U.S. News Weekly: Now how much would you pay?
This week, the publishers of U.S. News and World Report announced it's launching a publishing experiment that's been tried before: a weekly edition of its now-biweekly print news service in PDF format, for subscribers willing to pay about $20 per year.
Already, the concept has been given a lot of guff elsewhere on the Web. The prevailing word thus far appears to be that no one wants to pay for news any more, and why should they? Information, after all, "wants to be free."
Adobe claims 100 million AIR installs...Where's Silverlight?
Yesterday at a conference in Japan, Adobe announced it has received an independent assessment of the worldwide installed base for its Web platforms. A Millward Brown survey estimates that Flash has been installed on 99% of the world's Internet-enabled PCs, leading Adobe to estimate that Flash Player 10 by itself will break the 80% penetration mark by the end of Q2 2009.
Some 100 million PCs are believed to have successfully installed Adobe's AIR runtime platform -- and by "successfully," the company means, it's running and active and without trouble. That's based on the company's own statistics about downloads.
'Google for films' site helps Britons find media
A "Google for films" type of search engine site just rolled out this week lets you quickly peruse a database of 60,000 titles to find movies for downloading, in cinemas, to watch online, and on TV, standard DVD, and Blu-ray.
In a quick visit to the FindAnyFilm.com site today, for example, Betanews confirmed that The Dark Knight is available in all of these categories, whereas Slumdog Millionaire -- another box office draw -- can still be seen only in cinemas.
The rumored Skype sale by eBay: Much ado with little to go by
Commentary is swirling in the blogsphere this week over the prospect of eBay selling its VoIP property Skype to an acquirer. But does the online auctioneer really have some sort of "plan" in that direction?
Much of the media appears not at all convinced that this is so, despite all the attention paid to the rumors.
Fennec coming to HTC Touch Pro
In Mozilla's weekly project meeting yesterday, updates to mobile browser Fennec were discussed, and the M1 milestone release target for Windows Mobile was noted.
According to the meeting's minutes: "We are targeting a Milestone release for the first week of February, targeting the HTC touch pro. We are two patches away from the meta goal of building from trunk. The tools changes have review from dougt, and are waiting for review from ted, who has promised review by the end of the week. NSPR changes are waiting for review from Nelson, who asked for and received a patch against NSPR trunk."
Jimmy Wales wants Wikipedia edit flags
It appears that last week's Inauguration Day uproar over Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd's health has ended Jimmy Wales' patience with not having the Flagged Revisions options switched on at Wikipedia.
During a post-Inaugural luncheon, Senator Kennedy was taken ill and Senator Byrd left the room in obvious distress. Both men subsequently recovered, but for a few minutes, Wikipedia said they had died -- much to the chagrin of Wales, Wikipedia's founder.
Symantec launches beta of GoEverywhere cloud workspace
Symantec today opened the first beta of its GoEverywhere service, a browser-accessible cloud workspace that centralizes user data from a variety of cloud services and makes them available through a single interface and single user ID and password. GoEverywhere features more than 100 of the popular communications and productivity apps available on the Web today, and it could be described as something of a cloud-based virtual machine. Interested users can sign up on goeverywhere.com to participate in the free beta.
Wired.com discovers Google Docs flaw, but that's not the only one
A writer at Wired.com this week pointed to a document editing issue in Google Apps, and that's just the latest in a list of security holes -- of varying severity -- uncovered by users of Google's suite.
Other users have complained, for example, about Google document ownership getting assigned to the wrong people, an inability to delete images of Google documents, and the lack of SSL encryption for docs published in the Standard Edition.
Cloud-based document sharing service SugarSync 1.5 released
Sharpcast began rolling out the 1.5 version of its cross-platform synching service SugarSync today. The upgrade includes the new "shared folders" feature, which adds a document collaboration aspect to the nearly one-year old sync service.
SugarSync is a subscription cloud service that makes documents and files remotely accessible through synched Windows and Mac PCs or through mobile handsets including iPhone and BlackBerry. Current subscribers may not receive the SugarSync Manager upgrade until Monday or Tuesday, but the shared folders feature in the Web interface is available to all immediately.
MSN Mobile Music timidly tests the English Channel with DRM
MSN Mobile Music, a browser-based music shop designed for mobile handsets and completely unrelated to Zune marketplace was formally launched in the UK this week. Microsoft may have taken a step backward by protecting downloads with DRM.
The store is run by VidZone Digital Media and features .WMA downloads, ringtones, and video content from three of the "big four" major labels (Universal Music Group is not yet in.) Single songs cost £1.50, videos cost £2 and ringtones go for £3.
Catholic Church steps up to YouTube
Today, Google and YouTube announced the launch of www.youtube.com/vatican, the YouTube channel dedicated to the activities of the Pope and events in the smallest state in the world, Vatican City.
Footage on the channel comes from Centro Televisio Vaticano (CTV) and Vatican Radio (RV), so the primary language is Italian, but there will be information in Spanish, English, and German as well.
Google cuts the ribbon on its AJAX Playground
Having written three books on programming in a series that was called "By Example," I know first-hand that sometimes several hundred pages of written text doesn't really beat the ability to see something for yourself, tweak it, and find out what happens.
Not that Google has ever really been that big on documentation anyway; but this morning, it's unveiled something that's perhaps several hundred times better: Its new AJAX API playground lets JavaScript programmers not only sample all the major API calls in Google's toolbox in the context of functions, but tweak those samples and see the results live.
AOL Web Mail gets updated
This morning, AOL launched its latest version of Web Mail, which gives users the ability to tailor their Web Mail window with gadgets from the myAOL Gallery, and integrate their mailboxes with third-party mail services like Yahoo and Gmail. Additionally, the AOL Mail Synchronization feature that has been in beta testing since November has been added to the completed feature list.
Rounding out today's update is the ability for users to skin their AOL Web Mail page, similar to Windows Live Home and iGoogle.
Ads re-emerge in Pandora audio stream
Web radio service Pandora has announced plans to start playing short audio ads, now and then between songs. The ads were first introduced on Pandora's Twitter feed. The company pledged to be "prudent" and "respectful" in delivering the commercial interruptions to the personalized listening service.
In press interviews today, Pandora founder Tim Westergren made clear this may be the only way the company can afford its now-higher royalties, while avoiding layoffs or even a possible shutdown. Yesterday, the company's Twitter feed read, "So you know, we did not take on audio ads lightly. We try to be extremely respectful of your listening experience, & p romise to be prudent [sic]."
Zoho prepares for an exodus of former Google Notebook users
One of the canceled projects on Google's list last week was a surprise: a cloud application with at least the hope to become ubiquitous. It was called Google Notebook, and it was essentially a way for individuals to jot down notes in a way that they could be retrieved from multiple locations.
We learned today that Zoho, a cloud application provider that began deployment of some of its services on Google's App Engine just last month, is more than happy to pick up the slack. A Zoho spokesperson told Betanews today that the latest beta of its Zoho Notebook, which includes a plug-in for Firefox, will feature an interesting kind of on-screen interface that will let users who are logged onto both services simultaneously export their Google Notebook content (while that service is still active) directly into the plug-in, hopefully without change of format or function.
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