This post on the future of online video news is part of the September Carnival of Journalism.
The history of online video production and distribution is one of fragmentation (competing formats and players) followed by easy-uploads-with-inferior quality (YouTube); one of dissatisfaction with the cross-browser and cross-platform work-around (Flash) with hopes pinned on a new savior for rich media, HTML5.
How Americans Use Text Messaging: Voice Mail v SMS
My cellphone greeting to callers asks for a text rather than a voice mail. It’s an artifact of my life with a Samsung Blackjack that did not reliably or clearly indicate when I’d missed a call. That was before my iPhone, back when I had to wade through a series of keypad prompts to get to messages and then listen to them one-at-a-time.
Periodically, I think about tweaking my greeting, now that I have visual voice mail. But I never seem to get around to it. A new report from Pew will extend my procrastination.
Pew’s research shows that 8-in-10 American adults now own cellphones; three-quarters of those folks use SMS (short message service, aka texting).
The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project asked those texters in a survey how they prefer to be contacted on their cell phone and 31% said they preferred texts to talking on the phone, while 53% said they preferred a voice call to a text message.
HP is “[discontinuing] operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS phones.” The company slid this into its press announcement regarding possible purchase of Autonomy Corp (AU.L); with a market cap of $7 billion, it is the second largest pure software company in Europe.
The HP TouchPad tablet went on sale on July 1, 2011 and the Veer smartphone earlier in the year. Both run on HP’s webOS, which it acquired with Palm in April 2010 for $1.2 billion. HP has discontinued the TouchPad at 49 days.
On the same day that Google announced it was buying Motorola Mobility, Pew Internet told us that one-third of Americans now one a smartphone and that half of al cellphone owners use their phones to “get information they needed right away.”
Most of the headline writers focused on an inconsequential data point – people sometimes pretend to use their cellphones to avoid other people. Let’s look at the interesting data!
Updated 23 April : The Answer Is “No”
There was a flurry of press during the past week with headlines like this one: “E-book sales make history in the US, top paperback books in sales.”
But is that really what the Association of American Publishers (AAP) data (or the press release) said?
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