Posts by Studley 226 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Apr 2009
The figures you quote for Last.fm are from FY09, and since then they've removed the ability to stream tracks on-demand (which carries a significantly higher royalty rate - see also recent changes at We7). I'm guessing that the FY10 financials might come as something of a surprise, albeit not a $280m surprise....
Bah, and it was looking so good until that point. When will they learn?
It really needs full Market integration too. As someone who's still seeing out a contract on a HTC Hero, there's a fair range of 2.3 / 3.0 apps that I simply can't install, and this seemed like a good way to get at them. Trouble is, as you have to push your apps from Android to PC, I'm still stuck because I can't install the apps on Android in the first place - that's the problem I'm trying to solve!
998 out of 2,852 respondents to an online electronics shopping site does not mean 35% of US consumers. Or do PriceGrabber really think that Apple will shift 108 million iPhone 5s in the United States alone?
72 per cent of respondents will also get buyer's remorse when the iPhone 6 rumours begin in January.
Spotify isn't (primarily) streaming radio. On-demand listening has a significantly higher royalty cost than throwing random songs at a listener.
See also: We7's recent repositioning (basically "we do on-demand, but we'd much rather you listened to our radio") and Last.fm's changes in 2010 (goodbye on-demand listening).
People using an extension to download videos which weren't intended to be downloaded, and they have the nerve to complain about THEIR rights being violated? I've got as much sympathy as for torrenters who complain that their downloads are full of viruses.
The extension appears to have been removed from the Mozilla site now, anyway.
Either:
(a) Hotmail has had a serious overhaul recently and has fixed what was previously its biggest flaws by a country mile
Or:
(b) Which? Computing are shockingly underqualified.
Gmail, of course, has 7GB of storage, an easy interface, it groups into conversations by default, advertising which can be hidden with even the simplest of adblockers, better spam filtering, and it has the added advantage of not having been cripplingly useless for the past 10 years.
Also, from page 119 onwards of the same report, one of the pettiest disputes in the history of the world (let alone television) is dissected into 11 pages. Among the classic snippets:
"[Ms Almada complained that] The footage shown in the programmes as broadcast was edited in such a way as to portray her unfairly. In particular, her behaviour towards Coolio in the confrontation over the incident with her shoes portrayed her as unreasonable. [...]
[Channel 4 said that they chose] to exclude footage from the programme broadcast showing Ms Almada's complete reaction to Coolio‟s 'prank', as this included very graphic footage of her retaliating by spitting on Coolio‟s duvet and then wiping her crotch with it. These scenes were omitted because the producers had felt that their inclusion might have exceeded the expectations of viewers in terms of taste and standards."
Talk about complaining without a (third?) leg to stand on...
You can (sort of) hide news sources in Google News. If you're logged-in then click Settings > News Settings, and you can specify "More news from" and "Less news from" specific sources. It doesn't remove them altogether, but for pretty much every story it will offer you headlines/links for your favoured sources. I can't remember the last time I had a Daily Mail link in my headlines.
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