BOL 1025: Amazon's new kicks

Zappos has been acquired by Amazon, meaning Amazon will have even more shoes to sell, but also a new corporate culture to integrate with. Windows 7 gets released to manufacturing, meaning it's on its way to you. And Microsoft and UBIsoft are getting into the movie business. Is that a good thing?

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EPISODE 1025

Amazon to acquire retailer Zappos http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10293262-93.html

Windows 7 Has Been Released to Manufacturing http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2009/07/22/windows-7-has-been-released-to-manufacturing.aspx

Fiber to the home deployments will grow 30% CAGR to 130M installed by 2013 http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/fiber-to-the-home-deployments-to-grow-more,902195.shtml

Open Source gets it's own lobbying organization http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/new-advocacy-group-pushes-oss-for-the-usa.ars

ATandT activates 2.4 million iPhones; Second quarter tops estimates http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=21579

Microsoft and Ubisoft get into the film business http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ct-videogames23-2009jul23,0,5232624.story

Instant search comes to Splashtop http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10293479-1.html

Major League Baseball Beans Jon Stewart, and Obama's Pitch Vanishes http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090722/major-league-baseball-beans-jon-stewart-and-obamas-pitch-vanishes/

Artificial brain '10 years away' http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8164060.stm

Camaro Transformers Edition http://www.autoweek.com/article/20090722/CARNEWS/907229993

VOICEMAIL Joe Baton Rouge RTM?????

EMAIL Hey Buzz Crew,

I'm about a day behind, but listening to Episode 1023 today, I was intrigued by the fact that Natali has switched search engines to Bing. So have I, but I actually have a reason:

A staunch Google user, I decided to give Bing a try when it came out. One day my wife and daughter phoned from the car to ask me to look up a movie time for them. They said they were going to an AMC Theatre, but couldn't remember the show times. I figured I'd have to look up AMC, filter through a number of entries to find the theatre chain, open that link, find the Canadian locations and so forth. What happened in Bing was that as I entered AMC in the search box and selected the suggested AMC Theatres link, it brought up the actual listings and times of the shows at our neighborhood theatre, right on the Bing search page. I had the answer for them on the phone by literally typing 3 characters and hitting enter.

Not only does Bing read my mind, it knows where I am!

LOVE THE SHOW!

Mike Toronto

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Hey BOL crew,

A couple episodes ago you were talking about how Google keeps its products in beta for years. I was talking to a buddy of mine, who works at a large accounting firm as a technical auditor, about the topic and he mentioned a reason, which I've never heard of before, that benefits their bookkeeping,

According to him, when software is in beta the money that is spent working on it gets counted as a development cost for the asset, but after beta, it gets counted as a support expense.

So lets just say up to now gmail cost a total of $1 million:

a) By keeping it in beta, there books can show that they developed a $1 million asset

b) If they were to take it out of beta earlier, they would show that they developed a $700k asset, which cost them $300k to support.

In both, they spent $1 million but by keeping Gmail in beta their books look better. I don't know if this is right or not, and I don't think would be the reason gmail was in beta for so long, but it's an interesting reason I've never heard before, maybe an accounting guru out there can debunk it.

Love the show,

Jamie, the software developer from Nebraska

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Hey there, Just listening to the kilosode and you mentioned that the manager for RadioHead^? started what amounts to a venture capital fund for start-up bands. And Tom suggested something similar for other arts. This is an amazing idea! For a long time now, I've seen our culture as a feudal system consisting mainly of indentured servitude--to the monthly bills, the credit cards, the car payment, the mortgage--where we've decentralized our fealty or mastery. This new idea seems a clear step towards doing the same thing with patronage. It could work for any traditionally scholarly endeavor, art, science, literature, investigative journalism, whatever. I had always imagined Japan's 'keretsu's (sp?) as being the standard model for corporate feudalism, but it appears that a distributed model may be more robust and could also circumvent many of the bureaucratic problems associated with the culture of ownership. Very cool. Lts, Will Cool Portland, OR USA