No Mod Required

Web-only this time, but I’ll still be keeping my eye on it.

[edited to add]
except I won’t since they don’t have an available feed. What is this? Do they still think it’s 2001?
[/edit]

I used to love that magazine back in the day. Hard to believe it’s been 7 years since the original shuttered its doors. Whatever it symbolized in a larger sense, I really enjoyed reading it and felt a real connection to the editorial style. Hopefully the new version will continue to speak to me in the same way.

Predict the Future of the Internet with The Industry Standard

“It is a shotgun marriage, but the person holding the shotgun is Google”

That descries the situation pretty well.

Honestly? I’d like to see YHOO stay independent. Being an internet person, it would be sad for me to see one of the original internet
giants swallowed up by the house that Gates built. It’s also a horrifying merger from pretty much every conceivable standpoint. Mismatched systems, divergent ideologies, competing services, scale… I wouldn’t want to unravel any of it.

For my part, I just hope they leave del.icio.us and flickr alone.

Is demand for the iPhone in America already starting to wane?

AT&T, the exclusive American carrier of the iPhone, activated just 900,000 iPhones during the fourth quarter, the company revealed during its earnings conference call Thursday. It wrapped up the year with “just at or slightly under 2 million iPhone customers,” according to company executives.

Apple announced at Macworld that it has sold 4 million iPhones through the middle of January, and Toni Sacconaghi, a financial analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein, thinks the gap between the figures means that Apple might have a demand problem. He released a research note Thursday after AT&T’s earnings saying that the carrier’s figures imply that an awful lot of inventory is building up at Apple’s channel partners.

Read the rest:

Report: iPhones piling up at AT&T stores

For my money, while it’s a lovely device the lack of a keyboard and the lack of third party apps makes it an unattractive option. I couldn’t live without my Treo and a healthy part of that is the wealth of third party applications I’m able to jam onto the thing.

And yeah, I’m sure mobile Safari would make me all tingly with it’s slickosity, especially when compared to the sickly Blazer, but to be honest it probably wouldn’t matter all that much. most of the time, if I’m surfing a site on my phone I’m not usually interested in bells and whistles anyway. I’m usually just looking for info, and Blazer’s optimized mode is usually better for that than a full blown website anyway (Just another reason those black screen iPhone commercials drove me nuts. I wanted yell at the screen sometimes since they would imply that the only way you could quickly browse to a site to get someone’s name is with the magical powers of the iPhone. )

The thing that’s surprising is that I really felt like I was in the minority and that there was the usual insatiable Apple technolust for the iPhone. Of course, the numbers could be wrong and the demand could be as insane as I expected it to be, but if the numbers are accurate that’s sure a lot of unsold iPhones.

Of course, thinking about it, I only know three people with iPhones. I see more Blackberries and Treos than that at pretty much any meeting with more than maybe seven or eight participants… Not a huge sampling of course, but it still seems like a small number.

Here he is offering up a bet based on the idea that the average CEO of a Forbes 400 company probably pays a lower percentage tax rate than their receptionists.

I’ll– I’ll bet– I’ll bet a million dollars against any member of the Forbes 400 who challenges– me that the average for the Forbes 400 will be less than the average of their receptionists. So, I’m– I’m– I’m– I’ll give ‘em an 800 number. They can call me. And the million will go to whichever charity the winner– designates.

Warren Buffett and NBC’s Tom Brokaw: The Complete Interview