| Related Articles: News, All |
Top Stories: Nov. 23, 2009by Danny Wool on Nov 23, 2009Adobe Enters eReader Fray Amazon may have the Kindle, along with Oprah's endorsement, but there are plenty of new products entering the market, and San Jose's Adobe Systems plans to be a part of them. PDF's (Portable Document Format), developed by Adobe, are already ubiquitous online as a means of reading and sending documents that should not be altered, so it is only logical that the next step would be to adopt that format for electronic books. Sony has already done that, incorporating Adobe's technology into its eReader, and rumor has it that Barnes and Noble, the nation's largest book retailer, is planning to do the same when it comes out with its own eReader, Nook. The real problem is that so many other companies are also coming out with their version of the eReader, including Apple (the "Tablet"), Microsoft ("Courier"), and a new player, Spring Design, which will apparently run on Google's Android on its "Alex." So who will win the race to the top? It's too close to call. Kindle already has market penetration, Sony and Adobe are making inroads and have brand recognition, Microsoft is, well, Microsoft, and Apple has its own base of millions of loyal users. And then there's Fremont-based Spring Design … No one may have heard of them yet, but they do have the power of Google, including Google's vast Google Books collection (once—and if—all the copyright disputes are settled), to give them a good run for their money. It's still too early to call. Read More at NBC Bay Area. Read More at Mashable.com. Read More at Digital Trends. Could the Raiders Be Coming to Santa Clara Too? Could a second team be coming to Santa Clara? Could it be the Oakland Raiders? As the county struggles with ways to make the proposed new stadium economically viable without turning to the taxpayers, one possible solution now being touted is having two teams share the same stadium. And what team is being targeted to join the 49ers, but the Raiders from across the Bay. Advocates of the two-team approach claim that this would double the revenue. Two teams means twice the income. But then there are the opponents of having even one team migrate south to Santa Clara for the football season. These include Bill Bailey of Santa Clara Plays Fair. "Stadium proponents on the 49ers have tried to persuade us we will not see environmental problems more than two or four nights a year. Now they're talking about doubling the number of home games," he says. He goes on to list the possible irritants that local residents might feel, including increased traffic on game days, road closures, and police checkpoints. Karen Hardy, a former planning commissioner, concurs. She says that the proposal would turn local residents into "virtual prisoners" whenever there's a home game, adding that the proposal would also be a huge impediment for nearby Great America. So far, no one from the Raiders has publicly expressed interest in the proposal. On the other hand, they just renewed their contract with Oakland, extending it to 2013—just one year before the new Santa Clara stadium is scheduled to open. Read More at KCBS. Read More at the SF Examiner. Traffic to Mineta Dropping Despite last week's good news that Air Horizon will be launching daily flights from Mineta to Spokane, San Jose's refurbished international airport is still seeing a decline in traffic—despite a $1.3 billion investment. Passenger traffic in October was 8 percent less than it was in October 2008, while the number of total passengers has dropped by 1 million between 2007 and 2008. Perhaps its because there are fewer flights: daily flight volume decreased from 190 to 150 since September 2007. There is some good news, however. For the past two month, the decline in passenger traffic has been under 10 percent, and optimists like City Manager Debra Figone say this indicates that the decline is leveling off. With the holiday season ahead of us, that trend may even continue through November and December, but there is no assurance yet that it will continue into 2010. Read More at the San Jose Business Journal. Microsoft and Murdoch Taking on Google Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch have one thing in common: people either love or loathe them. Now it appears that they have something else in common: they are both at war with Google. Gates and Microsoft recently launched Bing to challenge Google's hegemony over the search market, and even teamed up with Google's old rival Yahoo to provide an ad platform to the site. Murdoch has been threatening for ages to take measures to prevent Google from "stealing stories" published in its newspapers. My enemy's enemy is my friend, as they say. Now Microsoft is in talks with News Corp., encouraging it to delist its sites from Google. Apparently, it is only the most recent attempt by Microsoft to get big publishers to delist their offerings. Insiders claim it is even offering to pay News Corp. to do this, thereby making Bing the only place to go to look up stories on the Wall Street Journal, antics by Glenn Beck, and friend lists on Myspace. Despite Google's denials that its revenue is based on news content, that would certainly draw users to Bing. But the real winner here will be News Corp., which has been struggling to find a way to earn revenue from its web presence, even as the newspaper business is dying. Could it negotiate itself into a bidding war between the two web giants over who indexes its content? They seem excited by the prospect. As James Murdoch says, there's "potentially a wholesale market place for digital journalism that we’ll be developing." Read More at the Silicon Valley Insider. Read More at the Financial Times. by Danny Wool on Nov 23, 2009 |
 Apple has postponed the launch of its Tablet e-book, and Adobe has entered the competition. |
|
|
