If you were hoping that Facebook’s buyout of Instagram would wrap up quickly and let you directly integrate your heavily filtered photos into Timeline, you might be disappointed. Citing the ever-present “people familiar with the matter,” the FT believes the Federal Trade Commission is orchestrating a competition probe. These kinds of investigations are common for most deals over $ 66 million — we suspect the $ 1 billion Instagram pact qualifies — but could add six months to a year to Facebook’s originally planned spring closure date. The deal is still expected to go through, and you can keep tilt-shifting your photos to death in the meantime; just don’t expect those shots to blanket friends’ Facebook walls anytime soon.
Rumored FTC probe could delay Facebook / Instagram deal, Toaster filter will have to wait originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 May 2012 15:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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A week ago, Fox changed its licensing rules so that non-paying users of Hulu would be unable to watch new episodes of their shows until eight days after their air date. Put on your analyst hat and think about what effect this might have on, say, piracy of those shows. Did you determine that it would increase piracy? Congratulations, you are a better judge of consequences than Fox. Because piracy of Fox shows went up by a huge amount during this last week.
Actually, it’s likely that Fox anticipated this increase in piracy and simply considered it worth the trade-off. With worse options for free users, more will watch the live broadcast, they suppose, and ad prices go up with these increased projections. Query: if these people could watch it on live TV, why would they be watching it on Hulu in the first place?
For busy and budget-conscious TV-watchers, expensive cable and a DVR aren’t an option. Hulu is. Hulu gets shows out there, allows for targeted, relatively unskippable advertising, and with a reasonable one-day delay, doesn’t add much inconvenience to the bargain for the user. This eight-day delay is punishing, and while “getting something for nothing” is a rather new entitlement we all seem to have, it does feel like a bait-and-switch for millions of viewers.
So what do they do? They google “download ______”, and halfway down the first page is a public, well-seeded torrent that downloads the whole episode — with no ads — in minutes, and allows them to use their favorite media player or take it with them anywhere. Wow! What a great way to watch your favorite shows!
TorrentFreak tracked the piracy of two Fox shows after the delay went into effect. Hell’s Kitchen downloads went up by 114%, and MasterChef went up a massive 189%. That number will only go up as more people discover the limitation.
Will Fox backpedal? Not likely. But Hulu is a work in progress, and the cards change hands rapidly in this business. What seems like a good deal to Fox now, improving their broadcast relationships, might turn out to be a ball and chain a year from now as the practicality of cord-cutting grows.
Sometimes companies have to do things that their customers don’t like. Raise rates, for instance. Ugly but inevitable. But making decisions plainly detrimental to your customer experience for mysterious reasons will have repercussions. In this case, they just lost thousands upon thousands of loyal viewers who enjoyed their products, many of whom consider themselves abused and will never return.
Analysts and pundits have been predicting an iPad 3 with a late 2011 launch for some time now, but if accounts from suppliers in Asia are to be believed, there just is no way that’s going to happen — if the rumors of the high-DPI screen are correct in the first place (and we think they are).
A 9.7″ display sporting 2048×1536 pixels, four times more than the current iPad and three times more than the HD displays on many Android tablets, is quite simply at the very limit of LCD panel manufacturing capability. Apple previously had hoped to have at least five or six million units by the end of the year and placed orders to that effect, but Digitimes is reporting that those orders have disappeared.
The chatter around the display industry water cooler is that Sharp is the only company capable of making these panels with any kind of real reliability; Samsung and LG apparently can’t reach a good yield. If these companies wanted to throw away money, they could invest despite poor yields, as Microsoft did in order to bring the Xbox 360 to market early, but we all know how that turned out. Samsung has actually demonstrated an alternative type of high-resolution display, but it’s unlikely Apple would use it even if it were ready for market.
These screens would be among the highest performing in the world, yet must be manufactured by the millions for relatively low cost. Apple doesn’t make its own displays (among other things), so it’s at the mercy of OEMs like Sharp. And if Sharp says “if anybody could do it, we could — but we can’t,” then Apple has no choice but to take that hit and delay the product.
Meanwhile, the same sources estimate as many as 30 million iPad 2s will be shipped in 2Q11; with no “rare” parts, they can be made as fast as the millions of hands in vast factory towns can put them together.
Of course it has to be said that a product that is not announced can’t, strictly speaking, be delayed. And I’m sure Apple was prepared for this eventuality, likely being informed while collaborating with Sharp that yields might just not hit targets in time. So: a revised launch schedule. January, anyone?
Crunchbase IPADProduct: IPAD Website: http://www.apple.com/ipad/ Company Apple
The Apple iPad, formerly referred to as the Apple Tablet, is a touch-pad tablet computer announced in January 2010, and released in April 2010. It has internet…
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Crunchbase APPLE
Company: APPLE Website: http://www.apple.com Launch Date: 1/4/1976 IPO: 1980, NASDAQ:AAPL
Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer,…
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Remember way back in February when Thunderbolt was unveiled? Shocking though it may be, a 10Gbps interconnect is useless without peripherals, and thankfully Promise and LaCie also announced compatible drives touting Q2 / summer availability. As promised, Promise’s wares released as expected alongside Apple’s T-bolt cable, but LaCie’s Little Big Disk has been curiously absent. As it turns out, the company’s website has been quietly updated and now reflects a winter 2011 release for these Intel 510 SSD-packable drives, which is just about enough to force a FOF onto even the happiest of faces. Still antsy to pick one up? Better plan to avoid Santa’s naughty list — at this point, waitin’ and wishin’ is about all you can do.
[Thanks, Mikhail]
LaCie’s Thunderbolt-equipped Little Big Disk sees apparent shipping delay originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 15 Jul 2011 19:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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White iPhone delay partly due to UV protection In an interview with Ina Fried at AllThingsD, Phil Schiller and Steve Jobs gave a little insight into what made the white iPhone 4 so tough to produce . Actually, it wasn’t really the manufacturing itself, but the materials science needed to make sure the white iPhone was in every way as capable and durable as the black-painted iPhone 4. Schiller told Fried, “…There’s a lot more that goes into … Read more on The Unofficial Apple Weblog
LG’s Optimus 2X: twice the power in every wash? LG is first to launch a dual-core smartphone in Australia, beating Apple’s next iPhone to the dual-core punch, but are dual-cores enough to win LG’s duel, not only with Apple, but its battle with every other smartphone maker on the planet? Read more on iTWire
White iPhone 4 Debuts in Stores Tomorrow Apple will release the white iPhone 4 tomorrow. It’ll be available from Apple, AT&T, Verizon Wireless and select resellers. Read more on infoSyncWorld
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Research In Motion—RIM to you and me—was forced to delay the release of its PlayBook tablet because Apple pretty much exhausted the supply of touchscreen displays. The tablet has been delayed for about a year now, so a few extra days probably won’t make too big a difference. And, of course, no tablet other than the iPad matters, so it’s all a bit moot.
The PlayBook will be available on April 19, but unlike the Motorola Xoom it won’t require a second mortgage to finance its purchase. It’ll come in three flavors: 16GB ($ 499), 32GB ($ 599), and 64GB ($ 699). It should also be noted that it “only” has a 7-inch display, but I could have sworn I’ve seen threads online wherein people wish there was a smaller version of the iPad, the current size being a tad too big to comfortably tote about town without constantly being reminded, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got this thing with me.”
We had nearly forgotten Lenovo’s Eedoo spinoff and its China-bound video game console, seeing as how it failed to meet a planned November 2010 unveiling, but IDG News reports that the motion-sensing eBox hasn’t slipped Lenovo’s mind — it’s just been pushed further into 2011. How far? If we were to guess, we’d say Q2 2011, and the video above spells out why. Seemingly by coincidence, we were just sent this footage of a game called Flyimal, built on the Unity Engine as a collaboration between 3D asset company Mixamo and 3D gesture recognition company Omek Interactive, and — get this — running on “the first [console] to be made by the Chinese for the Chinese market and due for launch by Q2 of this year.” We can’t think of many game systems that fit that description, to be honest. There’s not a lot to look at here, but we imagine PrimeSense and competitors will be perusing the video soon, noting that the machine captures precisely 15 points on a user’s body for its gesture recognition algorithms… and wondering if there’s a third dimension to any of that movement. Read Unity, Mixamo and Omek’s statement after the break.
We had nearly forgotten Lenovo’s Eedoo spinoff and its China-bound video game console, seeing as how it failed to meet a planned November 2010 unveiling, but IDG News reports that the motion-sensing eBox hasn’t slipped Lenovo’s mind — it’s just been pushed further into 2011. How far? If we were to guess, we’d say Q2 2011, and the video above spells out why. Seemingly by coincidence, we were just sent this footage of a game called Flyimal, built on the Unity Engine as a collaboration between 3D asset company Mixamo and 3D gesture recognition company Omek Interactive, and — get this — running on “the first [console] to be made by the Chinese for the Chinese market and due for launch by Q2 of this year.” We can’t think of many game systems that fit that description, to be honest. There’s not a lot to look at here, but we imagine PrimeSense and competitors will be perusing the video soon, noting that the machine captures precisely 15 points on a user’s body for its gesture recognition algorithms… and wondering if there’s a third dimension to any of that movement. Read Unity, Mixamo and Omek’s statement after the break.
Continue reading Lenovo’s Chinese eBox console suffers delay, here’s how its camera-based games might play (video)
Lenovo’s Chinese eBox console suffers delay, here’s how its camera-based games might play (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Jan 2011 13:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Though we found Verizon’s new LTE network pleasantly speedy in early testing, there are a few rough edges to the tech — Verizon’s USB modem have difficulty handing off connected users from an EVDO network to an LTE one, and of course, they don’t yet work on Mac. However, Verizon’s since admitted to both these issues and pledged to remedy the twain. “Hand-offs can take up to a couple minutes, but that was expected and a fix is in the works,” it told Computerworld earlier today. “Mac is not yet supported, and we’ve been working on drivers for Mac OS for weeks, and expect to update relatively soon,” a representative added. Now let’s see the company bring some sense to the wild, wild west we call the 4G market.
Verizon: LTE modem handoff has two-minute delay, fix (and Mac compatability) on the way originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 11 Dec 2010 23:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Yes, the HP Slate 500 is officially backordered, less than a month after its enterprising debut, and Hewlett-Packard claims it’s because of “extraordinary demand,” a phrase that’s presently not quantifiable. The long and short of it, though, is that you’re not getting one by Yuletide if you purchase the pricey portable today, as you’ll have to wait six weeks until they’re ready to ship out. Still, if your budding business bought in on day one, there’s still a chance it might arrive in time — ours is due to our door in early December, if that gives you any idea. We’ve pinged HP for comment, and hope to hear back soon. We’ll be sure to let you know just how “extraordinary” those sales numbers might be.
Update: We’ve yet to hear back from HP proper, but a trusted tipster with a contact inside HP spun us a very interesting tale — HP reportedly only ever planned a limited production run of 5,000 units, and received orders for 9,000 instead. When demand outstripped supply, HP apparently had to re-hire production workers just to get the presses printing out tablets again, and are presently placating angry customers by offering them over $ 100 off their $ 800 purchase as apology.
[Thanks, Dan]
HP Slate 500 sees ‘extraordinary demand,’ experiences six-week shipping delay (update) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 13 Nov 2010 23:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Is LG’s tablet delay really an Android Gingerbread delay? Some news coming out of Korea seems to suggest that LG’s Android tablet was never planned to run Android 2.2 Froyo, and that the tablet’s delay could be due, instead, to Google delaying the launch of its tablet-friendly Android Gingerbread OS, which was originally planned for Q4 of 2010. Read the full story here. Read more on Mobile Burn
Android Tops iPhone Among New Buyers Google Inc.’s Android software has become the most popular operating system in the U.S. among new smartphone buyers, topping the iPhone and BlackBerry platforms, according to Nielsen Co. Read more on BusinessWeek
Android phones popular in US WASHINGTON – SMARTPHONES powered by Google’s Android software were the most popular among US consumers over the past six months ahead of the Blackberry and Apple’s iPhone, the Nielsen Co said on Tuesday. Thirty-two per cent of new smartphone buyers in the United States purchased a handset running Android during the period, Nielsen said. Twenty-six per cent chose the Blackberry operating system … Read more on Straits Times
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