Content and services

The "cloud" took a hit over the weekend, when a problem with Gmail accounts apparently wiped out tens of thousands of email accounts. Google is vague about how many were affected, but some estimates suggest several hundred thousand account were affected. Here's the worrisome part: news reports are saying the accounts were "permanently" deleted, meaning the affected users can't get their data back.

Amazon has jumped into the movie streaming game big-time with a new offer to Amazon Prime customers, who pay $79/year for free shipping. Now included in that Prime subscription is unlimited access to on-demand 5,000+ movies.

I'm only a light user of Facebook, and reserve it for family and close friends. It is interesting to watch the evolution of other social media sites like Twitter and LinkedIn, which month by month continually add features and interface tweaks to bring them closer to a Facebook look and feel. This is neither good nor bad, and makes a certain sense since what we are seeing is the evolution of a certain approach to interface design, in the context of social connectivity.

SandMonkey, a prominent Egyptian blogger who was briefly detained by Egyptian security forces, advocates that opponents of repressive regimes should store all their documents, writing, and information (e.g. email addresses and data on compatriots) on a cloud-based service located in a different country. That way, if a laptop is confiscated, there are no incriminating documents on it.

It was inevitable that someone would see a business opportunity by providing private search. Starting Page is a search engine that promises to keep your searches private, unlike Google, Bing, and others that build dossiers on what you search for. The search data is sold to third parties and is also used to target ads. I've written recently about how an hour of searching for camping items resulted in weeks of ads about camping stuff.

The Daily is the new online newspaper that will be designed expressly for the iPad and other tablet devices. Developed by The News Corporation, the weekly subscription will be priced at 99 cents, or about $4 per month. By comparison, many newspaper subscriptions are closer to a dollar per day.

Some of my Christmas shopping included trying to evaluate some items via the Web. The purchases were just large enough to justify trying to read some reviews and pick the "best" rated item. But I found the effort trying at best.

Here is a report that tablet devices like the iPad are not delivering the predicted online magazine subscriptions. I have been saying for some time that these new devices have the potential to save the ailing magazine and newspaper industries. But I think it is too soon to say that data from essentially just one or two publishers is a trend.

Two stories in one: The iPad is cutting into traditional newspaper and magazine subscriptions while simultaneously increasing readership for the online versions of newspapers and magazines. The challenge for publishers of newspapers and magazines is to set the online subscription prices at the right price point. If they are greedy and try to keep the online price high, they will never achieve the economies of scale possible when distribution costs are nearly equal to zero.

Skype has announced a new record of 25 million concurrent users, meaning 25 million voice and video calls simultaneously. It also means that all those Skype users are NOT using their cellphones or land lines to make voice calls. Skype video works extremely well if you have a good Web camera (good means you ought to spend at least $50-$75) and a decent Internet connection; if you have tried Skype video and found it fuzzy or blurry, it's probably your camera.

Comcast and Level 3 are having a public fight. Level 3 is a long haul network provider; the company owns thousands of miles of inter-city fiber and hauls all kinds of data traffic, including Internet traffic, for a wide variety of customers. But Comcast is groaning under the weight of Netflix and other video traffic, and the cable company wants Level 3 to pay more to drop traffic onto the Comcast network for delivery.

Netflix has announced an increase in the price of monthly subscriptions, which is no surprise, given the popularity of the firm's video on demand service. With Netflix subscribers using 20% of the nation's bandwidth every evening, Netflix needs some way to pay for all that bandwidth. The company has also added a $7.99/month streaming only subscriptions--you can't get any DVDs.

If you have not yet heard about "The Daily," you will shortly. The new digital "newspaper" is a collaboration between Apple and News Corp., and it is designed expressly for tablet devices like the iPad. There will be no Web or paper edition. Hence, we need a new term for this, and I think "newspad" is just right, as it is derived directly from its predecessor, the "newspaper."

In what has to scare the heck out of the cable companies, Hulu has released an upgraded version of its premium subscription service and software while dropping the monthly cost from $9.99 to $7.99. Hulu Plus gives subscribers access to many of the most popular current season "TV" shows. I am going to start putting "TV" in quotes because broadband services like Hulu and Netflix are not the old analog TV, but they sure deliver the same content.

Facebook has announced a "modern" messaging system that will integrate email, text messaging, and Facebook messaging. Google's dominance, all of a sudden, is being challenged simultaneously on multiple fronts. And behind the scenes, it is often Microsoft that is leading the charge. Facebook's email service will draw some users away from Gmail, and Facebook has already announced a partnership with Microsoft to use Microsoft's Bing search engine for social search. And Yahoo!

Appitalism.com is an interesting new site that combines elements of the iTunes store, Amazon customer reviews, and tight links with social media. This might actually turn out to be a winner, as many of the "shopping" sites tend to lack enough traffic to produce reliable reviews, and in my experience, many listed products on those sites have no reviews. Finally, a lot of those shopping sites are basically just link farms for advertisers.

The Wall Street Journal has an article about issues with the way third party Facebook apps (e.g. FarmVille, HoldEm Poker, others) are grabbing personal information even though they are not supposed to be doing so. Facebook officials said they are clamping down to ensure that the 500 million Facebook users are protected.

The New York Times can now be read on the iPad via an upgraded NY Times app. The full edition of the paper is available for free until sometime next year, when a subscription fee will be charged. If I was the owner of a struggling newspaper with declining circulation, I'd be not only going the app route for distribution, I'd put together some kind of deal to bundle in an iPad with something like a twelve month easy payment plan for the iPad.

Every programmer knows it: the dreaded infinite loop. You have a little piece of code that gets the wrong input and starts repeating, over and over again. Computers being kind of fast, an innocuous few lines of code can execute millions of times an hour, sending the system of the network into "conniptions," which is the technical term used by all good programmers.

I still remember a conversation I had about a year ago when I told an business acquaintance that Blockbuster was toast, and that it was only going to be a year or two before the company would be gone.