Go on, celebrate: the Comcast + Time Warner Cable merger is officially dead

Concerns about monopolies, net neutrality and competition be damned: Time Warner and Comcast will no longer attempt to close a deal that would merge the two cable giants under Comcast’s banner. The internal desire — according to the two companies, anyway — was to bring more of their “great” product to more people in more cities. Says Comcast CEO and Chairman Brian L. Roberts:

Today, we move on. Of course, we would have liked to bring our great products to new cities, but we structured this deal so that if the government didn’t agree, we could walk away.

Comcast NBCUniversal is a unique company with strong momentum. Throughout this entire process, our employees have kept their eye on the ball and we have had fantastic operating results. I want to thank them and the employees of Time Warner Cable for their tireless efforts.

But it didn’t take long for red flags to pop up all over the place. The department of justice was the biggest opponent from the get-go, and much like AT&T’s proposed buyout of T-Mobile it was hard for them to believe that this merger could do anything good for the state of the US cable and broadband market.

The landscape of competition in said market is already severely flawed, with many areas only able to choose between just one or two services. Yours truly literally had no choice other than Time Warner Cable up until a few years ago when AT&T finally rolled out DSL. You’ll find similar situations in many areas of the country where Time Warner, Cox and Comcast enjoy the fruits of being the only cable provider in town for miles on end.

Thankfully the powers that be which blocked this deal realized that this monopoly would hurt an already lopsided industry. If not for the likes of Google Fiber and Verizon FiOS, we might not have seen these companies scrambling to upgrade their customers to Gigabit speeds.

Take Time Warner Cable, for instance. They kept their Charlotte, North Carolina customers on 50 megabit packages for years at what most of them would consider “fair” prices, but it only took them weeks to upgrade those customers to 300 megabit packages after they heard Google Fiber was on the way. Comcast did the same in Atlanta, Georgia when Google confirmed plans to expand to that particular market.

It’s clear these companies weren’t (and likely still aren’t) willing to do anything to improve service and value for their customers unless they had true competition. Allowing them to merge would have done nothing to change that (and would most likely have worsened the situation beyond repair). Good on everyone to see fit to block the deal and nip it in the bud in this instance just as they did to protect the spirit of competition in the wireless industry.

[via Comcast]

Google REALLY wishes you’d stop saying Glass is dead, because it isn’t

Ever since Google Glass “graduated” from Google X Labs, it seems we can’t write an article about the device without people proclaiming it’s dead. It’s not. Google is working on it. They’ve taken it private. Tony Fadell wants to take the early work done by the excellent team at Google and make sure he gets it just right, just like he did for Nest and the iPod, and he doesn’t want to show it until it’s ready.

Google Glass isn’t dead, so stop saying it. They’ve said it once, and now Eric Schmidt is saying it again:

“It is a big and very fundamental platform for Google,” Schmidt said. “We ended the Explorer program and the press conflated this into us canceling the whole project, which isn’t true. Google is about taking risks and there’s nothing about adjusting Glass that suggests we’re ending it.”

This is a thing. A real thing. A thing that’s happening. It might not be here as soon as we’d liked, but it’s not something Google is sweeping under the rug.

If you’re already an Explorer with the latest publicly-released unit, enjoy it. Stop obsessing and complaining over a new version that you won’t even be able to see until Google is ready to put them up for sale.

It’s OK to be concerned (and even angry) about the ,500 prototype you bought that will eventually be obsoleted, and we certainly do hope those folks are hooked up with some sort of upgrade path once the consumer version is ready, but no amount of petitioning and rioting will change Google’s stance on the future development of Glass if they haven’t already changed it.

Beyond that, you knew what you were getting into. You knew Glass was still in the exploratory and platform-building phases and Google only wanted people who truly understood that to use it, which is why they asked you to pay ,500 for a piece of kit that likely didn’t take nearly as much money to manufacture.

If Glass were truly dead, don’t you think they’d tell us just as they’ve done countless times in the past when they retired a lot of their other products? Sit back, relax, and let Google do their thing.

Dead Zebra’s “For Science” collection celebrates the brilliant minds of science

Dead Zebra has done a lot of cool themed collections over the years, but the coolest one yet has just arrived. This is “For Science,” a collection of Android figurines made to look like some of the greatest scientists, inventors and thinkers of our time.

The first release of this set takes place April 20th, and kicks off with three figurines. Isaac Newton and his law of gravitation, Marie Curie’s discoveries in radiological science and Nikolai Tesla’s work in usable electricity receive the honors of being first out of the starting gate. Each figurine will resemble the people they’re named after, of course, and will also come with a small related trinket that goes into their hand.

They all ship inside a windowed box stamped with foiled lettering for the collectors out there. The rear of the box gives a small summary of that person’s accomplishment (which would hopefully urge you to go and learn more if you aren’t already knowledgeable). It’s a fantastic idea, and it’s a collection that Dead Zebra expects to add to for the foreseeable future.

The Dead Zebra shop will have these promptly at 11AM Eastern on April 20th, and you’ll be asked to pay just per figurine. You can also get them in a 3-piece set if you want to collect them all. Be sure to mark your calendar, and feel free to let the geek in you get excited.

[via Dead Zebra]

Google Code is officially dead; here’s how to transfer your projects to GitHub

The day has finally come — Google Code is dead. The service, a code repository for developers to host their open-source projects, simply wasn’t able to adapt to the growing needs of developers like GitHub has been able to. Google apparently wasn’t interested in trying to contend, either (in fact, they admitted they’d already moved a significant amount of their own projects to GitHub as they “wanted to be where the developers are”).

Here’s a quick timeline on what’s going down:

• March 12, 2015 – New project creation disabled.


• August 24, 2015 – The site goes read-only. You can still checkout/view project source, issues, and wikis.


• January 25, 2016 – The project hosting service is closed. You will be able to download a tarball of project source, issues, and wikis. These tarballs will be available throughout the rest of 2016.

We suggest that you don’t wait until the final gong tolls — might as well start moving all your digital goods over to GitHub as soon as possible. Thankfully Google has a handy tool to make that as easy as a few clicks.

[via Google]

The Walking Dead: Michonne mini-series launching this fall

E3 is kicking off today with a series of announcements from big name video game publishers and if you keep an ear out, you’ll even find some mobile related news coming out of the show. In fact, Telltale Games announced a new Walking Dead title on their blog this afternoon. The new mini-series — The Walking Dead: Michonne — spans across 3 episodes taking place between issues #126 – #139 and centers on everyone’s favorite sword-wielding bad ass.

Telltale isn’t revealing too many specifics, only mentioning that the side-story will be launching this fall on all current and previous generation consoles (Xbox One, Xbox 360, PS3, PS4, and PC), as well as iOS and Android. Oh, and something about requiring at least the first episode of The Walking Dead: Season Two in order to play the Michonne story.

Telltale Games CEO and Co-Founder Kevin Bruner had this to say:

“Michonne’s complexity and range make her an ideal lead for the compelling interactive drama fans have come to expect from Telltale. With this mini-series, players will experience Michonne’s challenges first-hand, and the choices they make will shape her journey.”

We’ll keep you  posted as we learn more.