New Media News Every Morning
It looks like Amazon should not worry about the upcoming Barnes & Noble’s Nook ebook reader but with the iPhone instead. According to a report by analytics research company Flurry, book apps for the iPhone have overtaken previous  most downloaded category – game apps. [Read more…]
Originally posted on November 2, 2009 @ 7:09 am
As early as nineties, people were already playing music from their browsers instead of traditional media players. Despite its eventual fall from popularity, I brought a client to the top of her local pop charts on MP3.com. Despite its current stagnation as Yahoo Music, I have fond memories of listening to Launch.com at work.
Between services like Imeem and Pandora and Last.fm, music has been going the way of almost every other computing application: to the cloud. Google, of course, wants to be your gateway to the everything in the cloud. That’s why they’ve introduced Google Music Search.
Google’s approach to music stands in stark contrast to their approach to video. With video, they bought the world’s number one video destination site, then used it as a testbed for video search, recommendation, and monetization across the Web. With music, they’re skipping the testbed phase entirely. Given the litigious nature of the RIAA, the relative simplicity of music compared to video, and the preponderance of major music destination sites, perhaps that’s the best approach: let partner sites worry about rights clearing. That way, Google can focus on what it does best: search.
In the meantime, let’s hope Google works its algorithmic magic to take this feature to awesome extremes. Right now, I’m imagining song recommendations, genre searches, and predictive playlists. Now that would rock.
Originally posted on October 29, 2009 @ 12:12 pm
The road to application approval hasn’t always been smooth, with apps approved and then pulled, or outright banned on rather shaky grounds, but that hasn’t stopped Apple powering to 100,000 approved apps in the iTunes App Store.
The web site Appshopper.com has counted 102,485 approved applications and 93,659 available.
That’s a mind-boggling number, and unfortunately says nothing about the quality of those applications. Bear in mind that there are many variations on the same theme, and some (a lot) of them are complete and utter rubbish. [Read more…]
Originally posted on October 30, 2009 @ 11:01 am
A pre-revenue startup, built entirely around artificial character limits, reliant on celebrity users, with no business model, boasting a billion-dollar valuation? I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty frickin’ scary to me. Heck, it’s enough to give me nightmares about the dotcom crash.
That’s why I agree with The Joy of Tech’s trick-or-treat costume suggestion for Halloween: come as the Twitter Bird!
While you’re at it, have your morbidly obese friend walk around as the Fail Whale. Whenever that thing appears, Twitter addicts scream in terror.
Originally posted on October 28, 2009 @ 9:44 am
Proposals to cut off people who persistently download files illegally from the Internet have been washing around for several years now, but today Lord Mandelson, the UK government’s secretary of state for business, innovation and skills, laid out plans to introduce tough measures to combat illegal filesharing.
Opposed by leading ISPs, who fear that they will be forced to introduce costly and inconvenient monitoring and recording systems, Lord Mandelson did say that he had “no expectation of mass suspensions”, instead outlining a “three strikes” approach whereby persistent offenders would still have the right to appeal if cut off from the Net. [Read more…]
Originally posted on October 29, 2009 @ 9:15 am