Monthly Archives: November 2009

The e-book tractor application

November 29, 2009 – 12:57 pm

TweetLet’s rejoice: French teachers embrace the internet. Well, calm down. I’m not saying they embrace it the way I would like them to. This week saw two technological breakthroughs at my son’s Parisian high-school. The first one is a decision-support tool on the school’s website: it helps parents decide whether or not to send their [...]

Edited by Frédéric Filloux | Posted in hardware | Tagged , | Comments (8)

The Other French Paradox

November 29, 2009 – 12:56 pm

Tweetby Jean-Louis Gassée Foie gras, crême fraîche, butter, red wine — and lots of it! All these excesses leading to a higher life expectancy, to say nothing of the joys of sinning. That’s the legendary now official French Paradox. Scientists strain to explain the phenomenon: ‘It’s the phenolic compounds in the red wine’, they say. [...]

Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée | Posted in venture capital | Comments (11)

The web’s design problems

November 22, 2009 – 8:48 pm

TweetApplied to news, the web doesn’t suffer from one, but three flaws. Let’s call these the Rectangle, the Bottleneck, and the Diversion.  These flaws got built into the system from the very beginning and, now, their impact has become harder to deal with. For new sites, these unforeseen aftereffects have grown to become real obstacles [...]

Edited by Frédéric Filloux | Posted in advertising, design | Comments (20)

I’m Chrome, You’re Rust

November 22, 2009 – 8:47 pm

TweetAs you know, Google proceeded with the second announcement of its Chrome OS this past week, the first one took place on July 7th, 2009, and the ship date being a year away, we can be sure to have more launch events: one of the first beta, a couple more for applications and partnerships agreements [...]

Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée | Posted in software | Tagged | Comments (3)

Young readers: already hooked on subsidies

November 15, 2009 – 6:49 pm

TweetI love my country. Among many things, I enjoy its business attitude. In the media sector, it is an unabashed mixture of entrepreneurship, bold risk-taking and fearless independence. You can’t spend a week here without someone telling you : “Hey, you know what? We’re about to send some of our journalists, paid by the Ministry [...]

Edited by Frédéric Filloux | Posted in journalism, newspapers | Tagged , | Comments (6)

Droid and Android

November 15, 2009 – 6:48 pm

TweetLast Friday November 6th, the much-awaited Motorola Droid came out. Powered by the latest version of Google’s smartphone OS, Android 2.0, the new handset is exclusively distributed by Verizon. The carrier backs Motorola’s handset with an aggressive marketing campaign on its website and on TV ads. For such a “gifted” (Motorola + Verizon + Google) [...]

Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée | Posted in mobile internet | Tagged , | Comments (8)

The Monday Note iPhone Application

November 15, 2009 – 6:36 pm

TweetOur App is up and running. You can download it here. Now you can read the Monday Note on your iPhone, store stories, even, if you are offline. In addition to the weekly Monday Note, you’ll get a daily QuickNote, short bursts of news with links to relevant stories and documents. – At launch, the [...]

Edited by Frédéric Filloux | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (1)

Negative-sum games

November 9, 2009 – 9:01 am

TweetAs if current economic conditions weren’t dire enough, several forces conspire to push the media sector’s financial performance further downward. These factors are an obsession with market share, price wars, and first movers’ ability to set the tone, often for the worse. Take the iPhone application market as an example. At first, publishers were elated: [...]

Edited by Frédéric Filloux | Posted in advertising, newspapers, online publishing | Tagged , | Comments (10)

The End Of Megapixel Wars – Part II – The Canon S90

November 9, 2009 – 9:00 am

TweetLast August, I wrote about picture quality finally winning against macho marketing. In other words, it seemed Canon, Nikon and Sony were giving up the simplistic escalation: my camera has more pixels than yours, therefore it is better. In the P&S (Point & Shoot) category especially, the facts were that more pixels ended up producing [...]

Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée | Posted in hardware | Tagged | Comments (3)

The Death of the MSM

November 9, 2009 – 8:59 am

TweetYou probably heard of Fake Steve Jobs, Dan Lyons, the former Forbes writer. He’s built a justified reputation for using his blog to do a kind of Steve Jobs pastiche, by turns analytical, satirical, occasionally vulgar and, yes, insulting every possible target in the Valley and in the MSM (Mainstream Media). You’ll recall I criticized [...]

Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée | Posted in journalism | Comments (3)