John Paczkowski

Recent Posts by John Paczkowski

Billionaire Entrepreneur Blamed in Death of Internet

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“There is nothing ‘oh my god’ unique that has happened on the Net in forever. What we have seen are incremental applications that have been powered by the amazing ongoing drop in pricing of PCs, hard drives, memory and BACKBONE (not last mile) bandwidth. None of which are ‘the Internet.’ … It’s not the Net, it’s the applications, stupid! Falling costs to create, host and deliver digital bits enable entrepreneurs to be entrepreneurial. … It’s the brainpower that is changing our world. The Internet is just a utility to deliver the digital bits they create.”
Mark Cuban

In July 2006, Mark Cuban, the billionaire Internet entrepreneur who sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in stock back in 1999, declared the Internet “old news and boring.” And now, a little over a year later, he’s gone and pronounced it dead. Speaking at a cable telecommunications industry event earlier this week Cuban, who seems to have regained his wind after a recent and much publicized colonoscopy, said the Internet has become a dull bunch of infrastructure. “The Internet’s dead,” Cuban said. “It’s over. … The Internet’s for old people.”

Huh. So if the Internet’s for old people, where should the world’s next Mark Cuban focus his/her attentions? On the “intranet,” which Cuban describes as the on-demand and digital video-recording platforms managed by cable companies. “There’s less restriction on the intranet, it’s like your own corporate network for all the cable networks and even wireless,” Cuban told Advertising Age. “All [content] is moving to the TV. What’s the difference between a PC and a TV? Nothing.”

Twitter’s Tanking

December 30, 2013 at 6:49 am PT

2013 Was a Good Year for Chromebooks

December 29, 2013 at 2:12 pm PT

BlackBerry Pulls Latest Twitter for BB10 Update

December 29, 2013 at 5:58 am PT

Apple CEO Tim Cook Made $4.25 Million This Year

December 28, 2013 at 12:05 pm PT

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald