World-Shaker

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infoneer-pulse:

via Dilbert

Almost spit my coffee.

"Compared with online retailers, bookstores present a frustrating consumer experience. A physical store—whether it’s your favorite indie or the humongous Barnes & Noble at the mall—offers a relatively paltry selection, no customer reviews, no reliable way to find what you’re looking for, and a dubious recommendations engine. Amazon suggests books based on others you’ve read; your local store recommends what the employees like. If you don’t choose your movies based on what the guy at the box office recommends, why would you choose your books that way?"

— From Slate, a refreshingly intelligent, big-picture take on the independent bookstores vs. Amazon debate, flying in the face of recent shot-sighted rants. (via curiositycounts)

"Young people who move to an apartment or get a house for the first time don’t subscribe to any MVPD (multichannel video programming distributor) and they just… get their network programming from Hulu and they get Netflix… As an industry where people pay between $70 and $92 a month, that’s a lot of money to a young person today who is getting their first job when they can go out and watch Hulu for free and Netflix for $7.99. So it’s a threat"

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Charlie Ergen’s quote via The children are our future, and they’re not paying for TV — Online Video News

Nice to finally see a CEO of a pay tv network calling a spade a spade 

(via bijan)

"To state this as clearly as possible: The four American companies that have come to define 21st-century information technology and entertainment are on the verge of war. Over the next two years, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google will increasingly collide in the markets for mobile phones and tablets, mobile apps, social networking, and more. This competition will be intense. Each of the four has shown competitive excellence, strategic genius, and superb execution that have left the rest of the world in the dust. HP, for example, tried to take a run at Apple head-on, with its TouchPad, the product of its $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm. HP bailed out after an embarrassingly short 49-day run, and it cost CEO Léo Apotheker his job. Microsoft’s every move must be viewed as a reaction to the initiatives of these smarter, nimbler, and now, in the case of Apple, richer companies. When a company like Hulu goes on the block, these four companies are immediately seen as possible acquirers, and why not? They have the best weapons—weapons that will now be turned on one another as they seek more room to grow.
There was a time, not long ago, when you could sum up each company quite neatly: Apple made consumer electronics, Google ran a search engine, Amazon was a web store, and Facebook was a social network. How quaint that assessment seems today."

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The Great Tech War Of 2012 | Fast Company (via infoneer-pulse)

This quote makes me want to beat my sword against my shield.

People Who Use Macs At Work Are Richer And More Productive →

I’m sure this won’t stir anything up with the Windows/Android crowds…

In a report released yesterday, analyst David Johnson recommended that IT departments should formally support Macs as well because the best employees prefer them and are bringing them to work anyway.

As Fortune first reported yesterday, Johnson called Mac users the “heavy hitters” and “heroes” in organizations, and said that they hate Windows PCs because they slow them down and look cheap. “Stand in the way,” he warns IT departments, “and you will get run over.”

"Deadlines should be called Finish-lines"

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Greg Melander - The word deadline sounds so negative. It sounds like someone died. Instead I’d like to call them finish lines. This way it sounds more like you won. :)

I would be more excited to get behind this is deadlines for me weren’t such “Well, now you can work on the next part”-lines.

"Every time you “like” a friend’s Facebook status, sign up for a Nordstrom credit card, rate a Netflix movie, order a magazine subscription, or merely click on a website, you’re leaving behind a trail of data exhaust that up until recently has been like so many discarded Styrofoam cups lying along the information superhighway. The rise of microtargeting is a function of new logarithms—and computers fast enough to process them—that are able to capture all this trash and turn it into gold. Over the years, the data-mining industry has become adept at recycling information about the websites we visit and the products we buy. Rumor has it that some high-end companies, including Omaha Steaks, can now make more money by selling their customer pedigrees to data-mining firms than they can from selling their product."

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If you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer. You’re the product being sold.

The Information Arms Race (via infoneer-pulse)