Digital Content

Quick Lesson to Pirates: Keep It Quite if You Really Want To Do It — There was a very interesting situation yesterday with a new Firefox extension named Pirates of the Amazon that allows users to find any downloadable content you can buy on Amazon on various torrent sites and download these very movies or music from such sites - illegally but totally free right after the user finds a desired item on Amazon. Basically the extension when installed to the Firefox browser is intended to show the user when the Amazon digital content you are interested in is available for free somewhere else - and let’s the user download this content immediately. In addition... [Tags: amazon, attractiveness, developers, diggs, digital content]

Health Social Net DailyStrength Bought By HSW International — Health information social networking site DailyStrength has been acquired by HSW International, the digital content company which is a spinoff from HowStuffWorks.com (which later got acquired by Discovery Communications). Terms of the deal were not disclosed. DailyStrength raised a seed and a first round, both from Redpoint Ventures, and the total funding range was around $7 million. The site was launched in March last year, by CEO Doug Hirsch, a former senior exec of Facebook and one of the first employees of Yahoo. It hosts about 500 communities focused on issues such as weight loss, divorce, parenting and illnesses. Hirsch... [Tags: content company, dailystrength, digital content, discovery communications, divorce parenting]

Year-end review: Apple’s best of 2008 — “30 Rock,” “The Wire” and “Battlestar Galactica” are among the TV shows honored in iTunes 2008, Apple’s (AAPL) comprehensive — and surprisingly opinionated — year-end review. Available through what used to be called the iTunes Music Store, iTunes 2008 covers all the media the online venue now serves up: movies, TV, audiobooks, podcasts, iPhone apps and music in genres ranging from Alternative to World. Most categories are represented by software-generated lists of top sellers — often a good way to find out what your kids are listening to or what you might be missing. The lists of free and paid... [Tags: aapl, battlestar galactica, blogosphere, bryan cranston, center stage]

Gladinet is a free Windows application that runs on your desktop and offers easy access to files stored online or across remote PCs. The company's goal is to provide a single platform from where you can manage files regardless of where they are stored. While the company says it is like "building bridges among digital islands," we say it is an easy way to use Windows Explorer to drag and drop documents from the Web to your machine. Sponsor To manage your digital content, Gladinet makes all of your files accessible from a virtual drive mapped into your Windows Operating... [Tags: amazon s3, building bridges, digital content, digital islands, easy access]

Guardian Student Media awards: Imperial leads the field in a quality year — Imperial College London repeated their successful haul of 2006, taking two top honours at the Guardian Student Media awards last week. Imperial's paper, Felix, won newspaper of the year for its "fantastic mix of good stories, pungent comment, natural consumer journalism and humour", while editor-in-chief Tom Roberts took the prestigious title of journalist of the year. Matt Wells, the Guardian's head of audio, and a judge, said Roberts "displayed the most potential overall". In another rerun of 2006, Imperial College missed out on magazine of the year, again coming second to Cardiff University's Quench. "Of all the magazines, it felt... [Tags: broadcaster, cardiff university, cherwell, chief tom, consumer journalism]

I've had a browser open with a two part series from the site "e-consultancy" for the better part of a month, debating whether or not it's even worth going through this battle again -- but it seems worth it to clear up some serious misconceptions. The first article decries "digital socialism" and the second part goes after the "tyranny of the consumer." This, by itself, seems contradictory. The capitalist free market works thanks to the tyranny of the consumer. That is, the entire reason why the free market works is because consumers have power to move to a competitor --... [Tags: capitalism, collective ownership, competitor, consumers, digital content]

Writers' Guild Claims Studios Ignoring Earlier Settlement As Actors Get Ready To Strike — While I have no doubt that the movie studios are being sleazy and underhanded in how it deals with both writers and actors concerning various contracts, it still seemed like both movie and TV writers were making a big mistake in demanding residuals for internet usage. All that does is make it more difficult to get that content online. And, of course, it meant that actors were going to fight for the same thing. Now, just as the studios and actors had their negotiations breakdown, the Writers' Guild is claiming that producers are not living up to their end of... [Tags: actors, big mistake, contracts, decades, digital content]

Beatles Face iTunes Delay, But Zeppelin's Rocking Online — While Sir Paul and Apple are mired in discussions about bringing the Beatles to iTunes, Led Zepplin is turning up the volume on a releasing digital content online.... [Tags: apple, beatles, digital content, led zepplin, sir paul]

Newspaper Tries Going From Free To Paid — A few weeks back, I wrote how, economically speaking, online news has no choice but to go free over time. It's basically the same argument we've made with other versions of digital content. It's an infinite good, and there's enough competition out there that prices will get pushed to zero (which has already happened in a lot of cases). Some people took offense to this, claiming that I was wrong. The main arguments are twofold: (1) there are some online newspapers that have been able to charge and (2) free newspapers have no value and shouldn't be produced. Let's take... [Tags: business value, cash cow, confusion, critique, digital content]

Warner Premiere and Bryan Singer Do H+ — Warner Premiere, a digital content production division at Warner Bros., will team up with director Bryan Singer’s (The Usual Suspects) production company, Bad Hat Harry Productions, to create the new live-action sci-fi series H+. The Hollywood Reporter writes that John Cabrera and Cosimo De Tommaso will executive produce and write the show. Singer will not be serving as director, however, so the production will be searching for one of those, as well as a cast. H+ reportedly revolves around people who hardwire their brains to the Internet and the aftermath of a cyber terrorist attack that wipes many of them... [Tags: action sci fi, bad hat, brains, content production, cosimo]

Zune Music Rental Service, Now With Stuff You Get To Keep, Too — 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... [Tags: apparent interest, challenges, consumers, digital content, discovery]

Disney takes on Chinese affiliate over piracy — (Credit: Disney-Pixar) Disney is fighting a piracy war over its acclaimed film Wall-E against a company that its venture capital arm invested in, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The infringing company, 56.com, a Chinese video sharing site that's similar to YouTube, hosted several full-length bootlegs of Wall-E that were freely available on the company's site. The bootlegs were added by users of the site months ago, but only recently have they been fully removed from its pages. Piracy in China is nothing new, but the fact that 56.com featured Disney movies on its site is ironic,... [Tags: 30 million, bootlegs, digital content, disney, disney movies]

Disney (DIS) Capital Backing Chinese Pirates Who Rip Off Disney — Rampant piracy of intellectual property in China has long been a sore point for companies like Microsoft (MSFT), but Disney (DIS) seems to be playing both sides of the fence. Today the WSJ reports that Disney hits like "Wall-E" are available on Chinese video site 56.com -- which is funded in part from Disney's Steamboat Ventures. WSJ: John Ball, founder and managing director of Steamboat, says the firm was aware that pirated content was a potential issue when it made its investment in 56.com, but thought it could promote legal content on the site and work toward eliminating pirated material.... [Tags: beijing, champagne, chinese government, consults, digital content]

Microsoft: Not all information can be free — A top Microsoft lawyer made the case on Thrusday that sites like Google News are making money while the folks creating that digital content aren't able to make a living. Google News, said Thomas C. Rubin, makes $100 million a year, while the newspapers that power its content are ...... [Tags: 100 million, digital content, google, making money, microsoft]

HP TouchSmart TX2 is a nice touchscreen laptop — Nothing like a touchscreen computer from HP, and the TouchSmart TX2 is one of the coolest I have seen for a while. The touchscreen can be used by two fingers, and the user can apply iPhone gestures like pinch, rotate, arc, flick, press and drag, and single and double tap. The TouchSmart TX2 is unique as it has a specially-designed hinge so a user can convert it into three modes: PC, display, and tablet. It even has a rechargeable digital ink pen that allows the user to draw on the screen. If you want to use the pen to write,... [Tags: card reader, comedy central, digital content, digital ink, double tap]

October ABCe: US election build-up helps UK newspaper sites to record traffic — The build-up to the US election and continuing economic turmoil helped boost national newspaper web traffic to a new peak in October, with all the ABC-audited UK publishers enjoying record figures.guardian.co.uk reached 25 million users for the first time in October - and 10 million people in the UK alone - maintaining its position as the most popular UK newspaper website for the fifth month running. The site recorded 25,976,046 unique users last month, according to the latest officially audited web figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic. This was up 7% from September and 41% year on year."Not... [Tags: audit bureau of circulations, busiest month, digital content, digital pub, economic turmoil]

Beta.Joggle.com - Manage Digital Contents Easily — In their own words“Joggle is the easiest way to see, manage, and publish all of your digital content. Whether you want the convenience of updating multiple websites, blogs or social networks at once, or you prefer to just share your content with select family or friends, Joggle is designed by a team of dedicated developers who are constantly thinking of better ways to help you manage your stuff, ways that save you and your friends time and hassle.”What it doesJoggle is a web-service that will let you manage your digital contents with a minimum of hassle. This solution has just... [Tags: acquaintances, blogs, convenience, dashboard, developers]

iTunes customers angry over copy protection moves at Apple — Want to watch a high-definition show from iTunes on an older external display? Good luck! Some Mac users are teed off that they are getting error messages saying the iTunes movie they rented or bought can't be played on their display because it is not HDCP (High Digital Content ...... [Tags: apple, copy protection, digital content, error messages, good luck]

Sonic Solutions to Buy CinemaNow — Sonic Solutions, maker of the Roxio line of media applications and Qflix DVD-burning software, said today that it has agreed to buy privately held online movie distributor CinemaNow. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but CinemaNow is probably breathing a sigh of relief. While the company has been around for almost a decade, and even had the financial backing of big names such as Microsoft, Cisco and Lionsgate, it just couldn’t capitalize on its first-mover status in the movie download business. As part of the deal,CinemaNow will be combined with Sonic’s Qflix team to form a new Premium... [Tags: blu ray dvd players, burning software, cinemanow, consumer electronics devices, dell]

HP releases touch-screen laptop — Hewlett Packard has a new multi-touch tablet PC. The Touchsmart tx2 lets users select and drag files with their fingertips. HP's previous Touchsmart machines were desktops created as all-purpose family machines to check e-mail, leave messages, listen to music and view photos. "Breezing through websites and enjoying photos or video at the tap, whisk or flick of a finger is an entirely new way to enjoy digital content on a notebook PC," said Ted Clark, the manager of HP's notebook group, in a press release. The tablet also has a standard keyboard and mouse, and a digital pen to... [Tags: associated press, digital content, digital pen, e mail, economic climate]