Few industries are more badly in need of disruption than textbook publishing. Every semester, students fork over masses of cash for extremely expensive textbooks. Teachers choose the books, but students pay for them, so the incentives to compete on price aren’t what they should be. Then, every few years, publishers make a few minor tweaks, [...]
Music Industry Thinks Google Is Coming To Save The Music Industry From Apple (GOOG, AAPL)
Google is still trying to hammer out deals with labels so it can start selling music, Reuters reports. Google wants to have a “digital locker” for people’s music. That just means consumers can buy their music once and use it on every device. Apple was reportedly working on a similar plan, but it has nothing [...]
The Collapse Of Digg [CHART]
Gawker Media’s marketing manager Christopher Mascari has released a chart showing the change in the company’s social-media referral traffic over the past year. Peter Kafka at All Things D has analyzed and published it. Digg has gone from being the biggest traffic source to one of the smallest. Not surprisingly, Facebook is taking over. Stumbleupon’s [...]
A Merger Made In High Heaven: US Cannabis To Buy WeedMaps
Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson fame may be too chicken to invest in WeedMaps (think Yelp for pot), but that isn’t stopping other companies from sniffing around the startup, looking to score. In fact, a company called LC LUXURIES LIMITED, or rather its most recently established subsidiary, US Cannabis, is very close to buying [...]
Distribution Release: Legacy OS 2010
Legacy OS is a new name of a distribution formerly known as TEENpup Linux, a Puppy-based operating system for older computers. Version 2010 was released yesterday: "After eight months of development I am proud to offer Legacy OS for download. This release marks the moving away of Legacy…. Read more at source Related Reading:
We’re trudging down the long road to universal 4Mbps broadband
Judging by the Federal Communications Commission’s latest survey, we’re still pretty far away from the FCC’s National Broadband Plan goal of 4Mbps Internet download speeds for everyone. The agency’s newest statistics indicate that out of 71 million wireline household connections, less than half (44 percent) matched or exceeded that benchmark, with its upload goal of [...]
Tablet Skirmish Heats Up With Toshiba Entry
Toshiba has announced its own entrant into the tablet market with the Folio 100, which will run on the Android 2.2 operating system. Sporting a screen just over 10 inches, the device will be larger than other early competitors to Apple’s iPad tablet computer, such as the Dell Streak. The Folio will debut in late [...]
The virtual play-by-play: talking StarCraft 2 with Mike Husky
StarCraft 2 has been doing some serious business: Blizzard has recently announced that the game has sold 3 million copies in the first month of availability. Mike Husky is certainly doing his part to keep the game popular; his YouTube channel has just under 200,000 subscribers, and his videos have over 64 million lifetime views. [...]
Google Hopeful Of 2010 Launch For iTunes Rival Despite Lack Of Signed Label Deals
We all know Google Music is coming, it’s just a question of when – and what it’ll look like, of course. According to Reuters, Google hopes to launch the service as early as December 2010. Citing unnamed ‘people familiar with the matter’, Reuters says Google’s VP of Engineering Andy Rubin (which we likened to a [...]
10 Things You Need To Know This Morning (AAPL, GOOG, SNE, DELL, HPQ)
Good morning! Here’s the news: Apple wanted to use Facebook connect for its social network, Ping, but Facebook blocked Apple’s access because Apple wanted to allow too many people to access it at once. Twitter has 145 million registered users, and mobile usage has grown 62% since April. Google is hoping to have its music [...]
Ubuntu Tip : Installing New Lock Dialog Theme on Lucid/Karmic
For the last couple of ubuntu versions, gnome-screensaver, which is also the gnome screen-locking program, has been using gtkbuilder .ui files for configuration; unfortunately almost all of the third-party themes (e.g. on gnome-look.org) use .glade files. Here’s how to convert a .glade file to a .ui file for use with current versions of gnome-screensaver: (…)Read [...]
TELUS named first Canadian carrier to implement carrier billing for BlackBerry App World
While a lot of folks were more interested in the fact TELUS was releasing the BlackBerry Torch on September 24th, reading over the announcement it seems as though some important BlackBerry App World news got overlooked. The press related the majority of the information to the device launch but near the bottom it was noted: [...]
Watch ‘Life In a Day’ Videos on YouTube
On July 2010, YouTube launched a global experiment called “Life in a day” where users around the globe were requested to shoot a small clip from their day to day life and submit it to YouTube. If the clip is selected from the submissions, it would be featured in a movie directed by Kevin Macdonald [...]
Ubuntu 10.10 Beta Released
Ubuntu 10.10 “Maverick Meerkat” has finally entered the beta stage. And, as usual, along with Ubuntu its other official derivatives have also entered the beta stage. Here are some of the changes with the download links: (Warning: This is not a stable release and is meant for testing only.) Ubuntu Desktop The desktop environment has [...]

