Death of the Free Web | Cap Watkins: “I’ve actually been noticing this transition in SV for the past year or so. More and more startups are focusing on revenue right out of the gate. The old way of trying to build gigantic user-bases and then sell their eyeballs to advertisers is falling by the wayside. There are certainly still exceptions, but right now they are just that – exceptions. Seeing a startup go after paying customers used to be like catching a glimpse of a unicorn. Now, it’s the…

The Facebook Fallacy – Technology Review: “The daily and stubborn reality for everybody building businesses on the strength of Web advertising is that the value of digital ads decreases every quarter, a consequence of their simultaneous ineffectiveness and efficiency. The nature of people’s behavior on the Web and of how they interact with advertising, as well as the character of those ads themselves and their inability to command real attention, has meant a marked decline in advertising’s impact. “ (Via technologyreview.com.) What a great read. This could have been…

Pew report: The Future of Apps and the Web: Rob Scott, the chief technology officer for Nokia, believes the web will dominate and argues, “Once HTML5 browsers and fully capable Web runtimes are in place on the common Kindle through iPhone, the Web app will begin replacing native apps.” (Via TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog) I love how the tech world is full of this sentiment. “The browser is going to take over native apps any day now.” I’ve been literally hearing that since 2000. Hasn’t happened yet.…

> 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…

> 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.* via…