Link: Verizon passed up Apple iPhone deal - Engadget.
Verizon passed up Apple iPhone deal Posted Jan 29th 2007 11:02AM by Paul Miller Filed under: Cellphones, Portable Audio, Portable Video While Cingular (er, AT&T, but you know what we mean) couldn't seem prouder of its iPhone exclusivity, apparently Apple's first choice was Verizon, but the two companies couldn't agree on a deal that worked for both companies. "We said no." Said Jim Gerace, a VZW VP. "We have nothing bad to say about the Apple iPhone. We just couldn't reach a deal that was mutually beneficial." Talks began as far back as two years ago, but Apple's demands were steep. They also give us an idea of what exactly is behind the Apple / Cingular agreement: Apple wanted a percentage of monthly service fees, control over distribution that would limit iPhone sales to Apple and Verizon stores, and even some control over service and support for iPhone customers. "They would have been stepping in between us and our customers to the point where we would have almost had to take a back seat ... on hardware and service support," say Gerace. Cingular doesn't quite see it that way, so perhaps Apple changed its conditions a bit when it started courting Cingy. Says Mark Siegel, a Cingular spokesman, "I don't want to leave the impression that these (iPhone) customers are not ours. [MORE]
Summer is typically slow-going in the journalism world, but a team of journalism students at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism was hard at work, researching and building out a package of stories on data privacy that included two interactive pieces
One Flash piece is a interactive video-based time line that follows a woman named Brook Alexander through her daily routine in D.C., where she checks her email, drives, takes the Metro, goes shopping and works out. Along the way, she leaves breadcrumbs of data that make their way into corporate and government databases. You get to watch her quotidian activities then read where that data goes, what the privacy policy is, and how the federal government can access the data. You might also learn that Safeway uses web bugs in its promotional emails. [ MORE ]
When it comes to gubernatorial candidates chasing votes, no group is too small -- or too technologically advanced.
Democratic candidates from Deval L. Patrick of Milton to independent Christy Mihos , formerly of Cohasset , are posting podcasts on their websites, hoping to corral a younger, more digitally sophisticated crowd. On the Republican side, Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey also offers podcasts.
If you're scratching your head about what exactly a podcast is, don't worry -- you're not alone. [ MORE ]
Three years ago, a Russian mathematician by the name of Grigory Perelman, a k a Grisha, in St. Petersburg, announced that he had solved a famous and intractable mathematical problem, known as the Poincaré conjecture, about the nature of space.
After posting a few short papers on the Internet and making a whirlwind lecture tour of the United States, Dr. Perelman disappeared back into the Russian woods in the spring of 2003, leaving the world’s mathematicians to pick up the pieces and decide if he was right.
Now they say they have finished his work, and the evidence is circulating among scholars in the form of three book-length papers with about 1,000 pages of dense mathematics and prose between them.
As a result there is a growing feeling, a cautious optimism that they have finally achieved a landmark not just of mathematics, but of human thought.
And...
Dr. Morgan said the excitement came not from the final proof of the conjecture, which everybody felt was true, but the method, “finding deep connections between what were unrelated fields of mathematics.”
William Thurston of Cornell, the author of a deeper conjecture that includes Poincaré’s and that is now apparently proved, said, “Math is really about the human mind, about how people can think effectively, and why curiosity is quite a good guide,” explaining that curiosity is tied in some way with intuition.
“You don’t see what you’re seeing until you see it,” Dr. Thurston said, “but when you do see it, it lets you see many other things.” [ Full Article at NYTIMES.com ]
Online video ads are meant for cheap laughs, but getting them onto the Net and influencing viewers is no joke
Companies are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to create humorous ads in hopes they'll go "viral" -- what it's called when computer users spread content throughout the Internet via personal Web sites, blogs, and e-mails. The appeal of viral video has long been the potential to reach millions of viewers, without the hefty placement fees to media companies.
But those videos are slicker than ever, and making them is becoming a big business, generating $100 million to $150 million a year, according to market researchers. To see what the buzz is about, open the following link in a new window or copy and paste into your browser...http://images.businessweek.com/ss/06/07/viral_marketing/index_01.htm?chan=search
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