It appears that Skype as we know it very soon will be over.
Microsoft Corp plans to buy Internet phone service Skype for $8.5 billion in cash, a rich price as it seeks to regain ground on growing rivals such as Google Inc.
Microsoft's interest in the money-losing but popular service highlights a need to gain new customers for its Windows and Office software. Skype has 145 million users on average each month and has gained favor among small business users.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The publishing tide is shifting fast: E-book sales in February topped all other formats, including paperbacks and hardcovers, according to an industry report released this week.
E-book sales totaled $90.3 million in February, up 202% compared to the same month a year earlier, according to a study from the Association of American Publishers. That put e-books at No. 1 "among all categories of trade publishing" that month -- the first time e-books have beaten out traditional publishing formats.
Microsoft says that Google has put in place technical measures that restrict Microsoft's Bing search engine, as well as other search rivals, from "properly accessing" YouTube for their search results. It claims Google uses that otherwise restricted data to index YouTube videos in its own search results.
Above all, fellow cinephiles, we can’t have both $1 movies (like those you rent at Redbox kiosks) and instant access to the newest releases. You can pay $4 to Apple or Vudu the day the DVD comes out, or you can get it for $1 from a Redbox machine a couple of months later. And let’s not even mention Netflix’s streaming-movie collection, most of which seems to date back to the Carter administration.
Apple is being warned against trying to squeeze cash out of the newspaper industry by controlling subscriptions for iPads and iPhones.
The European Newspaper Publishers' Association (ENPA) says it is concerned by the company's plans to direct online sales through iTunes.
If that happens, the ENPA warns, a large cut of their profits would go to Apple.
However, the technology giant insists it wants to give customers choice.
Finally, very interesting analsys of Wikileaks fallout and what it means in regards of how corporations deal with the information:
Consider just how moribund yesterday's institutions are when it comes to information collecting and sharing. Take transparency in corporations. It's built on a set of institutions crafted in and for the industrial age — like annual and quarterly reports. Four times a year, boardrooms publish updates to their accounts, and once a year, a hefty report explaining and discussing them.
Now ask yourself: does that make even a tiny sliver of sense in a world where I can trade equities from nearly any beach in the world, hundreds of times a minute, using my iPhone? It's an obsolete institution, where my demand for information — to analyze, synthesize, and integrate — has vastly outstripped the capacity to supply it. Hence, stocks froth up and down before and after earnings report releases. When I can't get new information from the horse's mouth, I rely on your opinion, the latest rumor, or what talking heads are paid to say. Result: boom, crash, rinse, repeat. But the real question is one of institutional obsolescence. Why, for example, can't we have continuously updated earnings releases — that let us see what companies are earning in real-time — for a continuously connected world?
The latest announcement that blockade of Flash on iPad, iPod and iPhone is almost over fails to distinguish between Flash used in graphics on the site and Flash used in DRM protected streams. It doesn't apply to the later, hence is of no remedy to Hulu viewers, for example.
SAN FRANCISCO (Dow Jones)--Apple Inc.'s (AAPL) App Store now includes a program that can play video made for Adobe Systems Inc.'s (ADBE) Flash technology, a development that may help owners of Apple's mobile products work around a bitter Silicon Valley feud.
Skyfire Labs Inc.'s namesake program, which can be downloaded for $2.99, is an Internet browser that can play specialized Flash video from many popular websites. The browser runs on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. Read more
Business Week in the recent article put it dead on calling Web 2.0 companies as a season TV show:
Digg’s collapse has become a cautionary tale for so-called Web 2.0 companies in Silicon Valley, even the current crop of superstars, like Facebook and Twitter. The basic problem is that these new-media companies don’t really have customers; they have audiences. Starting a company like Digg is less like building a traditional tech company (think Apple or HP) and more like launching a TV show. And perhaps, like TV shows, these companies are ephemeral in nature. People flock in for a while, then get bored and move on.
MSNBS posted a good article on the very serious privacy violations introduced by the latest Facebook feature called "Places" which is enabled by defalult:
“Facebook has provided an official and automated means of sharing someone’s location, where users can now be systematically linked to a specific set of coordinates. These new check-ins could be potentially logged into a database, archived, mined... This is a significant change from just mentioning someone. The concern here is that locational data needs to be treated differently than just an average status update. This is why Facebook has tried to design the system so that, in their terms, no one can be checked in to a location ‘without their explicit permission’. Unfortunately, they fell short.”
Why would Facebook stubbornly keep this spooky feature in its new tool, and enable it by default, over the wide-eyed objections of privacy advocates?
There are two ways to create a fast-growing new business:
1. Create a new product that's so useful, millions of people rush to use it.
2. Have an existing business that millions of people use, and force them to use your new product.
Here, Facebook has picked technique No. 2.
session.gc_maxlifetime
This value (default 1440 seconds) defines how long an unused PHP session will be kept alive. For example: A user logs in, browses through your application or web site, for hours, for days. No problem. As long as the time between his clicks never exceed 1440 seconds. It's a timeout value.
PHP's session garbage collector runs with a probability defined by session.gc_probability divided by session.gc_divisor. By default this is 1/100, which means that above timeout value is checked with a probability of 1 in 100.
session.cookie_lifetime
This value (default 0, which means until the browser's next restart) defines how long (in seconds) a session cookie will live. Sounds similar to session.gc_maxlifetime, but it's a completely different approach. This value indirectly defines the "absolute" maximum lifetime of a session, whether the user is active or not. If this value is set to 60, every session ends after an hour.
Paying subscribers will get the same number of ads as users of the free website. Hulu figured out that $9.99 will not generate enough money to its media company parents.
Viewing of online video more than doubled during 2009: the number of videos watched rose from approximately 15 billion in january to more than 33 billion in December. The top 10 video sites accounted for more than 56 percent of online views at the beginning of 2009, but by the end of the year, they accounted for only 52 percent.
MIT Technology review, June 2010
Adobe has acknowledged a "critical" security flaw in its Reader, Acrobat and Flash Player software. Adobe says the vulnerability potentially enables hackers to take control of affected computer systems.
This cyclindrical design is a modular protype that provides flexible space within a minimum housing unit. Three different sections are dedicated to different functional needs: there's a bed and table in section, an exercise cylinder, and a kitchen with a sink. Read more
Brilliant.
Apple Patents Location Specific ContentOne of the latest Apple patents cites library-specific usage- this is regarding the iPhone, or any other mobile device they may create (third paragraph below). The specificity would imply that Apple has strong plans in that direction, and would also be reasonable as part of a counter-strategy to Google's interest and activity in library environments. It's especially interesting given the comments immediately preceding the library reference (multimedia streaming and delivery). Patent language is usually as broad as possible to cover all contingencies, while this given example is relatively focused:
The user's location could be determined by GPS, cell-tower triangulation, "dead reckoning", or simply by communicating with a local wireless access point. Content could be provided over the device's mobile telecom system, Bluetooth, local Wi-fi, or a direct-connect docking station.
That content could include "video content, picture content, audio content, multimedia content or routing content associated with a geographical area within a proximate distance to the device based on the location information."
The filing gives two examples. First, a user could walk into the public library, and a digital card catalog could be loaded onto that person's handheld. When the book-seeker leaves the library, the catalog would be removed from the device.
While that first example appears to be purely in the public-service domain, the second example moves closer to the realm of advertising. In that example, a restaurant could provide a menu app or URL to a patron, along with a second app that displays the current wait time on an icon. While the user waits, he or she could choose and order their meal from the menu app or browser page. When the user leaves the restaurant, the content disappears.
One really has to love Twitter, to put up with this latest flaw. It reminded me a last year's surprise when it appeared that Twitter used the word "password" in place of the master password to the site.
The new bug allowed many people to force celebrities, such as Lady Gaga, to follow them by simply typing "accept @ladygaga".
This would make it appear that Lady Gaga had chosen to follow them and would also inject a user's tweets into the singer's feeds.
It appears that web designers and their clients embraced Adobe Flash, tunnel pages, and users who are more comfortable with IE6 than with iPhone. Below are a few pics of the Web Sites that are not viwable on iPad, not to mention iPod Touch and iPhone.
Cartier
Hennessy
Rolex
Out of the top 10 luxury brands ranked by Forbes in 2009, none of their websites worked sufficiently to match their desktop user experience. Only Gucci seems to have created a site that can handle the technology requirements that Apple has placed on its mobile devices. Read more
On the other hand, Jean-Louis Gassée (a former Apple executive) proposes a simple thought-experiment: "By the end of 2010, there will be more than 100 million iPhone OS devices (iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad). You're the webmeister at an important content site. The boss comes in and asks you why you're not supporting the iPhone OS devices. 'Our stuff is all Flash-based, chief, those guys don't run Flash'. You're about to become the ex-webmeister. The boss, a really patient sort, asks you to 'think different' about all these 'noncompliant' customers, each of whom has an iTunes account backed by a credit card, and has developed the habit (encouraged by Apple) of paying for content. So, one more time, with feeling: what's your answer?"
Read more here.
Every day on New Jersey Transit I see more people watching tv and films on small screens.
And as of yesterday, Apple sold one million i Pads.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Despite rising cable and satellite TV prices and easy access to streaming TV and movies on the Internet, few consumers have cut the cord. But that looks like it's about to change.
One in eight consumers will eliminate or scale back their cable, satellite or other pay-TV service this year, according to a new study released this week by Yankee Group.