January 8, 2001
Newsweek: Sony’s Digital Dilemma.
But now Sony has become the first top-tier consumer electronics company to make mainstream devices that play MP3s. It’s an about-face as abrupt as record label BMG’s recent embrace of Napster. When asked to describe Sony Music’s reaction, one person at Sony Electronics said sheepishly, “They were pissed.”
USA Today: Sony exec sees wired future.
Q&A with Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony of America. We now have 300,000 people paying a $10-a-month subscription fee to play EverQuest. We have a Star Wars game waiting in the wings. So you have all these people buying CD-ROMs and paying subscriptions for something that, in a short time, will actually make money the old-fashioned way.
NY Times: More People Went Online to Talk and Send Greetings Than Shop.
They found that noncommercial activities — getting information about the holidays, seeking tips and ideas for celebrating and using e-mail and e- greetings to make contact with family and friends — drowned out the buy, buy, buy drumbeat of online companies.
MSNBC: Don’t bank on e-payments yet.
While I’m focusing on PayPal, I don’t mean to single them out. Their varied competitors may do some things better and some worse; but being one of the oldest and biggest in the e-payment big top, looking at PayPal’s struggles on the high wire can give a good indication of the problems the rest may face.
ZDNN: Egghead says hacker didn't get access to cards.
As previously reported, the Menlo Park, Calif., company handed over its entire database to the credit card industry on Dec. 21, suggesting that it believed the card numbers contained in the database were at risk. Today's statement seems to refute previous suspicions that the data had been stolen.
InfoWorld: Patent infringement case not going Microsoft's way.
A 35-page opinion by a federal judge in Chicago released after the holidays appears to bolster a small research and development company's case that Microsoft's technology may infringe on its patented Web browser technology.
O'Reilly Network: The End of Streaming Media.
Low bandwidth and poor quality continue to limit the successful distribution of audio and video on the Web. There may be a better way, however, to distribute multimedia content online, by scheduling downloads of high-quality content for appointment viewing or listening.
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