Eric Spiegelman has a Web video hit on his hands. “Old Jews Telling Jokes,” a series of short clips featuring exactly what the name suggests, is popular, viral, and cheap to make. But he still can’t cover his costs with Internet advertising. Enter the ancillary products, like a new book deal.
Sony did indeed have a bit of news to announce at the New York Public Library: Its most direct challenge to Amazon’s Kindle to date. Like the Kindle, the “Daily” reader will feature a wireless connection–Sony will use AT&T, while Amazon uses Sprint. And unlike current versions of the Kindle, the Sony device will feature a touchscreen.
But it will come at a price: The device will retail in December for $399. That’s $100 more than the current price of Amazon’s Kindle 2. And that price point is almost certain to drop in coming months.
Last week, Amazon acknowledged that it deleted some copies of “1984″ and “Animal Farm” from customers’ Kindles. So what book will be next?
Because while Amazon has said it won’t repeat what it did last week, it hasn’t actually sworn off remote book-removal–or remote-anything removal, for that matter–altogether. Does that worry you? It should.
We’re used to seeing Google vets leave for Facebook. Now they’re headed to Twitter.
The buzzy microblogging service has just grabbed its highest-profile Google exec to date: Alexander Macgillivray, a deputy general counsel at the search firm, is coming aboard as Twitter’s top lawyer.
We all know tomorrow’s newspapers won’t be printed on paper, but delivered via the Internet. The question for today’s publishers is whether consumers are going read them on iPhones or Kindles. But it shouldn’t be a question–smart phones like Apple’s are winning this one hands down.
Ad dollars are still moving from offline venues to the Web, which makes sense, because that’s where people’s eyeballs have moved. But they’re moving much more slowly: U.S. Web ads increased by a mere 2.6 percent during the last three months of 2008, to $6.1 billion. The year before, they had grown at a 24 percent clip.
Chris Anderson’s influential Web theorem says that endless choice equals unlimited demand. But a new study argues that most people want the same stuff–and no one wants that unpopular stuff, period.
Americans spent billions on CDs last year. But big-box retailers are increasingly uninterested in selling the discs in their stores. Newest data point: Borders Group, which has cut its music inventory by 30 percent in the last year.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
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