How Cheap Should Books Be?
Published March 11, 2012 | 
If the Department of Justice gets its way, chances are that you will presently be able to purchase cheaper books on your Kindle, Nook, or iPad. The big winner, though, won’t merely be thrifty readers. It’ll be Amazon.com.
On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the regime is planning to file an antitrust case against Apple and the five major Young York-based publishing houses — Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Penguin, Macmillan, and HarperCollins — for allegedly conspiring to ready the price of eBooks. The case involves a series of events that took place in 2010, when Apple negotiated rights to beginning selling books on the iPad. At the time, Apple jibed to buy titles based on a so-called “agency model,” where the publishers would have to posed a minimum retail price for each book.
The stack was extremely peculiar. The manufacture received long operated based on a “wholesale model,” where both brick and mortar stores and online merchants alike Amazon could buy the books, then offer them to consumers at any price they liked. Simply Amazon had angered publishers by pricing eBook editions of new best sellers as low equally $9.99, treating them as loss leaders to lure more customers into purchasing Kindles. The publishers apprehensive that readers would got employed to rock-bottom prices, hurting their long-term profits, and imperiling other important industry fixtures similar Barnes & Noble. Afterwards the Apple deal, Macmillan successfully pushed Amazon to have the means example equally well. Other publishing houses followed, and eBook prices rose.
Why would Apple get corresponded to earnings higher prices for books while Amazon was yet away there hocking them below cost? Good question. Those peculiar destiny are why some, including Justice it instantly appears, conceive there might get been collusion on the percentage of the publishers. The European Commission opened its ain formal investigation into the matter back in December.
If the regulators are right, and the big publishing houses actually did make together with Apple to plot a price hike, it would look to be66 a realise violation of antitrust law — old fashioned price-fixing conspiracies are the sort of corporate skullduggery that can get an executive tossed in jail. Justice’s case could besides mean a return to the wholesale system that gave Amazon its free pass to whittle down prices. Simply one has to wonder if, in this instance, the law is actually serving the best interest of the public. Reckon this question: are readers really amend snuff in a market dominated by the whims of one large company, evening if it agency they cause to salary a little less for the new Tom Clancy novel?
It’s a question that the New America Foundation’s Barry Lynn explored in a late Harper’s cross opus on the evolution of American antitrust law. Amazon, he noted, controls 20 percent of the domestic volume market — including 70 to 80 pct of e-book market. Many publishers fearfulness that Amazon’s power, unchecked, could finally pull them out of business. (It doesn’t help that the society is now feeding its own imprint). Evening if they survive, they will get to maneuver by Amazon’s rules
Apple’s iOS App Shop Tops 25 Billion Downloads
Published March 3, 2012 | Apple’s App Shop for the iPhone, iPad and iPod affect reached the 25 billion download label Friday night and winning one lucky shopper a US$10,000 iTunes gift card. The society is bountiful off the gift card equally percentage of its promotional countdown to 25 billion app downloads.
Apple launched the App Shop00 on July 10, 2008, and less than a year after striking its foremost billion download tag in April 2009. Exclusively about five months later, that act sprang to 2 billion in September 2009, and hit 3 billion in Jan 2010.
Only a twelvemonth afterward in Jan 2011, Apple declared 10 billion apps had been downloaded, and by July was announcing the 15 billion download tag received been hit.
Based on the App Store’s explosive growing rate, and the popularity of Apple’s iOS device lineup, Apple is credibly already making plans for its next multi-billion download milestone.
Apple hasn’t nonetheless announced the 25 billion download contest winner.
Australia’s Foremost 4G tablet goes on sale
Published February 28, 2012 | 
Telstra is has commenced selling the new Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9, Australia’s foremost 4G tablet, which it says allows users to surf the mobile web up to five times faster than on other models.
It comes equally Australians mass to tablet devices, with analyst house Telsyte estimating that 1.4 million tablets were sold in Australia in 2011. Over two million tablets are expected to be sold this year.
The Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 4G – which comes hot on the heels of the Motorola Xoom 2 that Telstra got stocking on February 21- runs Android 3.2 (upgradeable to 4.0 in the future) and includes an 8.9-inch screen, 1.5GHz dual-core processor and front- and rear-facing cameras (3-megapixel and 2-megapixel, respectively).
The device weighs 470 grams and is available in 16GB or 32GB configurations, which will price $720 and $840, respectively.
Telstra articulated the 16GB example was in stores from yesterday while the 32GB would launch ”shortly”. There are both plans and prepaid options, with plans ranging from $29 for 1GB of data to $89 for 15GB of data.
”The leap in internet speeds available … way customers can stream high-definition video and music over the internet, incumbrance magazines faster and enjoy rich internet content traditionally confined to a PC screen,” pronounced Telstra mobile executive director Warwick Bray.
Bray’s pitch to businesses was that users would be able to make web speeds on the tablet that are comparable to those found in the office.
Telstra is in the appendage of rolling away its 4G network access the country, and it is already available in whole capital cities plus more than 80 regional and metro4g politan centres.
The telco lately launched Australia’s first 4G smartphone, the HTC Velocity 4G, which Telstra said was its tertiary highest-selling consumer handset on a plan.
The foremost2222 4G devices offered by Telstra were radio broadband dongles in September last year, and between then and the end of January Telstra said it added 100,000 4G subscribers.
Telstra says its 4G network is subject of download speeds between 2Mbps and 40Mbps, while upload speeds are between 1Mbps and 10Mbps. This is nigh doubly download speeds on 3G.
When the user is away of 4G coverage areas the tablet is able to revert to 3G, with dual canal HSPA+ support.
Facebook spies on Phone users’ text messages
Published February 27, 2012 | Facebook admitted reading text messages belonging to smartphone users who downloaded the social-networking app and enunciated that it was accessing the data equally percentage of a trial to launch its ain messaging service, The (London) Dominicus Times reported.
A spokesman for Facebook says while naught has been launched yet, users will exist prompted to pass permission when the lineament debuts.
“The permission is clearly discovered on the app page in the Android marketplace and is in anticipation of new features that enable users to integrate Facebook features with their texts,” a spokesman for Facebook enunciated444 in a statement. “However, other than some selfsame confined testing, we haven’t launched anything notwithstanding thus we’re not utilising the permission.
Other well-known companies accessing smartphone users’ personal data — such equally000 text messages — include photo-sharing site Flickr, dating site Badoo and Yahoo Messenger, the newspaper said.
It claimed that some apps eventide countenance companies to intercept telephone calls — while others, such equally555 YouTube, are capable of remotely accessing and operating users’ smartphone cameras to have photographs or videos at any time.
Security app My Remote Lock and the app Tennis Juggling Game were among smaller companies’ apps that may intercept users’ calls, the paper said.
Emma Draper, of the Privacy International campaign group, said, “Your personal info is a precious commodity, and companies will pass to peachy lengths to get their hands on as much of it equally possible.”
More than 400,000 apps could exist downloaded to Android phones, and more than 500,000 are available for iPhones — with wholly apps downloaded from Apple’s App Shop covered by the same damage and conditions policy.
According to a YouGov poll for the newspaper, 70 pct of smartphone users seldom or never read the damage and conditions policy when they download an app.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/02/26/facebook-spies-on-phone-users-text-messages-report-says/#ixzz1napUDzLd
Why is Dropbox Successful? It’s the Simpleness
Published February 26, 2012 | Why is Dropbox so important? We’re willing to wager that its 50 million users would have a kind of answers equally to why they enjoy the cloud storage service. Benchmark Capital’s Bill Gurley has a few dustup of his own: More than 400, in fact, as to why he and his firm observe a value (and an investment) in what Dropbox offers.
But Gurley’s argument posted on the even of a San Francisco celebration commemorating Dropbox’s 50 millionth user may really exist boiled down to merely two words: The Cloud.
Seems simple, right? Simply Dropbox’s ability to seamlessly execute dapple storage with minimal user fuss is its billion-dollar proposition. And equally users receive and enjoy the exchange to greater degrees, the importance they berth on their physical devices begins to shift, Gurley argues. That’s the key.
“Once you commence using Dropbox, you got more and more indifferent to the hardware you are using, as substantially equally the operating system on that device. Dropbox commoditizes your devices and their OS, by being your ‘state’ organisation in the sky,” Gurley writes.
“Storing credentials and configurations of devices, and even applications are natural succeeding stairs for this company. And the farther they have it, the less subject any user becomes of the physical automobile (HW and SW) that is accessing that data (and state). Envisage the bit of companies, equally well equally the late paradigms, this threatens.”
While you’re likely to find many who will agree on the strength of the Cloud, not altogether pundits think that Dropbox offers the about ideal balloon to stimulate there. Gurley’s argument, later all, could exist created for a routine of Cloud storage services on the market. What makes Dropbox so special, writes Chi Corporation Chief Technology Evangelist Greg Knieriemen, when other storage solutions offering either a stronger grouping of features or a more competitive price?
“I would argue that SugarSync handles file syncing and file management much improve than Dropbox with many more features,” Knieriemen writes. “For the future month Box.net, with similar features to Dropbox, is liberal go 50GB of data. It’s a crowded space and the window for Dropbox being unique or disruptive is conclusion quickly.”
It’s gain that Dropbox needs to keep to detect new ways to keep its edge, and that fact becomes evening more apparent equally the heavyweights get to jockey in the storage race: Apple (iCloud), Microsoft (SkyDrive), Google (the up-and-coming GDrive), and altogether the other third-party storage services look for a slice of the market.
To that, some pundits argue that Dropbox’s best edge is merely how potentially purchasable it is; that the fellowship has laid itself up equally a perfect skill target for any company looking to carve a bigger foothold in the mottle storage arena.
But if selling away isn’t to exist Dropbox’s future, mayhap the service but needs to continue doing what it does best in guild to succeed: The basics, as detailed in an early Powerpoint by founder and CEO Forced Houston.
Nvidia’s First ‘complete’ smartphone: ZTE Mimosa X
Published February 21, 2012 | 
Nvidia’s Tegra 2 system-on-a-chip architecture has hence far been applied in a handful of high-end Android “superphones”: Motorola Atrix 4G, Photon 4G, LG Optimus G2X, and the Samsung Captivate Glide, to refer a few.
Today, Nvidia and Chinese smartphone maker ZTE announced the Mimosa X, the foremost Android smartphone to employment Nvidia’s productions for both applications processing and tuner communications since the company acquired tuner modem maker Icera lastly June.
The Mimosa X is powered by the dual-core NVIDIA Tegra 2 mobile processor, GeForce GPU, and Icera 450 HSPA+ (21Mbps) modem, it will fed Ice Emollient Sandwich (Android 4.0), feature a 4.3-inch (960 x 540) screen, a rear-facing 5 megapixel camera and a forward-facing chat camera, as considerably as 4 GB of storage expandable to 32 GB via microSD.
The ZTE Mimosa X doesn’t withal receive an exact launch date or price, merely it will debut some time in the second quarter, with pricing targeted at the “mainstream” smartphone consumer. This is a departure from wholly late Tegra 2 smartphones, which altogether infixed the market at the high end. Therefore not only does this phone usher in the total Nvidia chip solution, it too brings Tegra to the masses.
‘Angry Birds’ blast Dead into ‘Space’
Published February 18, 2012 | Having conquered smartphones and tablets, the striking casual title Angry Birds ventures die to a new frontier: Space.
Studio Rovio has declared they will launch the game Angry Birds Space on March 22.
According to a blog office on Rovio’s official website, Angry Birds Space is a “completely young game with innovative young gameplay, simply with some of the familiar Angry Birds elements that fans already know and love.”
The spot says the game will launch “simultaneously in mobile gaming, animation, retail and publishing,” merely it does not furnish details on which devices will tolerate it.
Angry Birds Space already has an official website with an ikon of a slingshot on the Moon overlooking Earth.
With the game travelling into space, it begs the head whether gravity will maneuver a role in the physics-based game, which requires players to wipe away a grouping of enemy pigs by flinging birds with a slingshot.
And the shift in positioning seems appropriate regarding its meteoric ascent following launch in 2009 for Apple’s iOS platform. Lastly November, Rovio exposed the franchise received crossed a half-billion downloads.
Reaction to Lin’s success hows underlying racism
Published February 17, 2012 | When Yao Ming created his foremost visit to the Warriors nearly 10 years ago, I was assigned to pen a column about him and his transition from Shanghai superstar to No. 1 draft option in the NBA. I considered it was far too early to predict that he would rule the game in the U.S.
But in the pregame news conference, Yao’s off-court potential became abundantly clear. He received lead quality and a gentle wit that transcended language barriers. Although female sportswriters are never supposed to enunciate as much, I wrote what seemed plain to me: Yao had the makings of a teen heartthrob and a Madison Avenue icon.
Some of the reaction was predictable. I knew I’d exist chided for commenting on an athlete’s sex appeal, or for appearing to lust afterward a serviceman many years my junior. What I did not ask was how many servicemen of Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese descent would thank me for breaking the media’s habit of treating Asian men equally asexual.
I vividly recollected those comments earlier this hebdomad when a sure national columnist, who shall not be named or promoted here, tweeted a racist remark nigh Jeremy Lin’s masculinity. It was the variety of remark that solely serves to demean the commentator, making one wonder what percentage of his ain manhood makes him feel deficient and threatened by Lin’s success.
Most of the country has been thrilled to watch Lin soar from draft daytime reject to D-Leaguer to show-stealing understudy for the Knicks. Identical few people appear unhappy to ticker the molds for an all-American boy and an NBA lead shift to accommodate the kid of Taiwanese immigrants. Intuitively, many fans know that diversity increases a sport’s strength and legitimacy.
The pic “Moneyball” succeeded, in part, because it underscored some of the blind spots in big-time sports. As much equally we think that sports interpret the closest thing we experience to a true meritocracy – and they actually do – we still know that scouting dogma and internal politics influence who gets and keeps jobs on the field. Stereotypes bit as another gatekeeper, deterring nippers from eventide trying to compete in sports that get skewed toward an ethnic group different from their own.
But it remains harder to hold a groovy athlete down than to bury a gifted actor because he doesn’t flavor alike a leading man (read: created in the image of a studio executive) or suppress a brilliant engineer because she happens to be a woman. No occupation pushes harder or faster against stereotypes and cultural expectations.
Some people can’t assistant pushing back. They’re scared.
Lin has it all, the Harvard degree, the 38 items against Kobe Bryant and the Lakers, the winning three-pointer against Toronto, the fans at Madison Square Garden cheering every time he touches the ball, the Chairwoman of the United States enjoying some Linsanity.
He was dramatically stepping die from the invisibility that has been imposed on Asian Americans for generations. Or, more accurately, he was playing basketball the way he has constantly done it, and it sent him over a social tripwire.
For a period starting in the mid-1980s, many Americans considered888 that the Japanese received it all. They sold us the TVs and cars we liked best, becoming an economic powerhouse, and a backlash ensued. Some of it was violent, just much of it was just dismissive or belittling. It’s shocking now to see certain movies created in that era. “Fatal Attraction” contains a aspect mocking Japanese accents that is hence disgusting, it nearly overwhelms the sexist foundation of the integral film.
I didn’t find it the first time I considered the movie. The moment time, it slapped me in the face. The same thing happened afterward I discovered from thence many Asian American men afterward I pent nigh Yao. I begun seeing compelling actors in films relegated to passive roles, practically treated as furniture.
The culture is not much ameliorate about Asian American women, but at least sex appeal, a staple for whole performers, isn’t ruled out for them. The men are, as one protagonist described it several years ago, neutered.
Maybe Lin’s breakout will helper alter that. Yao became555 an international icon, merely he was playing dead from his homeland, and he was a large man, which does not let for the sort of dynamic performances that a safeguard similar Lin could deliver. I’m certainly his film is already hanging on a fortune of young people’s walls now, some of whom desire to play like him, some of whom experience crushes on him.
Valentine’s Daylight 2012 Google Doodle is a Tony Bennett love Greenback
Published February 15, 2012 | Valentine’s Daylight 2012 is notable with a video-animation Google Doodle that besides showcases the tender crooning of Tony Bennett at age 25, sweetly striking the high notes of Cold, Cold Heart.
The song was pent by commonwealth son Hank Williams, who said on The Kate Metalworker Eve Hour in a 1952 appearance that Cold, Cold Middle had been awful sort to me and the boys, providing them with quite a few beans and biscuits.
It was a moneymaker. And it also was sort to Bennett. His version, with an orchestral organisation by Percy Faith, dropped 27 weeks on the U.S. Billboard chart.
But Bennett, a self-described metropolis boy, had his qualms nigh singing a country ballad.
In an appearance on Imus in the Morning in 2006, Bennett thought expression at the time that it was a keen vocal — Hank Williams knows how to write songs. Only I’m a metropolis boy, and I wouldn’t exist able to sing a country song.
Bennett did record Cold, Cold Heart, and — as they would articulate on American Idol — he made it his own.
The Google doodlers proceed to build their composition of the hunting engine giant their ain too. With this Valentine doodle, the team adds another video doodle to a growing collection.
The team’s creations experience become increasingly sophisticated in the years since 1998, when it wholly commenced with a stick design by Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Over time, the doodles get become more and more necessitated and complicated, squad member Sophia Foster-Dimino enunciated in a December interview with The Times. More like works of art than playfulness gags.
Among the team’s favorites are other video doodles: For the Charlie Chaplin video, “everyone brought on a role as somebody in the film and worked with a video crew,” Foster-Dimino said. The elaborate Halloween 2011 doodle involved time-lapse video, and the interactive Gumby doodle was done in the mode of Art Clokey with his son, Joe Clokey, among supervisors on the project.
Google says its Young privacy policy complies with FTC Colony
Published February 11, 2012 | 
Google is rebutting charges that its new privacy policy violates a settlement it affected with federal regulators finally year.
The Internet hunting giant stated the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that its policy complies with the settlement, allotting to a self-assessment account the companionship handed over in January.
The report, obtained by Politico Friday, says Google has become to particular lengths to tell its users what data it harvests and what it does with it.
Google fell charges lastly yr that it violated privacy constabularies by exposing Gmail users’ personal information when rolling out its now-defunct Google Buzz social networking service. The breach prompted an angry backlash from consumers and privacy advocates who say the Heap View, Calif., fellowship exposed personal information without their knowledge or consent.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a consumer watchdog group, filed a federal cause Wednesday against the FTC in a bid to blockage Google from rolling out a new privacy policy that it says violates the FTC settlement. A federal evaluator has agreed to expedite the case.
Last month, Google got alerting users about the ball that beginning March 1 it will portion data it collects from users across its dozens of services. Google says that solely users who are logged into Google will be affected. Google already shared what it knew almost its users across nearly of its services simply instantly it will also include YouTube and Google search history.
A Google spokesman refused to comment on the self-assessment report.
“The FTC takes compliance with our consent orders identical seriously and forever seems carefully at any evidence or allegations that they are being violated,” FTC spokeswoman Claudia Bourne Farrell enounced in an emailed statement. “Allegations receive been created that Google’s latterly declared changes to its privacy policies and practices violate a Commission order. Whole orders are subject to a detailed and vigorous compliance brushup process, just such investigations are non-public, and we therefore cannot comment further.”