pkarnig’s posthaven

One advertising agency in particular, Publicis, is pushing a ton of advertising dollars through Google in return for what two industry insiders independently refer to as “kickbacks” or “rebates.” Kurt Unkel, an SVP at Vivaki (the digital arm of Publicis) flatly denies there are any payments of this kind. “There isn’t a rebate in play. We have a strategic partnership,” says Unkel. Any suggestion that Publicis is accepting payments from Google in return for driving online ad spending through Google is “an utter crock of shit,” he says. He adds, “That is illegal in the U.S.”

Me thinks he doth protest too much!

Microsoft does not have an entry here and excellent User Experience is not something we usually expect from the busy bees in Redmond.... We have the spiritual children of Unix living inside the Cloud, powering the millions of Linux servers running at Google, Facebook, Amazon…

The only exception is Windows. Initially built on top of DOS, Microsoft painstakingly added version after version, always striving for backward compatibility while, at the same time, adding new features. It didn’t always work well (who wants to remember Windows Me and Vista?) but it worked well enough because Microsoft never gave up. They fixed mistakes that they claimed didn’t exist, and now we have the well-respected Windows 7. (Inevitably, critics will say that Microsoft wouldn’t have gotten away with such a tortuous path if it weren’t for its vigorously enforced monopoly.)

Windows will live on — in a PC industry now at a plateau. But otherwise, in the high-growth Cloud and smartphone segments, it’s a Unix/Linux world. We need to look elsewhere to find the differences that matter.

The technical challenges have migrated to two areas: UI (User Interface, or the more poetic—and more accurate—UX, for User Experience) and programming tools.

If in fact it's true that everything is moving to the cloud (i do agree!) and that Microsoft has failed to develop an OS of their own for the cloud, then it will be very interesting to see what they will do to advance their cause in the market. Or is this just more proof that it's time to short Microsoft.

The publisher of the New York Times acknowledged Wednesday that the newspaper will go out of print — eventually.

"We will stop printing the New York Times sometime in the future, date TBD," Arthur Sulzberger told an audience at a London media summit Wednesday.

Sulzberger's statement came in response to a prediction that the newspaper would go out-of-print by 2015.

The crazy thing is that most of the traditional (like nytimes) content providers seem to believe that charging for their online content will save the day. I disagree. I believe that a new model for content monetization will evolve through the use of advanced semantic filtering. This could also presage the end of Google's dominance in the market. Check out what we are doing at Grabbit!

So the Google-Verizon deal can be summed up as this: "FCC, you have no authority over us and you're not going to do anything about it. Congress, we own you, and we'll get whatever legislation we want. And American people, you can't stop us.

This is yet another example of how the American people have given away their right to self rule. Through our repeated inaction and lack of education and will we have allowed Big Business to take over our lives and force us into submission. The ONLY way we can take power back is to continually speak out to our friends, representatives, the media, our blogs. All the big companies care about is MONEY, not our well being. So when you read, "Bank of America is looking out for you" or "Google won't be Evil" or "Verizon makes life Better". It's all BS. They are making life better for their top management. They do not give a whiff for the common man.