Finance Matters

Archive for February 1st, 2010

…By now, we’ve all seen the iPad and know just about everything about it that we possibly can. But did you know that the secretive company may actually be hard at work on a second device already? …And this one may be much more like a Mac than an iPhone.

Before the iPad was revealed last week, rumors circulated for a long time that Apple might be working on two different sizes for the screen of the device. Some had the device as small as 7″, others were saying it would go up to 10.6″. (The actual size of the iPad is 9.7″.) But the information we’re hearing is that Apple is thinking much larger for another version of the product, maybe all the way up to the 15.4″ size that it currently uses for one version of the MacBook Pro. If you think that would be way too big for an iPad, we’re also hearing that this other tablet would be quite a bit different from the one revealed last week. Namely, it could run a version of OS X much closer to the traditional version that runs on Macs.

Continue reading at TechCrunch »

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• iPad For Verizon Is Happening, Verizon Source Says
• Hitler Gets An Apple iPad
• Apple Prepares For Video Calls On The iPad… Someday

Google is building an App Store for its business-focused Google Apps software, which includes Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Spreadsheets, etc., the WSJ reports.

Through the store, Google Apps customers could purchase add-ons for the Web apps, increasing Google’s feature set (and revenues) without increasing the complexity of its base products.

This as Google tries to disrupt several Microsoft businesses, including its Office and Windows giants, and its Exchange email business.

Google could announce the App Store as soon as March, the WSJ’s Jessica Vascellaro says. Like the App Stores flourishing in the mobile industry, Google could collect a cut from sales while passing the majority of revenue along to developers.

Click here to see 10 ways Google is trying to kill Microsoft →

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Google: Where A Genius Feels Average
• Google Is Wrecking DoubleClick, Says Unhappy Client
• CHART OF THE DAY: Google Revenues Reach $1.34 Million Per Employee

Whoops!

According to the Honolulu Advertiser, ABC hosted a sneak preview in Oahu, Hawaii and some 12,000 fans waited on a beach for the screening and watched the entire first hour of the spoiler-filled episode.

The Live Feed blog tells us some sneaky viewers posted the whole screening on YouTube, but ABC has taken the screening down. For now!

“ABC’s legal department is playing whack-a-mole trying to take down the videos,” according to the Live Feed.

There’s only about 28 more hours left until the real deal on ABC at 8 p.m. tomorrow night.

If you don’t mind the spoilers, there’s this intentionally leaked sneak peek from the two-hour season premiere:

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Lost’s Last Season Marks The End Of The Serial-Show Fad — Back To CSI
• ABC Cancels Ugly Betty After Ugly Ratings
• ABC Can’t Sell Out The Academy Awards

Steve Jobs may be known for giving a great demo, but let’s face it: there are a lot more people who want to see the iPad in action than there are people willing to sink an afternoon into watching it.

Fortunately, Neil Curtis has a solution: Jobs’s entire unveiling condensed to three minutes:

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Google’s Nexus One Presentation Was Terrible — Here’s What They Did Wrong
• iPad For Verizon Is Happening, Verizon Source Says
• Why I Won’t Buy An iPad

Earlier, we presented charts showing last year’s White House economic forecasts versus this year’s White House economic forecasts.

They look basically the same, except that last year the worst year for the deficit was supposed to be last year and this year it’s supposed to be this year.  And so on.  If you go back farther, moreover, to the George W. Bush years, you find that he, too, forever told us that prosperity was just around the corner.

Nothing illustrates this better than David Leonhardt’s cool new budget widget in the NYT.

With a scroll of your mouse, you can go through each forecast from 2001, which looked like this…

to 2009, which looked like this:

And you can also read David’s excellent tale of our budget collapse, which begins like this:

There are two basic truths about the enormous deficits that the federal government will run in the coming years.

The first is that President Obama’s agenda, ambitious as it may be, is responsible for only a sliver of the deficits, despite what many of his Republican critics are saying. The second is that Mr. Obama does not have a realistic plan for eliminating the deficit, despite what his advisers have suggested.

Keep reading at the NYT >

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Don’t Worry: Prosperity Is Just Around The Corner