The Onion strikes again. Much love to Dave Thackeray for passing this along. Made my day. Sort of.
Learn MoreI know the Great Man Himself once said that the iPad was the perfect size and that 7-inch tablets were “tweeners” (too big to be a phone, too small to be a tablet) and thus would be “DOA.” But I’ve been using the Google Nexus 7 for a few days and it has already become my go-to device. It’s small enough to toss in a bag, and small enough that you can sit with it in a cafe and not have this huge thing out on the table in front of you, small enough to keep on the table by your bed and just grab to take a quick look at email — and yet big enough that the screen and keyboard are comfortable. And the Nexus 7 costs only $200, versus the new iPad, which starts at $500 and goes up over $829. What’s not to love? Now Bloomberg and others are reporting that Apple is indeed defying the Great Man’s words and working on a smaller tablet. It’s a great idea, and a smaller iPad, priced to move, will be a huge hit. One thought: Apple as it exists today is so powerful and so successful in the mobile (post-PC) space that that the only tablets that...
Learn MoreI just had coffee with Tom Thai, who runs marketing at Bluefin Labs, which is one of the most exciting companies I’ve come across in a long time. Bluefin sells a social TV analytics service that tracks what people are saying on Facebook, Twitter and other social sites about the shows and commercials they see on TV. It’s extraordinarily powerful stuff and it’s catching on like crazy. Bluefin is still a pretty young company — its first product was launched last August and the company has only 45 employees — but they’ve already signed up more than 40 TV networks as customers, which is basically everybody in the US. Bluefin is also now reaching out to ad agencies and in some cases directly to brands, which can use Bluefin to see what people are saying about the commercials. Customers include PepsiCo, Kraft, Mars and Estee Lauder. It’s a subscription model. You pay based on the number of seats you’re using. The power of Bluefin is that networks and advertisers can listen to their customers and respond by reshaping sitcoms or changing ad campaigns based on what you’re hearing. Another place where there will be huge and obvious impact is political campaigns. This fall’s election will be a big test...
Learn MoreVenture capitalist and longtime Valley guy Bill Davidow pens a thoughtful piece in the Atlantic about how values have declined in tech since the days of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. In a nutshell: In the old days the emphasis was on helping customers; today it’s on exploiting them. Google, Facebook and Zynga get zinged. Not that they...
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Sadly, I played bass. Big mistake....
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I remember being a kid and having the nuns pull us all out of class and cram us into a tiny room where we would sit on the floor and watch NASA launches on a black-and-white TV. These weren’t all moon landings, and I know we didn’t see the first moon landing at school, because that took place in the summer. But every time they launched an Apollo mission, we watched. I remember all of us sitting there and being amazed by what we were seeing, and even now, all these years later, it’s still amazing what those people did. But today I spent two hours watching Apple announce a new MacBook Pro with a retina display, a new version of OS X and a new version of iOS that has … gasp … Facebook support integrated into it. All around the world, people were sitting at their screens, watching live blog coverage of this event, hanging on every page refresh. Forgive me, but this makes me sad. So many great minds, devoted to such trivial...
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