AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

Wall Street Journal - Portals Column by Lee Gomes
Had PowerPoint been around 150 years ago, Thoreau might have warned us to beware not only of enterprises that require new clothes, but also of those that require new paradigms.
A book from 2006, “The Long Tail,” was one of those that appear periodically and demand that we [...]

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Best overview of Google’s strategy in the mobile space that I’ve read:
From WIRED
“Is this interesting to Google?” That’s what Andy Rubin was asking Larry Page. It was a spring day in 2005, and the two were in a conference room just off the main lobby at Google’s headquarters. A simple yes and Rubin would have [...]

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TechCrunch
People-powered search engine Mahalo will soon have some competition from a stealth startup called YouBundle. If you go to YouBundle’s site now, there is nothing other than a landing page. But we got our hands on a couple screen shots from the private beta (click above for a larger image and see topic page below) [...]

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Disney.com announced today that for the first time ever the site will stream full-length movies online, featuring selections from the Wonderful World of Disney. The films will first air on ABC as part of the network’s weekly Wonderful World of Disney presentation on Saturday nights throughout summer 2008. The full-length films will then be available [...]

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NY Times - John Markoff
At the outset of his presentation at the opening session of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Steve Jobs showed a slide of a stool with three legs to describe the company’s businesses: Macintosh, music and the iPhone.
The company is making another bet on parallelism, and the implications may be more [...]

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LA Times
Michael Arrington landed interviews with most of the major contenders for the White House to weigh in for his ‘tech president’ primary. read more

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RoughType
Bill Gates, in his farewell address at Microsoft’s TechEd developer conference today, sketched out Microsoft’s expansive plan for cloud computing. The company, he said, will have “many millions” of servers in a network of data centers. Those centers will ultimately provide as utility services everything done today by traditional Microsoft software installed on local servers:
We’re [...]

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Informaitv
Tru2way is gaining momentum as the new way ahead for interactive television on cable in the United States. Tru2way is the retail brand for OpenCable hardware and OCAP software and will be much in evidence at the annual industry Cable Show in New Orleans. Following a two-day Tru2way developer conference, there will be more than [...]

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The New York Times
Netflix, which pioneered the business of offering DVD movie rentals by mail, is now offering its 8.2 million subscribers an option to watch movies easily on their televisions without involving the post office.
Working with a small Silicon Valley company, Netflix will begin marketing a $99 device on Tuesday that will allow customers [...]

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Content Agenda
Media Wonk says: keep an eye on ZeeVee Inc., a company with a terrible name but an interesting approach to bringing PC and broadband content to the TV screen. I know, I know, who doesn’t have a product or service for bringing broadband content to the TV set? Some of them even work. [...]

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