Archive for March 27th, 2008
Posted by: in Rights Online
Two weeks ago we discussed a proposal from music industry veteran Jim Griffin to implement a monthly fee from ISPs in exchange for the legal distribution of copyrighted music. Now, quinthar brings news that Warner Music Group has hired Griffin with the intention to make that proposal a reality. Warner wants Griffin to establish a collective licensing deal with ISPs that would let the ISPs stop worrying about their legal responsibilities for file-sharing while contributing to a pool of money (potentially up to $20 billion per year) that would be distributed amongst the music industry. “Griffin says that in just the few weeks since Warner began working on this plan, the company has been approached by internet service providers ‘who want to discharge their risk.’ Eventually, advertising could subsidize the entire system, so that users who don’t want to receive ads could pay the fee, and those who don’t mind advertising wouldn’t pay a dime. ‘I.S.P.’s want to distinguish themselves with marketing,” Griffin states. “You can only imagine that an I.S.P. that marketed a ‘fair trade’ network connection would see a marketing advantage.’”
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Posted by: in Rights Online
smooth wombat writes “In what can only be considered a bizarre court case, a former nuclear safety officer and others are suing the U.S. Department of Energy, Fermilab, the National Science Foundation and CERN to halt the use of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) until its safety is reassessed. The plaintiffs cite three possible ‘doomsday’ scenarios which might occur if the LHC becomes operational: the creation of microscopic black holes which would grow and swallow matter, the creation of strangelets which, if they touch other matter, would convert that matter into strangelets or the creation of magnetic monopoles which could start a chain reaction and convert atoms to other forms of matter. CERN will hold a public open home meeting on April 6 with word having been spread to some researchers to be prepared to answer questions on microscopic black holes and strangelets if asked.”
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Posted by: in Rights Online
What_the_deuce writes “For the first time in years, world wide web browsers are able to visit the BBC’s website. In turn, the BBC turns a lens on the Chinese web-browsing experience, exploring one of the government’s strongest methods of controlling the communication and information accessible to the public. ‘China does not block content or web pages in this way. Instead the technology deployed by the Chinese government, called Golden Shield, scans data flowing across its section of the net for banned words or web addresses. There are five gateways which connect China to the web and the filtering happens as data is passed through those ports. When the filtering system spots a banned term it sends instructions to the source server and destination Personal computer to cease the flow of data.’”
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Filed under: Competitive strategy, Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT)
 It’s no secret that Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) is trying to undermine Microsoft Corp.’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) software business at each turn. Although Google continues to be non-chalant about it, the company’s “software as a service” approach to competing with Microsoft’s established “software on your Personal computer approach” is popular in many circles, but still doesn’t seem to be affecting Microsoft’s revenue stream.
Microsoft’s Windows Vista is the pre-installed operating system on nearly every Computer sold in the world, and its corporate selling of the Microsoft Office package continues to be one of the company’s cash cows, even with similar competitive software given away for free. One of Microsoft’s corporate staples is its Exchange Server product, which lets all those installations of Outlook on millions of business desktops access company email. What if all those duplicates of Outlook could be using email, calendaring and contact management from Google’s freely available Gmail service?
Cemaphore Systems might have your answer, and this could very well be the tip of the iceberg for small companies tired of maintaining an Exchange Service — and exhausted of paying a decent chunk of change for it as well. Google’s Gmail service, after all, is completely free to use. The company’s product — MailShadow — lets your email service be Gmail (even with your own domain name, of course).
Outlook software on all those employees desks would connect to Google’s Gmail service sitting on the web rather than that Exchange email server sitting in a server room in the company somewhere. The trade-off is giving control over company email to Google instead of managing it internally with your own server. But, would some corporate customers be willing to trade that for a freely-available email, contacts and calendaring service managed by Google? Microsoft sure hopes not.
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Filed under: Industry, Competitive strategy, Motorola (MOT), AT and T (T), Nokia Corp. (NOK)
 Motorola (NYSE: MOT) is getting kicked while it is down. Not that the company has done a good job of keeping its cellphone sales going. It does not have a single “hot” product. Its global market share is around 13%, depending on who is measuring. Analysts are cutting the number of handsets that they think the US company sold in the first quarter.
The one place Motorola does have good market share is the US. With 35% of the market, it is the leader. Nokia (NYSE: NOK) as only 10% against its global share of 40%. Nokia plans to change that. According to The Wall Street Journal : “Nokia is making mostly behind-the-scenes changes. It is cooperating with the big carriers such as AT&T (NYSE: T) that control how most phones are sold to customers in the U.S. and has started designing phones specifically for North America.”
While the news could be good for Nokia, if it is successful, it would not have a big impact on its financials. The company already sells over 400 million handsets and does particularly well in fast-growing markets in China.
Any share Motorola loses in the US would be devastating. The company lost about $1 billion in its handset division on $19 billion in revenue last year. Those numbers are apt to be worse for 2008.
When Motorola announced its was breaking the company in two, its share price barely moved. It may be occurring to Wall Street that the company is not worth more than the sum of its parts, especially with its largest division doing so poorly and under pressure from competition.
Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.
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Posted by: in Services
Filed under: Design, World wide web, Pic, Features, Web services, Adobe, web 2.0
Digital photography has become a way of life for lots and lots of web users and there’s no shortage of services out there to host your digital pictures (Flickr, SmugMug, Picasa, Windows Live Spaces, not to mention social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace). As more and more day-to-day computing tasks move to the cloud, the market really needs a solid, web-based editing suite. With Adobe Photoshop Express, which launched its beta this day, we get just that.
We look at a lot of web software and services, but have to say that Photoshop Express one of the slickest web-based applications for pics that we have ever used. Even though services in the past like Picasa or Picnik have offered some basic photo editing abilities, what Photoshop Express is doing is in a totally different league. Like many other photo services, Photoshop Express will let you share and display your on the web photos; each user account is given 2 GB of space to store and share photos (this is free, additional space and extra features will be available in the future, pricing TBD) and you can embed links to the Photoshop Express hosted galleries or direct-embed individual images.
Continue reading Adobe Photoshop Express Beta launches
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Posted by: in Services
Filed under: Internet, Web services
It’s 2:00 in the morning and the phone rings. You roll out of bed and go grab your phone just in time to hear the person on the other end hang up, realizing it’s the wrong number. You stumble back to bed and the phone rings again. You put a pillow over your head and fall asleep dreaming of what you’d do if you knew where that obnoxious caller lived.
TP2Location can help. Well, to a degree. It won’t give you a street address, but if you type any phone number into this web tool you’ll get geographic information describing where the call came from. While this might not help you track down the person keeping you awake at night, it might help you decide whether you should place that overseas business call now or wait a few hours until the sun has risen on the other side of the ocean.
TP2Location also has a semi-useful Google Maps feature, which will bring up a map of the country corresponding to the phone number. While this would be great if you were looking at a country the size of Vatican City, the results for New Jersey and California phone numbers are identical: A map of the entire US.
[via MakeUseOf]
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For months now, I’ve been geeked about Amazon’s EC2 as a web hosting service. But until today, in my opinion, it wasn’t ready for prime time. Now it is, for two reasons. One, you can get static IPs, so if an outward-facing VM goes down you can quickly start another one and point your site’s traffic to it without waiting for DNS propagation. And two, you can now separate your VMs into “physically distinct, independent infrastructure” zones, so you can plan to keep your site up if a tornado takes out one NOC. If I were developing a new website I’d host it there; buying or leasing real hardware for a startup seems silly. If you’ve questions, or especially if you know something about other companies’ virtual hosting options, post comments — let’s compare notes.
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recoiledsnake writes “The new Safari 3.1 for Windows has been hit with two ‘highly critical’(as rated by Secunia) vulnerabilities that can result in execution of arbitrary code. The first is due to an improper handling of the buffer for long filenames of files being downloaded, and the second can result in successful spoofing of websites and phishing. This comes close on the heels of criticism of Apple for offering Safari as a update for approximately 500 million users of iTunes on Windows by default, and reports of crashes. There are currently no patches or workarounds available except the advice to stay clear of ‘untrusted’ sites.” Further, Wormfan writes “The latest version of Safari for Windows makes a mockery of end user licensing agreements by only allowing the installation of Safari for Windows on Apple labeled hardware, thereby excluding most Windows Personal computers.” Update: 03/27 17:23 GMT by Z : Dave Schroeder writes with the note that the license has been updated to correct this mistake.
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