stoev

"I don't understand why Microsoft took so long to do this."

Skype had free video group calls long before Google Hangouts even existed. If I remember correctly, they forced their users to pay for it a few months or a year after Google Hangouts launched, which was a really stupid move which surely helped Google's product a lot.

"It's not doing that just by introducing new ad space"

Maybe, but just a bit over a year ago they used to have two ads on the right hand side of their desktop version. Now they have seven ads in the same space. They also used to have one mobile ad in their news feed. Now they are sideways scrollable (I think there are five in total). The fanpages' organic posts are reaching fewer and fewer people in an attempt to make the owners pay for as many promoted posts as possible.

A point I noticed in their last earnings report reminded me of the reasoning in the OP's post: one of the signals of decelerating growth is the loss of popularity of early products. Their desktop ad business accounts for less than half of their revenue nowadays, despite the fact that there is a lot more ad space available there.

This reminds me of FBs ad business - they keep introducing new ad spaces, expanding their offering to more platforms, introducing logout ads, video ads, scrollable install ads, an ad platform, etc. With all of that they are just masking the fact that a large portion of their advertisers stop using them and that most of their products start losing popularity relatively quickly.

Yes, the problem won't be solved completely and you will still end up reading the same content more than once. But at least, by analysing the text the search engine could detect which articles are coming from the same source (e.g. inspired by the same press release or just telling the same news event over and over again) and group them accordingly. Currently, I don't feel like Google or other search engines are doing any of that (maybe they are, but if so, the results are not good enough).

I've only used DDG a few times in the past. Could you refer me to a link with some more information on this? Thank you.

How about a search engine that bases its results on how unique the information is on every one of them.

Every time I try to do an in-depth research on Google about some topic I open up 10 or 20 of the most relevant results, only to discover that at least 80% of the information is repeating itself in at least 50-60% of the pages.

One could write a search engine that compares the contents, groups the articles that have similar enough contents and only displays one article per group. This could work especially well in the case of longer searches with enough keywords.

Obviously, this is not a standalone product that would compete against the established search engines, but it could be built on top of them - a browser extension for example.

Any thoughts on this?

Somebody is also working on this and has made very impressive progress:

http://tactustechnology.com

They are also planning to release it for in-car displays.

A carrier would give a lot more thought to disrupting a competitive voice service provided by FB (who already have many agreements with carriers worldwide regarding data usage) than an independent and not particularly well funded (by carrier standards) company like WhatsApp.

I don't see it that way. After selling to FB it became clear that hey intended to launch VoIP. If they actually wanted to launch a high-quality product, better voice service than the one offered by carriers (and therefore much better than what Viber has to offer), they would probably have struggled to do it without the help of FB. Every carrier on earth would be against them.

While I strongly support any business model that tries to escape from the typical ads monetisation strategy, we can see (two years after this post was published) that not relying on ads has not been the best long-term strategy for WhatsApp for two reasons: 1. They didn't manage to stay independent and had to sell to Facebook. I always thought that they had a very good chance to expand their product and built a platform that could truly challenge Facebook, Twitter, etc. 2. Now that they have been acquired by Facebook, we know that it is only a matter of time before an ad product is introduced into the service.

Has anyone seen this before? The app doesn't seem to have any reviews. I wonder if it could be a bug due to the App Store's recent update to include the "In-App Purchases" tag.

The Brief by Time is also a very useful news email. You'll have to create an account on their website to get it.

This article is disappointing - the first two thirds explain why we need better batteries, as if it was not already painstakingly obvious, and then the last bit mentions three technologies without actually saying much about any of them.

Not if you only allow the phone to mine when you are not using it, when it is charging, connected to WiFi, and when the temperature sensor is being monitored. The user could also only give permission for mining in short periods of time.

So, in practice, what is the probability that a transaction would really be cancelled if the issuer of the payment uses this service approximately two minutes after initiating the transaction? (I assume that two minutes are a realistic estimate of the time it takes to realise that one has made a mistake, remember this service, search for it online, and fill out the necessary info.)

Kickstarter's core goal was to help inventors bring their ideas to life and help them fund initial production. It has since evolved into a platform that often helps their most engaged users find new ideas and get early access to new technology. Both of these processes benefit from one another, so I don't think that "it goes against the core ideas on which Kickstarter was created".

Because it is a lot easier to attract new customers and do a free PR campaign this way. It doesn't prevent them from selling the technology later on.

That's better, cheers.

I don't think that there is much that the major PC brands can do to prevent the device from powering their future devices. However, you are right that a certain a certain amount of risk exists and I don't think that one would actually save a lot of money by ordering early. Given that they use no custom electrical components (according to the project description), $89 seems like quite a hefty price. I assume that by the time the device is mass produced its price will be lower due to pressure from competitors.

Thanks. I read that, but was hoping that I could get more detailed information somewhere.

Not yet, apparently they will start shipping in about six months.

I've been thinking about the overweight (and overpriced) laptop adapters for a while and reading about this project made me very happy. Could anyone suggest some scientific reading on their claimed very high frequency power conversion (or any similar technology)?