Posted by Bill

OK, I get that the tech and business media love covering every falling sparrow regarding Apple and/or the iPhone. It’s fun, many of them sincerely like the company’s products and it beats having to cover something else, like a political campaign where you’re expected to produce real news from time to time.

But seriously, this is how the nation’s top mainstream business news media is spending reporting and writing resources? Really? When on the very same beat this, this and this are getting the same amount of attention? Delays in the white model of the latest iPhone, the iPhone  4, are thought to reflect manufacturing challenges unique to the model, but so what? Apple says it’s already sold 3 million black iPhone 4 handsets and analysts believe delays in the white model will have no effect on the company.

Reality check: The iPhone already comes in white, in its earlier versions. Plus, if your iPhone is in a protective case, nobody can tell what color it is.

Posted by Bill

Anyone who lived through the Internet bust at the turn of the century – you remember kids, back before we had the iPhone – rightfully is wary of drinking any “new paradigm” Kool-Aid too far ahead of the curve. That doesn’t look as if it’s going to be a problem with cloud computing.

Although numerous industry surveys and analyses indicate many enterprises and smaller businesses are moving IT assets and processes to the cloud slowly if at all – Gartner Group’s Tiffani Bova recently estimated only about 20 percent of businesses will have moved to the cloud by 2012 – the fundamental shift to cloud clearly is accelerating in tangible ways.

Case in point: The Wall Street Journal’s July 20 article detailing the huge demand for Internet servers and the cloud’s role as a primary driver of that demand. Couple that with another significant corporate cloud development — Rackspace’s plan to release an open source cloud platform it developed with NASA, a direct response to more proprietary cloud architectures from giants such as Microsoft and Amazon — and it’s clear that despite a fair amount of hype, the cloud is more than vapor. Open systems architectures and solutions are the foundation of the cloud, which itself has its greatest utility if end-users easily can move their data from one provider to another as the need or want arises – a task that closed or proprietary systems or a lack of widely adopted standards make more difficult for both provider and customer.

The next step is showing actual results from the cloud business case that prompt the corporate migration to cloud platforms and services to accelerate. Don’t expect that to take as long as it took to sop up all the excess bandwidth capacity deployed before the tech bust.

Posted by Bill

It was only a matter of time before The Associated Press, having finally decreed this past April that users of AP style should change their phrasing from “Web site” to “website”, would address a somewhat more current online topic: Social media.

The latest edition of the AP Stylebook includes for the first time an extensive Social Media Guidelines section, providing rules for journalists on proper usage and source verification when dealing with social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter. “Also included are 42 separate entries on such terms as app, blogs, click-throughs, friend and unfriend, metadata, RSS, search engine optimization, smart phone, trending, widget and wiki,” says the AP.

Having worked for years at the AP and at several publications that used the AP Stylebook as their style bible, it’s easy to view this news with a bit of, “So what?” Even at organizations that specify AP style for their written communications – whether those are articles, fact sheets or news releases – many writers routinely ignore the guidelines and style discipline falls by the wayside, unless there are diligent editors or copy editors around to enforce it. Most readers don’t know the difference.

Plus, the proliferation of new media news outlets has increased the frequency with which organizations impose their own style guidelines for areas such as verifying source information (not counting, of course, Twitter’s popular FakeAPStylebook feed. Gizmodo might use AP style for some things, but I doubt it follows anyone’s lead on how it sources its stories gleaned from online information. Betcha Perez Hilton doesn’t, either.

Besides, with social media evolving at literally Internet speed, the years it takes the AP to catch up makes the idea of topical changes to the Stylebook a bit quaint, to say the least. For example, the latest AP Stylebook also for the first time includes entries on Alcoholics Anonymous, Breathalyzer, Taser, GED, thumbs-up and high-five. Shouldn’t those entries have been added in The Eighties?

Posted by Rachel

Summer is here! And if you’re like me, you will be taking tons of pictures on your vacation, day hike or just around town on a beautiful warm day.

If you want to add a little more pizzazz to your photos, but don’t have a lot time or the software to do it, there some fun and easy options to get you started with photo editing. No prior experience needed!

Picnik lets you upload photos and edit them for free, so you can get the “I photoshopped this for hours effect” with two clicks of a button. Some of my favorite effects are “Orton-sih” which gives the photo and older, softer look and “Cross Process,” which enhances certain colors, giving the photo an artsy look.

PhotoFlexer is another free site, similar to Picnik. It includes tools such as auto fix, effects like “cartoon,” and “painting” along with “fix blemishes” and “smooth wrinkles.” I edited the photo below in less than two minutes to give it an older, vintage feel.

Both Picnik and PhotoFlexer are great for a quick photo fix or if you want to get creative with your photos.

Posted by Bill

It’s one of the oldest chestnuts in consumer product marketing: Give away the razor so people will buy the blades. Now we’re seeing that idea crop up in discussions about the new e-reader price war.

After Barnes & Noble and Amazon each cut the prices of their e-book reading devices earlier this week, some pundits resurrected the razor/blade analogy, noting how cheaper Nooks and Kindles – and wide availability of competitors such as Apple’s more feature-rich iPad — would significantly expand the mass market for electronic books, magazines and other material traditionally only offered on dead trees.

It’s not surprising e-reader prices would drop sharply; it happens with every new, desirable technology device (Remember how much your first iPod cost nine years ago?) But if these guys want to remain competitive and really expand the e-book market, they should avoid the razor/blade model. Think about it. The razor is now a commodity item, where the only innovation occurs on the “content” side of the equation: Blades, shaving cream, after-shave lotion, etc. As organizations that are retailers more than content innovators, do Barnes & Noble or Amazon really want to break even on the device side while having to compete against foes (Google, Apple) with storied expertise on both the device and content sides of the business equation?

Further, even cutting prices to seed the e-reader market could be a losing battle for Barnes and Amazon. Analysts in The Wall Street Journal estimate U.S. sales of about 6.6 million dedicated e-book readers this year; by comparison it took Apple about a month to sell its first million iPads in the same market.

A better model for the e-book purveyors might be the iPod, which Apple never has allowed to become a commodity even though its relative price has fallen sharply over the past decade. According to the Journal, Amazon and Barnes & Noble make money now from e-book sales. But they face unprecedented threats on the content side, where Google and Apple both have made major strategic inroads to their turf. Giving away the reader may win the short-term battle for price-conscious consumers, but could amount to a Pyrrhic victory if the booksellers don’t create any real value, either for authors or book buyers, that makes them the preferred choice for electronic reading content.

Posted by Aurora

Two years ago the cable industry promised tru2way was “the way” cable viewership was moving, but where did it go?

To really understand the evolution and future of tru2way we should take a step back and look at its predecessor the CableCARD.

The CableCARD goes back almost ten years, when TV manufacturers and cable TV service providers teamed up briefly for a ‘ditch the box’ effort – that is, eliminate that clunky old set-top cable box and instead build its functionality into new TV sets.

The belief then was that consumers hated having a separate set-top box, and that CableCARD functionality would make cable-ready TVs truly ‘plug and play,’ not to mention get rid of all that clutter of wiring. Some worked beautifully, while others stubbornly refused to recognize valid channel packages even when all conditional access was disabled. The pairing issues, and reluctance of manufacturers to support more than a handful of CC-compatible models, resulted in a very slow rate of adoption.

But CableLabs and MSOs hadn’t given up yet. Their ‘next big thing’ would be a bi-directional version of CableCARD, allowing a greater degree of interactivity and the ability to get video-on-demand – something the original CableCARD platform couldn’t do. To differentiate this new feature, they called it ‘tru2way.’

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Posted by Joe

Micahel Brito posted an interesting take on the value of Facebook Fans, citing a formula developed by Virtrue.

According to Vitrue’s formula, a company with 1 million Facebook fans equals a value of $3.6 million in a given year. Brito provides a recap of the formula as well as values of some top Facebook Fan pages. Here’s the formula:

1M impressions x 2 posts x 30 days = 60M impressions

60M impressions / 1000 x $5 CPM = $300,000

$300,000 x 12 months = $3.6M

$3.6M / 1M fans = $3.60

Company Values:

• Coca Cola – $0.96 cents (5.3M fans and posted 16x in the last month)
• YouTube – $1.92 (4.8M fans and posted 32x last month)
• Pringles – $.030 (3.1M fans and posted 5x last month)
• Adidas – $2.40 (2.7M fans and posted 40x in the last month. Also sharing links to their e-commerce store so one would assume that their fan value is much higher)
• Red Bull – $1.14 (2.5M fans and posted 19x in the last month)

I’ve never been good at math, but I think these numbers are spot on. Considering the amount of time people more spend on Facebook than Google (4 hours, 39 minutes per month). I think Coca Cola and Pringles are getting their money’s worth.

Posted by Joe

For video gamers it’s Christmas right now. E3 is taking place this week (June 15-17). To help get you prepared for the show, Wired has a video gallery of 10 Trailers for E3’s hottest games. Trailers include new Rock Band and Call of Duty games as well as Call of Duty: Black Ops.

It’ll be interesting to see what and if ACTIVISION says anything about Black Ops, being developed by Treyarch. ACTIVISION, of course, had the lengthy battle with Infinity Ward, which developed the popular Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games.

Besides the new games, it looks like motion control and 3D will be the big news coming out of the conference. Microsoft will have its Kinect system, which recognizes body movement, and Sony will showcase its PlayStation Move. The Move is supposed to be an upgraded version of the Nintendo Wii’s motion sensor controllers.

Unfortunately a lot of the E3 product announcements — Kinnect, Move, Call of Duty — won’t be in stores until November, so don’t get too excited.

Posted by Aurora

So by now you have probably heard about the new AT&T data plans. As it was stated it sounded like if you were currently on an unlimited plan, you could keep it, and AT&T will just consider you grandfathered in. Now here is where it gets interesting—after three years, AT&T has finally announced a tethering plan for the iPhone, which will go live with iPhone OS 4.0 is released.

However, if you want to use it, you have to leave your unlimited data plan behind, and instead move to the DataPro plan, which is $25 per month for 2GB of data, and $10 for each additional gigabyte of data used if you go over.

Now, read the fine print. AT&T is going to charge you $20 for the privilege of tethering. That $20 doesn’t get you any extra data usage—you are still relegated to the 2GB of data that you get from your $25 per month. In other words, AT&T is charging you a fee to use the data you already paid for.

From an outside prospective, that seems down right ludicrous! If you pay $25 for 2GB of data, and burn that 2GB on your iPhone, that is fine. However, if you pay $25 for 2GB of data and go through it while tethered to your computer, they expect you to pay an extra $20, even though you’ve only used 2GB of data—no more, no less—in both scenarios.

The fact that AT&T wants to charge you an extra fee just because you want to use the data that you’ve already paid for in a certain way just screams that they don’t understand true customer service. And here’s the real kicker, if you switch you can never go back to your unlimited plan once you leave it.

Posted by Rachel

Growing up, my parents always told me that watching too much TV can turn your brain into applesauce. Now research suggests that too much time with gadgets and the internet can have the same effect.

This week the New York Times published a story on the mental price of constant interruption from phone calls and emails. Besides the obvious side effects of our daily technology – such as car accidents due to talking or texting on mobile phones – the distractions can interrupt work and family life. Findings suggest that being constantly interrupted can decreases productivity and change the way we think, giving us less concentration because our minds are constantly stimulated and jumping from place to place when we’re online.

Another New York Times article, An Ugly Toll of Technology: Impatience and Forgetfulness, says that some studies have found that excessive dependence on cell phones and the Internet is comparable to an addiction. The article also points out that some studies show technologies can change our personalities, and not in a good way.

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