Thursday, January 19, 2012

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Will Interactive iBooks Be The Next Big Booty For Pirates? Top
piracyWith the shift from print books to digital books come a few nasty side effects. Sure, it's much easier much easier to acquire and read books when you don't even have to get out of your chair, but those digital copies can be cracked and disseminated for free with only a little more effort. As ebook sales expand, so does ebook piracy, so I have to wonder if Apple's concerted efforts in creating a new kind of iBook experience will open them up to unwanted attention from digital pirates.
 
Bitly Rolls Out New Enterprise Dashboard, Providing Better Access To The Real-Time Social Web Top
reputation-540wPopular link-shortening service Bit.ly is today announcing the launch of Bitly Enterprise 2.0, a new version of its enterprise-friendly dashboard. The Bitly Enterprise platform, which helps businesses with multiple social media accounts monitor the impacts of their content's distribution, will now include the first production release of the company's brand-new search technology, allowing customers to track content around any subject or phrase across the entire social web - not just Twitter and Facebook. This technology is providing access to a new view of the web. The web is no longer just a list of linked pages, but a web of fresh, social and viral content that's weighted and ranked in real-time, and, in many cases, before Google applies its own PageRank to it.
 
SOPA Scorecard: Internet 1, Lobbyists 0 Top
SOPAYou've got to feel sorry for the SOPA guys. They did all the right things. They got legislation introduced that would protect their industry from inconvenient threats -- like that pesky Internet. They spent millions on lobbying from their $63m budget. And they even hired a high-profile, well-connected, just-out-of-Congress Senator for the bargain price of a $1.5 million base salary to run their organization. And yet it appears that their support is collapsing and are resorting to a rather pathetic tactic of name-calling in response. You can't blame them for being a little shell-shocked. In fact, four years ago, a bill like SOPA would have sailed through Congress, particularly because it's a media-related issue, the mainstream media would have likely avoided shining a spotlight on the issue.
 
ZOOM's B3 Bass Effects Pedal Launches At NAMM Top
B3_slantIn a lot of the Paneldome demos I have done, I (flailingly) play guitar, but I am actually a bass player. That's why I am excited to hear about the Zoom B3 Effect Pedal/Amp Simulator released today at NAMM. The promise of "a stompbox pedalboard with the power of a multi-effects pedal and USB audio interface" for bass guitar is tempting. This all-in-one design would definitely be convenient to throw into your gear bag on the way to a gig, without requiring a bunch of extra cables and dongles — you know, kind of like a regular old pedal effect. Sounds interesting.
 
Twitter Acquires, Shuts Down Social News Startup Summify Top
summifySummify, a startup that uses social data to create a personalized news digest, just announced that it has been acquired by Twitter. This sounds like a talent acquisition on Twitter's part — in other words, the main purpose of the acquisition was probably hiring the Summify team. Some of Summify's feature have been immediately disabled, it's no longer accepting new users, and in a few weeks, Summify says it will shut down the current product entirely. Meanwhile, the startup will be moving from Vancouver to San Francisco to work out of the Twitter office.
 
Appstores.com Launches An 'AdSense For Mobile Apps' Top
appstoreslogoIf you're a developer of applications for iOS or Android — or a publisher looking to better monetize your mobile web content — you're probably going to be interested in this post. Today Appstores.com is launching what it's calling an 'AdSense for apps' — in other words, an ad unit that publishers can embed in their mobile websites that will automatically display ads for native applications that are relevant to whatever text appears on the page. For example, if a participating publisher were to write a story about basketball, users viewing the story from their phones might see an ad for a basketball game or ESPN app in the App Store or Android Market.
 
LinkedIn Shutters Twitter Widget 'Tweets' Because Of 'Extremely Low Usage' Top
Tweets | LinkedInLinkedIn is planning to shut down its Tweets application as of January 31, 2012. As you may remember, the Tweets application allowed users find and keep track of their LinkedIn connections on Twitter, view Twitter feeds of connections, recommend Twitter users to follow, and more. In an announcement, LinkedIn says that the application will be removed from all profiles and the homepage. From the announcement: At LinkedIn, we want to provide a simple and efficient experience for members like you. So from time to time, we take a look at our set of features to evaluate how they're being used by our members. Part of this process sometimes means we decide to eliminate a feature, so we can better invest those resources in building more great LinkedIn products.
 
Keen On…Inside Apple: How Apple Is Organized Like A Terrorist Cell (TCTV) Top
Screen Shot 2012-01-17 at 10.41.43 PMThe more we know about Apple, it seems, the less we really know. According to the journalist and writer Adam Lashinsky, America's most admired company is also America's least understandable company. And that's why he wrote Inside Apple - to reveal to the world how, as the subtitle of his book says, the Company Really Works.
 
Vibrant Media Boosts In-Image Ads With Acquisition Top
Chrysler Vibrant ImageYou may not have heard of Vibrant Media, but you've almost certainly seem its product — specifically, the "in-text advertising" that pops up when you click on double-underlined words on certain websites. Well, Vibrant is expanding beyond text, and to that end, it has announced its first acquisition, of an image-based ad network called Image Space Media. The financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed.
 
Wait A Second, There Are Only 8 Apple Textbooks Available At Launch Top
textbooks 8Apple is making a play for the textbook market with its launch today of iBooks 2 and the new textbooks within that app. It's Apple, so they are going to reinvent the textbook industry, right? Well, maybe not today. If you fire up your iPad and update to the latest version of iBooks (Apple's app for books with its own store separate from iTunes), you can check out all of the new textbooks Apple just introduced. All 8 of them. That's right, there are only 8 textbooks available in the new format.
 
JackThreads Announces Unique Mobile App For Android And iOS Top
scaled.photo 1Thrillist-owned Jackthreads has just announced the availability of their first mobile for Android and iPhone. Built by an outside vendor using designs and user experience built in-house, the app allows shoppers to browse new deals and sales as they are announced on the site and, if so inclined, make purchases. I spoke to lead developer Chris Steib who said that JackThreads saw that much of the traffic was coming through mobile sites, something they had not initially expected.
 
Some Key Subtle Details From Apple's Textbook Event Top
aToday at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, Apple held an event to talk about two key things: "Reinventing textbooks" and "Reinventing curriculum". But perhaps lost amid the tentpole announcements (iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and the all-new iTunes U) were some subtleties of those products and Apple's plans for the education space. Among them:
 
iPads And Digital Textbooks Do Not Belong In Classrooms Yet Top
slateI do not want my children learning math proofs on iPads. I simply do not see the value in it. iPads will not help with identifying sentence clauses or writing an essay. There's a place for interactive learning and there's not. It's a clear line. Give science and history teachers iPads loaded with demos, videos and soundbites. Allow children to pinch and zoom DNA strands and the inner workings of WWI trenches. But make my kids do math drills on paper with a dull pencil. Please. Simply put, the movement to digitalized learning scares me. iBooks 2 is just the start. Digital interactive learning has always been the future but I fear for my children now that it's here.
 
No More Swiping: Card.io Launches New Consumer App, Developer Tools Which "See" Your Credit Card Top
cardio_payments_03Card.io, the toolkit for mobile app developers which lets users pay for items by holding their credit card up to the phone's camera, is today launching a consumer-facing app. It's something like Square, but without the dongle. It's also not aimed at merchants, as Square is. Instead, the new Card.io applications, available for both iPhone and Android, are meant for person-to-person payments. Splitting lunch, borrowing money, paying for gas - that sort of thing.
 
New iTunes U App Hits iTunes With Over 500,000 Free Lectures, Videos & Books Top
itunes_uFollowing this morning's education event, Apple has launched a new, dedicated iOS application called "iTunes U." This educational content portal, previously available only in iTunes, has now arrived in the App Store for all iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touch devices. It has also undergone a major revamp so as to better complement Apple's newly-announced educational offerings, including iBooks 2 and its iBooks Author Tool, which allows anyone to easily create books and textbooks.
 
Nike Officially Announces The Nike+ FuelBand Top
Screen shot 2012-01-19 at 11.43.46 AMExercise gadgetry seems to be all the rage this season, with products like the Jawbone UP and MotoACTV entering the marketplace. Nike of all companies will certainly not be left behind, and has today announced a new wristband called the FuelBand. Not unlike its competitors, the FuelBand measures time, steps and calories during your fitness routine.
 
AppAddictive Raises $1.2 Million For Drag-And-Drop Facebook Page Builder & Ad Platform Top
appaddictiveAppAddictive, a newly launched DreamIt-backed startup from its 2011's NYC class, has just scored $1.2 million in seed funding for its drag-and-drop Facebook page creation tools and (forthcoming) ad platform. Designed to bring the same tools the big guys use to smaller businesses and other industry verticals, AppAddictive will offer dozens of easy-to-install applications for Facebook pages, including things like custom landing pages, photo and video galleries, static HTML, quizzes and more.
 
TCTV: Hundreds Rally In The Streets Of NYC To Defend The Internet Top
rallyfeatYesterday, as some of the biggest sites on the web 'blacked out' in bold protests of the deeply flawed anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA, hundreds of protesters took to the streets in several cities across the US to take the fight offline.
 
German Clone King Faces Battle With Former Staff, And Satirical Dance Track Of His Memos Top
oliRocket Internet, the Berlin-based incubator most famous for slavishly cloning US companies like Zappos, AirBnB and now Pinterest in Germany, now faces a new competitor - in the form of some of its key employees. As we reported recently the core team of Rocket, lead by Oliver Samwer and his two other brothers, left to set up something new, and now we know what it is.
 
Houghton Mifflin, McGraw Hill, Pearson First Textbook Publishing Partners For Apple's iBooks 2 Top
Screen shot 2012-01-19 at 10.48.25 AMToday at Apple's education event, the company introduced iBooks 2, a textbook platform that effectively transforms $200 textbooks into iPad apps at a much more reasonable price. But of course, a textbook platform isn't worth a thing without the educational powerhouse publishers behind it. Luckily, the first up to the bat on the iBooks 2 platform are names we know well: Pearson, McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. They're responsible for 90 percent of the textbooks sold.
 

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