Shocking! “Hamstrung by high fuel prices, reduced customer demand and, most recently, the effect of swine flu on travel patterns, most major airlines are now charging passengers for services once considered part of the ticket price. In addition to meals, snacks and checked bags, depending on the airline customers might be charged for selecting a seat, booking a flight by phone, watching a movie or using a pillow, blanket or headset.”  MORE »

Ouch.  Some big names on this list: “Which companies appear the worst off? We took the list and removed any company with a market cap under $3 billion. We then ranked the remaining names by a simple measure of the market’s perceived bankruptcy risk – Market Cap (MC) divided by Enterprise Value (EV). The less MC vs. EV, the less residual shareholders’ value (above what debt holders can claim) the market is pricing-in for the company. Thus a lower MC/EV means the market thinks the company is more likely to go bankrupt.” 

I don’t have the slightest idea what that means, but company names like Macy’s, Hertz, CBS, AMD, Sprint Nextel, Goodyear Tires and the Las Vegas Sands are enough to raise some eyebrows.

Trendsmap is a real-time Twitter tag map, so you can see what any given community is buzzing about at any given time of the day. 

It’s probably a bit cooler than it is useful at this moment.  But, if I were  a major news organization I would have this up splashed across a monitor in the newsroom. 

For people who still scoff at Twitter, I tell them, think of it as a digital telegraph or news wire (that also allows you to chat with friends).

Remember when drinking PBR was great because it was cheap and because everyone else seemed to think it was somehow “cool?”  I mean, in terms of personal branding and cultural flag waving.  There’s something a bit punk-rock (corporately, anyways) about PBR. 

Well, anyways, for whatever reason PBR because the choice of a certain generation, like Pepsi!, instead of other cheap piss-water beers (High Life, Keystone, Olympia, et. al.). 

“Hipsters boosted PBR sales by 17 percent that year, and sales are up a good 24 percent this year, more than other “subpremium” beers that have spent more advertising dollars trying to appeal to recession slummers.”   Now PBR is repaying those peeps by raising their prices as much as $1.50 more than the other piss-water beer brands. 

What this means is that certain people are going to learn to say Champagne of Beers awfully fast.  At the end of the day, sometimes a cold watery-lager tastes great, but spending that extra $2.50 to get a dank six-pack isn’t going to break the bank.

Finally, some good news from the recession.  In the wake of George Tiller’s murder and the revocation of its tax-exempt status, the terrorist anti-abortion  group Operation Rescue is broke, so broke in fact, that they are begging for money to keep agitating women during their most difficult hour protesting abortion clinics. 

“The group’s president, Troy Newman, blamed the economic downturn for its money woes in a desperate plea e-mailed Monday night to donors. But the Wichita-based organization has also been under attack from both fringe anti-abortion militants and abortion-rights supporters since the May 31 shooting death of Dr. George Tiller.”

Some good suggestions from Jezebel: “Let’s take up a collection, buy up their HQ, and turn it into a Planned Parenthood.” And “Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch of total douchebags.” [via]

Update: It occurred to me, well, readers really, that I should have linked to Planned Parenthood as a resource and to offer them my support. Terrible oversight on my part. My apologies, seeing as I linked to Operation Rescue.

As if you needed yet another way to consume more information, Google has rolled out what they are calling Fast Flip: “The way we would describe Fast Flip would be that it’s not quite a feed reader, and not quite an online magazine. The front page of Fast Flip presents you with several rows of content that can be sorted by topic—the top row lets you choose between recent, most viewed, and recommended headlines, while the second row lets you choose between various hot topics (unsurprisingly, Taylor Swift resides in this row as of this writing), and the third row lets you choose between specific news sources.”

Whereas an RSS reader is something you can specifically taylor to your individual tastes, Fast Flip acts as a method for scanning newspapers and magazines (no blogs I suppose).

Google has partnered with 36 magazine and newspaper publishers, who will receive revenue generated from ads on the site. Currently, the publishers include The New York Times, The Atlantic, Salon, The Washington Post, Newsweek, and ProPublica, according to The Official Google blog.

The BBC reports that other publications such as Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Elle, Popular Mechanics, and Slate, have signed on with Google. (Full disclosure: The Christian Science Monitor is one of the newspapers featured on Google Fast Flip.)

If you were AT&T and you were going to build an online video site, using industry-leading Hulu as inspiration would be a good place to start.  But what you shouldn’t do is use them for inspiration so much so that it looks like you’re just copying them.  It also doesn’t help that the site has practically no content, feels like a Hulu clone with a different color scheme.

On Friday we noted that GQ decided to bury a story about Vladimir Putin’s rise to power by not publishing his article in Russian and by not promoting the magazine article. 

In a classic double-middle-finger salute, Gawker Media has decided to publish the piece with a Russian translation for the world to read.  Or at least Russia. 

Simon Owens, of Bloggasm, sat down with Nick Denton, ruler of the Gawker Media Empire, to find out why. 

Why did he think Conde Nast was going to such great lengths to bury the story?

“I assume concern for the commercial prospects of their Russian titles,” he said. “And remember that the punishment of disobedient journalists can go beyond the impromptu tax audit. Paul Klebnikov of Forbes was killed.”

Gawker has never been one to back down when republishing controversial documents. When the Church of Scientology tried to get the media company to take down leaked video of Tom Cruise’s evangelizing several months ago, the media company refused.

“I’ve always thought that a site like Gawker — though we try to seek out corruption and hypocrisy in New York — would serve a clearer public purpose in Moscow, Beijing or Riyadh,” Denton said.

If you want to read the piece in English, you still have to buy the magazine.

According to a 2008 study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the United States ranked 19th in the world for internet speed with an advertised rate (far different from reality) of 9.6 megabytes per second (mbps). The top three countries were Japan with 92.8 mbps, Korea with 80.8 mbps and France with 51 mbps.

And in most cases, even if you’re paying $60 per month for the highest internet speeds, say from Comcast, they tell you it’s piping in at 12-15 mbps, but really it fluctuates between 5 mbps and 9 mpbs.

The good news is that these American internet service providers want to lower the bar instead of raising it to the Un-American standards of other countries.

“It would be disruptive and introduce confusion if the commission were to now create a new and different definition,” Verizon said in its letter to the FCC.

Comcast Corp, the biggest cable provider, said that “simpler is better” and that the actual online experience of any particular consumer at any particular moment in time involves a wide range of factors.

“Many of which are outside the control of the Internet service provider,” Comcast said in its letter, which argued for defining “basic” broadband as having a downstream and upstream speed of 0.256 mbps.

It’s good to see American companies succumbing to the time-honored American tradition of doing the least amount as possible and calling it good enough.

Really, when all is said and done with the American Empire, cultures will look back at our politicians, artists, companies and overall legacy and say, yup, America sure did know how to lower the bar; instead of rising to get over a higher and higher bar they just decided to crawl underneath it and call it progress.

The general consensus seems to be two fold: business world is excited by the merger & acquisition; fanboys are, obviously, a bit more reticent.

In exchange for $4 Billion, Disney acquires Marvel’s staple of 5,000+ characters.  The news comes as a bit of a surprise for a deal of this magnitude.  The terms of the deal seem to be similar to the one they struck with Pixar several years ago, with Disney acting as a distribution/marketing side and Marvel obtaining creative control of their properties.

The most exciting news?  Pixar head John Lasseter met with Marvel executives last week, “about a possible team-up between Marvel and Pixar and got ‘pretty excited, pretty fast.’ They say there’s definitely an opportunity there.”  Yes, yes there would.  If nothing comes of this deal except Pixar being involved with Marvel Animation then it’s totally worth it.

Though I suppose, Disney ruining the Marvel characters by making them family-friendly would also be a terrible thing.

UPDATE: The L.A. Times weighs in on how Disney can broaden its brand with the purchase of Marvel. The Beat has a good roundup of news related to the deal, too.

Everything about this article regarding cellphone service prices in America as compared to other developed nations is the worst kind of informational journalism. 

It’s remarkably easy to compare the cost of services, plans, phones, etc. against one another, but the piece obfuscates that by relying on he-said-she-said journalism. 

Not only that, but Dan Richman buries the meat of the piece — that the FCC is launching an investigation into cellphone company pricing practices — to the very bottom, rather than that being the hook to do actual consumer journalism.  To you know, perform a service and determine whether or not Americans really are being ripped off by cellphone companies, which most assuredly we are. 

MORE »

An interesting look into the future of wireless telecommunications.  On one side is Google and on the other side are all the old telecos using the same business practices when landlines were invented.

About a month ago, Apple mysteriously rejected a Google app for their new Voice program.  It turned out that it was AT&T that forced Apple’s hands, being that they are the sole provider of service for the iPhone. 

With Google Voice, you have one Google phone number that callers use to reach you, and you pick up whichever phone—office, home or cellular—rings. You can screen calls, listen in before answering, record calls, read transcripts of your voicemails, and do free conference calls. Domestic calls and texting are free, and international calls to Europe are two cents a minute. In other words, a unified voice system, something a real phone company should have offered years ago.

Apple has an exclusive deal with AT&T in the U.S., stirring up rumors that AT&T was the one behind Apple rejecting Google Voice. How could AT&T not object? AT&T clings to the old business of charging for voice calls in minutes. It takes not much more than 10 kilobits per second of data to handle voice. In a world of megabit per-second connections, that’s nothing—hence Google’s proposal to offer voice calls for no cost and heap on features galore.

What this episode really uncovers is that AT&T is dying. AT&T is dragging down the rest of us by overcharging us for voice calls and stifling innovation in a mobile data market critical to the U.S. economy.

I have AT&T for my wireless phone, mostly because I’m too lazy to switch, but also because rates/plans are pretty standard.  These companies want to pretend like we don’t know they are ripping us off, but we do. 

It drives me crazy that a data plan is $30, 200 text messages is another $5 (sending and receiving), etc. etc.  (If you paid per MB of data for texting it would run you close to $5000) In the end you’ve got to spend about $100 a month to have a worthwhile cellphone.  Otherwise you’re better off not really having one at all.

Yeah! Goldman Sachs had a very profitable first-half of the year.  So you know what that means!  Bonus!  Lotsa lotsa bonuses.  The executives would probably patting themselves on the back if they weren’t too busy flippin’ everyone off. 

From the Guardian: “Goldman Sachs staff can look forward to the biggest bonus payouts in the firm’s 140-year history after a spectacular first half of the year.”

In their defense, however, they did set aside nearly $1.2billion in profits to pay for these bonuses.  It’s just that, well, um, you know, there’s that whole $10 billion they borrowed from tax payers that should be paid back first.