Allen Weiner

Author John Grisham talks about the devaluation of books as well as “uncertainty over ebooks” in this insightful interview on NBC’s “The Today Show.”

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Both Google and Microsoft (Bing) have announced plans to add Twitter results (and, in case of Microsoft, Facebook updates) to search results. This is an interesting achievement for sure, but one that leaves me in major so-what mode. There has been a lot of buzz around searching the real-time web, and both [...]

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Amazon as taken two steps to ensure it has some breathing room between itself and the burgeoning list of competitors in the eBook-ereader marketplace. The company has announced that it is lowering the price of the bestseller Kindle to $259, down from $299 as well launching the Kindle with U.S. & [...]

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During Yahoo’s second quarter earnings call, CEO Carol Bartz talked of her company’s many current and planned projects aimed at providing operational stability, the tools to hit the ground running when the economy recovers and offering the market a sense of “wow” related to Yahoo’s products and services. Bartz pointed to [...]

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The cognoscente’s meme of the day is whether or not harsh words on Twitter cut off Sasha Baron Cohen’s “Bruno’s” U.S. box office hopes at the knees. Time’s noted film critic Richard Corliss believes that a decline in opening day revenue to the following day was due in part to bad cyberword of mouth. That [...]

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Google’s announcement that it plans to enter the ebook space is hardly a surprise given the search giant indicated such intentions as part of its class action lawsuit settlement with book publishers earlier this year. How Google manifests its interest in the ebook space and what parts of the value chain it assumes is where [...]

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This is a story whose draft plot has all the makings of a thriller. Add up these story arcs and see what you come up with:
*Amazon’s Kindle and Kindle 2 are gaining early signs of traction in the e-reader marketplace selling, by some estimates, around 300,000 units
*The Kindle (a single function device) is expensive at [...]

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For those of us deeply entrenched in following the e-book world, we watch and marvel as Amazon’s purchase of Lexcycle, developer of Stanza, a the most popular iPhone e-book application, further distances the Seattle company from the competition. Question: is everyone else in this space either asleep at the switch or too busy worrying about [...]

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As part of its audit process, evaluating its vast array of products and services, Yahoo! has decided to shutter Geocities the hosted community business which it bought in May 1998 for $3.75 billion. The closing of Geocities joins Farechase, Yahoo Briefcase, Yahoo Pets and My Web as part of CEO Carol Bartz’s plan [...]

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In this podcast, I talk briefly about a concept that I have been pondering (and talking about) regarding the notion of a mobile content creation device to facilitate content and audience immediacy. What should it be? What sort of functionality should it have? How much would it cost? Who are the buyers for such a [...]

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