Five years on, Microsoft finally gives up on Zune
It seems like eons ago that the first details of Microsoft's Zune player were leaked right here on the pages of Betanews, but five tortuous years later that effort is over. On the company's official support website, Microsoft let users know that it was finally giving up.
This was a complete reversal from its statements just yesterday denying that its music player was dead. Asymco founder Horace Deidu noted the irony. "Yesterday Microsoft denied that Zune was being discontinued," he mused. "Today it confirmed that Zune has been discontinued."
iPhone 5 rumors: they all boil down to baseband
Today, Apple is expected to announce its new iPhone somewhat more quietly than it has in the last couple of years, with no live webcast for the world to tune into, relying instead on the traditional press conference to get the word out.
Of course, the very existence of the press conference is enough to send the rumor mill into a frenzy, and speculation about Apple's "Let's talk iPhone" event today has conjured up quite a few fantastic stories.
LaCie takes away storage trading in new Wuala build
LaCie’s online backup service Wuala has been updated to build 368, codenamed Hirslanden. The biggest change of note is the removal of storage trading, which previously allowed users to give up free space on their hard drive in return for free online storage.
This news, which has angered many Wuala users, appears to be caused by a switch from UDP to TCP networking, a move Wuala claims will make the service more stable, but which makes trading storage impossible for security reasons. Anticipating a backlash, LaCie has announced that any earned storage through trading will remain free for 12 months, at which point it promises a “generous rebate” for those who wish to keep this storage.
Avira releases rebranded anti-malware software
It has been around since 1988, but German antivirus company Avira has finally said goodbye to the AntiVir brand. And so its 2012 range will now follow the same naming convention as, well: “AntiVir Personal” becomes “Free AntiVirus“; “AntiVir Premium” becomes “Antivirus Premium 2012″ and “AntiVir Premium Security Suite” is now “Internet Security 2012“.
The latest releases don’t have any major new technologies to help them stand out from the crowd, either, unfortunately. Still, Avira has been working hard, and there are plenty of smaller worthwhile improvements tjhat should be welcome to Avira fans.
Mozilla: Firefox is still No. 2
Mozilla is doing some damage control following last week's double-data whammy from Net Applications and StatCounter. Both firms show Chrome gaining usage share on Firefox. StatCounter claims Chrome will unseat Firefox from second place as early as the end of year. I don't believe it, but that's because I trust NetApps stats more, and they're different.
The statement begins: "Firefox demonstrated just how important browsers are but it's important to remember that the reasons for building Web browsers are significantly different from one company to the next". There's a lot of hidden meaning in that one sentence. Google's intentions are pretty clear, as the company builds up a development platform and seeks an anchor for search and ensuring its dominance -- all while integrating its many web services.
Adobe stiffs Apple
Android tablets got what can only be described as their greatest endorsement to date, with stunning support from one of the world's largest and most successful software developers. Today at its MAX 2011 conference, Adobe unveiled the suite of six Touch Apps, which will be available for Android tablets in November. There is no ETA for iPad, except announcement planned for 2012. Considering how much better iPad is selling than Android tablets, Adobe's choice can't be meaningfully described. The developer has chosen the lower-volume competitor instead of the overwhelming leader.
Adobe's decision says much about its increasing rivalry with Apple, the sometimes onerous App Store approval process (particularly for competitors) and relative openness of Android compared to iOS. It's perhaps a slap across Apple's face that the marketing photos on Adobe web pages for Touch Apps show Android tablets. There's nothing subtle about that.
T-Mobile and Walmart offer dirt-cheap 4G data plan
Aiming to attract the increasing number of data-intensive wireless users, T-Mobile says it will begin offering a new prepaid plan exclusively through Walmart. The plan will feature unlimited data and texting with 100 minutes of voice calling for $30 per month, and is available starting October 16.
As part of the new offering, T-Mobile will also expand its prepaid device lineup to six, including a 4G-capable device. The carrier declined to specify the device to Betanews, only saying that it would be announced "in the near future."
Adobe Touch Apps reimage Creative Suite for tablets
Adobe has debuted a family of six new applications it has developed for mobile tablets called Adobe Touch Apps, which mimic some of the professional creative functions of Creative Suite.
The scene-stealing app is Adobe Photoshop Touch, which gives Android tablet and iPad users the ability to apply popular edits and effects to photos just as they would in the full Photoshop. It adds a new exclusive extraction tool called "scribble selection", which lets users scribble over what they want to keep in the picture while everything else is removed.
India's $50 education tablet almost a reality?
The Institute for Sustainable and Applied Infodynamics, a collaboration between Texas' Rice University and Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, announced on Monday that they are getting ready to produce their low-price, low-power tablet for Indian schools.
This is unrelated to the fabled "$35 tablet" that was shown off by India's Human Resource Development Minister, Kapil Sibal last year, but one that Rice University scientist Krishna Palem debuted at roughly the same time called the I-slate.
Napster's finally dead: Rhapsody to acquire service/subscribers from Best Buy
Subscription music service Rhapsody announced on Monday that it has signed an agreement to acquire Napster from Best Buy. Though financial details were not disclosed, Rhapsody said it will acquire Napster and its subscribers and assets, which will merge into Rhapsody, and Best Buy will receive a minority stake in the service in exchange.
Best Buy purchased Napster and its 700,000 paying customers three years ago for $121 million, after the trailblazing peer-to-peer file sharing service converted into a legal, legitimate for-pay music service. One year after the acquisition, Best Buy slashed Napster's subscription price to just $5 per month to make it more attractive to consumers.
Kingsoft Office Suite Free 2012: Another Microsoft Office wannabe
Not long ago, investing in an office suite meant parting with a fairly substantial amount of cash, and while it is still possible to pay a great deal for a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation tool, there are also an increasing number of free options available. One newcomer is Kingsoft Office Suite Free 2012 which can be used both at home and in the office as an alternative for Microsoft Office.
The suite comprises three tools; Kingsoft Spreadsheets Free 2012 (to help with number crunching) Kingsoft Writer Free 2012 (for processing words) and Kingsoft Presentation Free 2012 (for the creation of slideshows and presentations). Each application is fully compatible with files created in their Microsoft Office counterpart. Each of the programs is impressive in its own right and all manage to look the part as well. While some free software has a tendency to look cheap, the offerings from Kingsoft are good-looking as well as functional.
Adobe buys TypeKit
>Watch out Tumblrs and WordPress bloggers, Adobe just announced that it has acquired font-subscription service TypeKit. Is it the end of cheap web fonts?
TypeKit founder and CEO Jeffrey Veen is "thrilled. There honestly is no better place for us to continue building our platform. But perhaps even more significantly, this represents a huge step forward in bringing fonts to the web".
Got a question? Ask Quora for iPhone
When it was unveiled, the potential for success for Quora was questioned by many, but in a fairly short space of time, the questions and answers service has gone from strength to strength. It was only a matter of time before an iPhone app was released to make it easy to ask and answer questions via the site, and that time it now; Quora for iPhone is here.
If you have a question about anything, and we mean anything imaginable, Quora should be your first port of call. Whether you are looking to discover how many people live in China, or you have a more practical query such has how to troubleshoot an error message that has been thrown up by Windows, there is sure to be something on hand who is able to help.
Economic woes push more enterprises to the cloud
Whoa, think enterprises are rushing to the cloud? Think again. It's still early days and slow going. Seventy percent have used software-as-a-service projects for less than three years, says Gartner. That's less time than consumer cloud services like Facebook and Twitter have been around or even Apple's iPhone. One-third of organizations have migration plans in place -- from on-premise to SaaS solutions. Among those enterprises already in the cloud in some way, 95 percent plan to maintain SaaS investments or increase them.
Gartner surveyed 525 organizations from nine countries -- in June and July. That may seem like old data but at the pace enterprises make IT changes, it's current; the survey might as well have been taken yesterday. :) Organizations adopting SaaS cite two major reasons: ease/speed of deployments and lower costs. Global economic crisis is a major factor driving SaaS adoption. Perhaps it's no coincidence that the US stock market collapsed three years ago last week, and the majority of enterprises started deploying SaaS solutions since.
Paint.NET 3.5.9: small changes make big impact
There are few programs that can honestly be described as ‘must have’ tools, but for anyone who works with images, this is something that can be said of Paint.NET. What started off as a development of Windows’ own Paint tool has quickly become a highly respected image editor that is a serious alternative to expensive tools such as Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro.
The update to version 3.5.9 is a relatively minor number increment, but the changes and additions that have been made are important ones. Previous versions of the program had problems with the DirectDraw Surface configuration screen as well as DirectDraw Surface themselves, but these issues have now been addressed.
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