a digital picture frame – thanks to its 7-inch LCD screen. → Read More
These stand-alone media streamers… Why wouldn’t you buy a PS3 or Xbox 360, then have a video game system in addition to a cheap-ish way to stream all those scene releases of “The Pacific” you downloaded? (That, or put together a full PC if you’re feeling adventurous.) Be that as it may, let’s just quickly highlight another option that’s out there, the Nationite HDVP-2. Not the snappiest name in… → Read More
Sometimes it is obvious where the world is headed, but some people and industries become frozen in place and time. They are like the duckbilled dinosaurs happily munching on the still-abundant plants around them when the meteor strikes instead of the small furry mammals underfoot who take cover every day by natural habit. In the print newspaper industry, it’s the same story. Everyone wants to … → Read More
It was only five years ago that kids between the ages of 8 and 18 “only” spent 6.5 hours online. Today, these same kids (well, the same age group) now spend some 7.5 hours online per day between the computer and their mobile. That may not sound like a much until you ask: where did these kids find an entire extra hour to mess around online? It’s even crazier when you consider that many of these… → Read More
Squint hard enough and you’ll see the D-Link Pebble, a streaming media player that should play “virtually all” of your media files on your big screen TV. You sync the Pebble up to your network, then plug her into your TV, and off you go. → Read More
I don’t watch a lot of television programming, and I’m not particularly patient with the way “Big Media” treats me, the consumer. I really wanted to like Flash Forward, but it’s pretty clear that the show is more interested in hitting that 100 episodes mark to earn syndication than it is in delivering an interesting, gripping story. So I gave up on that, and on a lark decided to try Fringe, to… → Read More
Google’s been taking a beating from the newspaper industry lately, and Rupert Murdoch in particular. But the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal let Google CEO Eric Schmidt respond today in an Op-Ed piece which basically says: Hey, we know the Internet is killing your business, but don’t blame us. Google is here to help.
Google sends news sites 4 billion clicks a month, and Schmidt says it wants… → Read More
New kid on the block Cranberry claims that their new DVD will last 1,000 years. Of course no one will be around to dispute that claim, and by then we’ll be using some kind of organic memory light data cell, but hey! Who knows, maybe future generations will want to see those vacation photos you took of Grandma Rhoda and Aunt Suzy. → Read More
The following post is by guest author Edo Segal (@edosegal), an entrepreneur who has launched and sold several companies, including Relegence to AOL. Today, he runs his Incubator/Investment vehicle Futurity Ventures, which recently launched a new search engine for wisdom.
Media scarcity is dead. In the future my son will have a flash drive that he will pay $29 for that will have the capacity… → Read More
I love companies like Disney. They seem to think that just because they want something some way, it’ll happen. Take for instance their latest scheme. Instead of allowing you to “buy” their movies on DVD, Blu-ray, or even VHS, they are going to allow you to buy access to their content. → Read More
Looks like EA finally understands what we’ve been talking about for a while now: that, in just a few year’s time, we’ll look back at disc-based media (here, video games) and be all, “Man, how quaint.” Peter Moore, who’s the president of EA Sports (no minor position, that), called the disc-based distribution model a “burning platform,” and that companies are either staring in the face of… → Read More
I’ve been angling to get rid of my TiVo and cable for some time now and I believe I’ve finally figured out a solution that works best for me. It involves a lots scripting, Sabnzbd, and HandbrakeCLI and I’ll tell you what I ultimately did next week once it’s stable but it seems to be working as well as can be expected for these sorts of hacks. I posit that the TV industry is… → Read More
The Economist, the famous British weekly, has a new way to order hard copies: your phone. Yup, starting this week New Yorkers can use the weekly text messages that the Economist sends to order the dead trees version of the newspaper, then have it sent to their door by 6 a.m. The future! → Read More
Local news always seems to get the short end of the stick, both in terms of coverage and advertising dollars. And as the entire newspaper industry continues to struggle for survival, the prospects for local news looks particularly bleak. It just doesn’t pay to have a reporter cover a neighborhood farmer’s market when she could be covering the Mayor’s office or something with broader appeal. And… → Read More
What Simon Dumenco lacks in tech savvy he makes up in relative prescience. There are a few issues media companies are dealing with now. There is a loss of ad revenue, competition from blogs, and, most importantly, falling circulation rates in communities that actually crave local news but don’t want to pay for it. There is a certain cohort of reader, however, that does not want to see the… → Read More
For all the fluff that generally pours out of Brando’s website, there’s always a diamond in the rough here and there. This one seems to be more diamond than rough. It’s basically an adapter that turns any 3.5- or 2.5-inch hard drive into an HD video player for your TV. It’ll also push out files from SD cards and USB thumb drives as well. → Read More
Hey, buddy! Need a miniature optical format for media? It’s small, it can hold 1 gigabyte, and it uses a mechanical playback system. Sounds great, right?
Vmedia, who apparently slipped Laptop’s Joanna Stern some loopy juice in hopes of getting positive coverage, is trying to release a mini optical format that is about as big as an SD card and will cost somewhat (read: not much) less than standard… → Read More
Yet more evidence that the future of media is digital (in case there are still any doubters out there). In a report released this morning, boutique investment bank Jordan, Edmiston Group estimates that between 88 percent of the publishing and advertising industry’s revenue growth over the next few years will come from four sectors: Database & Information, B2B Online Media, Consumer Online… → Read More
A new study confirms the obvious: the young are watching less and less TV, spending their time using the Internet and playing video games instead. The study, carried out by Deloitte, shows that the older one gets, the more TV one watches. People in the 14-25 age group (that’s me!) watch, on average, 10.5 hours of TV per week. → Read More
Google’s plans for global empire, by way of digitizing a bunch of dusty old newspapers, received a strong boost today, now that Mountain View has secured the archives of paperofrecord.com. Paper of Record has been digitizing entire newspaper archives, including the Toronto Star as well as other international newspapers, for some time now. With those archives now under its control… → Read More
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