> Rovio Entertainment, the created of the popular “Angry Birds” game, is in talks with an interested investor to receive funding that would see the company valued at $1.2 billion, according to a new report. I love Angry Birds as much as the next guy, but anyone who doesn’t see this as an obvious sign that another bubble is about to burst here in the Silicon Valley Tech world is crazy.

After all, what has Rovio done SINCE Angry Birds? More and more Angry Birds. No new ideas. No second hit game. All that money, simply reinvested into more marketing, more ways to milk the same product.

They are a company without new ideas. And they’re looking to others for money, despite their incredible revenues.

I thought a company’s worth, whether or not it would make a good investment, was a reflection of the company’s potential for FUTURE greatness. I’m not seeing that from Rovio at this point. Unless they have some other brilliant new game up their sleeve that no one knows about, and it’s costing them a ton of money to develop.

I think it more likely that they have no new good idea, so they’re making a push to sell off what’s left of their one hit. One last big cash in.

But what do I know?

> The company notes that “Starting October 1, smartphone customers with unlimited data plans may experience reduced speeds once their usage in a billing cycle reaches the level that puts them among the top 5 percent of heaviest data users. This is not surprising. And my guess is it’s just the beginning. Expect more stringent throttling soon.

Lots of my friends and some prominent bloggers kept their “grandfathered” plans last year when AT&T dropped the unlimited plan. They were no doubt thinking as long as they kept paying the higher fees for the old unlimited plan, they’d be able to keep that indefinitely. This, despite the fact that many of them don’t use anywhere near the 2GB a month cap on the cheaper $20 plan.

But I dropped my unlimited immediately, figuring that at the very least, when 4G comes out, AT&T would come up with some excuse why that was a DIFFERENT data plan, and thus wasn’t eligible for unlimited. Now it looks like they’re not even going to wait until the 4G iPhone rolls around.

So why pay $10 a month more in the meantime for something you’re not using, if in the future, when you need that extra data most, the carrier is just going to pull the rug out from under you anyway?

> That 250 gigabytes-per-month works out to about one megabit-per-second, which costs $8 in New York. So your American ISP, who has been spending $0.40 per month to buy the bandwidth they’ve been selling to you for $30, wants to cap their maximum backbone cost per-subscriber at $8. > > That doesn’t sound unreasonable on the face of it. Capping consumption at 20-times the provisioning level doesn’t sound so bad, but I think it sets a dangerous precedent. > > These data caps are actually a trap being set for us by the ISPs. > > Data caps that may make logical sense today make no sense tomorrow, yet once they are in place they’ll tend to stay in place. Great article by I, Cringely.

I’ve been thinking this ever since the talk of data caps started several months ago. Just like with variable pricing on music in the iTunes store, these sorts of pricing changes are never designed to actually help consumers. In the sort term, they look to make things cheaper for us. So most of us fall for it. But over the long run, they are cleverly hidden price hikes.

And the worst part is that none of it is necessary to keep ISPs in business. This is all about increasing profits. Nothing more.

2GB today sounds like a lot. 2GB a year from now might be average monthly use. 2GB ten years from now may very well be average DAILY use. Do you really think the ISPs are going to keep raising the amount of data you get for the same price over time?

Just when the Internet is becoming a necessary utility, companies are setting up the infrastructure to divide us up between those who can afford to pay for the data, and those who can’t. They’re turning something as essential to our future as running water and electricity into something only rich people can afford. And we’re going to suffer greatly as a nation because of it.

> IHS memory analyst Dee Nguyen said Apple’s move to the cloud could have “significant implications” on the memory market. “With Apple products like the iPhone and iPad accounting for a disproportionate share of NAND flash demand, any move among Apple users to offload storage to the company’s iCloud service could mean a corresponding decrease in demand for physical NAND flash memory in the future,” the analyst said. Wow, that’s one of the stupidest arguments I’ve heard in a long time.

Does this guy not know how iCloud works? Does AppleInsider not have enough sense to see the flaw in his logic?

iCloud doesn’t diminish the need for local storage. At. All. It actually increases the need for storage on all your devices, because YOUR FILES ARE GOING TO BE SAVED LOCALLY ON ALL YOUR DEVICES.

So instead of having one copy of that file on your laptop, you’re going to have one on your laptop, one on your iPhone, and one on your iPad. Three times the storage. You’re going to want MORE RAM on your iPhone, not less.

iCloud is not a streaming service. This isn’t Google apps. Data is stored locally.

Sheesh.

> And—with all respect to Alex Jones and Amy Goodman—this doesn’t require either a corporate or government conspiracy: it requires nothing more than sincerely good intentions. The Internet presents far more information to us than any of us can realistically process even as it encourages us to subscribe to ever more of that information. *You’ll be behind and uninformed if you don’t use this service, too—but don’t worry, we’ll make sure you only get the information stream from it you really want.* Mind-blowing article. Highly recommend reading this and pondering the implications.

We can all agree that the Internet brings us information overload. The question is, would it be better to let us each sort out that overload for ourselves, or, as Google and Facebook are doing, let computers decide which content we are “most likely” to want?

And his final thought, that maybe what we want isn’t even what’s best for us, is particularly intriguing.

Perhaps the very act of personal filtration of information on the Internet, good intentioned as it may be, whether by computer or by ourselves, is more dangerous to our long-term learning and mind expansion than anyone knows.