Archive for: September 26, 2007

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First it was movies, and now music. Amazon is intent on nipping at Apple's heels when it comes to selling downloadable media to the masses. It remains to be seen whether Amazon will succeed where services like Rhapsody, Sony Connect (which just closed its doors), and Walmart, have faltered, but Amazon's newly unveiled music store, Amazon mp3, just might have a chance to finally offer some real competition to Apple in the downloadable music space.

Everyone has a music store these days, from the marginally legal (if at all) AllTunes to the the popular--but independent--eMusic. Some of those sites have garnered followings, but none of them so far has managed to feature the wealth of popular music that Apple's iTunes has. Amazon's new music store may not have the music selection that iTunes does, but it does have a few things that iTunes doesn't offer.

The music available at Amazon Mp3 is DRM-free so it's completely portable and playable on any device. Music from artists on the Universal record label, for example, is available on both iTunes and Amazon Mp3, but it's only available without DRM at Amazon Mp3. Amazon was also willing to make a concession that Apple was unwilling to make and is offering its downloads at a variety of different prices, from 89 cents to 99 cents to start, with more popular music concievably costing more as it becomes available. Apple, for its part, believes that multiple pricing models for different artists and songs makes the music buying ...

The biggest shock about these two pieces of news is the amount of time that it actually took (well, and continues to take, really) for two of the largest entertainments sites on the Web to launch mobile initiatives.

YouTube finally launched a mobile version of their site, back in June, which, after prompting users to upgrade their data plan to unlimited, finally offered the ability to watch videos from mobile devices (uploading to the site via mobile has actually been available for some time). The site launched to little fanfare on YouTube's end--in fact, efforts to discover a press release on the subject proved fruitless.

After spending a bit of time on the site, it's not really difficult to see why. On launching, the site took a fairly minimalist approach with regards to content. Recently, the spread has certainly improved, though it still can't touch what's offered on YouTube's main site--though we're probably a long way and a lot of unlimited data plans away from that kind of content offering on a mobile platform.

For their part, Myspace, one of the Web's other major proprietors of streaming user-generated video content, has just announced their intentions to throw their News Corp-owned hat into the ring. The site intends to let users send messages, blog, find friends, comment on pictures, and update their mood via their handsets--in effect Twitterizing the process.

A more complete version, available to AT&T, Helio, and other unnamed service providers will get more access to Myspace features. Fox is also planning mobile versions of IGN, Rotten Tomatoes, and FoxSports.com. There was no mention of plans to offering a Mypace Video ...

Watch two new CW TV shows before their premiere, thanks to Yahoo! TV (beta). CW will stream the debut episodes of "Aliens in America" (which I'm gonna give a try) and "Life is Wild," both available via Yahoo! TV for free—and without commercials.

"Aliens in America" stars Dan Byrd from The Hills Have Eyes, who plays Justin Tolchuck, a shy 16-year old trying to make it through high school in Medora, Wisconsin. The Tolchuck family takes in an exchange student named Raja Musharaff (played Adhir Kalyan), a 16-year-old Muslim from a small village in Pakistan, hence the "Alien" title. It will be available for view until its broadcast Oct. 1.

"Life is Wild" is about a family who leaves (well, is dragged by the father) NYC to spend a year on a game reserve in South Africa in order to bring the family closer together. The children begin to love living there, and think it won't be so bad after all, while parents Jo and Danny learn to heal wounded wild animals. It can be seen Sept. 29 until its debut Oct 7.

The pieces of the massive global conspiracy that is the Google corporation are finally starting to fall into place. A few weeks ago, they announced their plans to take over the moon, and now, judging from a lawsuit last week that involved the company plagiarizing a poor Pennsylvanian man's social security number, and this new suit involving a Tanzanian tribe, it seems pretty clear that everyone's favorite not-evil-doing search platform is also attempting to dominate the planet earth, like a giant, multi-colored search octopus.

Texas resident, Denis Maringo (more specifically, CCA Houston Processing Center resident, thanks to immigration charges, according to the complaint discovered byThe New York Times' Bits Blog), that Dylan Steve Wayne guy in Pennsylvania was a total nutball. Of course Google didn't come upon their name by turning a guy's social security upside down and unscrambling it. Anyone with half a brain in their head can tell you that the company actually pilfered their name from the Gogo tribe in Tanzania.

Also, while he's suing people, Maringo thought it only appropriate to mention the fact that Google isn't the only search giant who nabbed a name from a fellow Tanzanian tribe. Yahoo!'s monkier actually comes from the Yao tribe. At least the Tanzanian Webcrawlers have remained unscathed, thus far.

Maringo is asking for $10,000 per member of each tribe. Google, however, is maintaining their original statement that the company's name comes from the mathematical term "googol." If that is indeed the case, when is the Arabic numeric system going to get its payday?

Also, who is looking out for Japanese anime assassin, Golgo 13, mid-90s M.O.R. group, the Goo Goo Dolls, and Andy Griffith Show star, George ...

If you read as many blogs and Web sites as I do, RSS is the best thing ever; going to individual sites to read their content is so 2004. The trouble with RSS, though, is that only a few of the sites that I read customize their RSS feeds by popular stories or by category or topic, so when I add the feeds to my favorite reader, I still wind up slogging through as much content as though I had gone to the sites themselves. FeedHub is one of a new breed of RSS aggregators that not only take all your feeds and put them in one place, but also filter out content that you never read or that isn't relevant to you.

I'm partially kidding about never visiting sites and only reading them through RSS, by the way. A lot of sites--Webcomics, for example--have information and media on the actual page you'd miss in an RSS feed. But for blogs and journals, RSS is the way to go. RSS aggregation isn't new; a number of sites allow you to import all of your RSS feeds onto one page and read them by topic, by feed name, or just all together on one page.

FeedHub is a little different. The service will take your existing OPML file (more on that later), and and create a single RSS feed that matches your preferences. The service will observe what you read and what you click on over time, and then adapt its feed to match what you're interested in reading. For example, ...

Over the weekend members of the microsoft.public.excel newsgroup reported a serious bug in calculations made by Excel 2007. Initially it just seemed that Excel Can't Multiply. The bad news is, Excel can't do other operations correctly either. The good news is, this is only true when the results are within a very specific range of numbers. And the better news is that the Excel team has mapped out the nature of the problem and is feverishly working on an update.

So what went wrong? It all boils down to the fact that you can't represent an infinite group of non-integer numbers using a finite number of bits. In fact, Excel can store "only" about nine quintillion distinct values. The numbers going into your calculations may be infinitesimally different from the number displayed, and for two calculations that nominally have the same answer the result may be infinitesimally different. Excel generally manages just fine in dealing with these tiny differences, but in exactly 12 instances out of the nine quintillion possibilities it goes completely bonkers.

The Excel team discovered that it wasn't just calculations involving 65,535 that were affected; those that should come out to be 65,536 were also sometimes wrong (returning 100,001 instead). And they discovered it wasn't just multiplication. In truth, the operation didn't matter, only the result. When they work up a fix it will still have to "make its way through our official build lab and onto a download site", but they expect it to happen soon.

...

A little while ago, it came out that Amazon's price protection policy allowed its customers to contact Amazon if they made a purchase and the price dropped within 30 days; they'd then get the difference in the price drop credited to them. Since then, we've seen an explosion of services that monitor the prices of different online stores to make sure that users are alerted when there's a price drop. Amazon Price Watch is one of those services, but it has a few twists that might make it stand out.

We've discussed Price Protectr in the past, which has since come out of beta and added several stores to its list, and it is still a great way to stay on top of multiple purchases from multiple online stores to make sure that you benefit from any price protection policies they might have. Amazon Price Watch is a little different. First of all, the service only tracks Amazon prices: This could be a good thing and a bad thing, depending on your perspective. If you do all your online shopping at Amazon, then you don't really care about the missing functionality. If you do any online shopping elsewhere on the Web, though, it could be a deal-breaker for you.

At the same time, where Amazon Price Watch excels is in the number of tools that it offers to help you keep an eye on the prices of things you've purchased. You can use Web tools, where you can paste in a link to the item that you purchased ...

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