Posted by Kirk Biglione in Apple on Jan 27, 2010
Apple’s latest gadget is everything we hoped for, and so much less. Granted, the iPad is very cool, but it’s more evolutionary than revolutionary. It is essentially an extra-large iPod Touch with optional 3G wireless.
In my last post I identified five things I’d be watching for during the iPad event.
Here’s what I saw: (more…)
Posted by Kirk Biglione in Apple on Jan 25, 2010
Forget the Super Bowl. Tomorrow is the big game.
Unless you’ve been hiding under a Blackberry you’re aware that tomorrow is the day that Apple unveils its highly anticipated new product. After nearly three years of speculation, tomorrow is the day we all get to see…the Unicorn.
Rumors abound about the alleged capabilities of this mythical beast. Some say that it can fly. Others have suggested that it’s invisible. Those same people insist that it’s already here and we just can’t see it yet. There is actually a rumor floating around the net theorizing that tomorrow morning when Steve Jobs walks onto the stage to introduce us to his new creation, a shiny new Apple tablet will materialize in each of our homes. These invisible unicorns have apparently been hiding in the corner for months just waiting for the right moment to come out and meet us.
Steve Ballmer will bow down to this supernatural new technology. Pat Robertson will condemn it as satanic. Newt Gingrich will buy three.
As for you and me? Who knows. Whether or not this “revolutionary” new product actually transforms our lives in the ways that we’ve been lead to believe it might, depends on any number of things.
Here are a few of the things I’ll be looking for to determine whether the Apple tablet turns out to be a unicorn or a duck-billed platypus. (more…)
Posted by Kirk Biglione in Apple on Jan 08, 2010
After two years of non-stop rumors and wild speculation the Mythical Apple Tablet (aka the Unicorn) will apparently become a reality later this month.
Among other things, the Unicorn is expected to single handedly (hoofedly?) save newspapers, magazines, and book publishers, while simultaneously killing Amazon’s Kindle. That’s a tall order for a device that no one outside of Apple has actually seen yet. These expectations are not surprising considering the amount of wishful thinking that has been projected onto the device by print industry insiders desperate for salvation in a world that is increasingly turning digital.
I have no intention of adding to the ill-informed speculation about the Unicorn’s specifications or magickal capabilities. Instead, I’d like to take a moment to dissect the claim that an Apple tablet will somehow kill the Kindle.
The logic seems to be that Apple’s tablet will provide a superior user experience to the Kindle (a reasonable assumption), and that consumers will favor a multi-purpose device over a dedicated reading device (probably true). As a result, the tablet is expected to become the digital reading device of choice. In other words, the Kindle is toast!
Well, maybe. (more…)
Posted by Kirk Biglione in Google on Oct 11, 2009
I used to think of Google as a friend in my personal battle against spam. The company has done an exceptional job of keeping my inbox free of unwanted pharmaceutical ads. Unfortunately, I’ve recently come to realize that Google may have a double standard when it comes to physical junk mail.
Over the past few weeks I’ve received several marketing letters from Google by way of the U.S. postal service. Each letter was unremarkable by itself. Each included an identical offer of credit towards the Google AdWords service. The only thing notable about these letters is that each one was addressed to:
Monday February
Captain Copyright Has Left the Building
Medialoper
If I understand this correctly, someone at Google thinks that Monday February is a person who works in the Captain Copyright Has Left the Building department at Medialoper.
The first time around I found the letter amusing. The second time I began to wonder how a Google bot could make such a careless parsing error. By the time I received the third letter I became convinced that something truly odd was happening. (more…)
Posted by Kirk Biglione in Amazon, DRM on Jul 20, 2009
When media historians write the history of DRM they may well devote a whole chapter to the day that Amazon customers awoke to find that their Kindle editions of “1984″ had vanished into a memory hole and that Big Brother Bezos had apparently turned George Orwell into an unperson.
You would be hard pressed to invent a more apt or ironic example of the dangers of DRM. Surely this will be the incident that finally raises consumer awareness of the risks involved in buying DRM protected media.
And yet, after digging deeper into this story, I’m not convinced that this was a DRM issue at all. At least, not in the truest sense.
Further, this incident raises a host of interesting rights related issues that have largely gone unexplored in the days since.
Consider the following: (more…)
