The Brooks Review

Author: Ben Brooks

  • Is Steve Ballmer Really the Best Choice to Run Microsoft’s Consumer Business?

    In short no. This is Ballmer grasping at straws, throwing pennies at a problem that needs millions.

  • Microsoft’s J. Allard and Robbie Bach Are Leaving The Company

    Matt Burns:

    Microsoft is losing two high-profile executives. Both J. Allard, “Chief Experience Offer” and Entertainment and Device Division’s CTO, and Robbie Bach, President of Entertainment and Devices Division, are leaving the company per a Steve Ballmer email from this morning. These are the guys behind the Xbox, Zune, Project Natal, and the dead Courier project — so basically all of Microsoft’s hit entertainment projects from the last decade.

    Not good for Microsoft at all, and indicative of the overall problem at Microsoft.

  • Congress to Review Telecommunications Law

    Edward Wyatt reporting:

    “The F.C.C.’s legal authority should be decided by the Congress itself, and not by applying to the Internet a set of onerous rules designed for a different technology, a different situation, and a different era,” he said [James Cicconi].

    They need to give the control to the FCC, they need to have done it yesterday.

  • Yext Launches Realtime Reputation Management System For Local Businesses

    Leena Rao:

    But Yext says that in the realtime web, it’s tough to manage your reputation as a business. So the startup is launching a realtime reputation manager for local businesses. It will claim your local business listing on sites like Citysearch, Yelp, YellowPages, Twitter, Facebook and more. The site will pull reviews for a local business on all these sites, a track each review for positive ore negative feedback.

    Smart.

  • Whither Verizon?

    Spot on.

  • AT&T Tests Free Wi-Fi in Times Square

    Charlie Sorrel:

    As of today, AT&T customers can grab free Wi-Fi when not buying helium balloons or miniature Empire State Buildings. This, we presume, is a way to improve the telco’s notoriously bad data performance in several metropolitan centers.

    I am kinda (not really) surprised that it took them this long to try filling in with Wi-Fi.

  • BP: Equipment in place for Gulf ‘top kill’ try

    Seattle Times:

    The top kill has proven successful in aboveground wells, but has never before been tried a mile beneath the sea. Company executives peg its chances of success at 60 to 70 percent.

    60-70%, how about 10-15%. Hate to be the one to break the bad news, but working a mile under water is a lot different than working in a desert. There is that whole water thing to contend with.

  • Brixx Wood Fired Pizza Fires Waitress Over Facebook Post

    Courtney Rubin:

    So Johnson, 22, did the 21st century equivalent of griping to the kitchen staff (or the bartender down the street): She vented on Facebook. “Thanks for eating at Brixx,” she wrote, “you cheap piece of —- camper.” (For the record, the $5 tip was 17 percent of the customers’ bill.)

    Within 48 hours, her managers came calling. They showed her a copy of her Facebook comments and fired her for breaking company policy forbidding insulting customers. A Brixx official told the Charlotte Observer she also violated a second company policy: Speaking ill about the company on social networks. According to the company, Johnson signed her agreement to these policies when she was hired.

    My question: Why do people think that what they post online is private?

  • Memo to Steve Jobs: the IAd Is No Miracle Worker

    Great post about mobile advertising and a breakdown of what iAds is and how it stacks up.

  • Going paperless gets some big-time backing

    Charles Bermant:

    Consumers have been reluctant to embrace paperless systems for three reasons, Shivers said. They are forced to log in to several systems and can’t keep track of different passwords; it’s too easy to miss a due date; and there is no effective way to manage the disparate documents. “Half of our target market pays their bills online,” Shivers said. “But only 20 percent receives them electronically.”

    Color me skeptical that this company can take the market from 12% to 50%, but you got love their ambition.

  • Google Chrome for Mac and Linux Is Out of Beta

    John Gruber on Safari’s problems compared to Chrome:

    Safari really needs an option to automatically reopen pages that were left open. It’s crazy that Safari still defaults to the same poorly-chosen behavior of Mosaic from 1993 — where quitting the app implies closing and forgetting all open browser windows. I know about (and make daily use of) the “Reopen All Windows from Last Session” command in Safari’s History menu, but there should be an option to make it automatic, and in my opinion, it should be the default behavior. Closing windows and quitting the browser should not be related tasks.

  • Apple Filming Next-Gen iPhone Commercials Directed By “American Beauty” Director

    John Brownlee:

    According to Engadget, the next iPhone commercial will be directed by American Beauty director (and mawkish paper bag enthusiast) Sam Mendes will be helming the commercials for the next iPhone, which is being referred to as Mammoth / N90 internally… presumably to keep the actual name of the next iPhone (the only aspect of the device not yet revealed by leaks) underwraps until WWDC.

    It would be naive to assume the only thing we don’t know about the next iPhone is the name, naive bordering on down right stupid.

  • New “Drastically Simplified” Facebook Privacy Controls Start Rolling Out Tomorrow

    MG Siegler:

    On stage today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City, Facebook’s vice president of product Chris Coxannounced that starting tomorrow, Facebook will be rolling out “drastically simplified” and improved privacy controls. He didn’t give any details, but did suggest that they should alleviate some of the recent privacy problems Facebook has faced.

    Maybe they should try this.

  • Dell Streak Tablet Coming This Summer

    Ian Paul:

    As expected, the Dell Streak will have a 5-inch WVGA touchscreen, Qualcomm’s 1-GHz Snapdragon Processor, 2 GB internal storage, maximum 32GB of external SD storage, 5 megapixel camera with LED flash, and a front-facing camera for video chat. The Streak will also have 3G, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 2.1 connectivity.

    One problem: as far as I know you can only store apps on internal memory when you use Android. Which would limit this tablet to only 2gb worth of apps. Whereas iPads have no less than 16gb. This matters when you consider that some iPad games are 100+ mbs.

  • .CO Hopes One Letter Less Is More

    Ryan Singel:

    The country code for Colombia, .co, is making itself available to the public in June and is marketing itself as a high-end top level domain with the cachet of .com without all the problems of getting a decent name. That difficulty is perhaps most evident in the fact that every possible combination of four-letter .com domain names has long been registered, and even a decent five letter .com domain name can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

  • Wal-Mart slashes iPhone price to $97

    That is on a 16gb 3GS, not 3G, 3GS that currently is $199.

  • The Top 10 Cities With the Best Broadband

    Stacey Higginbotham:

    Ookla, the three-year-old company based in Seattle that’s behind the online speed service, introduced a broadband index today that tabulates the results from the more than 1 million speed tests done each day around the world. The global broadband speed is 7.69 Mbps while the U.S. speeds average out at 10.12 Mbps.

  • Facebook’s Culture Problem May Be Fatal

    Yep another Facebook post from Bruce Nussbaum:

    Facebook is wildly successful because its founder matched new social media technology to a deep Western cultural longing — the adolescent desire for connection to other adolescents in their own private space. There they can be free to design their personal identities without adult supervision. Think digital tree house. Generation Y accepted Facebook as a free gift and proceeded to connect, express, and visualize the embarrassing aspects of their young lives.

  • Soluto Figures Out What’s Bogging Down Your PC (And Tells You How To Fix It)

    Jason Kincaid:

    The same can often seem true of a brand new computer — after that lightning-quick first boot or two, PCs have the nasty habit of gradually bogging down until that new quad core processor doesn’t seem much faster than the last one you had.

    Let me save you even more time: go here.

  • Yankee Stadium bans the iPad

    Christina Warren:

    According to Apple’s latest commercial, “iPad goes anywhere” — anywhere, that is, except for Yankee Stadium.

    This has Jeter written all over it.