The Internet Archive’s entire collection of digital videos will now be available in HTML5 as well as Flash, the organization announced today.
The Internet Archive will be using Kaltura’s open source video platform in order to deliver the 500,000 some odd digital video assets housed at the Internet Archive. Kaltura’s video player identifies…
Best Buy is joining Amazon, Google, and Apple in offering customers a cloud-based storage and streaming service for digital music. Using its “PlayAnywhere” technology, the Best Buy Music Cloud will let users upload their songs to the cloud, then stream the music across multiple devices, including Blackberry, Android and iOS.
But with stiff…
I think I could live quite happily without the “phone” part of my mobile phone. Other than taking press briefings and calling my parents, I rarely use my iPhone for actual calls. I’d rather text or IM. But according to survey results released today, it looks like my preferred methods of communication don’t match most Americans’.
A survey of…
The publishing and bookseller world as a whole has seen substantial shake-up over the last few years: the rise of the e-book, the collapse of Borders, for example. And the world’s largest bookseller Barnes & Noble has received its own fair share of mixed reviews lately as well. On one hand, the company announced last summer that it was putting…
The stereotypical video game player: he is young (under 20) and male; he plays for hours on his console, all from his parents’ basement. But that stereotype is becoming increasingly difficult to justify as study after study has shown that gaming population to be comprised of a very different demographic.
Indeed, video gameplay is not…
I had one of those terrible and all-too-typical experiences yesterday. I had to call a customer service number. I called, struggling with the voice-activated answering system, cursing vociferously in hopes of triggering some sort of special mechanism to connect me directly to a real person. Finally my turn in the phone queue came and – of…
Just three months after the hugely successful release of Firefox 4, Mozilla has released the newest version of its browser, Firefox 5. There’s little fanfare today, unlike with the previous releases of Mozilla’s browser. That’s because much like the rapid release cycle of Google’s Chrome browser, Mozilla has moved to a faster development cycle…
Since the Kindle’s launch, Amazon has heralded each new arrival into what it calls the “Kindle Million Club,” the group of authors who have sold over 1 million Kindle e-books. There have been seven authors in this club up ’til now – some of the big names in publishing: Stieg Larsson, James Patterson, and Nora Roberts for example.
But the…
On the heels of last week’s less-than-stellar quarterly earnings report, there’s more bad news for Blackberry and RIM today. Seesmic has just announced that, effective June 30, it will no longer support its popular Twitter client on Blackberry.
The words of Seesmic’s announcement make the company’s rationale clear: the company is discontinuing…
A Kindle version of Jack Kerouac’s autobiographical novel On the Road will run you $12.99, substantially more than the couple of bucks that a paperback version costs. But let’s sidestep the “print versus digital” debate for a moment. Because for the same price as the e-book version, you can now purchase an On the Road app for your iPad, available…
With a number of news stories lately about kids under 13 on Facebook (on the site against the social network’s terms of service), you’d think there weren’t any other social networking sites that were geared for kids or where kids wanted to be. That’s hardly the case, as there are many social networks, gaming sites and virtual worlds aimed at the…
The stories that we hear about teens and technology often border on hysteria. Technology is ruining their grades. It’s ruining their eyesight. It’s making them fat. It’s exposing them to dangerous people, dangerous ideas. It encourages stupid, senseless behavior – the sorts of things that will ruin their lives forever.
Sure, it’s easy to…
Despite its recent IPO, there’s a strong feeling among many people online that the professional network LinkedIn doesn’t quite work for them. Despite its millions of users, it isn’t necessarily easy to find people on LinkedIn that you’d want to work for you. And just as importantly, young people in particular feel as though you have to “put on…
On the heels of some major search improvements earlier this week, Google has announced another round of search-related updates today – this time to its “related search” feature. On the surface, these changes are simply meant to make the display of related queries much easier for users to navigate.
Starting today, if you perform a search on a…
Research in Motion has just held its earnings call for the first quarter of fiscal 2012, and the news doesn’t look too great.
“Fiscal 2012 has gotten off to a challenging start,” said Jim Balsillie, RIM’s Co-CEO. “The slowdown we saw in the first quarter is continuing into Q2, and delays in new product introductions into the very late part of…
Mozilla is working on technology that will allow PDF documents to be rendered within the browser, rather than utilizing a browser plug-in or an external app to open them. On his blog, Mozilla researcher Andreas Gal has described the project to build a PDF reader in HTML5 and JavaScript.
Typically, PDFs are rendered in a browser with a plugin…
Avid Harry Potter fans followed a series of online clues yesterday that led them to Pottermore.com – a fairly standard “coming soon” website with a magenta background and a couple of owls… oh, and a signature of one very famous author: J.K. Rowling.
There are plenty of pronouncements about “the future of the book” when it comes to the increasing popularity of e-books and the steady release of new digital literature apps. Indeed, the ability to add video, voice-over, animation, and annotation all point to the great potential when literature becomes electronic, and in coming years we’re sure to…
Our society puts a lot of emphasis on the college degree as a key step towards job readiness. In doing so, we tend to overlook the other ways in which knowledge and expertise can be shared. These can include internships and mentorships, both of which place student-learners in situations where they can hands-on experience and advice from actual…
As a workforce, we are becoming increasingly reliant on our mobile devices in order to do our jobs, and so it can be particularly frustrating when you can’t quickly find an email or set up an appointment on your phone. Although Google does offer mobile Web versions of its apps, there are still a lot of reasons why people might opt to utilize the…