Let the music (trial) play
Is it possible that the Recording Industry Association of America is afraid of listeners? Their pleading to a US appeals court to forbid the Webcasting of arguments in RIAA v. Tenenbaum is starting to sound like the excuses from a kid seeing monsters under the bed.
The latest round of entertainment up in Boston came last week, when 14 news organizations filed an amicus brief with the appeals court explaining that contrary to RIAA's claim, allowing cameras in the courtroom for the February 24 hearing falls in line with usual and customary camera access for similar hearings.
Search engine Sagoon launches in beta
Sagoon is a newly-launched search engine that joins the race to provide a semantic search with the elegant screen layout made famous by Google. The company calls its semantic technology the "Random Vector Model," where traditional keyword searches are paired with algorithms and formulas that analyze content between sites, finding their hidden similarities.
Sagoon is based out of Washington DC, but the underlying technology comes from New Dehli, India's Elixir Web Solutions
TringMe proves Silverlight-based VoIP (sort of)
In a crafty bit of coding, TringMe has unveiled a demo of a Silverlight widget that allows outgoing VoIP calls to be made. The India-based IP telephone software company says that Silverlight does not provide microphone support, so this widget uses Flash to access the microphone for the exchange taking place in Silverlight.
Netflix contemplates a tiered streaming model
Certain Netflix members this weekend received a survey from the company in their inbox which asked if users would pay more for premium content.
The survey focused on HBO content, which would add $9.99 per month and give the user instant access to HBO original series and movies. While it is still only an idea by the company, the introduction of a tiered streaming model is a logical next step for the company. It would move the streaming business out of the auxiliary position it currently holds and closer to the company's mail order business which currently has nine different monthly rental plans.
eJamming Audiio P2P music collaboration launches beta 14
At CES 2008, Intel's Paul Otellini used eJamming Audiio, BigStage, and the band Smashmouth to show off how a group of musicians located on various corners of the globe could get together via P2P and play live in a virtual environment.
BetaNews tested the eJamming Audiio software last year and found that it was suitable for recording and collaborating with others in a VoIP-enhanced environment, but playing instruments live had too many latency issues to be feasible. In using MIDI drums, a guitar and bass in three different locations in the United States, each musician found they had to get accustomed to latency in their own signal, and then the latency of the others as well. In the end, it was nearly impossible to play live.
Free online games see sharp increase
comScore data released this week showed online casual gaming has reached 86 million users in 2008, an increase of 27% year over year. Additionally, the time individual users spend on gaming sites increased 42%.
Casual gaming is the category where Yahoo is definitely king, with 19.5 million unique visits in December, a 20% increase over 2007 and 4 million visits more than second place EA Online, and 6 million more than Disney Games, which holds third place.
Whitehouse.gov incorporates RDFa mashup lingo
President Obama's TIGR (Technology, Innovation and Government Reform) team has already extolled the merits of mashups, and now we're seeing the beginnings of mashup language RDFa take root on WhiteHouse.gov.
Viewing the site's copyright policy source reveals the use of RDFa tags such as xmlns,and property. These provide a set of XHTML attributes (metadata) to augment the visual data with information meant for other machines to read, recognize and catalog.
Google's rumored GDrive personal cloud service gets real description
Google's GDrive -- a rumored forthcoming service for storing personal software files on cloud-based Google servers -- looks likely to launch soon, if a reference in a file used by GooglePack is a good indication.
GDrive's "localized product category" is "online file backup and storage," according to the newly discovered description in the file. It also offers a two-line "localized short description" for the long anticipated GGDrive service, which is seen by some as ultimately eliminating the need for storing personal data on PC hard drives.
Copyright Board begrudgingly adopts revenue-based streaming royalties
With explanatory language that made it clear its judges didn't particularly favor anyone at all involved in this whole process, the CRB announced this week it will apply royalties to streaming net services based on revenue.
Though the royalty schemes themselves may not be exactly what streaming broadcasters asked for, especially with regard to its phraseology and methodology -- which makes corporate tax law look like an episode of "Sesame Street" by comparison -- the US Copyright Royalty Board published in its weekly news bulletin (dated Monday but released today) its revenue-based royalties schedules for online services that provide streaming music, online music stores that provide downloads, and ringtone services.
Hollywood studios join the streaming media parade
Studio 3 Networks, a joint venture of three major production groups, revealed today that Epix -- the name for which it had filed multiple trademark applications in early December, will be a streaming on demand Web service.
Originally thought to be a premium television channel and companion on demand service, Studio 3 president Mark Greenberg said yesterday that it will actually be the other way around: a Web service with a cable channel planned for the future. Studio 3 is a joint venture of Viacom and Paramount Pictures, MGM Studios and United Artists, and Lionsgate Films.
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."
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