Affiliate Programs and Affiliate Reviews
Tuesday’s surprise $1 billion buyout offer for Novell from the New York-based private investment group Elliott Management came with a letter spelling out the investors’ goal for the company. “Over the past several years, [Novell} has attempted to diversify away from its legacy division with a series of acquisitions and changes in strategic focus that have largely been unsuccessful,” the firm wrote.
At the end of business last Friday, Google announced it had completed the transaction to acquire On2 Technologies, the maker of Web video encoding software and codecs, for a deal that was finally valued at $124.6 million. On2 was a small company that was, in recent quarters, losing small amounts of money.
One of the key objections Mozilla and its supporters have had to the use of H.264 codecs for HTML5 video — the built-in decoding system being developed for the next edition of HTML — is that it’s proprietary technology. As such, there are no guarantees against the rights holders to that technology staking claims to it and charging money for it.
Just over two years ago now, Facebook began deploying a behavioral tracking service it called “Beacon,” which automatically enabled the tracking of Facebook users’ behavior but shared that data with advertising partners. It wasn’t an “opt-in” service by anyone’s definition, and after Facebook took down most of the service, customers filed a class-action suit against the social network.
The problem with characterizing any kind of business, including information technology, as “war” is that it immediately polarizes the opinions not only of the war’s practitioners but also of its observers. Once an enemy is formally declared, the concept of “If you’re not with us, you’re against us” becomes self-fulfilling.
As the FCC continues to consider regulations that would limit an Internet service provider’s ability to restrict customers’ access to specific services in the name of traffic management, it is now no longer possible to foresee an outcome to the debate without someone claiming that Constitutional rights are being violated somewhere.
One of the reasons Apple has been the most venerable opponent a courtroom defendant may face is because of a significant trump card the U.S. Supreme Court handed it in 1983. In a landmark case that rendered “Apple II clones” effectively illegal, the high court established a unique precedent for determining liability and damages in software copyright cases.
The problem remains: How can a business be profitable at producing news for the Internet audience when the principal method for ensuring that the news is visible to that audience is a free system? The U.S. Federal Trade Commission could not have chosen two more appropriate representatives of the opposite poles of this issue than News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch and mega-blog editor Arianna Huffington.
If there were a psychiatrist seated across the room from us, and we were to present to her our feelings about information technology as a force in our lives, her diagnosis would be simple and immediate: We have an obsession. Maybe having nothing to do with technology itself at all, we’re obsessed with the notion of a nemesis with an unfair advantage influencing the decisions we make.
The reason commonly given for the creation of technology standards is to enable a more open, seamless process for licensing and adoption. However, in its lawsuit filed recently against iPhone maker Apple, Nokia is attempting an interesting spin on this definition, which may very well reflect reality.
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