In other words, stop complaining about unsustainable work habits leading to physical and mental problems among founders, and let venture capitalists turn that hard work into (a) profit for them while (b) keeping you all safe from Chinese Dominance.
I thought it was interesting? It's not even like the author himself came here and put it in front of you. I can send you some links with much more comprehensive displays of vacuousness on the internet if you need some solid targets.
Well, it is also not hard to think of other successful independent games that predate 2004. Or 1994. Or 1984. It seems to come down to what you mean by it? Without access to the author's mental definition of the term we can't really quibble successfully.
Well, I think the thing you're missing is that not everybody wants investors... Blow has actively worked to help other indie developers stay independent.
You'll also see the 2.6b you're calling liabilities is maybe accumulated depreciation? Actual FY2014 debt is 127.5M. Barnes & Noble is relatively debt-free for a large retailer.
Books (from major publishers at least) are generally purchased at wholesale and held - but (and this is a big but) they're generally returnable to the publisher. Individual store and publisher terms may and will vary.
from the OP: "2014 was the best year we've ever had". Serendipity yes can be found online - no recommendations I've seen have ever approached Amazon's (once I fed my data into them), especially a quickly-shuttered (too creepy?) and now not-remembered program that harvested recommendations via pairing you with folks who'd rated/owned/purchased similar things. That said, it was mostly the experience of physicality that I was referring to, although there is something distinct about browsing physical shelves, a hard-to-capture mix of weight, quality, and visual-imprint – spine design and relative length of titles being nearly invisible online; anecdotally one can see reports of authors captive to Amazon's self-publishing ecosystem writing shorter and shorter books in order to capitalize on per/title payments from their Prime lending program.
A trip to a bookstore, for a large section of the book-loving populace, is indeed something of value beyond just "curation" – the experience of browsing shelves, randomly finding or remembering something you wanted to read, seeing new releases on a table and judging the quality of the paper or the binding or appreciating the rag of the edges – none of this can be reproduced online. While you certainly don't have to appreciate them personally, many folks do.
I know it's only one of the points, but it's not true that ebooks are still "rapidly rising in popularity" - while they do seem to continue to become more popular, the trajectory has clearly slowed. It seems, generally speaking, that we're nearing if not already at a stable rate of ebook market share (on a revenue basis, at least w/r/t the US and UK markets, the only ones I can claim to watch closely.)
For point 1, while I don't have the data, I would be very surprised to find out that over the course of "decades" book sales (or even just print book sales) have "declined", especially given the rate of population growth. What has, 100%, happened is that sales have moved online, for the commodity reason you mentioned, and Amazon's inclination to deeply discount titles to gain market share (which they now are moving ever-so-steadily away from).
I'm not familiar with Tangled, but by the time Disney got to Frozen, there was a trailer with Olaf & Sven that is basically a stand-alone scene not in the movie at all (intentionally). It's impressionistic more than trying to represent the film literally.
the new title is actually incorrect, the "secret" RPG is not the released-to-the-public game but actually "[The] Starlight Lines employee forum" if one is going to be literal about it. I'd personally just keep the article's title.
Just since it hasn't been mentioned - I'd never buy my kids an iPhone 6+ to share, but when our coming up on 4-years-old iPad2 finally becomes unfeasible we'll absolutely get a new iPad. Not to mention the general and more formal education market...
Taboola and that ilk are seriously the devil. I can think of no other development in the last couple of years(or: that became popular over that span) that has done more to degrade the qualitative experience of web browsing.
Ad servers keep track of the number of times the graphic (or other asset) for a particular campaign was served. Lots of other "pixels" also get bundled into the calls depending on what kinds of ad tech the advertiser, publisher, or middlemen are running.
How many people (living, breathing, checkbook-possessing people) actually see an ad is an entirely different question from how many it is served to, and there is (of course) a whole 'nother area of ad tech companies working in that space.
Don't know why parent comment was killed when the article contains a similar assertion (the other way). While not a lot is gained by using loaded words like "theft", it is a simple fact that using ad blockers causes the owners of many of the sites that you visit to receive less revenue than they would otherwise. One can argue that one is perfectly justified in doing this (e.g. many typical examples of this are included below), but one can not truthfully say that they are not taking money away from the sites they visit. (Yes I know about PPC ads and how you never click them. Other than AdSense, the vast majority of advertising out there is sold on a CPM basis.)
You can still buy from within the Marvel and DC apps. I've never tried it, but it looks like comixology has a tool to sync your comics between accounts.
Thanks for doing this! We've been trying to track down a new set and eventually just put in an order at lego.com and hoped for the best for xmas delivery (it's fluctuating between 30 days and 2 week estimate), but this is very useful moving forward.
The retail prices on the new Minecraft sets (The Cave $20 / Crafting Box $50 / The Mine $110 / etc) are pretty closely in line with other branded sets. If you're looking at a marketplace price on an OOS item (e.g. crafting box at $85 right now on Amazon) it's easy to get a bad impression though.
Looking briefly at $50 list Star Wars sets, the piece counts are actually generally lower. Compare the 518 piece minecraft set to the z-95 headhunter @ 373, Umbaran MHC @ 493, & Droid Gunship @ 439.
People using ad blockers doesn't actually bother me, I know it's a pointless argument. What bugs me are people sitting around concocting elaborate moral justifications. If you don't like my site, don't visit it. The end.
In any case, fortunately for you (and for everyone else!) content providers by and large have decided that, rather than spend their time and efforts doing whack-a-mole trying to "block" ad blockers from their sites (something you seem to think is much simpler than it is), that it's more in their interest to invest time and resources in developing more of that same content or functionality that drew people there in the first place.
I like to picture you, sitting there comfortable on the couch, waxing philosophical, languorously reaching out to pluck the food out of my child's hand as he goes to put it in his mouth. Because it works for you, right, you wanted that sandwich? It was his responsibility to eat the sandwich somewhere out of your reach? Want to talk about egregiousness, let's look at the entitlement on display in this thread.
Interesting to consider in tandem with AmazonSupply - a much bigger play for businesses, and one you hear very very little about. You can (and I'm sure they'd prefer that you do) use your Amazon Local Register proceeds to buy most of what you need to run your business. (Leaving aside restaurants/cafes – outside of AmazonFresh delivery markets anyway.)
No offense, but you should really try and meet more people, if everyone you know feels that way. Maybe your peer set isn't diverse enough? Or seek geographic variance? Everybody here seems to be talking about multi million dollar SoHo lofts and what not, which are honestly not even a little bit relevant to the lives of most of the millions of people in the city.
Taking all that at face value it certainly disregards the actual user, who in the vast majority of cases will not be subscribing to this new service. It sounds like Google+ all over again; where Google is spiting the vast majority of its users (removing content that they wish to see) in order to launch a (likely to fail) service that directly replicates one or more services already widely available.
I don't really care about their wording. The proposition that Google has made the choice that labels can either (1) join the premium service or (2) not be on YouTube anymore does not really seem disputed by anyone other than you. Except you may not even dispute it now? If you don't, you may very well not agree with the opinions and commentary people are sharing about the situation, but that's a disagreement about interpretation not facts.
From a seemingly more evenly sourced article on gizmodo:
"Some labels are refusing to sign up because they say they're getting a raw deal from Google. They say that while the major labels have negotiated lucrative contracts, Google is offering indies comparatively bad terms. It's their right to say they don't want to sign up if they don't like the deal Google is offering them. In response, Google is drawing a line in the sand: If your label won't sign on to Google's crappy licensing deal for a new streaming service, you can't host videos on YouTube at all."
Google has a reply appended at the end that is absolutely the worst bit of corporate puffery-non-response I've ever seen from them and IMO as bad a sign as any of the actual things they're being accused of plotting.
Why sit around wishing that Apple would change the policy? Why not just vet the apps that you're installing? If you are considering a free app, it's probably going to have either (a) ads or (b) persistent in app purchase nags. There are lots of good kids apps with neither (check the Toca Boca catalog for instance) but they might set you back as much as $1-3.
Well, they're not talking about leaving a million on the table, they're talking about leaving a million and a half on the table every single day ("if only they'd use our product!"). The figure they come up with is a half a billion dollars, which is a much larger number than you're giving credit to here.