Author: Duncan Geere
Amazon's Kindle 2 takes shape, due on Feb 9?
Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, despite its low specs, has proved a hit with consumers, particularly after Oprah Winfrey featured it on her show in November. Since then, it’s been consistently sold out, and Amazon’s product page, for a long time, has shown a wait of 11-13 weeks for the device.
Well, last night that was changed to show 4-6 weeks, and Amazon has invited journalists to an event in New York on February 9th with the Founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, present. Leaked photos suggest that the old angular look is gone, and the new Kindle will be more rounded. It’ll also feature a much-updated e-ink display with a faster screen refresh time. If it replicates the success of the original, then we might even see it this side of the Atlantic. We can only hope.
Kindle Product Page (via NY Times, image via BGR)
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Top 10 Tuesday Wednesday: Free, Legal, Music on the Internet
I’m going to take a break from gadgets today, like Dan did yesterday for Technology Deathmatch, to tell you about some of my favourite sources of free, legal music on the internet. It’s entirely possible, contrary to what major record labels would have you believe, to live completely free of paying for recorded music.
Not all offer downloads that’ll work on your MP3 player – some just stream – and not all these sites are going to be around forever, due to the turbulent nature of the digital music market around now, but if you can live with both those caveats, then click over the jump for my top ten sites where you can get free, legal, music.
Twit4Hire – a company who'll Twitter on your behalf, for cash
I can understand people not having the time to update a blog. To grow a blog properly it needs time, effort and careful feeding of the community. A Twitter account, on the other hand, requires considerably less effort – 140 characters, perhaps twice a day? Well, if even that’s too much for you or your business, then Twit4Hire is the company for you.
It’s targeting business who want to “get on the Twitter” but haven’t got a clue how to go about it. Or they might have a clue, but can’t spare the resources. Either way, Twit4Hire will sit there and chat to legions of followers about nothing your business on your behalf.
I’m not sure I could recommend employing Twit4Hire. Do it yourself. For top tips on how best to use Twitter for marketing and PR, visit this handy site, instead.
Twit4Hire (via TechRadar)
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Mozilla and Wikimedia Foundation throw their weight behind open source web video
Pay attention, because this one’s important. Web video has issues. It has issues because it’s closed, and proprietary. The vast majority of web video is delivered in the Flash format, which owned by Adobe. This means that video sites have to suffer restrictions and pay license fees. Wouldn’t it be better if there was an open source version?
Enter Theora. It’s an open-source video codec which, when combined with the Vorbis audio codec and the .OGG file format, could replace Flash as the dominant form for web video.
Internet Explorer 8 release candidate now available
Internet Explorer’s been in beta for a while now – nearly six months – so it’s nice to see that it’s finally made its way into a release candidate form. If you’re bored of the Windows 7 beta already, then why not give it a spin?
Since we last reported on it, the ‘compatibility mode’ has become automatic – switching whenever the IE8 engine can’t render a page properly, rather than having to be triggered on demand. There’s also built-in clickjacking prevention, and Microsoft has updated the InPrivate (porn) mode and the filtering system.
Dick Cheney's house gets uncensored on Google Earth
Former American Vice President, Dick Cheney, was a big fan of secret surveillance and monitoring, but wasn’t so keen on having aerial images of his house beamed all over the world, so it used to be pixellated out at very low resolution on Google Maps. With the new administration, however, Joe Biden has moved in and suddenly the house has become viewable again.
The change happened on Google Earth on January 18th, and rolled out to Google Maps on the 22nd. Google’s official line? They didn’t do anything – the images were displayed unaltered from the source – in this case, the U.S. Geological Survey. I’m inclined to believe them, though it’s interesting that the White House remained in full view the whole time. For before and after pics, click over the jump.
GDrive rumours solidify – code spotted in Google Apps
The rumours around Google’s GDrive, which we reported on the other day, look to be gaining steam. First, there was a mysterious menu option appearing in Picasa for Mac, and now code’s been added to Google Apps that references a ‘webdrive’. There’s even a little icon for it.
I’ll reiterate my comment from the other post – this isn’t likely to be ‘unlimited’ storage. People have too much crap for Google to allow that, and most of that crap is dubiously-acquired intellectual property like movies, games and music. Google’s had problems with that with YouTube, so I find it unlikely that they won’t put restrictions on the service.
More likely, we’ll see a limited storage, limited file upload service that doesn’t do very much more than what you can already do with Google Docs and Google Mail. When will we see it? My money’s on ‘fairly soon’.
(via Google Operating System)
Related posts: Rumours of Google planning an incredible unlimited cloud storage service | Google adds tube map to Google Maps
DAB growth slowing across the UK
The humble DAB radio has been a fixture in middle-class households across the UK for several years now. However, it’s growth appears to be slowing. Although more than half a million sets were sold in December, that’s down nearly 10% on the previous year, and down 20% on the Digital Radio Development Bureau’s forecast for the year.
At the same time, there’s no date been set for analogue radio switchoff and the growth of internet radio and compatible devices directly threatens DAB’s position as the future of radio, in the same way that Blu-ray is being threatened by digital delivery of video content.
DAB either needs a strong injection of support, or to be cut free to sink or swim on its own. Its current middle-ground situation isn’t really helping anyone. Much will depend on what happens in 2009, I suspect. Do you use DAB? Could you live without it? Tell us your story in the comments.
(via the Guardian)
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Know a clown who's desperate to listen to music on his bicycle?
Okay, maybe that was mean. But you can’t claim that that thing over to the right doesn’t look like a pom-pom of some sort. It’s actually a speaker. The Yuen’To Music Ball, to be precise. Straight outta’ Japan, it’ll plug into anything with a 3.5mm jack connector and blare out sounds and music for upto five hours. After that, it’ll need recharging via USB.
It comes in red, blue, yellow, black and pink – nice bold colours – and costs $76.16 (£55 or so). That’s amazingly expensive. Still, no-one ever said that being a contra-auguste was cheap.
GeekStuff4U (via Akihabaranews)
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VIDEO: Worldwide air traffic over 24 hours
Click play on the video. Now watch as the world’s aeroplanes cross continents and oceans. It’s strangely relaxing in the same way that watching a trail of ants in a garden on a warm summer’s afternoon is relaxing. One thing that’s worth looking out for – compare Europe at the start of the video to Europe at 0:45 – the flight volume changes dramatically between day and night.
Seen a similarly fantastic depiction of data? Post it in the comments below. I love stuff like this, so if you’ve got a favourite visualization of information then I want to see it too.
Nitmesh (via @damiano)
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