Farhad Manjoo:

But there’s something even more perplexing about Amazon selling The Hunger Games and other huge bestsellers for free. The Kindle lending program upends the conventional wisdom about Bezos’ business goals for e-readers. Most people think that Amazon is selling Kindle devices at cost in order to make a profit on the sales of books and movies. But if Amazon is also giving away a lot of media for free—4 of the Top 10 books in the Kindle Store can be had for free under the Kindle lending program—then what is its business model for Kindle?

Giving away the razor to make money on the blades is a well-known strategy. But giving away the razor and the blades in order to make money on a subscription loyalty program as a way to sell everything else? Is that Amazon’s real goal with the Kindle—is Amazon in the device business only to sell Prime subscriptions, which the company sees as a key accelerant for sales across the rest of its site? And if that’s the case, how well is that circuitous business model working out? Is the Kindle helping to sell Prime? And are those Kindle-fueled Prime subscriptions moving more sales across the rest of the company’s inventory?

It’s a really interesting set of questions. Is it possible that subset of Amazon’s catalog – books, movies, TV, music – could evolve into a subscription-oriented service akin to Netflix? Prime members would get access to free or heavily discounted content in the hope that membership encourages them to buy more physical goods through Amazon as well. Personally, I certainly buy more things though Amazon since I got my Prime membership. Even if the price is the same, I’ll buy heavy or bulky items on Amazon to save me an inconvenient trip to the store.

MacRumors on AT&T’s plans for shared data plans:

Shared “family plans” for voice minutes have been available for quite some time, and a similar mechanism for sharing data seems to be a natural evolution. But aside from sharing data among family members, even individuals could see a benefit from the plans, which would allow them to subscribe to a single monthly data allotment that could be used with their iPhone, iPad, and perhaps even a USB modem or mobile hotspot device.

Being able to share a single data plan between devices would make me much more likely to buy a 4G-equipped iPad next time around.

In 2009, Sen. Dick Lugar acted as “grand marshal” of a DC-area chug-n-run:

The group of athletes came up with the idea last year as a season-ending blowout, Aronson explained. The rules are simple: Chug one beer before each of the four laps, and eat a hot dog between laps two and three. “The idea is to do something relatively short, relatively painless, and increase the likelihood that somebody would throw up,” said Aronson.

Lugar described the racers as “very high-spirited.”

You just can’t find public servants like this anymore.

File under “could’ve seen this coming”:

“My only regret was how we introduced pricing in the beginning, because how did we introduce pricing? Thirty dollars and you get all you can eat,” [AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson] said in the on-stage interview at the Milken Institute’s Global Conference on Wednesday. “And it’s a variable cost model. Every additional megabyte you use in this network, I have to invest capital.”

He goes on to complain about losing sleep over Apple’s iMessage service, citing lost revenue. I’ll file that one under “I couldn’t care less.”

The makers of Draw Something were acquired by Zynga a couple of months ago, and since then Zynga has been busily adding “sponsored brands” to the game.

Until recently, the Pictionary-like game had only run spammy banner ads in its free mobile app that, including the paid no-ads version, has amassed a staggering 50 million downloads in five months. Now, with a direct-sales force that’s been on the ground for a whole eight weeks, Draw Something is inserting advertisers’ paid terms into the game for players to literally draw brands.

Here’s how the game works: Pick a word from a list of three, then create a drawing so a Facebook friend can guess that word and you can win points. For the ad product, imagine inserting words like “Doritos” or “Coca-Cola” in among “golfer,” “bikini” or “fireworks.”

…

However, as brands begin to come onboard, Draw Something’s popularity with consumers may be waning. Its monthly active users have declined in recent weeks, according to App Data. Daily active users have dropped from 14 million at the beginning of April to about 10 million.

I’m not surprised that people are jumping ship. On the one hand, it’s an interesting business model, particularly as a departure from traditional banner ads. Nonetheless, I bought the paid version of Draw Something before it was acquired by Zynga, and I resent having “brands” shoved at me in an app I already paid for. This sort of thing is the problem with the “make it free and monetize later” model. In the long run, it ends up being annoying for users.

Daniel Hooper comes up with a great concept video for a better way to edit text on the iPad. Here’s hoping Apple implements something like this in a future version of iOS. If you agree, I highly recommend following the directions to file a feature request.

A new SDK called RubyMotion lets you develop iOS apps in Ruby. I bet there are a lot of people who will be excited about it, but I can’t imagine many iOS developers think it’s a good idea. Why would you put another layer between you and Apple’s APIs? How do you know the Ruby layer will stay up to date? To me, writing iOS apps in Ruby makes about as much sense as writing web apps in Objective-C. Want to write in Ruby? Build a web app.

The New York Times sheds some more light on Target’s decision to stop selling Kindles. Sounds like it’s not really about books at all, but about Amazon encouraging users to check prices in stores and then buy through Amazon instead.

Target announced that it will stop selling Kindles and other Amazon-branded products, but will continue selling Barnes and Noble’s Nook. Admittedly, Amazon doesn’t help brick-and-mortar retailers out too much by undercutting them on price, but I’m still surprised by Target’s move here. If someone wants to buy a Kindle in a store, shouldn’t Target be willing to take their money? I can’t imagine Target does a big business selling paper books, so what’s the harm?