For a full grown man, Michael Jackson sure has a lot of arcade games. Weird, huh? If you’ve got some money burning a hole in your pocket, why not head out to Las Vegas in late April to see if you can pick up some of these machines at deep, deep discounts. → Read More
It’s no secret that the record industry hates Seeqpod, a music site that lets users stream songs for free. Last year the company was sued by Warner Music Group (the outcome of the suit is still pending). Now, the company has just been slapped with a complaint from EMI. But the new complaint goes one step further, personally naming some of the Seeqpod executives, and in a move that may well raise the ire of countless developers, a developer named Ryan Sit who happened to tap into the Seeqpod API.
The legality of Seeqpod is murky. The company says that it doesn’t store any songs, but instead streams them from countless music files littering sites across the web. In effect, it acts as a powerful music search engine with a media player built in. The record industry claims that this is still illegal, and the new EMI complaint goes as far as to say that Seeqpod actually does host some of these music files, at least temporarily (which would strike a major blow to Seeqpod’s defense if proven true). In any case, Seeqpod is clearly on some shaky legal ground, so the new lawsuit doesn’t come as a surprise.
What is surprising, and potentially very alarming, is the fact that Ryan Sit was named in the suit for running the one-man startup Favtape, which leverages the Seeqpod API to stream music. Sit has created a number of sites, including Swurl and FavThumbs. In short, he’s a prolific developer who takes advantage of the APIs offered by many popular websites. → Read More
The Apple shareholders’ meeting has gone down (sans Jobs) and not a lot has transpired. The same board members were re-elected, and the four proposed reforms were rejected. The Q&A session afterward was notable for some “socialist” name-calling and the entire room singing “Happy Birthday” to Steve. → Read More
It wasn’t too many months ago that saying online advertising would decline in 2009 was enough to get you laughed at in the blogosphere, mocked on Twitter, and have Eric Schmidt roll his eyes and explain, again, why Google ads were such a better value than traditional media.
Flash forward to this week and the Interactive Advertising Bureau big wigs are predicting whole businesses dependent on online ads could go belly up, and researcher IDC has completely reversed its growth estimates. No longer will online ads grow 10% in 2009, says the firm. IDC now predicts a 5% drop in revenues in the first quarter that could get worse in the second. Fingers crossed for the second half of the year.
The trend is certainly already moving in that direction: Last year the market was growing at 18%. Last quarter it grew a sad .4%. That’s flirting dangerously close to the first quarter-over-quarter drop in online ad sales since the great dot com bust. Suddenly everyone’s bull scenario isn’t double-digit growth, it’s a year that doesn’t tip negative.
How’d everyone get the story so wrong? → Read More
It was reported this morning that the latest AppleTV update FUBAR’d Boxee, but that’s not true, says Boxee.
Each firmware update from Apple will normally erase non-Apple menu items from AppleTV. → Read More
I can’t remember the last time I’ve posted about Sony this many times so early in the week. The latest rumor comes from Dave Perry surrounding the PSP 2.
I hear Sony FINALLY has the PSP 2. And thank goodness, they’ve removed the stupid battery-sucking UMD disc drive. I’m excited!
Update: Some extra news from Perry via Kotaku. → Read More
Yahtzee makes his trademark withering remarks this week with his review of FEAR 2: Project Origin. I got to see the game at E3 last year and it looked solid, but not original. I happened to enjoy FEAR quite a lot and I’m sure I’ll enjoy its sequel, but it’s pretty much a popcorn game. → Read More
WETA Workshop, creators of almost everything seen in the Lord of the Rings films, have brought movie magic to real life with the creation of a prosthetic mermaid tail for a double amputee in Auckland, New Zealand. Nadya Vessey, who lost both her legs below the knee as a child, asked WETA for the tail two years ago. Recently her wish came true. → Read More
Hell hath no fury like Nintendo scorned. (Hey, this is free here, don’t complain.) And Nintendo is pretty damn scorned (?) at the following countries for letting piracy run amok: China, South Korea, Brazil, Mexico, Spain and Paraguay. According to Nintendo, these countries aren’t doing enough to stop the wanton piracy that’s going on there. → Read More
Salesforce is now officially the first enterprise cloud computing company to hit $1 billion in annual revenues. The company announced its fourth quarter and year-end earnings. It’s quarterly revenues were up 34 percent to $290 million, bringing the total for the year to $1. 077 billion. Net income for the quarter was $13.7 million ($0.11 a share), and $43.4 million ($0.36 a share) for the year (which doesn’t sound like a lot compared to $1 billion in revenues, but it was more than double last year’s earnings). Its operating cash flow for the year was a quite healthy $230 million.
Salesforce ended the year with 55,400 corporate customers, and 1.5 million individual subscribers. And it has $883 million in the bank. Salesforce expects revenues to increase by about 30 percent this fiscal year to $1.3 billion.
Passing the $1 billion mark is a major milestone for both Salesforce and cloud computing in general. Salesforce is the first enterprise computing company to get to that size based solely on selling Web apps.
(Earnings release after the jump) → Read More
Earlier this morning on Finland’s YLE (think BBC, but Finnish), Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo was asked if the company had plans to expand into the laptop market. Sure enough, his response: “We are looking very actively also at this opportunity.” Yeah. Weird, right? Nokia, making laptops? It seemed strange to us at first, too. Then we thought about it a bit more – and it kind of made sense. → Read More
Salesforce is now officially the first enterprise cloud computing company to hit $1 billion in annual revenues. The company announced its fourth quarter and year-end earnings. It’s quarterly revenues were up 34 percent to $290 million, bringing the total for the year to $1. 077 billion. Net income for the quarter was $13.7 million ($0.11 a share), and $43.4 million ($0.36 a share) for the year (which doesn’t sound like a lot compared to $1 billion in revenues, but it was more than double last year’s earnings). Its operating cash flow for the year was a quite healthy $230 million.
Salesforce ended the year with 55,400 corporate customers, and 1.5 million individual subscribers. And it has $883 million in the bank. Salesforce expects revenues to increase by about 30 percent this fiscal year to $1.3 billion.
Passing the $1 billion mark is a major milestone for both Salesforce and cloud computing in general. Salesforce is the first enterprise computing company to get to that size based solely on selling Web apps.
(Earnings release after the jump) → Read More
Wow. While building a digital pinball machine out of a giant LCD and a second, slightly less-giant LCD might cost more than buying an actual machine, the ability to play multiple machines using the Future Pinball simulator effectively turns it into an almost endless supply of fun for any serious pinball fanatic. → Read More
If this job posting by lab126.com, Amazon’s secret hardware skunkworks, is any indication there will be an International version of the Kindle sooner than later.
The candidate will be a senior and experienced software engineer or manager with a background in wireless. You will have worked on one or more baseband /radio solutions for wireless devices. You will have led or managed a SW development team and be proficient a recruiting and selecting top engineers. You will have a complete understanding of the communication stack from layer1 and drivers through protocol and framework. As the first person in this team, as well as recruiting up to four engineers through 2009 you will need to be a self-starter and hands-on to be able to set up the tool chain and development environment to start work before your team is on board.
While I’ve never seen a Sony dSLR “out in the field,” so to speak, I’ve been assured that the company knows its way around a single-lens reflex mechanism. To that end, there’s a rumor currently zipping about the Internet that pertains to two of the company’s dSLRs, the A200 and A300. It seems Sony is planning to consolidate the two models into one, and would be first announced this April. So the rumor goes, at least. → Read More
Here’s what’s been happening in the gaming world the last two days. The first video autoplays, so you might want to pause it. Sorry. → Read More
This morning Vice President Biden went on the CBS early show to promote Recovery.gov, the website that will detail where all of the money in The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will be going. Unfortunately, he forgot the actual address of the site during the interview, explaining that he was embarrassed that he didn’t have the “website number”. And thus, we have a new internet meme in the making, as Biden follows in the footsteps of Senator Ted Stevens’s Series of Tubes and President Bush’s reference to the “internets”.
In Biden’s defense, at least he was smart enough not to take a guess at what the website might have been called, only to have an entrepreneural domain squatter grab the domain and start a porn site. The last thing the government needs is something along the lines of NBC’s hilarious Hornymanatee fiasco. → Read More
Here’s one for the “Why would I buy a netbook instead of a notebook?” crowd. OfficeMax is selling the Compaq Presario CQ50-139NR 15.4-inch notebook for $349.99 after $100 instant savings – good until Saturday. It’s refurbished but you get a one-year warranty. → Read More
Every day we hear about new businesses being built around Twitter. Corporations such as Dell are discovering that it is an ideal way to distribute marketing information about deals and and services such as TwtQpn makes it easy for businesses to create Twitter coupons. But who wants to follow Dell? Maybe for a week or two while you are in the market for a new computer, but then you have to remember to unfollow. And if you are really into finding deals, following every retailer you love is a sure way to turn your Twitter stream into a constant flow of spam.
As a result, services are popping up to help you search for deals and coupons on Twitter. CheapTweet has already launched, and one that is in private beta is called Coupon Tweet. (To check out the beta be one of the first 500 readers to enter this code: TCBETA500). Coupon Tweet was developed by a Chicago firm called 12 Interactive, which is also behind employee discount site PerkSpot.
It filters out all the coupon-related messages from Twitter, categorizes them, and and lets you search them on its site. The latest deals appear chronologically in a familiar Twitter stream. Tabs across the top allow you to browse through specific retail categories (apparel, cell phones, computers, tickets, travel). Deals can be voted up or down the page, or retweeted. (CheapTweet has similar functionality). The top three deals are featured items. Stores can register with Coupon Tweet to ensure that all of the deals they Twitter are captured. → Read More
