While Blockbuster stock is in jeopardy of being delisted by The New York Stock Exchange and web site 27/7WallSt.com listed Blockbuster among the 10 most likely brands to be extinct in 2010, Blockbuster has no intentions of going away quietly.
According to Home Media Magazine "Blockbuster Inc. — the venerable brand some believe to be as relevant as the pager — is about to reinvent itself as a one-stop shop for home enetertainment." Blockbuster will unveil additional Consumer Electronics partnerships, including high-definition televisions that feature an internal Blockbuster widget, which is supposed to enable consumers to rent or buy movies electronically. For example, consumers who download a Blockbuster rental will be able to pause the movie and play it later on other connected devices.
It appears that Blockbuster still doesn't understand the shifts in the technology, which enable consumer to break their dependance from the devices such as TiVo, etc. and play a movie on one single device, such as their computer or iPod for viewing on demand.
It is not a novelty for iPhone or iPod users, but now it is becoming a mainstream. Digital TV goes from big to small.
Now that most of us have our digital big-screens TVs, it's time to go the other direction: Mobile digital TV means small is beautiful, and maybe more importantly, ready to go when and where you do.
Netflix U.S. Patent No. 6,584,450. is definitely a fascinating read for a technology aficionado:
4. "MAX OUT"
According to one embodiment, a "Max Out" approach is used to manage the number of items that may be simultaneously rented to customers. According to the "Max Out" approach, up to a specified number of items may be rented simultaneously to a customer. Thus, the "Max Out" approach establishes the size of an inventory of items that may be maintained by customers. The specified number of items may be specific to each customer or may be common to one or more customers. In the present example, if the specified number of items is three, then up to three items may be rented simultaneously by provider 104 to customer 102. If the specified number of items are currently rented to customer 102 and the specified item delivery criteria triggers the delivery of one or more additional items, then those items are not delivered until one or more items are returned by customer 102 to provider 104.
According to one embodiment, in situations where the specified number of items are currently rented to customer 102 and the specified item delivery criteria triggers the delivery of one or more additional items, then the one or more additional items are delivered to customer 102 and customer 102 and a surcharge is applied customer 102. The specified number of items may then be increased thereafter to reflect the additional items delivered to customer 102 and increase the size of the inventory maintained by customer 102. Alternatively, the specified number of items may remain the same and number of items maintained by customer 102 returned to the prior level after items are returned to provider 104 by customer 102. When used in conjunction with the "Max Turns" approach described hereinafter, the specified number of items may be unlimited.
Keep reading the rest of Method and apparatus for renting items at US Patent and Trademark Office.
On Amazon.com, Dan Brown's blockbuster novel "The Lost Symbol" sold more digital copies for the Kindle e-reader in its first few days than hardback editions. Within days, it had been downloaded from file-sharing sites such as Rapidshare and BitTorrent for free more than 100,000 times. In interview with CNN Ana Maria Allessi, publisher for Harper Media at HarperCollins told that
"we have to be vigilant in our punishment ... but much more attractive is to simply make the technology better, legally."
E-book technology offers so many positives for both the author and the consumer that any revenue lost to piracy may just be a necessary evil, she said.
"Consumers who invest in one of these dedicated e-book readers tend to load it up and read more," said Allessi. "And what's wrong with that?"
NEW YORK - For more than 60 years, TV stations have broadcast news, sports and entertainment for free and made their money by showing commercials. That might not work much longer.
The top prizes are going like usual to the British publications.
British Medical Journal:
During the editing of this Review of the Week by Richard Smith (BMJ 2008;337:a2719,doi:10.1136/bmj.a2719), the author’s term “pisshouse” was changed to “pub” in the sentence: “Then, in true British and male style, Hammond met Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye, in the pub and did a deal.” However, a pisshouse is apparently a gentleman’s toilet, and (in the author’s social circle at least) the phrase “pisshouse deal” is well known. (It alludes to the tendency of men to make deals while standing side by side and urinating.) In the more genteel confines of the BMJ Editorial Office, however, this term was unknown and a mistake was made in translating it into more standard English. We apologise for any misunderstanding this may have caused.
Daily Mirror (U.K.):
ON 17 July 2008 in our front page article “Ron the Lash” we falsely reported that whilst recovering from an operation to his ankle Cristiano Ronaldo had “gone on a bender” at a Hollywood nightclub where he splashed out pounds 10,000 on champagne and vodka and threw his crutches to the ground and tried to dance on his uninjured foot. We now accept that Cristiano did not “go on a bender”, did not drink any alcohol that evening, did not spend pounds 10,000 on alcohol, nor throw his crutches to the floor or try to dance.
Bear sighting: An item in the National Briefing in Sunday’s Section A said a bear wandered into a grocery story in Hayward, Wis., on Friday and headed for the beer cooler. It was Thursday.
The Sun (U.K.):
IN a report on May 5, 2009, headlined “Riddle of Boruc, the brunette and his hair straighteners”, we claimed that Artur Boruc had brought two girls to the house he shares with partner Sara Mannei and had sex with one of them. We published a picture which we said showed him straightening one of the girls’ hair. We now accept the picture was in fact of Mr Boruc and his younger sister Paulina in Poland some years earlier, and that neither did Mr Boruc invite back nor have sex with either of the girls in our story. We apologise to Mr Boruc and Ms Mannei for any embarrassment caused.
After 55 years in publication, I.D. Magazine, America's foremost design publication, has folded. These are devastating news for the design world.
Edited by food writer, broadcaster, and photographer Tim Hayward — you may know him from his writing for The Guardian — Fire & Knives is a new print quarterly of "new writing about food" out of the UK. Print! There is no advertising, no content online, and writers aren't paid. Though you can join Fire and Knives on Facebook and Twitter.
Quoting Rolling Stone on Obama's economic team of Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway:
So on November 23rd, 2008, a deal is announced in which the government will bail out Rubin's messes at Citigroup with a massive buffet of taxpayer-funded cash and guarantees. It is a terrible deal for the government, almost universally panned by all serious economists, an outrage to anyone who pays taxes. Under the deal, the bank gets $20 billion in cash, on top of the $25 billion it had already received just weeks before as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. But that's just the appetizer. The government also agrees to charge taxpayers for up to $277 billion in losses on troubled Citi assets, many of them those toxic CDOs that Rubin had pushed Citi to invest in. No Citi executives are replaced, and few restrictions are placed on their compensation. It's the sweetheart deal of the century, putting generations of working-stiff taxpayers on the hook to pay off Bob Rubin's fuck-up-rich tenure at Citi.
Now a little flashback to another another left adminsitration:
As Treasury secretary under Clinton, Rubin was the driving force behind two monstrous deregulatory actions that would be primary causes of last year's financial crisis: the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (passed specifically to legalize the Citigroup megamerger) and the deregulation of the derivatives market. Having set that time bomb, Rubin left government to join Citi, which promptly expressed its gratitude by giving him $126 million in compensation over the next eight years (they don't call it bribery in this country when they give you the money post factum).
Simply a must read article.
Quoting The New York Times article published on the December 4, "In the most recent sign that Apple is looking at alternative ways for people to store and play their digital music, the company has agreed to buy Lala, a four-year-old start-up based in Palo Alto, Calif., a person with knowledge of the deal said Friday." Immediately after an unnamed source in a Reuters report stated that Apple is ready to start streaming, "Apple recognizes that the model is going to evolve into a streaming one and this could probably propel iTunes to the next level," either were asleep during the last few years or are PC users. While I can't disagree that Apple recognized that the model is going to be about "streaming", I can only add that Apple recognized it many years ago and was setting up both software and hardware to accommodate the streaming, including the latest HTTP adaptive streaming on iPhone system 3 and Quicktime X, which is bundled with Snow Leopard OS.
In regards to Apple buying Lala, some say that, "if Apple is already testing a functional streaming service, there seems to be little need to buy an entire company to obtain similar technology. In fact, Lala uses Flash for wrapping its streams, and Apple has been notably averse to using that software for just about anything—it's certainly not displayed within iTunes as things currently stand." My interpretation is that Apple simply removed a competitor from the marketplace that got in its turf, even if it was with a sub-prime experience.
Do you ever wonder what people do in this technology driven fast pace environment? Origami. Between the Folds is showing on PBS's Independent Lens this month.
Origami: it's no longer just paper cranes. A determined group of theoretical scientists and fine artists have abandoned conventional careers to forge unlikely new lives as modern paper folders.
Antiquated American Patent System Slows Down InnovationU.S. innovation slowed this year for the first time in 13 years with a number of patent filings dropping 2.3% at the same time as U.S. patents issued to inventors and businesses in foreign nations jumped 6.3% for the year. At the same time the revenue of Patent Office dropped 200 million, which means a growing backlog of filings.
Currently, there are 740,000 patents pending, with an average wait time for approval of 40 months. The Patent Office isn't even able to look at applications for three years because of the backlog. That's an eternity for tech inventions, which tend to cycle through product generations in a year or so.
If backlog of 40 months is of no concern to the cutting edge innovators, perhaps the cost of filing and later on defending the patent is worth keeping up in mind.
The application, processing and legal fees average about $15,000 per patent, but the cost to defend those patents in court after they've been granted typically runs between $3 million to $6 million...
Starting with iPhone OS version 3.0 and QuickTime X, you can send streaming audio and video over HTTP from an ordinary web server for playback on iPhone, iPod touch, or other devices, such as desktop computers. This is called HTTP Live Streaming. Because it uses HTTP, this kind of streaming is automatically supported by nearly all edge servers, media distributors, caching systems, routers, and firewalls. HTTP Live Streaming also provides for media encryption and user authentication over HTTPS, allowing publishers to protect their work.
Apple's HTTP Adaptive Streaming in ActionAccording to the article in the Business Week, the upgrade to the iPhone operating system is going to change user experience with mobile video by utilizing HTTP adaptive streaming:
"HTTP streaming enables publishers to give users a better video experience by employing adaptive streaming techniques, something other players such as Microsoft (MSFT), Adobe Systems (ADBE), Move Networks, and Swarmcast already offer (though Adobe uses a more traditional proprietary real-time streaming protocol to do so, rather than sending chunks of video over standard HTTP like the others). That means that watchers can enjoy a continuous, smooth video experience. The stream intelligently adjusts to the highest quality a viewer can receive at each moment. If the connectivity worsens, a lower-quality stream is substituted without interruption or buffering. (For a more extensive explanation about adaptive streaming, see this subscription-only piece from GigaOM Pro.)"
Rubert Murdoch Doesn't Want Google to Index News Corp SitesRupert Murdoch is looking into ways to block Google from indexing content of the sites owned by News Corp which owns the Times and Sun newspapers in the UK and the New York Post and Wall Street Journal in the US.
He believes that search engines cannot legally use headlines and paragraphs of news stories as search results.
"There's a doctrine called 'fair use', which we believe to be challenged in the courts and would bar it altogether," Mr Murdoch told the TV channel. "But we'll take that slowly." Read more...
How did JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs make $6.8 billion in profit last quarter? Very simple. They borrowed money from the US Govt at 0% and then bought bonds from the US Govt that paid 2-3%.
What kind of bonds are they buying? Are they investing the money in American business? "No, they are mostly buying Treasuries." So the money is just being shuffled from one Federal bank account to another, with each Wall Street bank skimming off $1 billion per month for itself? "Pretty much."
Google page turners got caught in action. This is page 471 of The Anglo-American Telegraphic Code book.
Emigre has released a sans serif companion for Mrs Eaves, Mr Eaves. In my opinion it is a fantastic contribution to visual clutter along with Mrs Eaves, Apollo, Arbitrary, Backspacer, Base 9 and 12, Base Monospace, Big Cheese, Blockhead, etc.
Leading business schools including University of Cambridge Judge Business School, Fuqua School of Business, and Yale School of Management make course content available for download through iTunes University (iTunes U), part of the of the iTunes online store. Read more...
Related: iPod in the Classroom
At France's leading business school, HEC Paris, students are taking the idea of iPods in the classroom a step further, with what associate dean Valerie Gauthier describes as "technology in the pipeline that will set the standard for the use of quality education tools". As part of an exclusive partnership with Apple, the school issues students with the latest iPod Touch loaded with dedicated browsing software and podcasts. They can then preview courses from a browser menu, and put together a personalised programme to review at their leisure. "Millennials are accustomed to receiving the exact information they want, when and where they want it," says Gauthier. "The podcast of tutorials gives them all the information for review whenever they want."