furtherandfaster

Less is more S J

There will be more than enough words today. I'll just embed 2 videos and leave it at that..

 

and a truly awesome presentation..

Apple has more cash than the US government

 
A blog I cannot resist republishing. It must be Friday.. and just a reminder of the ideological war being fought in Washington at the moment. As the largest economy in the world runs out of money.. even though some of its corporations have pockets bulging with cash.  I wonder if Apple's finance dept is busy moving its cash out of dollars as fast as they possibly can...into yuan? Interesting times.

Bad day for newsagents today ..

if Apple is right. When the iphone came out it was an indifferent day for Nokia. Micrososft laughed it off - but they're not laughing now.  And by all accounts Apple is after the book. Offering higher margins to punlishers than Kindle is offering. They are threatening to hike the price of digital books up by 10-20%. So you may be used to paying a couple of pounds for a video download. But you'll have to pay £12 for a title on the bestseller list. I'm not convinced that I want my books to disappear into the ether. But I care a lot less about the magazines I buy. It would be kind of convenient to keep a back catalogue of old mags which I could leaf through or reference.

But newsagents have something to worry about. If magazines (and of course newspapers) start to disappear onto tablets then one of their principal revenue streams could begin to disappear.  And that's a healthy margin to redistribute between Apple and the content publishers. Disintermediation here we go again.

But do you want to have ads served to you on your Itablet? You may not care that much. I wonder if that would be a dealbreaker for advertisers? The question is where the ads would be served from - the publishers? Or would direct response go through an Apple clearing house? Are we about to see Apple become a major online advertising clearing house? Because they own the tablets and could use the data gathered on how that person uses the tablet to decide what to serve? Perhaps we are about to see the integration of ad serving on a portable device in a way that hasn't been done yet even for mobile phones. Because we still mostly use them for making calls.  This would move Apple towards Google. And the really valuable part of digital real estate. Customer data.

I don't think Apple are remotely interested in a tablet. Microsoft tried that and failed. I don't think the books market is big enough and dynamic enough to sell more than a few readers. But commercial publishing may have a new platform by 5pm this afternoon. Can't wait.