Democracy UK
Democracy UK has compiled a Facebook-eye-view of the year in connectivity. And the lives of 500 million people can be a bit overwhelming. Yes, imagine that "so very special" trailer for "The Social Network" movie exploded to global proportions: In 2010 43,869,800 changed their status to single, but many got into some situations with 3,025,791 going the "it's complicated" route. There were 5,974,574 happy engagements noted and 36,774,801 actually walked down the aisle. Further, the group (run by Facebook) reported the usage of the social network broken down to a more manageable 20-minute increment. …
CNN Money
As long as you are holding that phone, could you please pass it to Google? "Google has assembled all the pieces it needs to be a mobile provider like Verizon, AT&T or Sprint,"
writes CNN Money. They are of course, talking about Google Voice, the VoIP service that has been attraction millions of daily users. Google has been doing everything it needs to do to replace conventional wireless carriers for years: from building infrastructure to connecting customers to creating a fast-spreading smartphone OS to selling phones. It's not likely to happen anytime soon, but, then again, …
Measuring Measures
Piling onto the bad news about magazine sales on the iPdad, Bradford Cross on his blog Measuring Measures, makes the case that the iPad is "destroying the future of journalism," in which he calls the embrace of the device by the publishing industry, "a desperate final grasp at the past." The models have changed, he says, and no amount of hoping is going to make a subscription model work, according to Cross. People will not get content form just one source (even if you cal it an app) any longer. "It is finally sinking in that mobile …
All Things D et al
Sources tell All Things D that Myspace is mulling over taking a hatchet to its 1,100 staff count by half now that its a lean-mean entertainment machine. "While the decision of what cuts to make to its employee base have not been made yet, nearly the entire Myspace staff was given the last week of December off from work to save money," reports All Things D. This is traditionally the type of bad news companies like to leak out right before a big holiday weekend (and this is one of the sleepiest such times of the …
Slashgear
A patent filing from HTC for a "handheld wireless device, namely, a tablet computer" even gives the device a name: Scribe. Gadget geeks can now debate over whether the filing indicates the device will feature a capacitive stylus (which HTC offers on the HD2 phone) or "a dual-mode touchscreen that would have an active digitizer from a company such as Wacom." Slashgear boils down the specs: "As for the rest of the hardware, a 10-inch 1280 x 720 display is expected, while NVIDIA's Tegra 2 processor and 2GB of memory is tipped. That'll be paired with a …
Fast Company
When the clock strikes midnight on New Year's eve some will toast with sparkling wine, others may kiss their loved ones, while some will whip out their phones and look at the fun that people are having in other places where they aren't. Yes, thanks to miracle of technology and the good people at Toshiba and Livestream the last scenario is now a reality. As Fast Company reports, the official iPhone and Android app featuring live streaming video Times Square New Year's celebration is now available for Free. Cheers!
Edgadget
Giving China even more reason to ban it, Skype has unveiled a video calling for its iPhone App. The feature is no surprise, but the timing is. Writes Endgadget: "All signs have been pointing to this release for a few days now, but we'll admit: we expected Skype to wait until CES next week to pull the covers off what could become its crown jewel service over the coming months." Gadget blogs spent the day playing with and posting video demos of the new feature, so the timing is either counter-programming (Skype feared it would get lost …
TechCrunch
TechCrunch relates the unfortunate purgatorial state of Delicious. Yahoo had first said it was shutting the bookmarking site down. Then it said it wasn't but was selling it off. The site is stuck in an in-between sate, where much of it's staff is gone and Yahoo is not really making any effort to sell it because it has bigger fish to fry than the $5 million or so it may get for the service. TechCrunch confirms with venture firms who have spoken to Yahoo about a possible acquisition of Delicious that Yahoo either didn't respond at all, …
PaidContent
Pew this morning released data that 65 percent of those surveyed this fall paid for online content. But what's it really say about consumers willingness to pay for content? um, PaidContent asks. "At the most basic, it means Pew has a very broad definition of content ranging from music, software and gaming 'cheats' to newspapers, magazines, e-books, adult content and dating services," says the publication. Dismissing the report "a low-res snapshot of online consumer buying behavior," PaidContent laments that distinction between content and containers is blurred, saying "one category was "a digital newspaper, magazine, journal article, or …
WWD et al
"Remember when Wired's debut issue for the iPad sold more than 100,000 times in June?,"
asks WWD. (Ahh those were those heady times, those early days of April and May when hope was in the air and the media decreed the iPad the savior of print.) Well, forget it. "It looks like it will be a while before that type of performance is seen again," concludes WWD. Sales have lumped rapidly, for those titles that made sales numbers available to the ABC (which isn't many). Wired, one of the biggest early iPad success stories has …