Every Monday morning at 7:10 am, I am a guest contributor on CHOM 97.7 FM radio broadcasting out of Montreal (home base). It’s not a long segment – about 5 to 10 minutes every week – about everything that is happening in the world of technology and digital media. The good folks at CHOM 97.7 FM are posting these segments weekly to SoundCloud, if you’re interested in hearing more of me blathering away. I’m really excited about this opportunity, because this is the radio station that I grew up on listening to, and it really is a fun treat to be invited to the Mornings Rock with Terry and Heather B. morning show. The segment is called, CTRL ALT Delete with Mitch Joel.
This week we discussed:
If you ever needed a reason to switch your old Hotmail or Yahoo email address over to Google‘s Gmail, this may be the reason. Have ever written an email, hit the “send” button and suddenly realized that you made a huge mistake, sent it to the wrong person or said something that you should not have (or all three of those)? Ugh… that sinking pit feeling in your stomach, and then trying to figure out how you’re going to backpedal on it. Well, Gmail just released the ability to “unsend” an email. Although the functionality has been available in their “Labs” section, most people never bothered to dig for it. Now, it’s right there in the “General” tab of your settings. You only have about 30 seconds to undo an email, but that’s better than a panic attack.
We used to buy albums, then iTunes came along and we started buying music by the song (like we used to with 45s). What if Amazon took that tune, and spun it for books, but in a weird way? What if Amazon only paid authors based on how many pages people read of a book? Think that sounds crazy? It’s true. When you self-publish on Amazon, they will no longer be paying authors by the download for a whole book, but rather based on how many pages of the book are read.
They say that there is no more money in music, and that the new rock stars are Zuckerberg, Sergey & Larry. Linkin Park may have built a new bridge. They just announced that they have their own venture capital firm. It’s called Machine Shop, and they’re invested in companies like Robinhood and Lyft. So, do you think that rock stars can also be Silicon Valley stars?