Here’s an easily overlooked fact:
Amazon charges $3.50 shipping for books, and sometimes $4.50. Half.com charges $2.79 for paperbacks, $3.25 for hardbacks.
You can find this out by using the isbn.nu shopbot and checking the option to include shipping prices. But that’s a big price difference. On the pro-Amazon side, I’ve noticed that they are heavily discounting new books (discounted from what, I wonder), and that the $25+ free shipping does mitigate things somewhat.
In other news, Chris Anderson realizes that his Long Tail factoid about amazon.com’s sales figures is seriously wrong.
Mark Cuban on why broadcast TV will always be with us:
The internet cant support the equivalent of broadcast TV because the internet cant broadcast. It can deliever individual (unicast streams) streams, but thats it. This is why AOL streaming 350k simultaneous Live8 users was a big deal. Instead of a single 300k video stream that every one tuned into, every viewer had to have their own 300k stream. Thats a boatload of bandwidth and is expensive. What happens when 80mm people want to watch the SuperBowl ? What happens when a measly 4mm want to watch a show ? What happens when they want to see the show in 1080i HD ?
I finally got my Dell Axim PocketPC up and running again. What a relief. I read somewhere that an important part of creativity is making sure to capture your ideas. So many of our brilliant ideas just never get written down, or if they do, they are lost in the shuffle. Knowing that my PDA has personal data (and that it is getting backed up regularly) makes me no longer addle my head with all sorts of unimportant trivia about chores to do/people to call/things to buy.