[Download Show #16 as MP3]
News
- Movie Downloads: Netflix last week, Walmart this week. Movies $10-$12, TV shows $2 with content from Fox, CW and Viacom’s MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Logo and VH1. (Michael Arrington - TechCrunch)
- Will This Be Successful?
Walmart has had mixed results in their online initiatives. They’ve completely bailed out of the movie-rental-by-mail market when they couldn’t make headway against Netflix. In this case, however, there is no established player to try to kill. The movie download market is in its nascent stage and anyone can win.
CinemaNow and MovieLink should be particularly worried. They operate on very low margins, are being attacked by iTunes and others already, and now have to contend with Walmart. It’s unlikely they’ll have the staying power to make it, and it doesn’t look like any of the major sites are looking to buy in this space. It’s cheaper to build a Windows-based DRM-laden player and do deals with studios directly.
However, iTunes still has the only service that works cross-platform, plays on an iPod and now on the living room television with Apple TV. And they already dominate the television download market. Walmart will not be able to easily hurt iTunes in the short term.
And don’t forget that Netflix has already released a very, very good free(ish) movie and television download service, and Joost is another service coming soon. None of these companies are going to lie down in the face of competition from Walmart, and they know that Walmart will bail out of markets that they can’t dominate.
All of this is good for the consumer, but prices are still too high. Movie downloads are still more expensive than simply buying a DVD.
- Will This Be Successful?
- Would you trust your car to being parked by a robot?
- That's the question facing New Yorkers as the city's first robotic parking garage opens in Chinatown. With new software and enough laser and radar sensors to make Fort Knox jealous, it's believed that the new facility — which can squeeze 67 cars in space that would otherwise hold only 24 — will not suffer the kind of glitches that caused the nation's first robotic garage in nearby NJ to drop and trap cars.
- Who Really Won the Superbowl?
- And the other winner of the Super Bowl is...Coke
- That's according to brain experts, who for the second time in two years, have studied the neurons firing inside people's gray matter while they watched Super Bowl commercials.
- FKF Applied Research, with the help of UCLA's Ahmanson Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, said that Coca-Cola's "Video Game" ad--a 60-second animated spot that promotes random acts of kindness--scored this year because it elicited the most positive emotions in subjects' brains.
- "Coke's ad did well because it engaged a full range of emotions, including the mirror region, which is associated with connection and empathy," said Joshua Freedman, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at UCLA and co-founder of FKF Applied Research.
Software / Hardware / Power Web Picks
- Google Releases New Link Reporting Tools to Webmasters
- Current saeching for all links to your website only picks the top few
- New service for verified / registered webmasters allows many more.
- You can even download this list for offline use.
- Ubuntu & Wireless, Better Than Windows?
- For years, Linux has had a reputation of being notoriously bad for wireless access, whether through access points, ad-hoc, whatever. But the new KWirelessNetwork applet thats included in the new Kubuntu beta is just incredible.
Penny Pinchers
- 10 Things You Should Never Buy New (Liz Pulliam Weston - MSN Money)
- Few people really enjoy wasting their hard-earned money, but many of us do it every day by buying new. We could do our pocketbooks, and the environment, a big favor by opting to be the second owner of some of the stuff we buy. But lots of other stuff depreciates quickly while still having plenty of useable life left. Here are 10 items where the cost vs. use equation strongly tilts toward buying used.
- Books
- DVDs / CDs
- Little Kids' Toys
- Jewlrey
- Sports Equiptment
- Timeshares
- Cars
- Software and console games
- Office furniture
- Hand tools
- 181 Things To Do On The Moon [The List in PDF] (Nasa)
- If you woke up tomorrow morning and found yourself on the moon, what would you do? NASA has just released a list of 181 good ideas.
- Figure out what happens long term to life.
- Establish support services.
- Lunar power generation.
Security & Privacy
- Mac vs. PC Commercials - Vista Security
- Play commercial for listeners
- Play commercial for listeners
- CDX (BBC / preloaded / Adobe) Cinematic Flash Game
- Its Broadband and a bit slow because of some recent press attention
Editorial ("Power Up")
- Photoshop Tutorial - Designing a Web Page in Photoshop
- During the last show we started a new document and filled the background a solid color. In this show we're going to make the navigation area, and in the next show we'll make the buttons that go on that navigation.
- Now with your document open, pick a new color in the foreground color for the background of your navigation.
- Select the square tool and draw two overlapping squares, one down the left side of the screen for the navgiation, and on across the top for the logo and page title.
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