If you follow AllThingsD, and Weekend Update hopes you do, then one thing you’ve come to value is the special way the staff gets around the world to cover the important stuff and report it straight from the geek’s mouth. This week our bicoastal brigade brought the tech news as it happened, and in Boomtown’s case, from 30,000 feet.
Sometimes big news comes in small packages–especially in the world of high tech. This week, AllThingsD covered some little changes that mean serious consequences for the companies that make the stuff and consumers who rely on it.
BoomTown’s week began onstage in front of thousands of chanting women. No, Kara wasn’t filling in for Oprah; she was doing something much cooler.
Sometimes life’s irony smacks you in the face. Sometimes BoomTown smacks you with it instead.
Books vanishing from e-readers…magazines on Hulu…DVDs from a kiosk…cats and dogs living together…mass hysteria!
Kara was half James Bond, half Indiana Jones in the cities and jungles of BoomTown this week. She jet-setted, jet-lagged and still managed to report on a genuine cougar fight.
Nintendo President Satoru Iwata likes to say that game console price cuts aren’t the cure-alls many believe them to be. “People often talk about the price cut as if it’s an almighty weapon,” he said this past summer. “The fact of the matter is what a price cut can do is rather limited.” But Nintendo is cutting the price of its Wii videogame system just the same.
Geekfighting may never become its own UFC event, but following tech news this week seemed, in places, like a view to a big, well-funded cage match.
Kai-Fu Lee’s uneventful departure from Google to start a Beijing incubator really belies the spectacle that attended the beginning of his tenure at the search giant. Lee’s train-hopping from Microsoft to Google back in 2005 touched off a five-month pitched battle marked by all manner of inanities and expletive-laden outbursts.
It’s been a long time between weekend updates, and a long week without Peter Kafka, All Things D’s intrepid MediaMemo reporter. He returns Monday, and just in time, too, since John Paczkowski and Digital Daily will be out all next week. Must be August–do Europeans still take the whole month off? Or is that an urban legend? No matter; it definitely has not been sleepy around here.
Google began using billboard advertising for the first time earlier this month, though it may not have needed to. Because according to Millward Brown Optimor, the Google brand is the most well known and valuable brand in the world.
So Google has finally copped to developing an operating system–Chrome OS, a software platform “created for people who spend most of their time on the Web, and…designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems.” It is an extraordinary market play. And an unsettling one. For it seeks to place Google, which already collects vast amounts of data about our Internet use, at the very center of our information experience. The privacy implications of that are, of course, horrendous.
Nintendo really should have cut its losses yesterday and cancelled its E3 press conference after Microsoft’s Project Natal demo. How could it possibly have trumped Redmond’s controllerless game control system? Certainly not with a blood pressure monitor.
Is Microsoft truly committed to bringing its major productivity applications to mobile devices? Of course it is. Will the iPhone be one of them? Absolutely. How can I say that with such certainty? Well, because Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft’s Business Division, hinted at Web 2.0 Expo yesterday that it would be. But more importantly, because Microsoft formally announced it last November.
Another week into challenging times, and the theme for Weekend Update is undoubtedly cost-saving, with a healthy dose of revenue-seeking.
On the revenue-seeking side, BoomTown’s Twitter Business Plan Count-Up hasn’t yielded any real keepers yet. There is a real contender, though–since Jennifer Aniston so publicly broke up with her boyfriend John Mayer on account of his Twitter “addiction,” BoomTown suggests offering “Twitter rehab” for those not willing to lose their relationships just yet.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. 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.
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size.
11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183.
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
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 »
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