Here’s a little price snippet on Apple’s e-book plans, care of an eleventh hour Wall Street Journal piece. According to the article, the gang in Cupertino is asking book publishers (HarperCollins was specifically cited) to set the price point for digital versions of hardcover bestsellers at either $12.99 or $14.00, “with fewer titles offered at $9.99.” The publisher apparently has the option to set its own price, but at any rate, Apple’s taking the usual 30% cut from each sale — a $14.99 novel would thus leave about $10.49 for the publisher. Nothing else to glean from this other than a rather strongly-phrased assertion that tomorrow’s tablet has a 10-inch touchscreen, but no indication on where that’s coming from. These prices would put Apple’s selection at a premium compared with Amazon and its Kindle store, but perhaps it’ll also be bypassing any rumored digital delay on new works — question is, if Apple really is entering the e-book business and bringing with it higher prices, will it let us import our digital books purchased from other stores?
We all love a good debate about how the tech giants of today are competing with each other, but rarely do we get a handy reference sheet like this to point people to. Nick Bilton of the New York Times has put together a segment-by-segment comparison between America’s tech heavyweights, which does a fine job of pinpointing who competes with whom and where. We find the gaps in coverage more intriguing than the overlaps, though, with Microsoft’s only unticked box — mobile hardware — raising habitual rumors of a Pink phone. Apple’s absence from the provision of mapping services might also soon be at an end, given the company acquired map maker Placebase in July of last year (see Computerworld). Anyway, there should be plenty more for you to enjoy, so hit the source for the full chart and get analyzin’.
It’s sort of hard to believe that all the hype from CES is already over and done with. Larger companies spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to introduce and showcase new products at the show, and now all anyone wants to talk about in the tech world is Apple. Must be nice to be Steve Jobs (or an investor). The company that gave the world the iPod and iPhone is planning a media event on the 27th of this month, and while the world tends to believe a tablet or slate of some sort is planned, there has been no definite proof of that to this point.
We really have no idea what’s next from Apple; we just know that it’ll be something to unleash one’s creative side based according to a tagline in the invite. According to an inside source close to the going-ons involved in all of this, a new tablet of some sort may not be the only thing on deck for next Wednesday though. We have been led to believe by an inside source that AT&T will lose their iPhone exclusivity on the same day, though it’s not yet clear what other carrier (or carriers) will be stepping in to also carry the phone. For anyone who has followed the saga, you may notice that you haven’t seen AT&T fighting to extend their original exclusive agreement of late. In fact, they have spent most of their time fighting Verizon’s negative ad campaign.
We all know how the iPhone can secure itself, but you can get it to secure your entire house as well.
A while back, I briefly toyed with the idea of going without a landline. It’s an alluring prospect, and strikes me as satisfyingly post-modern. But one thing held me back: my home security system, which relied on a landline to connect it to central monitoring. So even though I went through a brief affair with Vonage until Verizon FiOS Triple Play pulled me back in, I had to keep a limited line connected to the house for our security system.
I tried to get rid of it. Oh, how I tried. But until recently, retrofitting the system to go cellular, or swap it out with a more modern system using (for example) a secure cellular connection, always cost more than it was worth. Then our home security monitoring contract price went way up and all of a sudden, the price difference between retrofitting and acquiring a new system went down. That made getting the new system worthwhile.
I went about trying to find a security system that would give me the flexibility I needed, as well as the knowledge that I wasn’t compromising home security. I already ran a small security program in the house to run a video baby monitor, but for the whole house, I needed some kind of central monitoring. Enter Alarm.com.
If you’re thinking to yourself, “that’s sort of a small window for a luxury hotel suite,” well, you’re right. But it’s only because this room occupies the entirety of a repurposed Cold War-era East German aircraft.
OK, the view isn’t anything special: the plane stays grounded outside the Teuge airport in the Netherlands. But the room itself, dubbed the Vliegtuigsuite, is spectacular, including three flat screen TVs, a Blu-ray player, a sauna, and a jacuzzi. Guests have access to the entire plane, from your king-size bed in the back all the way up to the cockpit.
As Alice Schroeder explains at the end of her book, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, although Warren Buffett is best known for being the second richest person in the world, “above all, he would describe himself as a teacher.”
From sharing his thoughts with small groups at cocktail parties to spreading his wisdom to the entire world through his annual shareholder letters, Schroeder shows throughout her book that Warren has always prided himself on teaching others.
Although he is most highly sought for his investing advice, the wisdom Warren has shared over the decades can easily be applied outside of the world of finance. Because of this, I want to share the following twenty quotes from Warren Buffett, and how they can be applied directly to your job as an Internet marketer:
Oh sure, we’ve seen Sony’s UMD-hatin’ PSP Go splayed before, but never like this. Call us crazy, but we’re calling stop motion video the future of unboxings and tear downs. Seriously — this is one wild two minute ride that you simply have to take.
Maemo’s already pretty open as open platforms go, but what’s better than a single open platform on your open phone? Two open platforms, of course, creating a vortex of pure, unadulterated openness the likes of which the world has never seen. Hacking is par for the course with Nokia’s N900, so it comes as no surprise to see that a motivated individual has managed to get his unit set up in a trick dual-boot configuration with Maemo on internal storage and Android on a separate partition loaded from the microSD card. He says it’s “proof of concept” for the moment — but to steal his words, “its [sic] real and it could be spectacular.” We couldn’t agree more, and as much as Nokia loves its own code, we can’t help but think this precisely the sort of tinkering the N900 was made for.
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PS3 finally properly hacked?
In a post titled “Hello hypervisor, I’m geohot,” hacker George Hotz (already known in the iPhone community) has made a strong claim: that he has cracked the PS3. The system has remained (mostly) uncompromised for over three years now, with a few exceptions here and there. But, this one pledges full read/write access to the entire system memory and complete control over the processor — all without a mod chip. Has he really done it, if so how, and what comes next? That all remains to be seen. This exploit supposedly “isn’t really patchable, but [Sony] can make implementations much harder,” meaning he isn’t tipping his hat until he’s ready, because once he does the never-ending firmware update war begins, and as we’ve seen on the PSP, Sony can really knock out those updates.
Sure, we’d love to be hanging out with this device in person, but we suppose this is second best. ASUS UK has some shots of the upcoming DR-950 e-reader, sporting 9-inches of grayscale SiPix e-paper. It admittedly looks pretty great under these idealized lighting conditions, and the homescreen interface looks simple and oh-so-touchable. Hopefully we get to put the device through its text-to-speech, 3G and ePub paces soon enough.
