Catching Up (8/19)
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The Fall of Groupon: Is the Daily Deals Site Running Out of Cash? - Nicholas Jackson - Technology
The company is stuck in a sort of Catch-22: Groupon must spend to grow, but must continue growing to cover its operational expendituresDid YouTube Kill Performance Art? - Room for Debate
Michael Nagle for The New York Times A performer in "Ocularpation: Wall Street" in New York this month. On Aug. 1, shortly after 7 a.m., a group of people on Wall Street — who seemed to be going about their regular workdays — began removing their clothes as part of a project by the artist Zefrey Throwell . The performance, "Ocularpation: Wall Street," was intended as a social commentary on the state of the economy and the need for more transparency on Wall Street.
Quick, to the patent office! Tim Carmondy has an interesting piece up on Wired’s Epicenter blog about the value of Kodak’s patent portfolio . Following the massive $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola by Google, and the recent record setting $4.5 billion auction for Nortel’s patent portfolio, it’s a seller’s market for ailing tech companies with large and storied troves of patents.
What’s Worth More: Kodak’s Patents, or Its People?
Yesterday HP killed off webOS hardware, here's how it really went down - TNW Insider
Neither Palm devices, nor the HP TouchPad were ever going to be able to showcase webOS properly. That’s why yesterday’s news that HP was shutting down its webOS hardware development should have been welcomed by the company’s Personal Systems Group, a source familiar with the matter has told The Next Web. Instead, the announcement was handled poorly, producing confusion about the future of webOS that may hurt its chances to survive. HP made the announcement that it was ceasing to make webOS hardware, but neglected to get a hardware licensing deal in place before doing so. This seemed to drive home the point that webOS was dead in the water, when in fact it is very much alive and was never the issue.
HP’s WebOS team almost certainly had an idea that the company’s new tablet, the TouchPad, had very little chance of challenging Apple’s dominance in the tablet market, as the company’s webOS operating system was running “over twice as fast” on its rival’s iPad 2 tablet, a source close to the subject revealed to The Next Web. Update below.
HP tested webOS on an iPad. It ran over twice as fast. - TNW Apple
Posted on Wednesday, August 17th, 2011
British Airways Revolutionises Customer Service Using iPads « British Airways Press Office
Ben Fry, Information Designer - By Julia Turner
Ben Fry The information designer is a relatively new figure on the cultural landscape. The field—devoted to the sophisticated display of data, and the idea that visuals can often tell stories more efficiently than words can—was pioneered by the legendary Edward Tufte in the 1970s and '80s, and recent years have seen an explosion of data visualizations in print and online .