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After the disastrous past few months, it seemed nothing Netflix could do could stop its bad fortune. But various pieces of news about the California-based movie rental company from the past week paint a collective picture of a company that isn’t dead just yet, after all.
Happy Tuesday! Here’s what’s happening in tech so far…
You’re hours or maybe entire days into Bethesda’s roleplaying opus, probably bleary-eyed, a little edgy, coming out of the weekend like you chugged a case of Honningbrew Mead and fell into a phantasmagoric stupor. Maybe it’s time to step back, take a break and give things a second look, just to be sure everything’s running smoothly.
If you’re reading this, you’re online and, as such, you probably have an email account. But have you ever wondered about the origins of email? It’s not exactly a cut-and-dried case, as various forms of electronic messaging have been around since the humble telegraph. I had the opportunity to sit down with V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, who holds the first copyright for “EMAIL”—a system he began building in 1978 at just 14 years of age. It was modeled after the communication system being used at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in Newark, New Jersey. His task: replicate the University’s traditional mail system electronically.
Google is giving YouTube a makeover with a new dashboard, home screen and color palette. The bigger news, however, is the continued integration of Google+ into more and more of Google’s products.
Originally promised in October, Apple’s $25-per-year iTunes Match service has finally gone live. Unlike competing services that let you upload your songs “to the cloud” for easy access from other computers and portable devices, iTunes Match scans your music collection and cross-references your songs with the songs on its servers. If there’s a match—get it?—then you’ll have access to that song while on the go.
Not content with murdering people on television and in prose, serial killer anti-hero Dexter has now moved on to computers as well, with new malware trading on the popular Showtime series’ fame to infect PCs.
To everyone who’s been waiting patiently for their new Amazon Kindles to arrive, here’s some good news: The company is shipping them out early, it announced today, with Kindle Touch and Kindle Touch 3G orders being filled six days earlier than expected.
Activision Blizzard announced that the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 was what it’s calling “the biggest entertainment launch of all time in any medium,” with sales in just the U.S. and U.K. topping 6.5 million games sold in its first 24 hours of release.
Amazon’s Kindle Fire arrives on Tuesday to shake up the tablet market, and the reviews are rolling in.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, after Wired’s Steven Levy remarked that Amazon’s new $199 Kindle Fire tablet “seems like more than merely another iPad competitor.” Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think [Wired]
