Although the Apple tablet has yet to prove itself as fact or fiction, I hope the new speculation about tablets for periodicala will include the thriving comicbook and manga businesses. Websites like Zuda and Marvel successfully translate the comic reading experience to the web but to be honest, the last thing I want to do is read a comic book on my laptop. I want to be able to read them in the bed, in the back of a cab or on a plane. As the seats in planes shrink (or I get bigger) my 13″ Macbook has proven to be too large, while any netbook has too small a screen to be useful.

There’s some pretty cool readers for the iphone like Comic Reader Mobi (above video) but the iphone isn’t really a good medium for reading an entire comic book. Unless the art is reduced to a panel by panel reduction, the screen is simply to small. I haven’t purchased comics regularly in a decade but I can actually see myself getting back into them if I could purchase with the click of a button on a store like itunes. However, I’m not impressed by the stuff Apple is doing with motion comics at all. Comics are comics because they’re printed, animation is animation because it’s animated. Does the world really need an in-between?

The biggest is the announcement that Flickr co-founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield have decided to leave the company they sold to Yahoo! in 2005!  This is big, not only because they’ve been pretty adamant about staying involved with their pet project but because Yahoo! is in the middle of formulating new strategies to appease angry shareholers after that much publicized Microsoft acquisition failed.  They’re also under increased pressure to breathe life back into their stock which has also suffered in the wake of that same deal.

Technorati announced some new funding, no doubt related to the longtail business model they just unveiled.  Technorati essentially plans to allow bloggers and publishers of all levels of popularity to sell ads.

The Huffington Post is also making a major step towards becoming an even bigger news media outlet.  They intend to compete in localized news markets initially offering a Chicago, Illinois portal and eventually expanding to include other regions of the country. This is apparently part of a larger strategy to move beyond solely political blogging, which has obviously been critical in this election year.

“We are aspiring to be a newspaper in that we want to covering all news [sic], not just the political blogging the way we began,” Huffington said.

I’m almost certain this will either lead to acquisition offers by the major media news outlets who are (or should be) afraid of Huffington’s growing dominance on the web.

Lastly, Facebook surpassed Myspace to become the most popular social network worldwide. Considering it was valued by analysts at over a billion dollars only a few months ago, this adds more validity to speculation that Facebook will file for an IPO and go public soon.

When Polaroid users pulled a picture out of their cameras, an image would slowly appear before their eyes. Now, like the process in reverse, the image of the Polaroid instant camera — dimming for years — has finally gone black.

Polaroid, based in Waltham, Mass., is shutting down factories in the United States and abroad as the company abandons the technology that made the instant photo possible, the Boston Globe reported yesterday. The company will cease production of its film by next year.

Src: Huffington

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