It’s about time: Apple to expand DRM free music offerings
Apple has negotiated deals that will finally enable iTunes to offer songs free of copy protection software from the three largest music labels, according to sources and reports from people close to the negotiations. In exchange, Apple has agreed to become more flexible on pricing as well (about time for this too). Yes! No more arcane protection schemes. And it’s about time.
Under the terms of the deal, song prices will be divided into 3 different types: older songs, midline songs (newer songs that aren’t really big hits), and current big hits. This new deal will expand iTunes’ DRM-free library to include songs from all three major labels (Sony BMG, Universal, and Warner Music). The best news: a price drop for most songs to 79 cents, which will make buying music more affordable for more people, something I can always support.
It’s a huge development for a platform that has been somewhat dissed by many users for its DRM practices (and it’s why I rarely used iTunes myself personally). Once I buy a song, I should be able to do what I want with it (assuming i’m not a pirate with zero conscience making 100 copies for my friends, which I don’t).
And the story goes on: RIAA fires their user snooping company, MediaSentry
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has fired the company charged with gathering evidence for use against people accused of illegal sharing of copyrighted music, according to this report in The Wall Street Journal. Have they come to their senses and perhaps realize they could spend their money a lot better?
The RIAA had hired MediaSentry to comb the Internet for evidence of people sharing music. The trade group’s campaign on behalf of the world’s largest recording labels reportedly resulted in lawsuits against over 35,000 people, but the end result was mostly ineffective according to many trade reports. Their gathering techniques were often characterized as invasive and a little nasty at times.
The company wrote scripts to automatically search for the names of copyright songs and locate the IP addresses of computers sharing files at all. MediaSentry checked the hashes (identifying marks) on the song files to make sure they matched the copyrighted song. If the marks did not match, the company used software from Audible Magic to compare sound waves. This is a decently solid technique, but it can be subject to failure much as any remote method can be. MediaSentry would then forward the information to the RIAA if a violation was suspected.
As reported here, they plan on using the ISP’s to crack down on heavy file downloaders, something they’ve been a little resistant to (understandably in this economic climate). Hopefully they eventually realize how silly this all really is, and use that money towards lowering CD prices and creating a product people will want to buy, rather than alienating their users.
Rattling the sabers, internet style: Facebook sues Power.com, a social site aggregator
Facebook is suing Power.com, a start-up in Brazil that lets users access a number of social networks through one portal. It’s a great idea, except that the sites involved don’t like being “bypassed” in effect by a third-party portal. I can understand it, but they need to find a way to cooperate, not sue each other. In these fragile economic times, partnerships are more effective than litigation in the long run.
Facebook filed a lawsuit on December 30 in United States District Court in San Jose, CA. for copyright and trademark infringement; unlawful competition; and violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, CAN-SPAM Act, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, among other charges. It’s a pile of charges, but much of it will be negotiated no doubt, for money and/or concessions.
Here’s more info about this story.
Android netbooks coming? Maybe, maybe not
A couple of freelance writers for the VentureBeat blog say they have ported Google’s Android operating system to an Asus Eee PC. But does this constitute a new trend in Netbooks? Not really. But its an interesting development, and who knows whether the big PC makers will be interested in such a proposition, seeing as the Android powered phones aren’t setting sales records as it is.
Matthäus Krzykowski and Daniel Hartmann said in a post Thursday that they compiled, in four hours, the open-source Android operating system for an Asus Eee PC 1000H Netbook. It’s a suitably geeky-cool accomplishment, but who knows if it will matter in the long term.
In cascading prose here’s what the authors wrote about Android on Netbooks: “For a myriad of software companies, it means a well-backed, open operating system that is open and ripe for exploitation for building upon. Now think of Chrome, Google’s Web browser, and the richness it allows developers to build into the browser’s relationship with the desktop–all of this could usher in a new wave of more sophisticated Web applications, cheaper and more dynamic to use.”
If this was Verizon or even Asus itself stating this, it would be major product news. Otherwise, it remains an interesting experiment and nothing more. A “black” market of sorts could spring up for Android powered ‘puters and devices, but it remains to be seen if it can be a viable consumer item for mass market consumption.
Uh Oh: Big layoffs for Microsoft coming?
January 15th may be a bad day for some MS employees, perhaps the day they’ll lose their jobs.
Reports on several sites put the layoffs as high as 15,000, which is almost 17% of their workforce. The Jan. 15th date is a week before Microsoft’s second-quarter earnings report, scheduled for January 22.
This is not good, folks. This is very bad, both for the industry, and for the individuals. A company once seen as almost “invincible” is suddenly a little on the vulnerable side.
Those purported layoff numbers are up from rumors on other sites from a few days ago, which suggested that 10 percent of the company’s employees would lose their jobs.
We’ll keep an eye on this, but hopefully this is just a company adjustment to be more profitable, not a sign of more dire news to come or deep financial issues at MS.
Top 5 predictions for 2009, via CNET
CNET has released their top 5 predictions for the tech world in 2009, and some are interesting, some people may not like, and some are pretty much foregone conclusions.
My top one I agree with is the PS3 pricing dropping significantly. Yep, it’ll happen. Their high price compared to the XBox360 is why they’re so far behind. And it will definitely make the console race more interesting to watch.
The others I can’t argue with too much: Blu-Ray won’t gain much ground on DVD, Steve Jobs will probably be retiring in the next few years, and the iPhone will eventually end its tie to AT&T. All three will change the tech landscape as we know it. 2009 should be a very interesting and telling year for a few companies, and how they’ll compete going forward into the future.
More details about the predictions here.
MS do themselves no favors in the MP3 ratrace: The Zune music player having major issues
Looks like the weather isn’t the only freezing going on: many people are reporting that their 30GB Zunes are spontaneously going haywire as well. Oh great. Already having to do double-time to compete with Apple and their iPods, they release a buggy player. Why does MS always shoot themselves in the foot? With their resources? There’s no excuse really.
The symptom is being reported widely on discussion boards about Microsoft’s music player, so it isn’t an isolated thing. With the problem, Zunes reboot but freeze when the startup status bar reaches 100 percent.
Some users reported the problem happened at exactly midnight PST, at the very beginning of the last day of the year, leading some people to call the problem Z2K after the Y2K problem that was widely feared to cripple the computing industry when computer clocks moved from 1999 to 2000. It has nothing to do with the issue more than likely, but hey, MS needs to really get their act together in this arena, or face being buried by the iPod machine.
Microsoft has acknowledged the issue on the Zune support site today, which is the first step. A quote from the site: “Customers with 30GB Zune devices may experience issues when booting their Zune hardware. We’re aware of the problem and are working to correct it. Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for your patience!”
Holiday Satisfaction Indexes are in, and something is rotten in Denmark
With the nation on edge, you might assume that every Internet retailer would have extended red carpet treatment to shoppers during the traditional end-of-year shopping rush to earn their cash and loyalty.
Based on these numbers, that’s not quite the case, and something is very wrong with that picture.
In fact, more than one-third of the 40 online merchants surveyed in a report on retail satisfaction finished with lower scores than they did during the same period a year ago, including many tech vendors like Dell, Best Buy, and even Apple.
Still, the annual report from Foresee Results found that scores for most of the 40 online retailers it tracks remained the same while one-fourth registered improvements from 2007, which is a good thing.
Amazon and Netflix turned out to be favorites with online shoppers during the holidays, finishing first and second, respectively in the rankings. Amazon’s improvement corresponds to their better overall sales, more than likely.
Freed noted that higher customer satisfaction ratings often translates into loyalty and purchase intent. Of the 40 websites, who were rated on a 100-point scale, only Amazon and Netflix finished with scores above 80. More than a quarter scored 70 or below, and almost 40 percent saw their satisfaction rankings drop year-over-year, which seems odd given that retailers of all kinds are battling for every penny right now and should be treating customers like gold.
Windows 7 Beta 1 debuts a little early (on torrents)
The first beta of Microsoft’s next operating system has apparently been spotted in the wild, but not quite in the form MS expected or probably wanted.
The first beta of Windows 7, which is expected to hit shelves in time for the 2009 holiday shopping season (assuming things go well), has reportedly popped up on torrent trackers as an ISO file. This isn’t the first time this has happened, mind you, it’s a fairly typical event for a major new software product.
ZDNet writer Adrian Kingsley-Hughes also has reported having a copy and has posted his early impressions of the beta on the site. Overall, Kingsley-Hughes wrote that he likes Windows 7, calling it “solid and fast.” But he does take issue with a few new features. Here’s a quote of his regarding the product:
The new revamped taskbar is visually very interesting (and certainly a lot easier to use at higher screen resolutions that the Vista or XP taskbar), but it tries to do too much and as such comes across as kludgey and counter-intuitive. One failure is that it’s hard to tell the difference between apps that are running and shortcuts that have been pinned to the taskbar.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is expected to promote and speak about Windows 7 from a consumer viewpoint during his speech at the CES next week. Microsoft is expected to officially distribute the first official beta to testers in early January, and it sounds as if it could be a very good thing for MS, if it separates itself from Vista more distinctively, and improves on it in more than an incremental way.
News bulletin: Holiday sales (tech especially)… stunk, for lack of a better word
Over the next few days, a picture of holiday sales will begin to materialize. And the numbers so far look rather discouraging for many vendors. It’s a picture of the average consumer holding onto their money and not spending.
One of the first reports to surface doesn’t sound incredibly painful until specific categories–like electronics–are broken out. And then the hurt becomes obvious and ugly.
MasterCard Advisors, a unit of the credit card giant, released on Friday its SpendingPulse analysis of national retail and service sales for the holiday-shopping season, and the picture is not a positive one.
Overall retail sales year over year (excluding gas, which doesn’t make a great holiday gift anyway; who gives that as a gift?) were down 2 percent in November and down 4 percent from December 1 to 24.
Overall, e-commerce fared relatively well from November 1 to December 24, better than store sales were, really. Not a shock. It was down just 2.3 percent, reflecting the overall national trend. That seems to be in line with Amazon.com’s positive report of its own sales, reported here previously.
The electronics and appliance category, however, showed a 26 percent decline over 2007, and that’s a really bad sign for the industry. People have always loved their gadgets, and its an industry that doesn’t usually feel the hit from a struggling economy. But it sure is now. It will rebound at some point, but when, and how much? That is the question.
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Recent Posts
- It’s about time: Apple to expand DRM free music offerings
- And the story goes on: RIAA fires their user snooping company, MediaSentry
- Rattling the sabers, internet style: Facebook sues Power.com, a social site aggregator
- Android netbooks coming? Maybe, maybe not
- Uh Oh: Big layoffs for Microsoft coming?
- Top 5 predictions for 2009, via CNET
- MS do themselves no favors in the MP3 ratrace: The Zune music player having major issues
- Holiday Satisfaction Indexes are in, and something is rotten in Denmark
- Windows 7 Beta 1 debuts a little early (on torrents)
- News bulletin: Holiday sales (tech especially)… stunk, for lack of a better word
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