Dropping The Internet Baton. As I speculated, NBC's revenue from online video advertising during the Olympics was pitiful. eMarketer reports the take as only $5.75 million. Via TechCrunch, which notes that Yahoo had more Olympics related page views than NBC. Ouch, that's gotta hurt!
The Good Enough Point? Ole Eichhorn notes the deceleration of improvement in laptop specs in the last few years. We're seeing a confluence of reasons: Limitations imposed by energy budgets and battery life, performance already good enough for most uses, and a lack of inspiring new applications to drive platform specs. The bleeding edge of development has shifted towards low power, more specialized mobile devices on one hand, and server-based applications on the other. As laptop technology commoditizes, one might expect a shift from specsmanship towards packaging and design, which may partly explain Apple's rising market share.
Who else remembers videotext? Valleywag is not my usual cup of tea, but in this case they've done a service with a history of the newspaper industry's misadventures online. It's not as if the papers haven't tried through the years - the article includes a screen shot from a Viewtron NAPLPS interface circa 1983. But it seemed that they walked away from that and other experiments with the same lessons that proved fatal to CompuServe: Online was a slow-growth market, not ready for real consumers, and too much or too early investment was the way to lose your money. All of which was true, until it wasn't. Unlike the online services, the newspapers thought they could deal with the change in their own time, since after all "Content is king". Except it's not, It's easily trumped by communications and community, and the industry is still in a flat spin from which it's unlikely to recover.
Didn't you always suspect this? A fake restaurant wins an award from Wine Spectator. The spoof menu and wine list contained a number of vintages that the magazine had previously trashed. Wine Spectator claims it did its diligence by making phone calls and checking online - everything except actually eating at the place. One hopes they are actually tasting the wine they review. Snark aside, I've little use for this kind of review content. Going to the wineries and checking things out personally is one of the pleasure of California that partially justifies the price tag of living here.