Digital media

"The Disney Way" often refers to the Disneyland employee handbook, which introduces staff ("cast members") to the values that embody Disney. But it should also refer to Disney's habit of making bold acquisitions and turning them into home runs.

The Walt Disney Company just sent shockwaves through the entertainment, tech, media, and finance worlds with its $4 billion blockbuster acquisition of Lucasfilm, the creators and owners of the "Indiana Jones" and "Star Wars" franchises. Lucasfilm has also provided the visual effects for countless blockbusters, including "The Avengers" (a Disney … Read more

Three years ago (an eternity in the social media world), Facebook was trying to become more like Twitter. Facebook, while big, wasn't the dominant force it is today, and Twitter was growing at record speeds.

This scared Facebook, of course, so Zuckerberg and his team set out to counter the Twitter threat with updates of their own. Facebook added public status updates and a real-time search engine. It even released Facebook Lite, a simplified Facebook interface that drew a lot fo comparisons to Twitter's sparse and simplistic design.

Fast-forward to today. Facebook has grown to 950+ million users … Read more

Wall Street does not like Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer at the moment. But I'd bet on Mayer over Wall Street any day of the week.

Yahoo's stock has dropped 9 percent over the past week. The reason: the tech giant recently announced that it might not return to shareholders the billions it stands to earn from selling its stake in Alibaba. As a result, short-term investors started dropping Yahoo shares almost immediately.

I feel for Yahoo shareholders, especially the long-term ones. You've gone through one mediocre CEO who couldn't move the needle (Carol Bartz) and one … Read more

It's widely expected that Apple will release a 7-to-8-inch tablet next month. Will it be the "iPad Mini" as many have been calling it? Or will it be a larger iPod Touch, as has been debated?

My experience using Google's Nexus 7 Android tablet suggests to me that it might not matter.

The rumored Apple tablet got renewed attention last week, after court documents in the Apple-Samsung patent dispute revealed that even after Steve Jobs famously dismissed 7-inch tablets in October 2010, Apple was still internally discussing the idea.

How have we gone from Jobs seeming … Read more

One of the nice things about the new Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion release is that the Notes application makes it easy to have notes sync from your Mac to your iPhone or iPad. But what if you're an Android user or want your notes to flow outside the Apple ecosystem for some reason? Yes, it can be done.

I don't take a lot of notes, but I've found it handy to have some things like frequent flyer numbers jotted down digitally in an easy-to-locate format. As a longtime Outlook user, I've used Outlook'… Read more

Since this is a column about "Common Sense Tech," I thought I'd take that name and run with it in terms of social-media sharing. Sometimes I see a lack of common sense, politeness, and manners when it comes to personal sharing. Consider this a "things not to do" list.

Some of the suggestions below are things I personally try to follow. I love to share on social media, but I also try to be mindful of people's privacy. Some of the suggestions come from others whom I asked through... social media!

The suggestions are … Read more

Years ago, I went digital with my music. I ripped all my CDs, bringing everything into Windows Media Player. I didn't start with the iPod. The Rio Karma was my main MP3 player. Over the years, my music library moved from computer to computer. It migrated into iTunes (and into iPods, iPhones, iPads....). It gained new music from purchases or the occasional rare CD that I'd buy. And my music got really messy.

I shouldn't really care that somehow, I ended up with two or three different copies of the same songs. What does it really matter, … Read more

Yahoo has pulled off an incredible coup. Forget Carol Bartz, Scott Thompson, and Ross Levinsohn -- Marissa Mayer is Yahoo's new CEO.

I can't stress how much of a coup this is for Yahoo. Mayer, Google's 20th employee and first female employee, was one of the search giant's most recognizable faces. She ran product for Google's search engine for years before being relegated to Google's local products. It was clear her influence in the company had waned, which may be why it wasn't a hard decision for her to leave the comfortable world … Read more

Apple claims 500,000 apps in its App Store for the iPhone and over 700,000 when iPad apps are added in. Google Play claims 600,000 apps for Android. Windows Phone is estimated to have 100,000 apps in its marketplace.

But do the numbers really matter, especially when the "new apps" may be content like video, music, and books?

I'm not a big fan of numbers just for numbers' sake. I watched search engines play the numbers game for years, each trying to be "bigger" than their competitors by having more Web pages. … Read more