Brian Gongol
Instagram ventures into 15-second videos
With Instagram-characteristic filters. One wonders whether the 15-second limit isn't a subtle nod to Warhol's 15 minutes of fame, but compressed into seconds for a media-drenched world. Is there really a reason to become obsessed with the differences between Instagram video and Vine's 6-second videos, or should everyone just calm down? Probably the latter.
Are the Apple iOS 7 graphics too gaudy?
Google decides that brain teasers are a pointless way to hire
Google's approach to hiring and interviews always sounded a bit gimmick-heavy, and they've apparently determined that giving people brain teasers as an interview test doesn't really tell them anything useful about how those people will perform as employees.
Dish gives up on pursuit of Sprint
This makes it a lot more likely that Softbank will successful in its attempt to buy out Sprint. But it also highlights the possibility that Dish may just be regrouping and thinking of buying T-Mobile from Deutsche Telekom.
The market for used games
Microsoft apparently announced, then reversed, a policy to make it more costly for people to buy and sell used Xbox games. But as major software makers are taking things out of the physical world of game cartridges and discs and making them Internet-based (like Adobe's new cloud-based Creative Suite), used games may already be an endangered species, even without a policy.
FAA may be ready to allow more access to "the cloud" from among the clouds
A final report from a working group working for the FAA won't come out until September, says the New York Times, but they may be thinking of allowing greater use of electronics in-flight
"Jersey is the new Wall Street"
So much of stock trading is electronic that the NYSE may be headed the way of bell bottoms and mood rings
Microsoft plans expansion of West Des Moines data center
Iowa is giving the company a tax break to "create 24 high-quality jobs" with a nearly $700 million expansion of the data center
