Google is experimenting with ad-supported music in China, in a bid to catch up with local market leader Baidu.
The Google service allows Chinese consumers to search for music, link to the Web site of a Beijing company called Top100.cn and download licensed music from that Chinese site, which has signed contracts with the music industry… Top100.cn will sell advertising on its own site to pay for more than 1.1 million songs it plans to offer to Chinese consumers. And the struggling music industry gets a new revenue source, sharing income with Google… Google also said its new service would offer high-quality music downloads and protect consumers from viruses and poor-quality recordings, which the company says are a problem with illegal sites.
Skype is explicitly going after cellular revenues. A review says “awesome”.
As with Skype on the computer, users of Skype on mobile phones can make calls and send instant messages to other Skype users free, and they pay lower rates than the phone companies would charge when they use Skype to call landlines or other mobile phones… Apple will limit Skype’s use on the iPhone somewhat, allowing Skype calls to be made only when the device is connected to local Wi-Fi networks, and not allowing Skype calls over the data networks of its carrier partners like AT&T.
But Google is going after Skype with its own service; collateral damage being the death of telco’s.
Google Voice allows users to route all their calls through a single number that can ring their home, work and mobile phones simultaneously. It also gives users a single and easy-to-manage voice mail system for multiple phone lines. And it lets users make calls, routed via the Internet, free in the United States and for a small fee internationally. Skype… has 400 million registered users and is adding 350,000 users a day…
The long tail of magazines. HP has a new service MagCloud. NYT calls it “the YouTube of magazines” but I think it’s more like the iTunes store. Publishers provide hi-res pdf’s of their magazines and the site handles previews and orders and then farms out printing to a network of presses around the world – billing the publisher only 20c per page when magazines are actually printed and shipped. Publishers charge what they like and net the difference.
OnLive is extending the SAAS (software as a service) model to games.
OnLive, which was started by WebTV founder Steve Perlman and former Eidos CEO Mike McGarvey… will digitally distribute first-run, AAA games from publishers like Electronic Arts, Take-Two, Ubisoft, Atari, and others, all at the same time as those titles are released into retail channels… The system is designed to allow players to stream on-demand games at the highest quality onto any Intel-based Mac or PC running XP or Vista, regardless of how powerful the computer… The system will also stream games directly to a TV via a small plug-in device, and players can use a custom wireless controller as well as VoIP headsets… instead of requiring users to download the games, OnLive will host them all and stream them from a series of the highest-end servers… players won’t have to upgrade anything to keep on playing games on the system years into the future. Instead, the upgrades will happen on the back-end… OnLive has set an ambitious goal: dethroning the console makers as the game industry’s kings…
I’m really excited about e-books, particularly those at least A5 in size with wifi, an embedded browser, and SD card storage. Not so worried about color vs grayscale.
Electronics manufacturer Fujitsu says it is shipping an LCD-based electronic reader called FLEPia in Japan next month that displays vivid color, a first in the industry. It hopes the technology can compete directly with E Ink, the manufacturer of the black-and-white e-paper displays used in the Kindle and eReader… The new Fujitsu e-reader takes about a second to fully refresh its screen, which is about five inches by six and a half inches in size…
Not coincidentally, this is the best thing I’ve ever read on the death of newspapers, and publishing generally.
If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other… When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works…’ No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the reporting we need.
New iPod voice overlay is very, very clever (I thought of proposing it several years back).
If you hold down the center clicker for one second, you hear, in your earbuds, a crystal-clear male voice identifying the song and the performer; it knows 14 languages, so it can handle Italian aria names, for example. If you hold down the clicker longer, until you hear a beep, the voice starts rattling off the names of your playlists (“Jogging Tunes…Purchased…Makeout Music.”) You click the clicker when he gets to the one you want, or use the + and – buttons to go forward or back through them. You can also flip the power switch off and on again to hear him tell you how full your battery is—for example, “Battery 50 percent.” [BUT] the new Shuffle locks you into using Apple’s earbuds. No other headphones have the clicker on the cord, and so can’t make the music play music at all.
This is somewhat amazing – RailCorp in Sydney is suing a developer who is making their weekday schedule available via an iPhone app. Seems the schedules are copyright the crown, and RailCorp is planning to make a plan themselves about an eventual mobile strategy… tax dollars at work.
Chip sales are plummeting at a rate reminiscent of auto sales… reminding me that the chips in a car are worth more than the steel.
In January alone, chip sales plummeted by almost a third from the previous year, to $15.3 billion…
Gartner data has CS lowering PC forecasts.
We are lowering the forecast from a 4.5% unit decline in 2009 to a 15.3% decline… desktop units decline by 26.6% in 2009, with notebooks showing a fairly resilient 3.7% decline… traditional notebooks, excluding netbooks, unit decline is 14.1%… desktop ASPs decline by 8.5% and notebook ASPs decline by 17.3%… annual unit declines go from 1.4% in 4Q08 to 17.3% in 1Q09… annual unit declines reach a bottom of 19.1% in the June quarter.
You’ve got to be a special kind of stupid to fire 1,400 employees and then realise that you’ve paid them too much severance and THEN ask for the money back. Oh, and then back down, publicly apologize and let them keep it. The total amount? About $125,000. With PR like this…
Microsoft says it made an accounting error when it laid off some employees last month and now feels the best way to correct the error is with what will likely add up to a public relations blunder… “An inadvertent administrative error occurred that resulted in an overpayment in severance pay by Microsoft,” the letter states. “We ask that you repay the overpayment and sincerely apologize for any inconvenience to you.”
In a statement, Microsoft said that it had mishandled the affair and would no longer be chasing repayment.