Comcast Streaming Video Service
Posted on February 23, 2012
Earlier this week, Comcast announced it will offer a video streaming service termed, Streamflix. At $5 monthly it’s a direct competitor to NetFlix priced at $8. Like NetFlix, the Comcast service will be streamed over the Net to any device capable of displaying such streams, including suitably equipped television sets. Content shall include old movies and prior-season TV shows. Our analysis leads to four conclusions.
Download four minute narration to iPhone, iPod, or iPad here.
First, two points indicate Comcast’s chief purpose is to discourage “cord-cutting” of Pay TV and landline telephony service. One: The $5 monthly fee is waived for about 10% of Comcast’s 23 million subscribers using the highest service tier. Two: Unlike NetFlix, Streamflix will not be offered to Internet users outside the Comcast footprint. Read more…
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Author Interview: Inside Apple
Posted on February 13, 2012
As much as any contemporary book can be, Adam Lashinsky’s Inside Apple is about Apple, not Steve Jobs. While Jobs and his legacy permeate the entire story, Fortune Magazine’s Senior Editor-at-Large provides two key insights.
One is an exploration of the methods and other personalities that transformed the company into the enviable success it became over the past dozen years. A second is an evaluation of how those factors might sustain, or alter, the company’s future.
Download 28 minute audio interview to iPod, iPad, and iPhone.
Presumably at his insistence, three key points drove the company to undisputed leadership following Jobs’s second coming. Read more…
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Superman’s Virtual Reality
Posted on February 9, 2012
A casual remark during a Harlem educator’s interview inspired the title for the public-education documentary, Waiting for Superman. As a poor child in the 1950s and early 60s, Geoffrey Canada read comic books. One day his mom explained Superman was not real. He cried, because he had expected Superman would arrive someday to fix everybody’s problems. Eventually he concluded if a quality education were available, he could make it his pathway out of the ghetto.
Download six minute audio narration to iPod, iPad, and iPhone.
For exceptionally talented and dedicated online students, the new version of Apple’s iTunes-U implies Superman can soon become a virtual reality. Read more…
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Apple’s Textbook and Education Plans: Part 2
Posted on February 7, 2012
Part 1 concluded that the fundamental disadvantage of conventional books is their limitation as isolated information silos. In contrast, e-books are simultaneously both (1) information repositories, and (2) portals into the nearly infinite resources of the Internet. For example, not only are definitions of unfamiliar words easily obtained in an e-book by highlighting the applicable word to summon a digital dictionary, but more context is conveniently available by “Googling” the term, or connecting to Wikipedia.
Download eight minute audio narration to iPad, iPhone, and iPod.
Apple’s iTextbook emphasizes a couple of additional features that conventional books cannot match. First, it encourages authors to mix media. Second, it permits interactivity. Read more…
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Apple’s Textbook & Education Plans – Part 1
Posted on February 3, 2012
A couple of months hence shall mark the 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster. In response, I’ve been reading several books including Charles Lightoller’s memoirs, purchased from the Kindle store for ninety-nine cents. Lightoller was the ship’s senior surviving officer. His story is so incredible that fiction editors would likely reject the plot as too improbable. As playwright Oscar Wilde put it, “(audiences) will believe the impossible, but never the improbable”. More to the point, the experience of reading the e-book on an iPad via Kindle’s App hints at the potential for Apple’s iTextbooks and iTunes- U initiatives.
Download six minute audio narration here.
At age thirteen Lightoller apprenticed aboard a four-masted “three-skysail yarder.” Being an unfamiliar term, I put my finger on “skysail” to summon iPad’s dictionary which described it as “a light sail above the royal”. The definition was not useful since I was also unfamiliar with the meaning of “royal” sails. Fortunately, iPad’s dictionary also provided links to Google and Wikipedia. The Wikipedia link connected to a full explanation including photographs and diagrams identifying all the sails of a clipper ship. Read more…
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