Fire-Wired Blog

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Since the turn of century, when the Internet began consuming our attention spans, we’ve all been champions of “Revolution Free.” Napster started the uprising with free music, content aggregators such as Google News and Huffington Post stoked the flames with free news, torrent services gave us entertainment, and social networks gave us communication. While paywalls are starting to cordon off online content, the pulse of the revolution still beats with YouTube as its heart. The idea of free online is, for all intents and purposes, a lie. Whether it’s your local newspaper, CNN.com, Hulu, or even YouTube, all online content providers must pay delivery, storage and also the pesky matter of compensating producers. How are these bills satiated? Advertising. And while others have turned to premium, subscription-guarded content, YouTube has subsisted on advertising for nearly a decade. Whether you’re uploading to or streaming from Yo...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Continuous growth is the demand of every shareholder and blight of every company. Everyone from CEOs down to mailroom clerks wants to rake in profits as much as investors, but failure to recoup bigger and bigger profits can quickly kill their job and reputation. How do companies bring in new riches? Through diversification or innovation. To stay relevant and profitable, practically every company must diverge from its initial path. Microsoft started as a software company, Apple was a computer manufacturer, Google a search engine and Facebook a social network. While all these companies still hold a major footing in these arenas, they’ve all pushed into other industries with varying levels of success. Apple makes the majority of its profits from phones and digital sales, Google is in advertising, software development and content distribution, and after entering the stock market in 2012, Facebook started spraying a firehose of cas...