Lesenswerte Artikel – 7. February 2010

– „While markets have their flaws, over the long run they are good at executing these technological transformations…. Reports of the death of book publishing, like those of music publishing and newspaper publishing, are greatly exaggerated. Business models will change, companies will come and go, and people will lose their jobs. But at the end of the process, there will be fewer people who will be paid higher incomes to produce a wider array of products at lower prices. There’s a word for that — progress — and it’s exciting to see it unfold right in front of us.“

– „The founders call their application the ultimate mashup, because it currently uses 35-40 APIs to provide the best reply it can. Queries are spoken in simple English, such as “book me a taxi” and “what’s the weather forecast in Boulder this weekend?” Even the speech-to-text translation is an API“

– „PDFMyURL is a free service and doesn’t watermark or otherwise alter the site you are converting to PDF. „

– „AOL tried this and lost. But AOL did not have the algorithms and social connections that Facebook has in place, so I think we’re in a different era. Facebook could eat the web or, perhaps more likely, become a parallel universe web. But, the question is this – will the web allow itself to be eaten or will two webs emerge? Time will tell.“

– „If you are a frequent commenter on TechCrunch blog, here’s a slightly disheartening news for you – TechCrunch has stopped displaying user comments on all stories that are older than 10 days. Your comments have not been deleted from the actual WordPress database but they aren’t putting them on the site anymore.“