I like ebooks. Sometimes. For certain occasions or reads. This summer, for instance, I didn’t schlep a ton of paper bricks to the Greek island where we spent our family vacation. Instead, I loaded a lot of fine books onto my iPad. As I neither waterproofed the iPad nor found a working cooling solution for… [Read more…]
November 2, 2011
On Saturday, November 10 2001, Steve Jobs killed almost saved the music industry as we knew it: the first generation of the iPod reached the Apple Stores. So let’s flash back to those prehistoric times. For about two decades, the music industry had made a killing by distributing billions and billions of digital masters. The… [Read more…]
September 23, 2011
At F8, Mark Zuckerberg showed off Timeline Facebook’s neatly displayed version of “I know what you did last Summer (and in case you forgot you can look your life up here)”. But the really big step happens in the background. The ubiquitous Like-button introduced an explicit way to write some information into Facebook’s Open Graph.… [Read more…]
September 15, 2011
I’m so glad the Internet wasn’t invented by some crazy Korean hardware manufacturers, collaborating with American cable guys. Just calling a device smart and adding some clickable icons doesn’t add any extra intelligence. Compare the smart phone with the smart tv. The first makes your typical phone tasks a bit easier, simply by adding a… [Read more…]
September 1, 2011
Remember Sony, inventor of mobile music (the Walkman, if you’re generation iPod), makers of shiny gizmos and all things transistorized? Yesterday, I spent one hour at Sony’s press conference T IFA Berlin, where all manufacturers and lovers of home electronics gather since the days when television was the next big thing and very much black… [Read more…]
August 16, 2011
In the real world, we abhor censorship, take many civil rights for granted. But as digital citizens, we happily click ourselves back into the 17th century. Facebookistan has the 3rd largest population on the globe, just behind China and India. Google+, the new kid on the block, already surpassed Switzerland (big deal), Senegal, and even… [Read more…]
August 15, 2011
What are software patents good for? NPR’s “This American Life” explained nicely the theory behind the software patent business. A more hands-on approach comes from Sanjay Jha, CEO of Motorola Mobility. After hinting that Motorola could use its bazillion mobile patents to tax some of its Android competitors, Google defended its Android franchise by buying… [Read more…]
May 26, 2011
In an interesting talk with pkabel, Peter tried to convince me, that the webwide perception of free will for the next foreseeable keep digital stuff, well: free. Partly, I wholeheartedly agree. Free is powerful, and any digital commodity will sooner or later end up there. So one question can be: where and for whom could… [Read more…]
March 17, 2011
Beloved Twitter finds itself currently in a very awkward position. Twitter always acted as some kind of a weird, but successful crossbreed of for profit company and something resembling an open Internet protocol. A massive, cloud based, proprietary communications channel with a set of open APIs any developer could connect to. While Twitter was struggling… [Read more…]
March 9, 2011
Please strike the one word which does not fit here: cotton jeans digital media Right. Jeans is the wrong one. Because cotton and digital media are commodities, but the jeans a value added product. Exhibit 1 As Joe Weisenthal insightful question in Business Insider: Guess What Surging Cotton Prices Do To The Cost Of Blue… [Read more…]
November 18, 2011
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