I love the html5 version of grooveshark though it's limited I can still use it on my iphone. I really wish there was a directory which showed all html5 apps kind of app store style. Does anyone know if there are any?
I find this line pretty interest:
"Because Murstein's company owns a bank, it’s able to take advantage of the Fed’s low interest rates to borrow money for 0.35 percent and loan it out to striving young cabbies who want to own a medallion. The cabbie borrows at around 5.5 percent, with 25 percent down.
“If a borrower doesn’t pay, we send out somebody,” Murstein said. “Literally, they can pop the medallion off the hood of the car and bring it back to our office and, bingo, the guy is out of work.” "
He basically has no risk on his end. Looks like he found a pot of gold!
For that, they have first to get a supply of medallions. And current owners won't sell them unless they are given some serious money to replace that 5.5%-0.35% income stream. One of the reasons why the price of medallions skyrockets.
Of course, I imagine it's not completely risk-free. It is a strictly regulated business. Which means you need a lot of friends in key places - otherwise somebody who does have a lot of friends would put you out of the lucrative business and take it for himself.
And there's some measure of competition - 5.5% is not a super-high for a loan with a collateral. Higher than mortgage rates but substantially lower than unsecured loan rates. About 1% over common HELOC rates and about the same as home equity loan rates. Of course, repossessing a home is much harder than repossessing a medallion, so probably medallion business is better, but the rate is not totally outrageous compared to similar loans.
i'm not too sure on the exact details of antitrust but this seems more ethical then antitrust. They are not disallowing the users from NOT being able to purchase more dropbox storage - as long as it goes their stream to purchase it (which results in them getting 30%). Wouldn't antitrust be that they are not allowing it all together on their platform? Wouldn't the same idea of you going to a movie theater and not allowing you to bring in your own food/candy - you must purchase it through them since they make more money from a transaction you would have done elsewhere?
What is the reason why Google is shutting down Patent Search and (they already shut down Uncle Sam)? I mean - does it really cost them a lot of money to keep these sites running but not update them? For search products like that they should at least make a google product archive to at least access some stuff that could be easily found via those search products even though they no longer update or provide support for them anymore.
They are going away from their motto of "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". Yes you can find patents via other means or get government info via other means but it's defeating the motto of making it universally accessible.
From TC: "Other tools, like Patent Search, are being integrated into the main Google experience."
From Google's own announcement:
"We're redirecting the old Patent Search homepage to google.com to make sure everyone is getting the best possible experience for their patent searches. Over the past few months, we've been making updates and improvements to the Patent Search functionality on google.com—not only are you able to search the same set of U.S. patents with the same advanced search options, the new experience loads twice as fast as the old Patent Search homepage, contributes to a unified search experience across Google, and sports Google Doodles as well. The team looks forward to including patents from other countries soon, and will be rolling out additional features to Patent Search on google.com in the future."
Please re-read the whole announcement.
Oh and I don't think I see anywhere Google+ being mentioned....
the reason why i said google+ is ruining everything is referring to how they are focusing on one thing and that thing is Google+ as per the convo Sergey had with Jobs about concentrating on one thing and stop turning into Microsoft.
Maybe it's a pre-april fools prank (as in it's probably not going to happen but the extra hype will be the prank)! No one would take it seriously (even more seriously) if this fell on sunday.
Thanks and it is all my girlfriend's work. Alexandra is an interior design major at Academy of Art University SF - but as good as she is with architectural design programs (e.g. 3d max), she's just as good as a hobbyist painter.
