The Brooks Review

Category: Links

  • When to Keep Your Mouth Shut

    Honestly Yahoo’s CEO Carol Bartz needs to just keep her mouth shut, just take a look at some of these quotes from her recent interview with USAToday.

    Q: Who’s your biggest single competitor?

    A: Facebook — not today, but they could be. If they keep going, they will have the vault of information on everybody in the world, and that’s valuable.

    Or to translate, let me not answer your actual question and give you a foreshadowing answer that means nothing.

    On Yahoo’s advertising push:

    Too much of the advertising (on the Internet) is static and feels old-fashioned. So we like to work with the advertisers to say, “Let’s kind of get in there and mix it up. Let’s get people jolted awake again.”

    One of my favorites: Purina Puppy Chow has a little puppy walking across the top of the screen. I sit there like an idiot because it’s cute, and I happen to like puppies. It drags the bowl.

    She is right there is not enough moving, blinking, loud Flash ads on the web – clearly we need more puppies.

    When interviewer David Lieberman says that Yahoo makes him do to much work by him having to click a button that says “don’t show me this again” Bartz responds:

    Oh, excuse me, please. You are getting a lot of value. This is not like a free lunch here. We just opened a data center in Buffalo, and in its first phase it has 50,000 servers. That is not cheap. So the very fact that you get all this great information is part of the deal.

    Are you fucking serious?

    Also this patently untrue statement:

    If you want to run an ad on the iPad, it has to be approved by Apple

    Or you can just have an ad in a webpage – but you know they don’t allow Flash so cute puppies are out.

    Then I stopped reading this after I saw this gem:

    Q: In January you gave yourself a B-minus for the first year. How about this year?

    A: I’m off the grading thing. I’m just going to declare that we are pass-fail, and I pass.

    How does she still have a job? Oh she passed, never mind.

    [via Aol/TechCrunch]

  • Happy Cog Rethinks Blog Comments

    Zeldman:

    Kids today are more likely to respond to a blog post on Twitter than in the article’s comments section; so we’ve collocated our comments on Twitter. Share a tweet-length response here, and, with your permission, it will go there. If you are moved to respond with more than 140 characters, post the response on your website, and it will show up here. Clever, these Americans.

    A pretty neat idea, it will be interesting to see how this plays out long term.

  • Google Inside™

    Because paying $1900 and making me replace my TV is exactly what I want to do. But hey, there is Google Inside right?

  • Sony Squeezes 16.4 Megapixels onto Camera-Phone Chip

    All I can say is this is really insane. If the sample pics provided are real-world pictures then this is one damn impressive feat by Sony.

  • Microsoft Yearns for Some Flash?

    Nick Bilton:

    Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, recently showed up with a small entourage of deputies at Adobe’s corporate offices in San Francisco to hold a secret meeting with Adobe’s chief executive, Shantanu Narayen.

    The meeting, which lasted over an hour, covered a number of topics, but one of the main thrusts of the discussion was Apple and its control of the mobile phone market and how the two companies could partner in the battle against Apple. A possible acquisition of Adobe by Microsoft were among the options.

    And you thought Photoshop couldn’t get any uglier or more crashtastic.

  • Logitech Smart TV with Google TV

    Remember what I said about the Sony remote the other night? Yeah, well Logitech decided to just give you a keyboard, because every wife wants an f’ing keyboard sitting on the coffee table. Because every person wants to have to type in the dark to be able to change the channel… I’ll stop now.

  • ‘How Steve Ballmer told me what to do with my iPad!’

    This whole thing is a must read – it is the epitome of why Windows sucks on a tablet device. But in the interest of saving you time here are a few choice quotes that sum it up.

    Steve Ballmer talking about optimizing Windows 7 for touch interfaces according to Mark Wilson:

    Media Center is big and, when people say ‘hey, we could optimise more for clients’ I think what they generally mean is ‘Big Buttons’. Big Buttons that’s, I think, a codeword for Big Buttons and Media Center is Big Buttons not Little Buttons. I’m not trying to trivialise that – it’s a real issue.

    and:

    The truth of the matter is the laptop weighs less – you can set it on your lap, it doesn’t weigh anything at that point and then you can type.

    That isn’t just marketing talk, it is a completely asinine take on how to build a good tablet.

  • The Latest Verizon iPhone Rumor Hubub

    Yukari Iwatani Kane and Ting-i Tsai reporting for the Wall Street Journal:

    Verizon, in those earlier discussions, balked at Apple’s requirement that Verizon not allow its retail partners to sell the phone, people familiar with the discussion said at the time. Verizon also declined to give up its ability to sell content like music and videos through its proprietary service, these people said.

    And a great point from MG Siegler:

    If Apple really does care about U.S. market share — and again, indications are that they actually do — they need Verizon more than Verizon needs them. And that’s a bad place to be in — and one Apple isn’t used to in recent yea

    There is zero doubt in my mind that Siegler is right, Apple needs more carriers in the U.S. to continue to grow its market share – that is painfully obvious. The thing that I keep bouncing around in my head though is perhaps there is a CDMA iPhone in January and a GSM phone – both are sold directly from Apple in an unlocked state – a ‘here it is come and get it’ approach.

    Wouldn’t that be interesting? Would you pay for an unlocked iPhone – maybe if the price was right. What if Apple keeps AT&T as the only carrier that you can buy directly through but sells phones unlocked that work on any network in the country? That sounds like a pretty good model to me – it would remove a ton of complaints while giving Apple the entire U.S. wireless customer base all at once.

    Again though it is all going to come down to $$$.

  • Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Browser Falls Below 50% of Worldwide Market for First Time

    Statcounter:

    Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) browser has fallen below 50% of the worldwide market for the first time according to StatCounter. The company’s research arm, StatCounter Global Stats finds that Microsoft IE fell to 49.87% in September followed by Firefox with 31.5%. Google’s Chrome continues to increase market share at an impressive rate and has more than tripled from 3.69% in September 2009 to 11.54% in September this year.

    That will keep dropping I would suspect – though I am hearing IE 9 is pretty nice.

  • Analog Sunday

    What a great thought – read a book and spend time with someone you love on Sundays and leave the computer/iPad/iPhone/Web/TV alone. I don’t know that I would be able to do this, but my wife and I do try to spend solid chunks of time together on the weekends not sitting in front of our computers (usually this means watching TV/Movies together).

    [via Minimal Mac]

  • ‘The Chokehold of Calendars’

    In Real Estate people love to have face to face meetings to ‘hash’ stuff out. My thought process is that 90% of all meetings are a waste of my time. Taking that then, over the past few years I have always asked if we can wait to meet until the next week, saying that I am all ‘booked up’ this week. When the next week rolls around I would just ask if we still need to meet and most of the time people seem to have figured out, or forgotten about, the problem that they wanted to talk to me about.

    Saving me a ton of time.

    Mike Monteiro though nails the real problem on the head (in what may be one of the most quoted segments of the day):

    In my experience, most people don’t schedule their work. They schedule the interruptions that prevent their work from happening. In the case of a business like ours, what clients pay us to make and do happens in the cracks between meetings, or worse, after business hours.

  • Google Goggles for the iPhone is Here

    It is fairly impressive, got the Apple logo right away, but can’t find the Sigg Water Bottle logo. I am going to test it out on the mini roadtrip I am taking tomorrow.

  • Alpha Geeks and the DIY Mentality

    Marco Arment responding to Benjamin Stein’s post:

    And as many major technologies and platforms become dominant, we stop tinkering at those levels. We’re all happily using Ethernet and TCP/IP instead of trying to invent new protocols at those layers. Nobody’s writing a PC OS from scratch in this decade. Nobody’s even writing their own web search engine anymore. It wouldn’t surprise me if we’ve seen the last new social-network giant for the next decade.

    I remember the days of reinstalling my OS ever month, or constantly iterating with hardware component purchases. Frankensteining together louder stereo systems – making my computer work with things they were not made to work with at the time.

    Now though I agree with Marco:

    That was an interesting time, but it’s time to move up the stack and mess around at higher levels.

  • ‘How Android Is Transforming Mobile Computing’ [Not Really]

    Dan Lyons writes a post for Newsweek contending the:

    Android is the kind of runaway smash hit that techies spend their careers dreaming about.

    and:

    But Android has enabled handset makers like Motorola and Samsung to develop credible rivals to the iPhone. This year, as those companies have gained traction, Apple’s momentum has stalled.

    I am sure he is referring to the fact that Apple’s stock is tumbling and no one is buying iPhones or iPads anymore. That has got to be it right?

    Lyons used to be so cute back when he was pretending to be Steve Jobs – now though it is just getting sad.

    [via DF]

  • Sharp Copies the Wrong Thing

    Sharp introduced a new phone with a display of the same resolution as the iPhone’s retina display. The problem though is that the phone is ugly as sin. They should copy the industrial design first and worry about the tech specs later.

  • 20 Most Economically Stressed Counties

    Spoiler: Don’t live in California if you want to avoid economic (and likely psychological) stress, but do head on over to Nebraska.

  • Darpa’s New Snoop Plan

    Katie Drummond:

    The agency’s goal is to replace “largely manual exploitation and…chat-based operator interactions” with a system that mines different inputs, including drone footage and on-the-ground intel, and quickly stitches together the data to identify potential threats.

    24 has had this technology for like 6+ years – time to catch up Darpa.

  • Instapaper: Become a Subscriber

    Marco just implemented a subscription model $1/mo so if you use the service you should subscribe. You don’t have to, and right now you don’t get any real perks – other than you know supporting something truly useful. How much did you spend on FarmVille last month? Yeah so probably just subscribe.

  • Evan Williams Steps Down as Twitter’s CEO

    1. It would have been way better if he could have resigned in 140 characters or less.
    2. It is hard to judge his performance without knowing the financials of the company.
    3. He did a hell of a job growing the user base.

  • ‘If you do this in an email, I hate you’

    I second all of this.