This is a test of the sex and alcohol network. This is only a test.
Seriously, this is search term, Google bait test. Please disregard this message.
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Mergers, wikis and movies, oh my!
AMD buys ATI
Are any TLA companies starting with “A” safe from this insanity?
SocialText goes open source and JotSpot goes 2.0
Two wikis enter, one wiki leaves. Will the open source wonder take down its more usable, more expensive foe?
Amazon to offer movie downloads
Jobs better get their service out soon before everyone else does.
While the blogging world is falling all over itself in praise of Yahoo!’s release of the so-called “DRM-free” Jessica Simpson track (I won’t even comment on the fact that the track is from Jessica Simpson, oy), I think that the music industry is indicating how desperate they are to break from the iTunes hegemony that they have created and how they aren’t really willing to get rid of DRM any time soon.
First, let me address the DRM issue. The downloadable Jessica Simpson track is available as a personalized track. If your name is Jason, Jennifer, or Jared, you are in luck and pay $1.99 for a personalized track from Jessica Simpson, which if you think about it, is a pretty cool idea. But if you continue to think about it, unless your entire social circle has your name, most of your friends won’t really want to copy your song. File trading networks probably won’t have a comprehensive version of this song, so while the Jason’s of the world could probably find their version of the song on BitTorrent, I’m betting the Jordi’s of the world are probably out of luck.
You see, the Jessica Simpson track is only available as a personalized track and therefore, the DRM is social.
Second, even if I’ve overplayed the impact of personalization (I haven’t heard the song), this still signals what the music industry really wants to do, and that is to raise prices on music downloads. The music industry has created a monster and that monster is more concerned about the user experience than about making a quick buck.
Despite all of this, I wonder if the music industry is starting to realize the truth, DRM-free music is the easiest way to break iTunes’ dominance on music downloads. The music industry loves price fixing, but not so much if someone else is doing it. DRM-free music removes most of the advantages that iTunes currently enjoys and allows any number of resellers to distribute music for any price that they (or the labels) want.
So, come on, music labels… let’s hop to it. I’m a huge fan of Apple, but DRM sucks and we all know it.
Movielink to allow movies transferred to DVD
Didn’t they already do that? Maybe it was the other guys.
Build your own iPod HiFi
Two in wall speakers, $200. Two dead Mac Classics, $25. Retro iPod HiFi, priceless.
Yahoo! to the 9’s
Daily video feature of the top 9 videos from the web. No podcast, so you gotta watch it on Yahoo! And just as an aside, apparently Yahoo! finally figured out how to do video that works with a Mac. Maybe one day Launch will actually work outside of IE6 on Windows.
[via CNET]
A couple of weeks back, I attended the Gnomedex conference to hobnob with the digital l33t and make some techie contacts in the Seattle area. I registered late for the conference and was not completely prepared to go.
I had no business cards.
The cardinal rule of attending a conference (and making people remember you) is to bring lots of business cards. As I’ve been playing stay-at-home dad for the last few months, my company (ok, my 2 year old daughter) hadn’t yet supplied me with business cards.
I’ve never designed or had business cards made, the companies I’ve worked for have always done it for me. Being a fairly DIY kind of geek, I set out to make them myself. I had several criteria:
- They had to look professional.
- They had to grab attention.
- I had to have them in less than 4 days.
Today I’ll talk about the design part of the process and tomorrow I’ll finish with how and where I got them printed.
More after the link.
I’ve been a mostly happy user of EyeTV for about a year now (I’ve got the EyeTV 500 for recording digital TV signals), but I’d always hoped that they would go the 10 foot interface route.
I use EyeTV in our kitchen and record programs mainly for my daughter and to stream signals to a network DVD player in my bedroom. My biggest complaint with EyeTV is that unlike it’s PC brethren (Windows Media Center, SageTV, and Beyond TV), it lacked a good way to control it from far away.
The new version of EyeTV will work in full screen mode (that is a little more than an homage to Apple’s FrontRow)and it appears most of the features will be accessible from a remote control. The upgrade will work with the Apple remote or the remote that was bundled with the EyeTV hardware. Unfortunately, there are no screen shots of program scheduling or upcoming schedules, but the two screen shots they have provided, it seems that they are keen to keep the simplicity of the FrontRow interface, for better or worse.
It’s a bit strange that this is a dot release for EyeTV given their recent upgrade from 1.x to 2.0 was a small upgrade feature-wise and they charge $79. This upgrade completely changes EyeTV into a TV friendly application, rather than merely a way to watch television on your desktop.
As a first release, I’m sure that their will be some kinks to work out, but I look forward to the EyeTV upgrade later this month. Kudos to Elgato for continuing to build and improve this great Mac program.
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Thursday Links
CinemaNow gets more funding
$20mm should help… I thought bandwidth was free?
GUBA inks deal with Sony
These guys are on a roll.
Efax: How not to treat your customers
I had a free account cancelled for overuse. Apparently, their customer service isn’t so great, either. [via Daring Fireball]
Looking back at Hotwired
Hotwired rejoins Wired so what better time than now to look back it’s interesting history. [via Daring Fireball]
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TechMeme hacked?
We’re here at Gnomedex at Chris Pirillo just pointed out on his blog that it looks like TechMeme has been hacked?
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Thursday Links
ReplayTV resurrected?
looks like my old pal ReplayTV is back from the dead in the form of PC software. But for $100 and a $20 yearly guide fee, uh-uh. Replay, you were my first and my favorite, why did you have to piss off the TV industry so? See Dave Zatz for more commentary.
Yahoo! Messenger for Mac 3.0 in beta
I gave up on you so long ago, Yahoo! Messenger. Check out what your friends in at AdiumX are doing. [Via Jeremy Zawodny]
IDEA Design Awards on Businessweek.com
Always very shiny, very pretty.
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Google Checkout
Google Checkout launched today and is Google’s attempt at the universal wallet. The idea is that you sign up with Google and you don’t have to enter in your credit card and personal information at every website that you purchase from. Google also provides fraud protection against shady merchants, so theoretically, you will feel safer purchasing from merchants you may not recognize.
While this is an interesting proposition, this is a path well worn path by Google’s competitors. Both Yahoo! and Microsoft have wallet products that have been moderately successful, but there are no grand slams here.
Google has made Checkout more consumer friendly than it’s competitors. First, it doesn’t transmit your credit card number to the merchant. Second, if you select the option, Google won’t send your email address to the merchant either. While these features are consumer friendly, this program is not friendly to merchants.
Google’s biggest challenge here will be acquiring merchants who are willing to accept not owning (or even knowing) their customers. Merchants view advertising on Google (and Shopping.com, Yahoo! Shopping, etc) as a necessary evil to acquire new customers, but ideally they would like to convert customers from these aggregators as customers of their own.
Google has one thing going for it: size. Since the vast majority of web merchants derive their customers from search engines and Google is the most used search engine, merchants may have a hard time saying no, especially if Google skewed results in favor of merchants that offered Checkout.
One thing is for sure, the web shopping landscape just got a little more interesting.
Google Checkout
Participating merchants
[UPDATE: Om Malik has an interesting take on what Checkout means about the CPC business]
OS X 10.4.7 released
and hasn’t destroyed my machine yet.
Apple swapping out dirty MacBooks?
Warning: Don’t let PigPen use your MacBook [Via Engadget]
Gizmodo Sidekick 3 hands-on
Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world’s smallest Sidekick. Sidekick 3 will be that Sidekick. Better than it was before. Better, smaller, faster.
Chris Pirillo coins “freedbacking”
and Google listens.
NBC sells 6 million videos on iTunes
Turns out, Hasselhoff is popular in the US as well.
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Gnomedex Speakers and their blogs
I’m heading to Gnomedex this weekend as it is hosted in Seattle, my current backyard. Gnomedex is a blogger conference held annually Chris Pirillo, blogger and tech geek extraordinaire.
So, I’m a little new to the whole Gnomedex thing… I’m no insider, mega blogger, or Chris Pirillo, but I did want the 411 on who would be speaking. The Gnomedex Wiki seemed to be down, so I created a quick and dirty schedule with links to all the speakers for this weekend.
Click through for the schedule.
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TEDTalks Video Podcasts
The TED Conference (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is held every year in Monterey and attracts bigwigs from the various industries they represent. Occasionally, you’ll hear about what these luminaries talk about and present, but by and large, what’s talked about in Monterey, stays in Monterey.
Until now, that is. TEDTalks is a series of presentations from this year’s conference including Al Gore, David Pogue and (shudder) Tony Robbins. TEDTalks will be releasing a new video each week.
I’ve watched the Al Gore video this morning at the gym and it is amazing how Gore can connect with the audience on both an emotional and intellectual level. Where the hell was this guy in the 2000 election?
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WSJ – NBC, YouTube in promo deal
This deal is pretty big for YouTube, who just months ago was being sued by NBC:
NBC plans to announce that it will make available on YouTube promotional video clips for some of its popular shows, such as “The Office,” “Saturday Night Live” and “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.” NBC plans to market its new fall lineup using clips on YouTube, and is holding a contest for consumers to submit their own promotional videos for “The Office.” It will also buy ads on the site and promote YouTube with mentions on television.
The article goes on to do a profile of the YouTube founders and their meteoric rise.
Read [subscription site]
Toshiba wants unified DVD format
god, as much as I want a single HD disc format, this smells like fear.
Farecast launches public beta today I’ve been using this for a few weeks to book flights to various places. If you are in Seattle or Boston, or just a flight pricing nerd, check it out. [Via CNET]
I ditched iCal
Making the switch to Google’s online calendar.
Usenet and illegal video fans should be weeping today, GUBA has signed a deal with Warner Movies to distribute Warner’s videos day and date as the DVD releases. Rentals are available for $1.99 and purchases are 9.99 for catalog titles and 19.99 for new releases(that sounds really familiar). You gotta have a Windows XP or 2000 box and Windows Media Player. No Macs need apply.
I haven’t been a customer of GUBA in the past, but originally, the site made its money selling subscriptions to Usenet groups that had illegal videos and porn. I’m assuming that all illegal video has been removed (and if you look around you are hard pressed to find Usenet at all) as a result of this deal.
GUBA, in their former life, even transcoded video from Usenet groups into an iPod compatible format. That appears to be gone as well.
I suspect that with it’s new “official” catalog, GUBA will lose more customers than it gains. Although, it might not get sued out of existence.