Pay Tube?

Posted: January 29, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

No, they’re not going to start charging for everything, but You Tube is set to launch some paid channels this spring. They’re trying to lure some content producers along the lines of lesser cable channels and makers of TV series to the site. Apparently they will have pay per view, or monthly fees to watch these more commercial channels…ranging from a dollar to five dollars a month. A Google spokesperson says they’ve been looking at doing this for quite a while now. It remains an experiment…they aren’t sure that even with professional content channels at the level of cable TV that large numbers of people will pay to watch….especially on a site that’s been built on free content.

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Videos Now the Fruit of Twitter’s Vine

Posted: January 24, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Something new besides Tweets and pictures is just out from Twitter. It’s from a company they acquired, and it’s called Vine. Vine lets you upload little 6 second looped videos. Yes, that’s short, but from a company that gave us 140 character Tweets, no surprise. Twitter says it will encourage creativity…and apparently lots of editing to cut things down to 6 seconds. Right now, Vine is only available on iPhone and iPod Touch from the Apple App store, but Twitter says versions for all the other mobile platforms will be out soon. Some users had trouble logging in with their Twitter credentials early on. The problem is supposedly cleared up for all now. Here’s a word of warning…if you’re prone to drunk texting or Tweeting, you might want to pass on Vine!

Microsoft’s Surface Pro Finally Coming

Posted: January 22, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

After months, Microsoft has finally announced a release date for the Microsoft Surface Pro tablet, and a price. They will start selling it on February 9th, and the Surface Pro will run you $899…a full $400 more than the Surface RT that’s already out. If you really want a good Windows tablet, this might be the ticket…it runs the full version of Windows 8, so you can do actual work on the Surface Pro…the hardware is said to be equal to that of an ultrabook. The Surface Pro will be available at Microsoft stores, Best Buy, Staples, and online at microsoftstore.com. You can add the cover with flat keyboard for another hundred, and even though it has a touch screen…if you really have to have one, there’s a mouse!

We Still Use Phones More Than Tablets

Posted: January 14, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

You’d think tablets were taking over the world, but at least in data use, they’ve got a ways to go before catching up with smartphones. A survey is just out, and of the top 10 data gobbling devices, 7 are smartphones, and 3 tablets. Technically, one is a phablet, but that’s really just a big smartphone. Researchers at Arieso, the mobile data analytics company, found that iPhone 5 users really burned through the data, downloading 4 times as much content as iPhone 3G users did. All the flagship smartphones…from Apple, Samsung, and HTC showed greater data use than tablets. With all the outrage when phone companies have threatened to throttle data hogs, they found that 1 percent of users chew through 40 percent of downloaded data.