Best of Today 6/14

Why Content Isn’t King - Magazine. How Netflix became America’s biggest video service—much to the astonishment of media executives and investors Taylor Callery Netflix famously engenders fierce loyalty from its ever-growing customer base.

This year, it even beat out reigning champion Apple, among 528 other brands, in Brand Keys’ annual survey of customer loyalty. In more-rarefied circles, however, the company provokes equally intense but quite different emotional reactions. Among traditional-media executives and investors who like to bet on the fall of high-flying stocks, Netflix’s continual share-price appreciation and accelerating subscriber growth have sparked aggravation and even anger.

Netflix recently announced that with nearly 23 million U.S. users, it is now the largest video service in the country. In fact, the dirty little secret of the media industry is that content aggregators, not content creators, have long been the overwhelming source of value creation. Take scale. It's All Software. Tuesday, 14 June 2011 Here’s Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, writing about iCloud: Here’s how Google and Apple’s vision of the cloud differ: for Google, the cloud means cloud + web; for Apple, cloud computing means cloud + software, with the internet stuff happening behind the scenes.

All of the cloud computing services Google offers to consumers, like email, word processing and spreadsheets, happen within the browser. To Google, the point of cloud computing is to replace desktop software with the web. Social Web Browser RockMelt Teams Up With Facebook. For the Facebook- and Twitter-obsessed, the RockMelt Web browser, introduced last year by veterans of Netscape, offers plenty of goodies: a button to share any Web page or link; a rail showing what’s happening on their favorite social sites; another rail showing the activities of their friends and making it easy to chat with them; and plenty of other nifty social features.

But RockMelt remains little more than a rounding error in browser market share. It has received one million downloads and has hundreds of thousands of active users, said Eric Vishria, the chief executive. Nokia and Apple settle patent dispute. 14 June 2011Last updated at 11:11 Nokia claimed some technology in the iPad infringed its patents Nokia and Apple have agreed a technology licensing agreement that ends the long-running legal dispute between the two firms.

"The agreement will result in settlement of all patent litigation between the companies," Nokia said. Nokia sued Apple for patent infringements in 2009 and extended the action in December last year. Apple had countersued, accusing Nokia of infringing its patents. Nokia said Apple had agreed a one-off payment, the value of which was not disclosed, and ongoing royalties to use its technologies.

Apple said the deal covered both companies' patents. Counter claims Continue reading the main story “Start Quote What this story really shows once again is how one phone, the iPhone, has proved the undoing of a company whose dominance seemed unassailable just four years ago” Why All The Daily Deal Hate? Editor’s note:Guest author Rocky Agrawal is causing quite a stir with his in-depth TechCrunch series looking at the daily deal industry (read his latest, Why Groupon Is Poised for Collapse, as well as Part I, Part II, and Part III).

Agrawal is an entrepreneur who has worked on local products since 1995. He blogs at reDesign and Tweets @rakeshlobster. Some people have been asking me why I’ve spent the last 10 days writing about Groupon. What’s my hidden agenda? I’m tired of seeing small businesses get screwed. Debates: Tech bubble: Statements (Build 20110413222027) Search by text, voice, or image - Inside Search (Build 20110413222027) During our Inside Search press event in San Francisco today, we discussed how mobile search has inspired new ways to remove barriers to knowledge on the desktop and help you get to your results faster.

On a mobile phone, you’re not limited to typing - you can search using your voice or a picture. Now you can do the same on your computer with Voice Search and Search by Image on desktop. You can also get your results faster with Google Instant on Images and Instant Pages. Voice Search on desktop. Apple feels "harassed" by "copyist" Samsung's demands for early look at iPhone 5 and iPad 3; showdown on Friday (Build 20110413222027) With all that's going on, this is already my third blog post within a few hours.

After reporting on The New York Times Company's and OpinionLab's declaratory judgment actions against Lodsys and the settlement under which Apple pays royalties to Nokia, I still wanted to do a quick update on the dispute between Apple and Samsung. There's some interesting legal argument to report on. The rhetoric is rather unusual considering that Samsung is one of Apple's key suppliers (probably its largest one). In one of its most recent filings, which became discoverable late on Monday by Pacific Time, Apple says that Samsung "attempts to harass" it and that Samsung's demands are not made in good faith. Apple also refers to Samsung as "the copyist" in this dispute. Angry Birds looks to conjure some location-based Magic [Video] — Tech News and Analysis (Build 20110413222027)

Rovio is looking to take Angry Birds local with location-based integration, which will now enhance the game play for users when they visit real-world locations.

The feature, called Magic, builds off a previously announced NFC feature for certain Nokia phones , which allows a very limited number of users to unlock additional levels when they tap two NFC phones together or tap an NFC tag at a location.