Comcast couldn’t mollify Wall Street about its pending deal to buy NBC Universal this morning, because it refused to talk about the deal at all. The company did spend time, though, explaining the peril and possibilities that Web video poses for the cable giant.
Rupert Murdoch has been pushing The Wall Street Journal to raise its prices. Here’s one way to try it: Levy an additional fee for subscribers who want to use the paper’s iPhone or BlackBerry apps.
Is Time Inc. building a Kindle Killer? Nope.
A report suggests that Time Inc. wants to get into the hardware business and produce its own e-reader.
That’s something other publishers, like Hearst and News Corp., are actually doing or have at least mulled. But multiple sources familiar with the Time Warner unit’s thinking say that’s not the case here.
See? You don’t just have to be a buzzy social network to suffer through security problems. You can be a relatively staid Web 1.0 giant, too. eBay is warning developers who build programs that incorporate the online marketplace’s engine about a security breach.
The paper’s Internet operations used to be a bright spot. But last quarter Web advertising dropped more than 15 percent. What gives?
This is now an Apple earnings-call tradition: Analysts try their hardest to convince Apple executives to express interest in the booming market for cheap netbooks and Apple executives make it perfectly clear how much disdain they have for netbooks. But an $800 iTablet? That’s something else altogether…
Amazon has explained why it has been deleting some novels from its customers’ Kindles: It shouldn’t have been selling them in the first place.
Amazon says the copies of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and “1984″ that it removed, without warning, from some Kindles this week are “illegal”, because the publisher didn’t have the rights to sell them. Won’t happen again, the e-commerce giant says. Sort of.
Microsoft’s first series of Web video ads for Internet Explorer 8 didn’t seem to garner much attention. But its latest one did: It features a married couple, an unspeakable porn site and a lot of vomit. Now Redmond says that was probably a mistake.
Did you wait in line this morning to buy a new iPhone 3G S? If you want to take advantage of its “tethering” feature and use it as a modem, you’re going to have to wait a while longer. And you’ll have to pay–though it’s unclear how much that’s going to cost.
Netflix has been one of the rare winners during the recession/depression: Customers are flocking to the movie rental service and investors love the stock. This meant that expectations were very high for the company’s first quarter, and it appears to have met them.
That was quick. Time Warner Cable is shelving plans to charge its Internet customers based on usage. For now, that is.
The cable giant had planned on charging customers in four locations on a “consumption” plan in which they’d pay between $15 to $150 a month based on the amount of data they hoovered via the Web. But noisy opposition to the plan surfaced immediately and has been getting louder over the past few weeks.
Amazon won’t come out and say exactly what happened to it sales-ranking system over the past few days. But it is sorry, and it would like the Web and its customers to know that it wasn’t singling out books aimed at gays and lesbians.
Last fall, a small but vocal group of Twitterers managed to shame Johnson & Johnson into apologizing for one of its Motrin ads.
This weekend’s replay: a howl of outrage, amplified and directed via Twitter at Amazon, which may or may not have instituted a boneheaded policy regarding “adult” books on its site. Or “adult” books aimed at gay and lesbian readers. Or something.
No matter what really happened, the retailer is now in a real pickle.
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. Read more »
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.
D is unlike any other executive conference. Since its debut in 2003, D has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way. Read more »
Don't miss a post! Sign up for our Daily Email and get AllThingsD.com delivered each day.
Get columns, blogs and video from D and All Things Digital on your iPhone. Download now »
