Murdoch tries an old fashioned approach

The pace of iPad App releases by newspaper and magazine publishers has ratcheted-up of late with most major publications now boasting a product in the App Store or at least one at a mature stage of development.

While that may give hundreds of mastheads an iPad presence, I don’t think many have thoughtfully embraced the new platform at all well. For an industry that desperately needs a circuit-breaker — something that adds value to the online reader experience and thereby to balance-sheets as well — none so far would appear to have game changer potential.

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When David becomes Goliath

What a difference a decade makes for Apple. During the late nineties the computer company (that’s all they built back then) nearly went broke. But then came the iMac which changed the company’s fortunes, followed by the iPod, which changed the world.

For most of its thirty years in business Apple has held underdog status, a David in the context of a Microsoft Goliath. The Apple brand brought connotations of a fringe-dwelling cult and its followers were personal computer outcasts with just a two or three-percent market share. But you need to strain hard to remember those days now given what Apple has become: today it’s a globally dominant force in half a dozen markets.

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Canon moves to claim new web real estate

Canon has applied to the people who control such things for the right to use its own company name as a custom top-level domain.

The company announced it is talking with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) about the right to use the “.canon” domain type.

They’re the first to apply to do so (certainly the first to say so publicly) so there’s no telling how they might plan to use it. I am assuming it won’t be canon.canon, so maybe eos.canon or 1d.canon to provide product specific links?

Or are they just getting ahead of the domain squatters?

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