Lots of buzz about a potential Apple tablet coming soon. Gizmodo reviews the current digital books.
I’m pretty eagerly awaiting the CrunchPad – a stripped down wireless flat screen running nothing but a web-brower. The system was crowd-source designed by the founder of TechCrunch.
… we’ve decreased the overall thickness to about 18 mm… case will be aluminum… a Linux based operating system and a Webkit based browser. The device boots directly into the browser…
Amazon’s early lead in ebooks is forcing rivals to adopt an open standard to compete. By the end of the year Sony will sell digital books only in the ePub format, an open standard joining the growing constellation of other readers that support ePub. In my view all these closed devices and standards will lose the war to generic devices displaying html; as music eventually ended up with mp3.
Companies like Sony and Adobe do not want to abandon anticopying measures, fearing that piracy of books would run rampant. Rather, they want to push the e-book industry toward common standards to avoid a replay of Apple’s domination of the digital music business… Sony recently introduced two new, less expensive devices and announced it was dropping its price for new releases and best sellers to $9.99… Amazon, for its part, believes it can go it alone, without embracing industry standards.
Excellent Gizmodo essay on the whole standards game, and how Apple has cleverly used open standards like mp3, aac, H.264, WebKit, and now OpenCL to fight off being shut out of a de facto proprietary standard by a larger competitor.
Apple has actually always been a booster of MPEG’s H.264 codec, which is the default video format supported by the iPhone — part of the reason YouTube re-encoded all of its videos, actually — and gets hardware acceleration in QuickTime X with Snow Leopard. H.264 is basically becoming the video codec (it’s in Blu-ray, people use it for streaming, etc.). Why would Apple care? It means Microsoft’s WMV didn’t become the leading standard…. A sorta similar story with AAC, another MPEG standard. It’s actually the successor to MP3, with better compression quality — and no royalties — but Apple had the largest role in making it mainstream by making it their preferred audio format for the iPod and iTunes Store… Another bonus, besides AAC’s superiority to MP3: Microsoft’s WMA, though popular for a while, never took over.
Amazon committed a huge PR gaff flexing muscles as Big Brother, but Bezos was quick to apply damage control.
… hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books… had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for — thought they owned… apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price… the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm.”
This conversation between Krugman the economist and Stross the Scifi author is surprisingly fruitful.
… maybe it was just my age or something, but things don’t seem to have changed as much in the last 30 years as myself as a sci-fi reader would have expected them to… The 20th Century, and going back to the 19th Century, the real visible vector of change technologically was transportation speeds… The whole world has shrunk to the scale of the English Home Counties in 1809 over about two centuries… it was sigmoid curve – we had a slow start, a very rapid period of improvements where we went at about 20 years from biplanes to supersonic jets. And then the curve stopped going up… where is my food pill, where are my jetpacks?
If you walked into a kitchen from the 1950’s it would look a little pokey, but you’d know what to do. It wouldn’t be that difficult. If someone from the 1950’s walked into a kitchen from 1909 they’d be pretty unhappy – they might just be able to manage. If someone from 1909 went to one from 1859, you would actually be hopeless…
There’s a lot of stuff we don’t know about how the genome works. It’s not, as was widely thought in the 50’s and 60’s, a blueprint. It’s more like a very very messy snapshot of a running computer program. In fact, the bits we’ve been looking at and referring to as genes, the exons are, if anything, just the static data strings encoded in the program while it’s running…
The New York Times has got enormous web presence, four million or so people read it online and yield the corporation very little in the way of revenue in the process… the thing survives to some extent because people still like a piece of paper with their breakfast coffee but also to a large extent because you still can’t online get quite the visual quality of color advertisements for luxury goods that you can get in the New York Times Magazine. But you’re relying upon a very thin lag in technology to make the whole enterprise of creating and disseminating information viable.
If it was up to me, I’d figure what we’re looking at with copyright today is a smoking hole in the collective landscape. It doesn’t work… Now the best thing I’ve been able to come up with is an idea for doing this is a tax on bandwidth. Basically, if you have a mobile phone, if you have a broadband connection, if you have a modem connection, a chunk of what you pay goes in tax. The tax goes into a pool which is then distributed to content creators on the basis of some kind of sampling or rating mechanism that’s sampling the traffic that’s going across the network.
There are 24 Pirate Party organizations around the world: the Swedish Pirate Party gained a seat in the European parliament in May, while the German Pirate Party has an elected MP. A U.K. party has just registered to contest elections which must be held before June 2010.
It is proposing an exemption from copyright law for noncommercial file-sharing, which is essentially an extension of fair use. Under U.K. copyright law, fair use allows organizations such as schools and news agencies to use parts of a copyrighted work… The party will press for the length of the copyright on works to be reduced from the life of the owner plus 70 years to a shorter term… In May, government advisers estimated there were 7 million file-sharers in the UK.
Old media strikes back. The US college athletics Southeastern Conference (SEC), which has sold the rights to cover events to CBS for 15 years, will try to ban social media (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc) from all games.
Clay Shirky: “The idea that people can’t capture their own lived experience is a losing proposition.”
New rules from the U.S. Open state that tweeting is not allowed on court, and cautioning about off-court use.
The rules state that tweeting is not allowed on the court during matches. They also warn players about using Twitter away from the court, saying that sending “certain sensitive information” could be considered passing along inside information to gamblers.
Looks like video games aren’t that recession proof. July video games sales were down 27% from June, down 29% from last July; falling for the fifth month in a row. YTD numbers are down 14%. Hardware was off 37% from a year earlier. In July, consumers bought 252,200 Wiis, versus 202,900 Xboxes and 121,800 PS3s; with XBoxes up 17% over the previous July.
Slashdot frets about new games with targetted in-game advertising. The technology has been present in other games, for example in Far Cry 2, but not actually used.
In-game advertising provider Massive Inc., acquired by Microsoft in 2006, has signed up or renewed contracts with several publishers, notably EA, Blizzard Entertainment, THQ, and Activision… Eagerly anticipated games like ‘Need for Speed: Shift’ will feature the technology that continuously collects ‘anonymous’ information about users, sends them to the Massive database for analysis, and downloads advertisements to be shown in the game. All that happens insidiously, without the users’ explicit consent and out of their control, which raises further concerns about privacy, security and quite frankly, customer abuse.
A Texas judge has upheld an earlier order for $200m damages due to patent infringement, tacked on $77m more, and ordered Microsoft to stop selling Word in the meantime. Microsoft will appeal.
Toronto-based i4i sued Microsoft in March 2007 alleging that the Redmond,Wash.-based software giant violated its 1998 patent (No. 5,787,449) for a document system that eliminated the need for manually embedded formatting codes… In May, a federal jury in Tyler, Texas, ruled that the custom XML tagging features of Word 2003 and Word 2007 infringed on i4i’s patent and ordered Microsoft to pay $200 million in the case… Microsoft is now ordered to pay an additional $40 million for willful infringement, as well as $37 million in prejudgment interest. The new order requires Microsoft to comply with the injunction within 60 days and forbids Microsoft from testing, demonstrating, or marketing Word products containing the contested XML feature.
Microsoft has caved in to market demand and offered drivers facilitating Windows Server to the Linux kernel project under the dreaded GPL 2.0 open source license.
Microsoft made the move largely to help strengthen Windows Server as a host environment for Linux… Microsoft met all the requirements for inclusion of the code in the Linux kernel and said it will probably show up in version 2.6.32 of the kernel, which will be released about four or five months from now… Microsoft is now a full fledged Linux developer and will be responsible for maintaining its piece of Linux… the community has already submitted a couple of patches aimed at improving Microsoft’s code.
Google, Apple and AT&T. Apple has blocked Google’s voice and SMS apps from the iTunes store, and retroactively removed a couple of similar ones; apparently at AT&T’s request. Schmidt has resigned from the Apple board.
Why would AT&T care? Because of those free text messages and cheap international calls, of course. If these apps became popular, AT&T’s revenue could take a serious hit… This business has blown up in Apple/AT&T’s face. The Federal Communications Commission, in fact, is now sniffing around… In short, what Apple and AT&T have accomplished with their heavy-handed, Soviet information-control style is not to bury these useful apps. Instead, Apple/AT&T have elevated them to martyr status… They’ve put a rock in the river, but the water will just find a way around it.
Mobile top-up codes are in use in the 3rd world as a new financial instrument.
Essentially, a secondary market in top-up cards has been developed that enables small money transfers to be made quickly and easily. This informal money transfer system has proved so popular that these top-up cards are now sold among the diaspora in London as a handy way of remitting money to relatives. And Western Union is now planning to roll out a mobile money scheme in Africa to avoid being left behind.
David Pogue is trying to trigger a mass movement to force mobile carriers to drop their 15 second instruction message, which is primarily designed to stretch out billable time.
If Verizon’s 70 million customers leave or check messages twice a weekday, Verizon rakes in about $620 million a year. That’s your money. And your time: three hours of your time a year, just sitting there listening to the same message over and over again every year.
Service records of soldiers campaigning in the 100 years war have been released online.
The detailed service records of 250,000 medieval soldiers – including archers who served with Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt… reveals salaries, sickness records and who was knighted.
The number of first-time venture capital investments in Q209 dropped to a 15-year low, but the total invested was up slightly over Q1 though still down 51% from a year ago.
The venture capital industry put $3.67 billion into 612 separate companies or deals during the second quarter, of which $1.5 billion… 141 deals were first-time investments. Biotechnology funding grew 54 percent to $888 million in 85 deals, software came flat at $644 million in 135 deals and Internet companies fell 15 percent to $524 million in 124 deals. Clean technology funding grew 15 percent to $274 million in 42 deals.