11
22
Online-music rental services — where users get access to a library of songs for as long as they pay a monthly fee — keep hanging around, despite little apparent interest in them. In an attempt to breathe some life into its subscription service, called Zune Pass, Microsoft is now giving subscribers 10 songs they can permanently keep per month. The company says its research shows that more consumers might consider subscription services at current pricing levels if they got “to take something with them.” But isn’t that just saying consumers prefer to buy music, rather than rent it? Rentals work for one-time-use items like movies and books, but for things like songs, which people tend to listen to multiple times, subscriptions aren’t attractive. The argument that subscriptions are good for discovery doesn’t really hold water, either, given the proliferation of online services that let users listen to huge libraries of [...]
11
22
Do you think of your MP3 player as the well from whence music springs forth like so much cool, pure H2O? Neither do I, but that didn’t stop some brainy (that is, totally insaney) designers from…
11
22
Believe it or not, but it has taken 103 years and the combined power of various of the world’s top supercomputers to prove Eintein’s biggest equation right, resolving e=mc2 at the scale of sub-atomic…
11
22
Believe it or not, but it has taken 103 years and the combined power of various of the world’s top supercomputers to prove Eintein’s biggest equation right, resolving e=mc2 at the scale of sub-atomic…
11
22
Every time I scroll through my list of ‘Friends’ on Facebook, I inevitably come to the same (somewhat depressing) conclusion: I have absolutely no idea who many of these people are. This is mostly my fault - my standards have always been pretty low when it comes to accepting inbound requests, and I never kept up with assigning them to appropriate Friends Lists. But there’s also the fact that Facebook doesn’t do much to automatically differentiate between friends and acquaintances (while it does filter your News Feed based on who it thinks you’re interested in, there isn’t a way to automatically generate a list of “good friends” versus everyone else).
Meezoog, an Israeli startup backed by veteran VC Yossi Vardi, is looking to help differentiate between acquaintances and close friends. Today the company has launched its own social network at Meezoog.com that attempts to determine how strong the [...]
11
22
Over the past few years, we’ve seen various European governments freak out over Google’s dominance over the internet, complaining that since it was an American company, it was a problem and “something must be done.” Usually this took the form of handing over a ton of taxpayer money to some ill-defined project that would compete with Google, but which usually just turned into a way for private companies to get free money. However, one project to come out of these efforts actually does look interesting. The EU has launched Europeana, a site that attempts to offer up, digitally, various cultural artifacts of Europe — and do so in creative and useful ways. Rather than just showing documents, for example, it ties together various multimedia to make things a lot more useful.
Considering that much of the cultural content being digitized for this project is already in the [...]
11
22
“Colorful soup” – BunteSuppe.de – is the name of a German collaborative art tool. Just drag & drop any tile on the screen to create a larger picture.
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Color Soup, a Collaborative Mosaic | Comments]
[Advertisement] Want to advertise here? Your ad will show in the blog and feed.
11
22
Back to the usual review this week, after our 20 Essential Apps list last Friday. Thankfully, it’s been a pretty good week in the store, with lots of actually useful apps—including a full-fledged…
11
22
Why go out to the strip club when the strip club can come to you? That’s right, for $300 an hour ($200 each additional), you can rent out a rickshaw in NYC from the entrepreneurs at PoleRider. It is…
11
21
A Cool Web Browser Testing App
11
21
We’ve been covering the DMCA lawsuit filed by Coupons.com against a guy, John Stottlemire, who figured out that if you delete a few files on your hard drive you could make extra copies of the coupon. Coupons.com tried to greatly stretch the DMCA to claim that this was circumventing copy protection — but simply telling people to delete files on a hard drive hardly seems to be an circumvention tool. Plus, there were some legal issues over whether or not what Coupons.com was doing was really “copy protection.” In many cases, Coupons.com’s arguments seemed to contradict itself, though Stottlemire (who defended himself) was quick to point that out to the court.
It looks like Coupons.com recognized that this lawsuit was going to end badly, and has now agreed to dismiss the case. This is a big win for Stottlemire, though it’s unfortunate that there was no legal [...]
11
21
In keeping with its progressive reputation, San Francisco is looking to pave the way for widespread electric vehicle adoption in the US. A Palo-Alto start-up called “Better Place” has received the…
11
21
President-elect Obama wants to get rid of daylight saving time in the United States to conserves energy.
Turns out, according to two academics on the NYT Op-Ed page, there is little scientific proof that this reduces energy consumption. It also turns out that this practice could be wasteful, a bit annoying, and a lot of people, including Obama, want to get rid of it.
A study in Indiana, a state that recently started DST, showed an overall increase of 1 percent in residential electricity use with occasional increases of 2 to 4 percent in late spring and early fall. So much for conserving energy.
I hate DST. It throws me and my kids out of whack for a couple of days. I hope Obama gets rid of it. too.
Obama Looks to Axe Daylight Time
11
21
Can you feel it? It’s the last Friday before Black Friday. You’ve got exactly one week to plan out where you’re gonna hit—what are you’re hoping to grab this year, anyway? Today, we’ve got a…
11
21
The elections were good to the HuffingtonPost, the political uber-blog. It’s audience in the U.S. rose fivefold in the last year to 5 million monthly uniques in October, according to comScore (see chart below). In what may turn out to be perfect market timing, the Times UK is reporting that the company is close to raising $15 million. In the past, it has raised a total of $12 million from investors including Softbank Capital, Greycroft Partners, Bob Pittman, and Ken Lerer.
As with all political sites, it is likely that the HuffPo’s traffic will dip now that the election fever is over. The question for investors, though, is whether its current levels represent a peak or, whether it can take advantage of its new-found audience to establish a solid, new traffic floor from which to keep growing. If you look at the HuffPo’s chart from [...]