Positive Mental Lattitude
We have been working with the charity Lattitude Global Volunteering for a few months now, helping them create a …
Big news small change
The summer holidays generally lead to ‘silly season’ news. Some of its funny, others make headlines but won’t make much change. In the world of technology we have seen a few of the latter in the last couple of weeks:
The Big Apple
Property of Apple (via Nasa)
So it emerged that Apple has more money than the US government. To be honest, they are $14 TRILLION in debt, so most homeless people have more money than the US. But this was actually about liquid cash and in that case, having more than the US is a big deal. They are joining the likes of the worlds largest oil companies and Google and… well thats about it. That does indeed make them pretty large. The next story will lift their well-financed spirits even further:
No longer using an HP to write
Anyone wanna buy a failing American technology giant?
HP, in what they are calling a “radical change of direction“, and what everyone else is calling “a horrifying realisation”, have discontinued their ipad “rivalling” Touchpad and said they are moving out of personal computing and into software and services. This comes less than a year after they bought Palm to use its WebOS for their tablets and only 2 months after launching the Touchpad. With the news of its discontinuation many retails dropped its price from £399 to a little as £89!! This caused it to be, very briefly, the most popular gadget on sale in the UK. To try and bolster its new credential as a software and service supplier HP have bought the UK software giant Autonomy for £7bn. I can only pose the question: have HP gone mental? I mean, its great for Autonomy, but HP spent 15% of its value on a company that produces 1%. Maybe HP should have picked a bit more wisely:
Googlerola
And finally there was the news that Google have bought Motorola Mobility, the mobile phone and video arm of Motorola, for $12.5bn. This looks to be a pretty shrewd move as they are getting quite a lot for their money. Firstly they obviously get all the patents and technology associated with one of the worlds largest mobile phone producers, and secondly they now get a finger in the pie of “home devices and video solutions technology” (which sounds much dirtier than it is) – an area they were already make huge headways into through Chrome laptops and Gmail calls. And all this for a quarter of their liquid cash.
As I said at the start, big money news but will anyone really be able to tell the difference? Apart from those who grabbed themselves a cheap (and shortly to be obsolete) tablet, I suspect not.
Have a great week.
Riot: How FB fed the flames and Twitter put them out!
What a sad (#UKriots) and at the same time uplifting (#riotcleanup) few days it has been in the UK. Riots in areas of London, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Nottingham and Liverpool have shown the worst side of their “communities”. I could write …
Grand Theft Electro
In Laws:
The British government has laid out new plans this week to stop companies requesting ISPs block copyright infringement websites. This has come after the Motion Picture Association managed to successfully lobby BT to block a website that helped locate copyright infringed material (music and movies in layman’s terms). Along with this it has also been declared legal for you to rip CD’s and DVD’s for your own use – which by Vince Cable’s (the British Government’s Business Secretary) own admittance “if you have a situation where 90% of your population is doing something [illegal], then it’s not really a very good law”.
No longer an outlaw to society
The final noteworthy point from this legal review is that parody will be looked at more favourably with regards to copyright. Anyone who saw the brilliant New York State of Mind parody Newport State of Mind before it got pulled from youtube by EMI’s legal action, will know that 9/10 parody doesn’t hurt the original party, it just makes them (or in this case EMI) look like corporate jobsworths (I think that choice of word was very kind). Hopefully it will also ease the law on not allowing parliamentary footage to be used in a satirical context (admittedly this isn’t a huge selling point for anyone, but those who in the last few weeks have been watching (or hoping to watch and been foiled!) The Daily Show with Jon Stewart will know that ’tis a silly law and one that makes the British look a bit self-important).
Morality
Pity the poor head of EMI
There have been many (the big media corporations) who have tried to extoll the virtues of banning these sites that direct you to free media files – I loath to call them file sharing sites as they don’t host the files and are effectively a more targeted version of Google. The basis for this is that theft from them costs economies across the world billions of dollars and stops talented film and music production teams from getting much needed jobs. Unfortunately they say this while sat in their multi-million dollar houses after receiving their very large salaries – and maybe they deserved them – which kind of reduces their credibility when they say there isn’t enough money to make this new film, or support this new artist.
There is also no real way of saying how much profit is lost from piracy – and this is an important point to make: there is no money taken from industry by piracy, just a loss of profit. There are figures banded about that this is anywhere between $3bn – $20bn per year. And when you see figures like that you instantly know that
The scourge of the 7 ISP's!
the music and film industry has no idea how much profit is lost. However there have been multiple studies – such as here, here and here – that seem to demonstrate the “pirates” purchase more digital content than “honest” people. I certainly think this kind of thing can’t go unchecked, after all if everybody stole al digital content then not a lot would get made, but maybe its down to the large music/film corporations to alter their model, rather than alter the world. And anyway, anyone who has read Freakonomics knows, 87% of people are basically honest and will pay for what they purchase… it just depends on the industries involved making sure they show us value in paying for hat we get!
Have a great week!
RSS
Twitter