The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘america’

Might as well get this over with now. The FCC has announced its National Broadband Plan , which describes where the agency would like to see the U.S

Go here to read the rest:
The FCC’s National Broadband Plan is now live!

Up until a moment ago, this was going to be a standard “newsy” post: the FCC will announce its National Broadband Plan on Tuesday, here’s what it’s all about. Then I read the comments of a PC World article discussing that very same plan—many people are outraged that the government would muscle its way into the free market! If Americans wanted fast broadband then the market would provide it on its own terms. That, of course, is complete nonsense: plenty of Americans live in one-ISP towns, and if said ISP provides terrible service, well, though cookies, chico

Read more here: 
Why are people against the FCC’s National Broadband Plan?

As everybody knows, 3D TVs are all the rage at the moment, with Panasonic being one of the most active electronics companies in that area .

See the original post here: 
Panasonic and Best Buy to bring 3D TVs to the US this Wednesday

As everybody knows by now, Apple ships the iPad in the Wi-Fi version this month, with the 3G subscription-based model following in April ( probably ). And as it’s AT&T that has secured the right to provide 3G connectivity to iPad users in America, you’d think Randall Stephenson , AT&T’s CEO, would be the first person to promote sales of the 3G model. But it’s Stephenson who is now quoted as saying that he doesn’t expect “(…) a lot of people out there looking for another subscription (…)” and that the iPad wil mainly be a “Wi-Fi driven product”

View original here: 
AT&T’s CEO (of all people): iPad will be driven by Wi-Fi, not 3G

Flash games on the Web are getting to be so quick and responsive . . . that they can recreate 30-year-old arcade games no problem. And that’s just fine with me because those are about the only video games where I can hold my own. Online video arcade OMGPOP’s latest game is a remake of Atari’s Missile Command on its 30th anniversary.

The OMGPOP version is true to the original except it adds a multiplayer twist. It’s pretty addictive and the social aspect makes it more fun. Just like at the old coin arcades, it was always better when you went with a couple of friends.

Like most OMGPOP games you can enter a live match with other players or invite your friends to meet you in a game room. You can sign in with Facebook Connect or AIM. OMGPOP matches you with players at about the same level as you. You can get more missiles, enlarge their impact radius, or increase your reload rate buy using your health points to buy better capabilities. If things are going really badly you can buy a nuke for 500 “coins.” You earn coins the more you play, but you can also pay for them straight out through PayPal or a credit card.

Selling virtual goods is OMGPOP’s main source of revenues. The site has about a dozen games. CEO Dan Porter (who used to be the president of Teach For America, TicketWeb before it sold to TicketMaster, and worked as a corporate VC for Virgin) says that about 2 to 5 percent of players end up actually paying for something. About 30 percent of its virtual goods revenues come from third-party offers from TrialPay, but they try to keep the scammier offers out. Porter says the site has 2.5 million members, and about 1 million monthly unique visitors. Most of those are high school and college students. The site is still small but has a loyal following. About 40 pecent of users visit the site more than 50 times a month.

I recently visited OMGPOP’s New York City offices, where Porter, founder Charles Forman, and game developer Will Chen gave me a preview of Missile Command in the video below. I also get Forman to weigh in on the HTML5 Vs. Flash debate. He says there is no way he could create the games on OMGPOP without Flash.

Last week I met Gever Tulley, author of the provocatively-titled “Fifty Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do.” The book grew out of a 2007 TED talk about why embracing and exploring danger ultimately lessens it. (See! Good things do come out of TED. Let the TED-TechCrunch healing begin!) The book doesn’t advocate playing in traffic, but it does extol the virtues of things like super-gluing your fingers together, boiling water on the stove in a paper cup, and putting metal in the microwave.

He talked about the decrease in “tinkering” in America and linked it to Americans seeking an appearance of affluence, i.e. only poor people would try to fix their own sink, anyone else would call a plumber. Tulley is a big believer that this is bad for kids and by extension the country. I’ll take it a step further—I think it’s bad for American entrepreneurship.

There’s something about that tinkering, playing, hacking ethos that is core to what makes Silicon Valley, and entrepreneurship in general, exist. Nearly every tech visionary landed in trouble at some point for hacking, cracking video game codes, or phreaking– everyone from Steve Wozniak to Max Levchin. It’s the same mischievous curiosity that gets so many people excited about each year’s Maker’s Faire and the same desire that causes someone to jail-break a several-hundred-dollar device to see what’s inside or even toss one in a blender. It’s a core curiosity that adults have or they don’t, but almost all kids naturally have it. It can have risks, sure. But it also encourages creative problem solving, how to work within constraints and what rules can be broken and which shouldn’t.

I met Tulley because he was a guest on NBC’s Press:Here yesterday. He found it a nice change from The BBC, where interviewers excoriated him for encouraging kids to do something that could hurt them. And, well, that’s not surprising when you consider the British stereotype of restraint and aversion to risk and failure. Similarly, last November, when I was in India several Indians told me a big advantage the United States has enjoyed in business is that parents let their children fall down when they were young, encouraging an acceptance of set-backs and failure. In India there are protective bubbles of parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles who keep any harm from coming to kids.

Clearly, the important thing here is the line. There’s a difference between doing something unethical or harmful to another person and (literally) playing with fire because you wonder how quickly something might burn. But in an America that’s increasingly fear-based and protectionist a little danger, risk and failure might be just the thing the younger generation needs.

Tulley himself seems to practice what he preaches. He showed up to the set on crutches. How’d he hurt himself? Not skydiving or running with the bulls—he was just walking down the street.

Sure, I know what you’re thinking: scanners are a bit boring. But Fujitsu hopes to tempt you with some of its delicious ScanSnap S1300 features including direct to PDF scanning as well as scanning directly into Excel spreadsheets. That’s right: you can recreate a printed Excel sheet just by sliding it through the scanner.

Read more:
Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 hits the streets: An impressively powerful portable scanner

Foursquare continues to sign interesting deals with major players in a wide range of fields. Following the service’s Bravo deal a couple weeks ago, they’ve reached a deal with restaurant rating guide Zagat, according to The New York Times. And AdAge has some details about deals with even more partners, including HBO, Warner Brothers, and the History Channel.

The service has been on a roll lately. They’re now seeing over a million check-ins a week, with that rate doubling in the last month alone. And these new deals can only help them as they bring the type of mainstream appeal that it took services like Twitter so long to find.

While Zagat is an obvious partner thanks to its restaurante recommendations, the entertainment partnership appeal may not be immediately apparent. But as you can see on the Foursquare page for the movie Valentine’s Day, those promoting the movie have added 50 “Romantic Tips” around the cities that the movie takes place in, New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Boston. Any Foursquare user that checks-in at one of these places will unlock a special badge for the movie.

The new HBO show, How To Make It In America, meanwhile, has four special badges that you can unlock: Culture, Living, Cocktails, and Nightlife. Each of these is obtained by visiting venues from the show.

And the Zagat deal is interesting in that it goes beyond simply offering food and restaurant recommendations. The service plans to have a weekly web video series entitled “Meet The Mayor” in which they interview the Foursquare “mayor” of a restaurant in their guide.

Another deal that Foursquare recently signed was with Harvard.

These types of deals are crucial to Foursquare not only because they point to an eventual money-making opportunity, but also because they give the service a way to fend off attacks from Yelp (which just launched a check-in feature on its own iPhone app), and soon Facebook. Meanwhile, these deals give brands a fun way to interact with the public. It’s advertising, but it’s interactive.

Now Foursquare just has to solve that douchebag problem…

This time last week I rattled off the world’s laziest column. I was struggling against my book deadline which expired 24 hours later and I simply didn’t have time to write anything else. This week should have been different; I should have finished the book days ago and now be sitting on a beach in the Caribbean, sipping a Diet Coke martini and lazily writing a long, well-thought-out column about some vital issue of the day. Why it’s inadvisable to write a mea culpa in the passive voice (otherwise it’s just a ‘culpa’). Something like that.

And yet, and yet – the fact that, seven days later, I’m still sitting at my desk and I still haven’t delivered the manuscript to my publisher, should give a hint to how perilous things are right now. I’m Wile E. Coyote about five seconds after he looks down and realises he’s overshot the cliff. And yet despite my urge to sack off this week’s column and focus on lessening the size of crater I’m about to leave in the desert floor, there’s something on which I can’t remain silent on any longer. Four words which I’ve been seeing again and again all week, and which threaten to drive me mad…

“A victory for authors.”

That’s how some people are describing Amazon’s capitulation to Macmillan over the pricing of ebooks. They say it in the same tone as people describe more expensive milk as “a victory for farmers” or subsidies for domestic cars as “a victory for American auto workers”, which is to say the same tone as you might use to pity a cat with three legs.

Poor authors, after all, need all the help they can get. They work for years on their Great Novel, probably subsisting on stale cheese and rats’ milk as they do so, and what thanks do they get? A measly royalty, chipped away at by heavy discounting in book stores. Thank God then for Macmillan taking a stand against Amazon and its aggressive discounting. And thank Jesus for all of the other publishers bravely following them.

Oh please.

First a few facts, in the form of a disclosure statement. I am an author. Before that I was a publisher. Although my publisher is now Hachette, I’ve been published in the past by Macmillan, both in the UK and the US. Macmillan were a partner of the publishing house I co-founded, and were responsible for distributing all of our titles. Richard Charkin, the former CEO of Macmillan, was an advisor. I like Macmillan. I feel, then, somewhat qualified to call bullshit on the claim that this deal is good for anyone – including Macmillan and especially including authors.

Much like the monarchy, Macmillan started life in Britain even though it’s now controlled by Germans. Its British roots go to the very heart of their negotiations with Amazon. In America, books have always been available at a discount – with book stores relatively free to set prices as they wished. Of course, publishers still choose their wholesale price, but there’s nothing to stop, say, Borders from heavily discounting bestsellers to get people through the door. Publishers didn’t necessarily like this as it led to booksellers demanding more aggressive discounting (sometimes more than 60% off the cover price), but they didn’t have much of a choice but to accept. The fact is that publishers couldn’t justify opening up their own stores, so if they wanted readers to be able to actually read their books, they had to keep bookstores happy.

But that’s not how things used to work in the UK.

In the UK, way back in 1900, publishers corralled retailers into the Net Book Agreement (NBA); an agreement between British publishers and booksellers that books would be sold at the price specified on the cover. If a bookseller offered so much as a penny discount, then the publisher would simply withdraw all of their books from that bookseller and encourage other publishers to do the same. The arrangement suited everyone; book shops were the only place to buy new books and the NBA meant they didn’t have to worry about rivals undercutting them; this particularly benefited independent bookshops. For their part, publishers knew exactly how much they’d be getting for each title and authors knew how much of that would form their royalty.

It took until the late 90s for the Restrictive Practices Court to declare that the Net Book Agreement was anti-competitive and should be scrapped. Shortly afterwards, Borders entered the UK market, hundreds of UK independent bookshops went bankrupt and publishers decided to change their contracts with authors. Now, instead of being based on the cover price of a book, the author’s royalty would be based on ‘net receipts’, which is to say the price that publishers actually received from bookshops.

Since 1997, that’s how things have stayed. Authors learned to adjust pretty quickly, especially as fewer than 20% of titles actually ever earn back their advance and start paying royalties. But publishers have remained annoyed. Deep discounting cuts directly into their profits. There was one area, though, where publishers could still make a killing on every sale: hardback books. The fact is that printing a hardback book, as opposed to a paperback, costs a matter of pennies more. But there is a perception amongst book buyers that they are far more expensive, a perception that it has been in no one’s interest to correct as it allows them to be sold for twice the price of paperbacks. Even with booksellers demanding deep discounts, the publishers still make a ton of profit on each hardback sale. By releasing the hardback book months before the paperback, publishers can subsidise a huge amount of their business from hardback sales, while booksellers can still discount highly to get people through the door.

And then along came the Kindle and everything went to hell.

Before e-readers, publishers didn’t care about ebooks. You could tell this by the fact that they gave authors really generous royalties on their electronic sales. It was an easy item to appear generous over – so they could fuck you on the paperback royalty. No one read books on their computer so it was no huge loss. For the same reason, publishers were happy to release ebooks at the same time as hardbacks – it wasn’t like the sales of the former were cannibalizing the latter.

But now, with ebook sales soaring, and with the iPad looking to make them soar even higher, publishers are panicking. Thanks in part to deep ebook discounting by Amazon, but also because the same people who can afford hardback books are the same people who can afford e-readers, people are starting to buy ebooks where they once bought hardbacks. The only cash-cow remaining in publishing is disappearing, like CD sales for music, and DVD sales for movies.

The publishers’ answer to this? A de facto return to the Net Book Agreement, for the whole world. Publishers don’t need booksellers as much as they used to. If an ebook isn’t available from one place – Amazon, say – it will be from somewhere that’s just a click away. Amazon on the other hand, can’t sell Kindles if a huge chunk of popular books aren’t available on it. Furthermore, thanks to the ease of distributing an ebook directly to the customer, there’s nothing stopping a publisher – or group of publishers – from creating their own store. Most sell ebooks directly online already. The balance of power has swung back to publishers, and they’re making the most of it, especially when then know they can play Amazon off against Apple.

For the first time in the UK since 1997, and ever in the US, publishers are able to set – and enforce- their own prices on ebooks. And they will; not to make a fair return on ebooks but rather to cripple their sales in order to protect early hardback book sales. They’ve admitted as much themselves, saying that prices will start high on hardback release, before dropping steadily over time.

The idea that this benefits anyone, least of all authors, is laughable. Every day, thousands more book lovers move to ebooks. These are people who devour books, and who are attracted by the convenience of getting new releases delivered instantly. Yes, there’s a chance that they’ll keep buying hardback books if ebooks go up in price. But now they’ve already invested in ereaders so there’s even more of a chance that they’ll simply turn to piracy to get their fix. It’s like if record labels had tried to encourage people to keep buying CDs by raising the price of mp3 downloads (or slapping restrictive DRM on them). All that would likely have done is drive even more people to Limewire.

Piracy isn’t an industry-killing problem for publishers yet, and if they can keep prices low enough and delivery mechanisms convenient enough, it could even stay that way. Macmillan’s attempt to bring back the NBA though, while it might result in a few more hardback sales in the short term, can only end in disaster for everyone concerned.

As an author, I don’t see a pricing strategy that encourages piracy as a victory. I see it as a backwards-looking quick fix that will do far more long-term harm than short-term good.

Youa culpa, Macmillan.

With more than 140,000 apps on the iPhone alone, there is a real need for services which help you find the best apps. Apple’s iTunes ratings and genius recommendations only go so far. One startup attacking this problem is French-Israeli AppsFire, which just raised its first angel round. AppsFire was co-founded by former TechCrunch France editor Ouriel Ohayon and Yann Lechelle.

The investors are a group of successful French entrepreneurs (yes, they exist), including Marc Simoncini (CEO of dating site meetic.com), Jacques-Antoine Granjon (CEO of Vente-Privee.com), Xavier Niel (CEO of French ISP Free), and entrepreneur and angel investor Jean-David Blanc (who also recently invested in Square). The amount raised wasn’t disclosed but it is believed to be in the low seven figures.

AppsFire offers a simple utility app which makes it easy to share iPhone app recommendations with your friends. Since its beta launch last summer, more than 10 million apps have been shared, leading to hundreds of thousands of clicks to iTunes. It also highlights apps through its AppStar Awards. Recently, AppsFire started promoting its own short link for iPhone apps, http://getap.ps/, which opens up iTunes on both the iPhone and desktop computers to a specific app’s page. While you are waiting for iTunes to open up, information about the App appears on the landing page, developers who use getap.ps will get analytics on conversions and other stats. This America Life (http://getap.ps/thisamericanlife) and DailyMotion (http://getap.ps/dailymotion) are already using it.

The startup plans to move beyond the iPhone to other mobile devices with growing app markets such as Android and Blackberry. It also recently launched PasteFire, a way to share other things such as Web links, emails, phone numbers, and photos to and from your iPhone. It will start to give users app recommendations based on the content they copy in PasteFire as well. The whole focus of the company is to help people discover new apps and drive more downloads and sales of apps. Competitors include Appolicious, 16Apps, and others.