From the monthly archives: February 2007
The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reports that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) wants to give
hundreds of college students an alternative to being sued for copyright infringement. A new site has been setup, P2PLawsuits.com, as a way for the RIAA to interface with these suspected students. The idea [...]
Blockbuster today announced a dispute with its CEO over the size of his bonus. The company’s reported
profit for the four quarter of last year fell 28% because of high costs associated with its new service Total Access. But despite that, CEO John Antioco says the $2.3 million bonus he received on January [...]
Looks like your friend and mine, the amazing Costco return policy, is
on its way out. Apparently, it did enough damage to the already razor thin profit margins of the company for management to take action. For those unfamiliar, it used to be that you could return anything whenever you wanted for [...]
In its latest effort to diversify revenue sources, Google now has a
"Premier Edition" of Google Apps. The $50 per user per year is
obviously much cheaper than any Microsoft equivalent. At the same time,
though, Google’s spreadsheet program is nowhere near as robust and so
far there’s no [...]
So the latest news in online video revolves around Viacom signing a deal with YouTube competitor/newcomer Joost. The deal is limited for now (no South Park or Colbert Report) and will include shows like MTV’s My Super Sweet 16, BET’s American Gangster, Comedy Central’s Freak Show, and some movies from Paramount. Financial details [...]
Dell is shelling out million to ex-CEO Kevin Rollins who stepped down on January 31 and will leave the company on May 4. The $5 million in cash will be given out over the next two years. Founder Michael Dell is back in charge and has to clean up the mess of [...]
Last year I wrote an article called Putting the “Pay” in PayPal, which was mostly an expression of frustration at how eBay and PayPal were being a bit heavy-handed, pushing sellers to upgrade their free PayPal Personal accounts to PayPal Premier in order to accept credit card [...]
The Yahoo Suggestion Board, Dell IdeaStorm, and MSN Reporter were all released last week and were all at least, shall we say, “Digg Inspired.” But should we call them Digg clones? How similar are they? Let’s take a closer look and compare things like purpose, voting/bury style, uniqueness, algorithm, login, default [...]
The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) has not one but two articles out today on Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s warning of underwhelming Vista sales. The details are hazy, but investors don’t seem happy. The share price has dropped a bit as the news is digested. Here’s what Ballmer had to say:
So Yahoo today released a Digg-like voting system as the backbone of the Yahoo Suggestion Board. Even though the Yahoo announcement credited Digg, the Digg crowd is not pleased. The new suggestion system was first implemented for Yahoo Autos and of the top 5 "suggestions," 3 have nothing to do [...]
