New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
Facebook's Graph Search may face some profound challenges and risks, first, because Facebook users haven't been thinking of their posts as product reviews; and second, because Facebook will now have to contend with the social-network equivalent of SEO "gaming" of results.
Apple may want to do a TV offering, but to meet its goal it would have to address three specific issues that have been exposed by earlier attempts to make Internet TV work.
The new UltraViolet online DRM model has people upset, but the question we should ask ourselves is whether we want a flexible model to harmonize content owner and content consumer rights, or a one-takes-all model that probably results in less online content.
Google's Knowledge Graph concept of returning the "right answer" might change the Internet if it becomes a common practice, but it could also contaminate the answers with commericalism or hurt Google's own business. Can they navigate these choices?
What do Apple TV, Google TV, Netflix, and Apple's tossing YouTube from iOS have in common? They prove that streaming video success is dependent on two things, a solid linkage to TV and an ecosystem surrounding the video to mine margins and profits for the provider.
Netflix seemed to be a threat to all of TV, but with the current quarterly earnings report, it sure doesn't look as if that's true now. Netflix really proves that even Internet viewing of video isn't immune to profit and other business issues. This is a lesson we need to learn if we want a viable online video model.
Yahoo's new CEO can't go back to what Yahoo was; that's how it got to what it is! Instead she has to look at something that Yahoo has always rejected, which is a relationship with the telcos and cablecos. They'd love a partner in creating service applications.
Guess who wants to be a streaming video player? The telcos! And they're taking control of their own destiny by launching their own projects or investing in startups, rather than going with vendor solutions.
Elizabeth Pizzinato, SVP of marketing and communications at Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, calls content marketing "the new black" and explains how her brand engages its target audience.
The amount of data traffic running over US wireless networks grew 123 percent from 2010 (388 billion MB) to 2011 (866.7 billion MB), according to the CTIA. Carriers have tried to prepare for the change by moving from 3G to 4G networks. But with data rates increasing so rapidly, will there be enough bandwidth to meet future demand? Doubtful!
The Murdoch/News International scandal has all the elements of the digital age, from phone-hacking through embarrassing emails to agile digital reporting.
Some say that exposure to violence in gaming, online video, etc., is creating a violent culture. Tom says it's not that straightforward. Rather than regulate violence, we should understand it better.
We think Amazon's Kindle Fire is pushing Apple to a smaller iPad format. But Sony's Vita and the interest in a small device for portable gaming may create the real threat. Keep your eye on the tablet-gaming space!
We're getting wrapped around the wrong issues with SOPA. The problem isn't in how it's enforced. It's the fact that the basic concept is a violation of due process.
Reporting from "overnight duty" (hmm…) at Internet Evolution, Kim Davis gives an update on the day Wikipedia, Reddit, and BoingBoing went dark to protest SOPA.
Hundreds of thousands of mobile apps have emerged in a short period of time – and some of these include violent and sexual content. Consequently, the CTIA, an industry consortium of carriers, including AT&T and Verizon, has begun outlining a rating system that will label video game content, in a manner similar to that for movies.
Verizon has made the Xbox into a basic set-top box, so does that mean streaming video will replace TV after all? That's complicated. It turns out there are three different video models and three different futures for them.
Famous musicians claim the Internet's ruining their royalties. But given time, signs indicate that the Internet will make peace with the music industry.
Today's infants quickly move from the womb to a touchscreen. A survey by Common Sense Media found that half of children under eight years old access a mobile device like a smartphone, a video iPod, or a tablet; and experts are mulling the ramifications of this.
Netflix lost more customers than the Street expected, because people are upset about price increases, but are users inevitably facing even higher costs for streaming video in the future? The portal players are in a squeeze, and consumers will likely pay in the end.
This holiday season, whether you're shopping for a personal smartphone or smartphones for your business, it's useful to know the latest and greatest specifications.
Amazon's new Fire isn't an iPad competitor, but it is a device that will rival Barnes and Noble's Nook. It also may signal a shift toward retail-dominated Web media versus the ad-dominated form. In short, be prepared to pay more for content!
Based on reactions in Nicole's Newsfeed, everyone hates this version of Facebook. This should matter to Facebook now that there's a real competitor on the scene named Google+.
Allowing users to share music and video on Facebook might sound like good news, but is this part of a coherent strategy, or is Facebook just stumbling from idea to idea?
While the publishing industry reels from the pressure of digital books and freely available content on the Web, one branch of the industry, the publishers of academic books and journals, remains above the fray. How is this possible and how long will it last?
Amazon's upcoming tablet may not be a technical revolution over the iPad, but it might be a business model revolution that pushes Apple toward a subsidize-tablet-with-service approach. That might bring a major change to the tablet market.
Hulu is supposed to be up for sale. Some say the business model is bad, some it may be too good. Whatever it is, it makes more sense for Hulu's owners to work out a position for OTT video than to sell off the venture and let someone else do that.
Microsoft's early comments about Windows 8 suggest that its real focus is tablets. The tablet features would have to compete head-to-head with Apple and Android.
Pandora.com has released 10,000 comedy clips on its site and developed an algorithm to find the ones that will make you laugh. Kim, however, is not amused.
Hollywood directors are outraged at a deal between major studios and DirecTV to bring new movies straight to your home. Let’s see what Kim and his toy sheep have to say about this!
Do you want to immerse yourself in the details of the royal wedding of William and Kate, neither of whom will ever know you in real life? Well, now there’s actually an app for that. How sad.
TV networks aren't liking Time Warner's new streaming strategy, even though it's only targeted at in-home iPads – and Netflix wants to produce its own TV series. This is proof that fresh content may be a critical asset for online video.
The risk the iPad now faces is less from feature competition than from price competition, and the players most likely to compete in price are Amazon and Barnes & Noble. By subsidizing their "tablets" with ebook sales these guys may field affordable products that could redefine the market.
Facebook is going to stream video, but what makes video optimally "sociable"? I think it's the metadata, and if we get it right then even movies and TV shows could "go viral" and online video might be revolutionized.
The Sony court decision to compel a jailbreak site to reveal IP addresses of visitors shows that in trying to enforce the DMCA we may be trampling on rights of people who never hacked, jailbroke, or even owned a Sony game product. A better balance of rights and law is needed here.
The Comcast/NBCU and Huffington/AOL deals indicate that content is, again, king. The question is whether this type of consolidation of content providers could stifle innovation and evolution.
The explosive growth in Internet traffic is forcing ISPs to increase their access investments without generating new revenue. They'll need to either raise prices or make the OTT players like Google or Netflix pay.
A decade after the dotcom boom, the Internet continues to dramatically change the way that business gets done and individuals communicate. More than a trillion email messages traveled over the Net last year, and dramatic changes loom on the horizon.
Tim Westergren, founder and CEO of Pandora, talks about his company’s push into automotives and the way his Internet music service is enhancing, not destroying, the future of radio.
The German organization WWF has released a file format similar to Adobe's PDF that does not allow printing. You can do the same right now with Acrobat's 'no print' option.
The big cable companies and telcos are experimenting with new video business models, which may introduce some very interesting options for us over the next six months. Keep watching!
Google is supposedly launching Google Editions for reading books on just about any device with a Web browser. However, there are numerous challenges and unanswered questions.
The Netflix streaming service may show us whether consumers value TV over movies, ad-sponsored over paid content, and whether they value good Internet video enough to encourage operators to offer premium services, as Google and Verizon propose.
It's getting to look as if we're going to have content-sponsored ads instead of ad-sponsored content if the number of TV commercials and manipulated search responses keep rising. We need to strike a balance before consumers get so into ad avoidance they kill the goose that's laid the golden egg.
TV got the lion's share of the political ad bonanza this election. Even though we may hate these advertisements, this validates the fact that television ads trump online ads.
MySpace is reinventing itself by focusing on content, but it's too late, and other social networks should learn from its example by looking toward a telco payment model if they want to sustain user commitment and their own revenue.
Nielsen says worldwide ad spending is recovering, and that's a good sign for online ad ventures, but we're also facing record levels of click fraud and privacy violations. To avoid the fate of Wall Street and its "easy morals" we may need to start policing ourselves better.
Fox, as part of an ongoing dispute, recently blocked some Cablevision customers' access to some Web content. If this is a net neutrality violation we need to re-frame our whole notion of what neutrality is, and if it's not then we need to ask if our vision has any value at all.
Yahoo and AOL? That may be an attempt for the two to build critical mass in advertising… but it sounds more like two Titanic survivors clinging to each other instead of to a lifeboat.
The video calling trend, spearheaded by Cisco, may lead to troubling collisions with broadband pricing trends and even potentially with net neutrality.
High on the list of desired improvements from the mobile industry are: shared digital storage for the Internet; phone capability across borders; reduced electro-magnetic radiation; and rewards-based service plans.
The next edition of one of the greatest English language reference books, the "Oxford English Dictionary," might not be published in paper. Bibliophiles might mourn, but should they?
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