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30 Dec 2011 11:48

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Tech: Amazon sold a bunch of Kindles, but don’t expect a specific count

  • 4 million Kindles sold in December … well, at least we think so source
  • » It’s an estimate based off of Amazon’s evasiveness. They said that customers “purchased well over 1 million Kindle devices per week” in the month of December. Sales of Kindle e-books were up 175% from last year’s period between Black Friday and Christmas; so while Amazon may not give us clear numbers, the company seems to be doing well in the fields it created.
Posted by samimain • 0 Comments • Permalink

21 Apr 2011 14:23

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Biz: Running the NYT paywall has higher cost than you might expect

  • $13 million to run the New York Times paywall in 2011 source
  • » This is a hefty figure. And it’s not the whole enchilada — the Times spent a lot getting it together, on top of the incremental costs involved. But it doesn’t necessarily spell problems for the new system — the Times has netted about 100,000 digital subscribers since instituting the paywall, reportedly enough to break even on the operating costs after the first quarter of 2011. That said, we suspect not many casual observers expected this high a cost would be absorbed simply to keep up the paywall, and having the spoils of your first 100,000 subscribers be a financial wash is something we doubt the Times relishes. But we think people need to give this time.
Posted by Chris Tognotti • 0 Comments • Permalink

31 Mar 2011 14:28

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Sports: A national pastime to pass your time

  • The long winter is over: For those of you who are baseball fans, Opening Day is an occasion when anticipation, good vibes, and nostalgia of all stripes can wash over you in an instant. And as two-thirds of us here at ShortFormBlog have the World Series-winning Giants in our backyard, the local enthusiasm is hard to miss. A fun bit of trivia, courtesy of The Atlantic: since William Howard Taft, every President besides Jimmy Carter has thrown out at least one ceremonial first pitch. Likely due to the kerfuffle that unfolded over his NCAA basketball bracket, President Obama will not be throwing the first pitch at the Nationals opener this year. source
Posted by Chris Tognotti • 0 Comments • Permalink

26 Jan 2011 13:35

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U.S.: The high cost of unfunded tax cuts

  • $1.07 trillion could have been our deficit in 2011 source
  • » Not to belabor the point: The extension of the Bush-era tax cuts, which the President hashed out with Republicans, was a compromise granted to a political party that claims to be concerned about the deficit. You might therefore think the deal wouldn’t staggeringly increase the deficit, but you’d think wrong. This news will invariably be spun into another story about reckless liberal spending, but remember: this was the war trophy the Republican Party got out of the President, unfunded expenditure be damned.
Posted by Chris Tognotti • 1 Comment • Permalink

18 Jan 2011 22:09

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Biz, Tech: Steve Jobs may be sick, but Apple’s still killin’ profit expectations

  • Want to know the best way to get investors off your back about your iconic CEO’s illness? Post numbers that make everyone criticizing you look like chumps. That’s what Apple did today. And even though Steve is still sick (and hopefully he’s able to deal with that without a problem), the numbers suggest that Apple does so much right that it’ll be hard for them to screw up the next couple of quarters. Just to give you kids an idea:
  • $22 billion in revenues in the first quarter for Apple (very good)
  • 2% the increase in Apple’s stock after Apple’s numbers were released, nearly erasing earlier Jobs-illness-related losses
  • 4:5 the number of Fortune 500 companies currently field testing the increasingly-popular iPad – suggesting further success
  • 16.2M the number of iPhones Apple sold, which is way up from a year ago
  • 7.33M the number of iPads they sold – an extremely robust number
  • 4.1M the number of Macs they sold – also way up from a year ago source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

21 Jul 2009 22:49

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Culture: The Ninja Turtles found a screenwriter in John Fusco. Hi-ya!

Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello and Raphael, are returning to kick some blockbuster butt in 2011. Now, they’ll have a plot too. source
Posted by Nathalie Heiberg • 0 Comments • Permalink

19 Mar 2009 00:35

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U.S.: How many soldiers were affected by the stop-loss policy?

  • 120,000+ solders have been affected by stop-loss since 2001
  • 13,000 are still currently in the military due to stop-loss orders source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 
 
 
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