Category: Stories
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We sneer at your global standards, and your economies of scale…
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Andrew Orlowski
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More dismal news for the US consumer. After the simultaneous failure of Municipal Wi-Fi projects in three major US cities – something we predicted four years ago – faster, cheaper mobile data looks further away than ever. So why are Google lobbyists advocating for the next wave of collapsing wireless initiatives – rather than helping…
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Rick Rubin’s subscription strategy: Right idea, Wrong price
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Andrew Orlowski
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The record producer and co-founder of Def Jam has only been “co-head” of Sony’s Columbia Records since May, but he’s already setting about destroying the old business so a new one can be built in its place. It remains to be seen how effective he will be, but for now Rubin is prepared to say…
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Nokia: Don’t bet the house on content
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Andrew Orlowski
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At times you can feel sorry for Nokia. The company is damned when it dares to plan for the future, and it’s damned if it doesn’t. But that illustrates the depth of its dilemma. Today, Nokia is phenomenally successful in one business – handsets – which generates £27bn ($54bn) a year, with a margin of…
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One-Click™ colonialism
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Andrew Orlowski
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The music industry has a long and shameful history of robbing black artists of their rights. Now along comes some new software that will help speed up the job. Think of it as a sort of 1-Click “non-payment” system. Liblicense is a project that Creative Commons hopes to integrate with MIT Media Lab’s OLPC, or…
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Smart radios are still pretty dumb
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Andrew Orlowski
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More than three years ago, your reporter got a good taste of how miserable technology utopians can be. It was at Intel’s Developer Forum in San Francisco, and the debate was about liberating analog TV spectrum for exciting new digital uses. The analog switchover is slated for February 2009. On behalf of Microsoft, Google, and…
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Google Health offers reputation massage
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Andrew Orlowski
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“Fire the publicist. Go off message. Let all your employees blab and blog!” fantasised the writer Clive Thompson in a recent WiReD magazine cover story. “The name of this new game is RADICAL TRANSPARENCY, and it’s sweeping boardrooms across the nation,” burbled the mag. But the perils of allowing employees to “blab and blog!” were…