The battle over e-book prices hits authors and readers the worst
Over the weekend, the e-book ecosystem shuddered a bit.
Major publisher Macmillan met with Amazon.com last Thursday to discuss terms of e-book distribution, and the two parties could not establish terms. Macmillan CEO John Sargent took an ad out in Saturday's Publishers Lunch announcing that Amazon had pulled all of the publisher's content, both printed and digital.
Unified communications comes closer with Vo-Fi over 802.11n
The following commentary is by Jay Botelho, a product manager with network administration and tools provider WildPackets. This is not an advertisement; Betanews is merely presenting Mr. Botelho's point of view.
In case you missed it, seven long years of wrangling have come to an end: 802.11n has now been officially ratified by the IEEE.
The iPod touch: Still a category of one
Of all the short-form conclusions about the iPad, the one that seems to stand out from the crowd is, "iPod touch on steroids."
I'll buy that, since I also concluded much the same thing in a conversation with at least one reporter following the iPad's introduction. At first glance, it extends the same old iPhone-based operating system over a larger form factor that manages to both delight (still-unique industrial design and support for the largest online app inventory anywhere) and annoy (no memory card support, no USB, and supported by only one, less-than-beloved carrier) all at the same time.
Sybase rises against rival databases from Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM
On news of its best financial quarter in company history, Sybase celebrated this week by officially rolling out a new edition of its enterprise database.
The new Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) 15.5, which shipped in December 2009, is the first product from Sybase to be shipped with an in-memory database (IMDB), an emerging alternative to disk-based databases which has already been adopted by competitors Oracle and IBM.
When does online news cost too much?
My answer is $155. Yesterday, when checking my bank account, I found that Dow Jones had charged $155 for a year's Wall Street Journal online subscription. I had been expecting the same $119 charge as last year, which already was borderline too high but acceptable (I had a fulltime job 12 months ago). WSJ had gone too far with its pricing. I called customer service, cancelled the account and asked for a refund. The call wasn't easily made, because of the real and sentimental value received. I do regularly read the Journal online, and I have subscribed since 1996! No longer.
With that introduction, and before continuing with the post, I must ask: What price is too much for you to pay for online content? How much would you pay -- haha, if anything? What about digitized content, such as ebooks? What do you consider to be a fair price for new ebook titles, or older ones? Please answer in comments.
Google's next step in hardwiring the Internet: More location-sensitive DNS
If today's Internet worked the way it was originally designed, where content took whatever route seemed most convenient at the time to reach its destination, there's a good chance we'd already be in a state of gridlock today. As it turns out, global-scale load balancing has already been well under way for several years, with companies like Akamai providing edge caching services that move copies of frequently accessed content from a high-volume server geographically closer to the clients that access it.
Now, Google wants the entire Internet to be capable of implementing a concept that could make similar services to Akamai's feasible on smaller scales everywhere. Earlier this week, the company announced it had submitted a formal proposal to the Internet Engineering Task Force, that would enable authoritative nameservers -- the principal directories in the Domain Name Server system -- to ascertain more clearly where the request for a resolved address is coming from. That way, Google says, the DNS server can craft a response that can be more directly and expressly routed to its recipient. As it stands now, recursive resolvers -- the DNS entities that more often directly face the public -- tend to forward requests to nameservers using their own geography, rather than that of the original client.
How to fit an entire HD video rig into a 15-inch notebook sleeve
Mission: Assemble a full-HD video camera setup that can fit into a carry-on bag with a total weight under 6 pounds.
Deadline: SXSW Interactive Conference and Festival, March 12.
New wave of outages impacts the plagued Google phone
Since early Friday morning, as hundreds of commenters on T-Mobile's and Google's support forums are reporting, 3G data connectivity service has been completely unavailable -- for some, since approximately 4:30 am Eastern Time this morning, but for a great many more users beginning at 10:00 am. Some users in recent minutes are reporting service restored, although indications from both forums are that service can come back and go away again.
Users attempting to connect to the Internet are apparently being greeted with this message: "To connect to the Internet with the device you are using, you'll need a webConnect data plan." At least one customer, speaking with T-Mobile customer support this morning, was informed that he appeared to have been enrolled on the wrong data plan -- specifically, one for the T-Mobile G1, not the Nexus One. If that's the case for other customers as well, the problem could lie in T-Mobile's database, which could be telling Nexus One users they're not qualified to connect. Another customer reports having been told by a support rep at HTC (the phone's manufacturer, where customers reportedly received the best service for the first outage) that T-Mobile is investigating its N1 customer databases.
'Apple iPad was my idea'
I've been awfully hard on Apple's iPad, criticalness that I really should consider, for a surprising reason. With iPad, Apple took the approach that I recommended nearly a year ago. Microsoft's current, catchy PC operating system marketing campaign ends with some consumer asserting: "Windows 7 was my idea." Perhaps I should claim that "Apple iPad was my idea." ;-)
Some background: In early 2009, as the economy sucked growth from the PC market, netebook sales surged and Windows OEMs slashed prices, there were many calls by Wall Street analysts and pundits for Apple to release a netbook and to slash Mac prices. I opposed both ideas in several blog posts. I've called netbooks a menace, because they suck margins out of the PC market without offering much value to the computer manufacturer or netbook buyer. Meanwhile, Mac price cuts made no sense to me, even as more analysts called for them. Apple has established a premium brand that price cuts would jeopardize, all while reducing margins and offering little other business benefit. Apple had long priced against itself rather than against Windows PCs, which has been a successful strategy. Why change it?
Canada's privacy office puts Facebook back in the hot seat
One of the principal factors behind Facebook's revision of its privacy policies has been said to be a formal complaint filed by the office of Canada's Privacy Commissioner last July. That complaint alleged that the leading social network failed to properly disclose to its users the extent to which it could use personally identifiable information, including sharing that information with partners and advertisers. The following month, Facebook agreed to implement changes.
Those changes led to last December's overhaul of the Facebook privacy system, which many now consider to be more of a giveaway than ever before. With the guise of clear and straightforward explanation, users are now being asked to accept default settings that expressly give Facebook permission to share personal information with partners, and are even told that in the absence of such permission, there are ways in which it could be shared anyway.
Amazon CEO: We sell 6 Kindle books to every 10 books
Online retailer Amazon.com had quite a year. Yesterday, the company reported a 42% year-over-year increase in fourth quarter net sales, and a 71% increase in net income. For the full year 2009, Amazon's net sales increased 28% to $24.51 billion, and its net income increased 40% to $902 million.
This increase in profits and revenue is attributable to a number of factors, among them were the drop in price for its EC2 and S3 cloud services in October, for the November acquisition of Zappos.com, and of course, the launch of the Kindle 2 in the beginning of 2009.
Hands-on with TweetCaster for Android
Those who say there are no decent Twitter apps for Android simply haven't found the right one. When the Android Market first opened, you could sign in, watch the handful of new apps being uploaded every day, and generally know everything that was available on the platform. There really were only a couple of Twitter clients.
But now that the Market has been revised, and there are more than 25,000 apps by the last unofficial count from Androlib, there are plenty of Android Twitter clients to choose from.
Beyond obsolescence: What Microsoft Office can become
The original reason for Microsoft Office's existence was to provide retailers with an incentive to move product that wasn't moving. The bundle created a discount deal that enabled the momentum behind Excel, which was hot, to help push Word, which was not. It had hardly a tenth of the sales volume of WordPerfect, and Word was a product that retailers had to actively work to sell. This was at a time when software consumed shelf space in stores and was sold like automobiles -- a time which is now essentially gone.
The idea that Office could be a platform came later, with Microsoft's realization -- albeit a late one, and a hard sell for a lot of us outside the company to have made -- that there was more to this multitasking thing than linked and embedded objects. I was a very early believer in the ideal that an application could be customized to suit the functions, requirements, and even tastes of the businesses that use it. I'm proud to say I've had more than just a voice in helping to bring that reality about. It would be a false statement for me to say I predicted this from my seat on the sidelines and it came about; I got off the sidelines, took my tools with me, and worked to bring it about.
Microsoft reports $19 billion quarter, lifted by $1.71 billion deferral
A year after global recession sapped Microsoft sales and the company announced its first-ever massive layoffs, real signs of recovery can be seen. The holiday quarter was as good to Microsoft as could be expected, given how much sales are dependent on large businesses -- the majority of which are still tightfisted with IT spending or are renewing licenses for fewer seats because of layoffs.
"We reported record revenue and record profits," Peter Klein, Microsoft's new CFO, asserted during a conference call this afternoon. He praised consumer sales, particularly for Windows 7 PCs. But Klein warned that "we have not seen a return of enterprise spending growth."
Let's stop the iPad whining: It's not about the hardware
It's almost embarrassing...Correct that, it's big time embarrassing, for me to read some of the public's response to yesterday's announcement of the Apple iPad.
Yes, we know that the name is thematically close to a certain feminine hygiene product. No, we don't need to read the obvious over and over in the comments section of every tech and mainstream Web site, blog, Facebook page, Twitter stream, and (gee, thanks, Brian Williams) nightly newscast. We get it. It may have been funny when we were in the second grade, but now that we're all supposedly adults, it strikes me as needlessly juvenile.
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