Every year, cable companies have to re-negotiate their carriage fees with broadcasters. These negotiations are essentially an evaluation of how much certain channels are worth to the cable company, and then the cable company agreeing to pay a certain amount of money to the broadcasters in exchange for the right to feature those channels in their subscription packages.
Read More...By Joe Wilcox, Betanews
Well, it’s not about customers.
Microsoft has quite aggressively touted HTML5 during PDC 2010, which wraps up today. It’s seemingly inconsistent with Microsoft’s revamped cloud strategy, which is very much about taking propriety software to the cloud. How then does Microsoft’s platform-independent HTML5 approach reconcile with extending the proprietary Office-Windows-Windows Server applications stack into the cloud?
Read More...By Scott M. Fulton, III, Net1News
It should have been a week of relatively good news for the Mozilla organization. The former senior vice president for mobility at enterprise database producer Sybase, Gary Kovacs, signed on to become Mozilla’s new CEO next month, replacing John Lilly and serving under Foundation chairperson Mitchell Baker. Having headed up Sybase’s mobility and integration efforts during that company’s buyout by European software giant SAP last summer, Kovacs is certain to inject a much-needed dose of corporate prestige and structure in to the organization.
Read More...Mint.com today has rolled out the beta of a new service called Mint Data that takes the tons of anonymous shopping data it receives, and turns it into a searchable database of retailers. Similar to the way Google’s Alexa categorizes the popularity of a website by its unique visitors, total views, and inbound links, Mint Data ranks a retailer’s popularity by the average purchase price and number of purchases per month.
Read More...The white iPhone 4 may never see the light of day as Apple admitted Tuesday that it would not meet its end of year goal for the model’s release. When pressed on the issue by Reuters, a spokesperson said the white iPhone won’t make an appearance until at least Spring 2011.
Read More...After an arduous four years in and out of the courtroom, battling the RIAA over copyright infringement accusations, peer to peer file sharing service Limewire has finally been shut down.
The RIAA’s suit against Limewire was part of a sweeping initiative to curb the trade of copyrighted materials on peer-to-peer networks. In 2005, the group sent cease and desist letters to the owners of major p2p services including Kazaa, WinMX, i2Hub, eDonkey, BearShare, and LimeWire. The orders demanded the services “immediately cease-and-desist from enabling and inducing the infringement of RIAA member sound recordings,” but gave the services the option to discuss “pre-litigation resolutions.” Most services complied, such as Kazaa, which offered a 5 million settlement.
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Is MacBook Air a netbook killer?
By Joe Wilcox, Betanews
The answer to the question may be a question: If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, is it a goose?
By analysts’ criteria, the 11.6-inch MacBook Air is no netbook. Strange then that many Betanews readers regard Air to be a netbook — and an overpriced one at that. But even if Air is classified as something else, it could easily suck away netbook sales, as analysts contend iPad has done. MacBook Air being a netbook or not is really independent of its impact on netbook sales. That said, in researching this story, I found that many readers (and real consumers) don’t separate the two concepts. I wonder if they really need to. Read more...