CNBC:
According to multiple sources, a trader entered a “b” for billion instead of an “m” for million in a trade possibly involving Procter & Gamble …, a component in the Dow.
Wow.
Category: Links
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Spelling Matters, Just Ask the Dow
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Nokia Moving Towards Services
Tarmo Virki:
“We support management in this,” Jorma Ollila said in a speech to shareholders on Thursday.
Nokia has started to build a new business by offering Internet services ranging from music downloads to e-mail, but these have gained little traction so far.
Wait so the #1 cellphone company is moving from making cellphones to offering Internet, Music and Email. So let me rephrase this.
Nokia is struggling to compete with Apple on the smartphone market, instead they will start selling music downloads. This will put them in competition with Apple. Wait.
Nokia is struggling to sell phones, so they will now try to sell Internet. Do they even have an infrastructure to do this?
Nokia is struggling to sell cellphones, especially now the Google and Apple are competing with them. Instead they will try selling email services, putting them in competition with Googles little known email service: Gmail.
Idiots.
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At Hotels, Making Wi-Fi as Standard as a Bed
Joe Sharkey:
Still, in recent years, most hotels have heeded the message that business travelers require Wi-Fi access — no excuses accepted. While many convention and luxury hotels still impose a daily charge for access, most midlevel hotels and even many budget-price hotels now provide it free. And corporate travel managers are pushing hard for all hotels to provide free access, pointing out that customers, especially younger ones, live in a world where free Wi-Fi is expected.
It is surprising how well the hotel industry is modeling the coffee shop industry when it comes to WiFi. For a long time the “premium” coffee shops such as Starbucks charged for internet access (they still kind of do) while the local one off coffee shops gave it away for free. For the most part everyone started to realize that at the very least they needed someway of getting their customers online, for free, if even on for two hours (damn you Starbucks).
Not too long ago you really had to double check that there was WiFi at a hotel you may be traveling to, now days it is expected (and usually there). I have paid $10 a day for access (though it always pisses me off) and I have gotten free access. The one thing I have never gotten, whether paid or free, was fast and reliable. The last hotel I stayed at had a wireless router built into the landline phone, this was a terrible speed connection with about a 10ft range.
Hotels are improving their WiFi rapidly, but if you want to go somewhere reliable to get it be sure to check out my post from Monday.
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Teenage Insults, Scrawled on Web, Not on Walls
Tamar Lewin:
Formspring is one of many question-and-answer Internet sites that are widely used to find, say, the calorie count of avocados. But Formspring spread like wildfire among young people, who used it to for more intimate topics — or flat-out cyberbullying.
Many schools say they have seen students crushed by criticism of their breasts, their body odor or their behavior at the last party.
I guess I was clueless that kids were using it for this. I have an account and so far no one has even asked me a thing (guess you have to be somewhat famous or a teenager).
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UC Davis Says Bye Bye to Gmail
Paul McDougall:
Many faculty “expressed concerns that our campus’s commitment to protecting the privacy of their communications is not demonstrated by Google and that the appropriate safeguards are neither in place at this time nor planned for in the near future,” the letter said.
Google officials, for their part, insisted that their privacy controls are adequate. “Obviously there’s lots of opinions and voices on campuses,” said Jeff Keltner, a business development manager in the Google Apps for Education group.I think the most noteworthy thing here is that Google “insisted that their privacy controls are adequate” – really? Adequate is the word you want to use here. That is just not good if even your employees think that your privacy is not that great.
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Envisioning Interactions in the Home of the Future
Professor Axel Roesler:
During an intensive five week project, five student teams conducted an iterative user-centered design process to explore future applications for the projection of interfaces on any surface suitable for display and interaction in the home of the future.
Some pretty neat ideas in here.
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The iPad is Crushing Netbooks
Philip Elmer-DeWitt:
What caught my eye, however, was what her proprietary research shows about the impact of the iPad and other tablets on the broader gadget market, starting with netbooks. As her chart (above) shows, sales growth of these low-cost, low-powered computing devices peaked last summer at an astonishing 641% year-over-year growth rate. It fell off a cliff in January and shrank again in April — collateral damage, according to Huberty, from the January introduction and April launch of the iPad.
Be sure to take a look at the chart he has, I don’t think the drop off is solely due to the iPad. I think we are looking at two things happening simultaneously here. 1) The iPad is about the same price and a lot better. 2) People are realizing that netbooks are junk and that they should either by a full sized laptop or nothing at all.
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So Newsweek Really Is Dead
Michael Wolff:
The Washington Post announced yesterday that it was putting Newsweek, in recent memory one of the most important news outlets in the country—which the Post has owned for almost a half-century—up for sale.
Sad, I was always a big reader of Newsweek and it was the first news publication that I ever got a subscription to.
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Why Intel Will Be a Mobile Loser
Om Malik:
The market has read the tea leaves as well, thus explaining the stock performance of Microsoft. Same goes for Intel. Despite its efforts to launch new chips or dabble in likely-to-fail OS efforts such as its joint venture with Nokia, the Mobilin, Intel resembles an elephant on top of quicksand.
As I said yesterday:
Competition is almost always a good thing for consumers. My fear would be that Intel tries to monopolize the market much like they did with the PC industry. It would seem to me that if Android or WebOS ran on any mobile chip, that it would take one step closer to being the Windows of the mobile market.
That still stands. A lot of people predicted that Microsoft was too late to get into the video game arena with the introduction of the Xbox. What nobody accounted for was Microsoft’s determination, and money. Intel is seemingly in the same boat.
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FCC Is GungHo About Net Neutrality
Edward Wyatt:
On Thursday, Mr. Genachowski is expected to assert that the agency, under its powers to regulate phone service, is permitted to require broadband service providers to follow certain transmission guidelines, including safeguarding privacy, not discriminating against certain types of content providers, offering service to rural customers at the same rate as urban customers and providing access to people with disabilities.
This is good.
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Get $2 From AT&T
Nate Anderson:
And, if you were an AT&T DSL subscriber, but the company’s records show that nothing improper was done to your line, you can still get money. The proposed settlement says that those who “believe that your DSL Service has not performed at satisfactory speeds” may still be eligible for a “one-time payment of $2.00.” Yes—$2.00.
As expected AT&T settled with the Ohio class-action suit over limiting its DSL speed. But hey, it is better than nothing.
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Infographic on How Teens Use Cellphones
Christina Warren:
At this point, 75% of teens have cellphones, up from 45% back in 2004. Thirty-three percent of teens send more than 100 texts per day. Teenage boys send an average of 30 text messages per day and girls send an average of 80.
Be sure to click through and check out the infographic. If I were a mobile tech CEO, this is the kind of data I would use to shape my company for the future. Today’s teens make us look like luddites.
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Towards Better Ads
Marco Arment:
If you currently block ads, is there anything the ads themselves can improve that would make you change your mind? (I’m guessing there isn’t.)
Even the best ads are still ads, and still aren’t always appropriate or wanted. I don’t think smarter ads are the solution to this problem. I don’t think ads are the solution to this problem. What if more ad-supported sites and services offered paid no-ads subscriptions?
It is worth clicking through to read his whole post. The gist of which is that no matter what advertisers do you are not going to click on the ad. And no matter what blogs do you probably are not going to pay to support them. I think perhaps the best model is to look at the Daring Fireball’s monetization model. Charging to support the RSS feed, adding in lovely ads and finishing off with T-Shirt sales. Now not every blogger can do this, but it is a great model for John Gruber.
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A Tiny Apartment Transforms into 24 Rooms
This is the future, this guy has an amazing setup to make a very small apartment very functional. There was a lot of time, thought, money, and technology put into the development of this place.
(Warning this is a YouTube link, so there be Flash)
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10 Reasons To Delete Your Facebook Account
Dan Yoder:
While social networking is a fun new application category enjoying remarkable growth, Facebook isn’t the only game in town. I don’t like their application nor how they do business and so I’ve made my choice to use other providers. And so can you.
I have been toying with the very same idea. I get very little out of Facebook and put a lot of data out there for that privilege.
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Apple Isn’t the Problem. Wall Street’s Big Banks are the Problem.
Robert Reich:
Why is the Federal Trade Commission threatening Apple with a possible lawsuit for abusing its economic power, but not even raising an eyebrow about the huge and growing economic (and political) muscle of JP Morgan Chase or any of the other four remaining giant banks on Wall Street?
Our future well being depends more on people like Steve Jobs who invent real products that can improve our lives, than it does on people like Jamie Dimon who invent financial products that do little other than threaten our economy.
Could not agree more. Did not know this though:
So why is the FTC nosing around Apple and not around Wall Street? Because the Federal Trade Commission Act allows the agency to stop “unfair methods of competition” almost anywhere in the economy except in the financial sector. Banks are explicitly excluded.
Time to make some changes to those rules I think. Big banks had a chance to prove us wrong and instead they made 10% of Americans unemployed. Ooops indeed.
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iPhone, Gizmodo, and moral clarity about crime
Stuart Green on the “lost” 4G iPhone:
Finally, there’s the misguided idea, long espoused by many in the tech community, that “information wants to be free.” But whether it’s in the form of proprietary trade secrets embodied by Apple’s latest iPhone or intellectual property subject to seemingly endless illegal downloading and file sharing every second of every day, information is not free.
It takes a lot of time and energy and money to write books, compose music, create movies, and design and market electronic devices like iPhones. Such information deserves legal protection, even when it’s been lost in a bar.
This is probably the most clear headed take on the matter, from a law professor no less.
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Google Readies Its E-Book Plan, Bringing in a New Sales Approach
WSJ:
Google says users will be able to buy digital copies of books directly from its site. It will also allow book retailers—even independent shops—to partner with Google Editions on their own sites, sharing the revenue.
and
While Mr. Palma didn’t go into details, users of Google Editions would be able to read books from a web browser— meaning that the type of e-reader device wouldn’t matter. The company also could build software for certain devices like an iPhone or iPad.
The first quote is killer, if Google say let people self publish ebooks, sell them through Google and got 60% of the revenue – this is how Apple got the App Store so damn popular. They made it easy for creators to sell to consumers.
The second part though – well no one wants to read an ebook on their computer, let alone in a web browser. The typography would be terrible, Google needs to integrate this with Android and Chrome OS to win some market share.
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Exploring iWork for iPad
Robert Mohns:
We’re not fans of the huge, side-scrolling “My Documents” view. It’s a gratuitous waste of screen real estate, and doesn’t scale well past a handful of documents. What happens when a user has created twenty or thirty documents? Or a hundred? It’s not far fetched, yet Apple doesn’t seem to have considered that obvious scenario.
That never once crossed my mind as a problem, but I can see it happening very quickly.
The final factor is this: If you want to author documents, spreadsheets and presentations on iPad, quickly and easily, and today, Apple’s iWork trio is the only game in town.
That is the same conclusion a lot of people are coming to. There will be updates that will make these apps shine, and there will be more third party offerings. But neither are here right now.