Amazon’s Bold Tablet Play

Amazon announced FOUR new Kindles today, including the first-ever plausible iPad competitor. Pretty awesome stuff. Enough to get me excited, even though I probably won’t be springing for one given that I already own an iPad and a recent-generation Kindle. At $200 though, the Kindle Fire tablet is dangerously close to impulse buy territory.

In addition to the new hardware, Amazon also announced Amazon Silk, a cloud browser that has the ability to deliver blazing fast speeds. But the technology behind Silk gives Amazon a major advantage in the consumer retail and media space. Chris Espinosa breaks it down:

[W]hat this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the privacy and data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here. Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there.

Facebook Removes Choice From Your Sharing Options

Farhad Manjoo, on the money as usual about Facebook’s new changes and, in particular, the “ticker” feature:

Zuckerberg calls this “frictionless” sharing. What he means is that I don’t have to bother with the “friction” of choosing to tell you that I like something. On Facebook, now, merely experiencing something is enough to trigger sharing. Once I sign up for Spotify’s Facebook app, my consent is assumed: When I listen, I share. The same goes for the many other apps that Facebook’s partners are launching. When I watch something on Netflix or Hulu, when I read something on the Daily, or when I play a game like Words With Friends, Facebook will tell my friends. Everyone I know on Facebook will now have a running log of my life.

This is a nightmare, but not for the reasons you might suspect. I don’t hate this new model because of its lack of “privacy,” or due to Facebook’s clear financial interest in collecting my personal information…My problem with “frictionless sharing” is much more basic: Facebook is killing taste.

Laura June also has a smart take on the matter.

How HP Self-Destructed

Sad to see one of the greats go down in flames like this.

Don’t Be Evil Towards Yelp

Yelp’s CEO pens some fascinating, damning testimony against Google’s antitrust tendencies when it comes to the local game:

Because Google competes against Yelp to provide consumers with the best information about local businesses, these government groups have asked Yelp to discuss our experiences with Google’s conduct.

We have responded to these requests and told officials that we believe Google has acted anti-competitively in at least two key ways: by misusing Yelp review content in their competing Places product and by favoring their own competing Places product in search results.

Sit, Don’t Stand

It used to be that standing desks were thought of as the solution to that age old problem of not allowing our sedentary lifestyles to kill us slowly. But now, new research from Cornell reveals that the best solution is somewhere in between (via Gruber):

Sit to do computer work. Sit using a height-adjustable, downward titling keyboard tray for the best work posture, then every 20 minutes stand for 2 minutes AND MOVE. The absolute time isn’t critical but about every 20-30 minutes take a posture break and move for a couple of minutes. Simply standing is insufficient. Movement is important to get blood circulation through the muscles. Research shows that you don’t need to do vigorous exercise (e.g. jumping jacks) to get the benefits, just walking around is sufficient. So build in a pattern of creating greater movement variety in the workplace (e.g. walk to a printer, water fountain, stand for a meeting, take the stairs, walk around the floor, park a bit further away from the building each day).

For TechCrunch, This Is How It Ends

The Guardian chronicles the latest chapter in the Crunchgate fiasco, in which a startup that Arrington invested in won TechCrunch Disrupt:

The whole episode marks a giant loss in credibility for TechCrunch, a mangled, undignified departure, unprofessional personal scraps between colleagues and a decidedly fetid atmosphere around what has generally been a vibrant, inspiring and powerful brand. Ultimately, whatever the future of the writers and investors involved, this is a real shame for the entrepreneurs who’ve worked extremely hard to get this far.

How To Destroy HP In One Year

Al Lewis runs down all the bone-headed moves that HP has taken in the past year alone:

It has been a year since H-P fired Mr. Hurd. Jack Kevorkian couldn’t have devised a better plan for euthanizing a company. But like the good doctor used to say: “Dying is not a crime.”

The Culture of Apple

In the wake of Steve Jobs’ resignation as CEO of Apple, the best reflection that I’ve read on this topic comes not from a tech pundit, but from Linda Holmes at NPR:

The relationship between Apple and its aficionados has always borne little resemblance to the relationships consumers have with most other giant companies, tech companies, or even brilliantly marketed companies. To see congruence, for instance, between Apple fans and Microsoft users based on the constant back-and-forth that makes fights between them so pointless and eternal is to misunderstand how those discussions work. People love Apple; at best, they appreciate Microsoft (and, more to the point, grow weary of those people who love Apple). What you see is not “Apple is brilliant,” “No, Microsoft is brilliant.” What you see is, “Apple is brilliant.” “Oh, would you shut up already.” These discussions, for those who choose to spend time on them, are often about a binary sense of Apple: Apple Yes, and Apple No. That’s the definition of the argument, and that’s the definition of dominating the part of the culture in which you exist.