Apple and Emi announced today that the entire digital repertoire from Emi music can be purchased at Apples iTunes store without DRM. The songs will be offered at a higher quality which means an encoding quality of 256 Kbps instead of the usual 128 Kbps. There is however one downside: The DRM free songs cost $1.29 per song instead of the usual price of $0.99 per song. I'm a little bit concerned about the 30% increase which can not be explained rationally I think. Albums on the other side will not change in prices at all which makes the single song price increase a mystery to me.
It seems that the big three, that is Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, always have to compete against each other. When someone introduces a new feature the others are surely going to announce a similar feature that is just a tad better than the feature of the other company. We are witnessing the race for Email storage at the moment. Microsoft has a storage limit of 2 Gigabytes for their users while Google has currently a limit of 2,8 Gigabytes. Yahoo decided to accept the challenge and give the others something to choke on, they announced today that they will offer unlimited Email storage to all of its users in the near future.
You might know that Youtube held a video awards voting on their site for the last five days were everyone was able to vote for their favorite videos that Youtube preselected. Ten entries were shown and you could assign spots from 1 to 10 to them. Now, after all votes have been cast Youtube presents the Winners of the 2006 Video Awards in the categories Most Creative, Best Comedy, Best Commentary, Best Series, Best Music Video, Most Inspirational and Most Adorable. The videos below are in the same order in case you are wondering.
Amazon offers a huge product catalogue on their different (country) websites which has one major problem and that is clarity. Navigating through the content can be really painful, especially if you only want to check the current price of several items that you would like to buy. One way to handle this would be to store all products as bookmarks and check them manually every day to see if the price was reduced. This is however not very practicable.
The free Amazon Price Watcher aids you in this task. It allows you to search many Amazon stores - including those for the United States, Great Britain, Germany and Canada) - using the Amazon Price Watcher interface. Just search for products in selected categories and save interesting results in a library. The library offers fast access to information such as price and availabilty including a price chart which displays the overall price trend.
We already know that most iPod can store various information next to music and videos. Wikipedia can be uploaded as well as information about subways in various citys. The iPod city guide is another excellent application for most iPods, including iPod Nano and iPod Video, which adds information about more than 300 cities to your iPod.
Did you know that there are more emoticons accessible in Skype than the 56 that are displayed during chats ? I'm not sure why those additional ones have not been included in the menu where you can choose the emoticons. The only way to add them to your text would be to enter them manually.
You might remember the other stories that circulated the internet before: get a free usb stick, get a free microsoft visual studio 2005. This time it is a free microsoft vista and microsoft office if you do the same as last time. Register at the power together website, listen to three webcasts and bam, you might get vista and office shipped right to your doorstep.
Ever heard about Bix ? Bix.com to be precise. Don't be ashamed to admit that you never heard about it either. I read about the site today and decided to pay a visit to website I never heard about before. I always thought I know everything that is going on but it seems that some sites seem to slip through my grasps. Back to Bix: Bix is a contest site that seems to be pretty famous for it's Karaoke contests.
Before you judge the article by looking at the title read on and you may understand why I suggest that you do not buy one of the Zune players that are offered […]
Widgets are small programs that add their small windows to your desktop and can be used from there. Widgets come in all colors and forms and you could categorize them the following way:
With all the rumors about an acquisition of youtube by Google circulation on many websites it was only a matter of time when the real deal was announced. This happened some minutes ago. Google officially announced the deal in a press conference that took place today. Youtube was acquired for 1.65 billion dollars in a stock-for-stock transaction.
Amazon Unbox, the new video download service provided by Amazon, went live yesterday offering users a free and easy way to download and view videos on their computer. Most tv series cost 1,99$ while movies begin at 3,99$ up to 19,99$ for new releases. Files are offered in .wmv and .amzn (for portable devices) format only and can't be burned on DVD to watch the movie at the television. The only way to do that would be to connect the computer to the televsion.
This is a funny story I read on the World of Warcraft forums. A guy who is playing World of Warcraft was on his flight from the United States to Canada to meet some of his fellow clan members. He used the toilet on that flight and witnessed afterwards that the stewardesses were acting strangely. Something seemed to keep the toilet from flushing. The guy immediatly thought it was his fault but decided not to tell them because of this embarassing situation.
You might have read about the google translate proxy that makes it possible for some to access blocked websites because the administrator did not think of blocking the translate function of google as well. What most people don´t know is that Google offers at least two additional services that can be used as a webproxy to bypass restrictions imposed upon you by your system administrator.
I find this rather interesting and thought I give you some insights. Google Checkout is a new google service similar to Ebays Paypal that you can use to send other people money over the net without a bank transaction between the two parties. Checkout went live a few days ago and Ebay was quick and reacted agressivly by not allowing their buyers and sellers to use Google Checkout as a method to close the transaction.
Maybe some of you do like cycling and watching the Tour de France. I found a live tracker that displays every stage of the tour de france. Shown on the map are of course start and end of the current stage as well as information about mountain and sprint stations along the way.
If you are from the USA or Canada you will be able to get a free copy of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 standard edition. All you have to do is watch three webcasts after you´ve signed up at the site. What else will you get ? A Microsoft Developers Security DVD, a 50% discount on a Microsoft Certified Professional Exam and a voucher that allows you to buy Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition with an MSDN® Professional Subscription at renewal pricing (a $400 savings).
Google Trends has been live for a few days and it´s time to play around with this new google service and find out what it´s all about. By entering one or more search terms you see a graph that shows the search volume and the news reference volume for about two years. This in itself isn´t that exciting but the feature to compare results by searching for multiple terms is. You could for instance compare linux distributions or windows, linux and macintosh.
To get Yahoo Mail Beta, just switch your content preference to Germany, Frence or UK. Then you will be asked if you want to join the beta when you log into your Yahoo Mail. Say yes, and join the beta. Then from the options menu, change your content preference what it was before. Then go to Yahoo Mail again. You should still see Yahoo Beta. If you don’t see it, go to options and click “Try Beta�? button. That’s all.
Flickr.com is a online photo service that allows users to upload, download, view and share pictures. One bad thing about it is that flickr itself does not offer a option to view or download more than one image at a time.
GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google Gmail account, allowing you to use Gmail as a storage medium.
Head over to the Mystery Solved site of microsoft.com and click on the usb stick on the right where it says Get Yours. You need to sign in with passport.net and answer the following questions:
I know that this has been in the news for some days but some of you probably have not heard about it, christmas is stress, you know. You can use the google translate feature to visit webpages that are blocked in your country. For example germans are not allowed to visit stormfrontdotorg or rottendotcom and could use this proxy to visit this sites.
