Best of Today (7/22)
Video of the fake Apple Store, and customers' fight for a refund
We tip our hat to the intrepid American blogger who broke the story this week about an Apple store in Kunming, China, that turned out to be a fake. She has caused a media firestorm and has created a story that continues to spawn new angles. Also, she's gutsy. She went back to the store and took the above video Friday evening.
Friday, 22 July 2011 On Wednesday, less than 30 minutes before Apple announced another record-breaking quarter of financial results, the Wall Street Journal published a story by Yukari Iwatani Kane, Joann S. Lublin, and Nick Wingfield regarding the issue of Apple CEO succession. (You can circumvent the WSJ paywall using this link , which allows access to anyone coming to the story from Google.)
On Succeeding Steve Jobs
By AMIR EFRATI Google Inc. GOOG -1.06% has made changes to the way its search engine displays information about local businesses, a move that follows the disclosure of a U.S. antitrust investigation of its business practices. The company said it removed snippets of customer reviews that were taken from other Web firms for its Google "Places" service, which has millions of pages for local businesses. Google's practices have drawn fire from some of those Web companies, and is believed to be among the issues the Federal Trade Commission is investigating.
Google Bows to Web Rivals
What’s a book? It’s whatever you want it to be
As we’ve mentioned a number of times, the evolution of the book-publishing business has been accelerating recently , with more authors doing an end run around the traditional industry by self-publishing — or even setting up their own e-book stores, as Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling has done with her new Pottermore site . Now media companies seem to be showing an increasing interest in publishing their own e-books using content that they have already created , moves that are taking them into the growing market in between full-length books and magazine-style pieces.
I had a sense that something was wrong pretty quickly. In between checking my email and finishing up a story for the site you're reading right now, I was casually watching some tweets stream in through TweetDeck -- as I almost always am. Every 10th or 20th tweet posted by those I follow had something to do with Oslo. "Prayers are with those in Oslo," "Not sure what the situation in Oslo is but it doesn't look good" -- messages to that effect.
A Bomb in Oslo? What Google Lost by Ending Real-Time Search - Nicholas Jackson - Technology
Test of corporate Google+ accounts scaled back | Deep Tech
Ford Motor's corporate Google+ site now has a prominent "test account" label. (Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET) After first accelerating its plans for Google+ corporate accounts, Google said last night it's scaling back immediate tests of the feature.Why Google’s screwup on Google+ brand pages is a big deal
There’s been a lot of sound and fury about the way Google has approached branded (i.e., non-personal) pages on its new Google+ social network. Much of it is a symptom of internecine warfare among the big tech blogs, some of whom waited to launch branded pages and got sandbagged by what they say is the web giant’s flip-flopping . But there is a serious issue underneath the griping, which is that Google can make or break a company’s presence online by virtue of its control over the web-search market — something Google+ is almost certain to become an integral part of. When Google first launched its new social platform a couple of weeks ago, a number of media brands — including Sesame Street and the tech blog Mashable — rushed to set up pages on the network as a way of staking their claim, in the same way that many have set up what used to be called Facebook “fan” pages.
Google+ says it has fumbled business pages; blogs unhappy
After pulling the plug on Google+ pages set up for businesses on Thursday, Google laid out some details (and a bit of regret) on what it has done so far and hopes to do next to get companies, nonprofits, bands and other entities into the social network as soon as possible. Almost two weeks ago, Google asked businesses eager to get started on Google+ to stay out of the fledgling social network. The reason? Google said current Google+ pages were designed for people to network, not companies or other groups.
Seated nearby was Tarn’s older brother, Zach, squinting thoughtfully and jotting ideas into a notepad. It was a chilly afternoon in Silverdale, Wash., a town about 20 miles west of Seattle, and Tarn was wearing one of his favorite sweatshirts, a beige hoodie decorated with rows of strutting cats. The brothers — both heavyset, with close-cropped brown hair and sweetly sheepish demeanors — were conversing, as they do every day, about Dwarf Fortress, the computer game they began devising in 2002.
The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress
