Breezeblog

It’s so easy these days to download music, movies, books and games. However, it’s just as easy to forget about some of the pitfalls – especially as a parent.

Recently I was self-righteously shaking my head at the story about Canadian parents whose 7-year-old twins bought $3,000-worth of in-app purchases on iTunes while playing the hugely popular game Clash of Clans. How could they let that happen? A week later I was shaking my head in disbelief when our credit card statement showed that our 10-year-old had racked up almost $500-worth of in-app purchases for the same game in just four days!

Click and easy: in-app purchases for Clash of Clans range from 99c to $99.

This is mere chicken feed for Supercell, the game’s Finnish developers, which reportedly rakes in a staggering $2.4 million a day from in-app purchases from the only two games it has in the market – Clans and Hay Day, played by an estimated 8.5 million people daily.

So how did our little spending spree happen? We’re a pretty tech-savvy family and heavy iTunes users (no, you really don’t want to know how heavy), and I thought we had taken precautions to stop things getting out of hand. We set up our teenaged daughter with her own account that can only be sustained by iTunes gift cards. Until he is a little older, we allowed our son to use our family account on his iPod but adjusted the settings so that he had to ask us for approval and to put in the top secret password for him whenever he wanted to purchase anything. Any purchases were then duly deducted from his pocket money.

Up until last month this had worked fine but, as I found out to my cost, I had not made one crucial change to the settings, which was to require the password for every purchase. As I had set it up, once logged in to our iTunes account, any subsequent purchase during that session (i.e. until the user has logged out or turned the device off) did not require the password. As a result my son simply didn’t think the charges applied as

(more…)

The recent sale of one of the world’s great newspapers, the Washington Post, to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has raised eyebrows across the media industry. Given how Bezos revolutionised the retail business, many commentators are speculating that he may just do the same for the ailing newspaper sector.

Jeff Jarvis: reporting is more important than ever.

In a recent article for German newspaper Der Spiegel, Jeff Jarvis, one of my favourite writers on all things media, is optimistic that Bezos can bring the best of the internet – efficient business models that focus on individual relationships with their customers and users – to the Post.

The article addresses the bigger picture of the future of newspapers, arguing that while the internet continues to change our perception of the media and what constitutes news in the Twitter age and the relentless flow of information, it is also an opportunity for news organisations and journalists to “reimagine” themselves.

He writes: “There is still a need for journalists, perhaps greater than ever. Journalists must add value to that flow of information, confirming facts, debunking rumours, finding sources, adding context and explanation, and, most importantly, asking the questions and getting the answers that are not in the flow — that is: reporting.”

(more…)