Google announced Google music on this years Google i/o conference, a launch that has been anticipated by the pundits for a long time. The service looks like it could be very big as it allows a maximum number of tracks instead of a maximum amount of storage to be uploaded. What was unexpected was the fact that, as Amazon had done before, Google launched without having a deal in place with the record labels. Google didn’t elaborate on this, but the general consensus seems to be that they probably don’t need a deal to begin with.
As the first invitations are pouring out (of course i have already applied for mine) I wondered how Google manages this. Google’s redundancy model usually protects against data-loss by mirroring your data across multiple datacentres. But even on Google scale, mirroring 20000 tracks per user (at 4-7 mb a pop) to 2 or more datacentres has got to hurt. Even if most users never come near the 20000 track limit, I cannot imagine Google engineers being happy about storing “Baby hit me one more time” 3 million times. So this got me thinking if Google maybe has some data de-duplication going on somewhere. Even more awesome would be if they were to include matching your content on your hard-drive against fingerprints stored online so that you wouldn’t need to upload your entire music collection. Oh well, one can dream..
We’re back up and running again, at least on this blog. I asked my hoster to upgrade my account with SSH, which seems to entail a server-move. During that move, the databases get migrated as well and during the migration they managed to lose all database contents. Of course, this left the blog in tatters. We’re back up and running, due to a restore of the old database-contents. Now, let’s see if I can get www.stampfini.org to run again…
Edit: and that is running again as well.
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced that Kindle has become the most gifted item in Amazon's history. On Christmas Day, for the first time ever, customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books.
via Amazon.com — News Release.
Well, it’s been a while, shall we say. In the mean time, I’m still in full swing on another embedded Linux project and got a chance to cut my teeth on some D-Bus actions. In addition, two of my little pet peeves have moved significantly:
- Android on my HTC Touch Diamond has become much more useable
- I bought an E-reader ( a Sony PRS-300)
Both items will be covered in more detail in the future here. Very soon I will have some more time to give out some more details on both matters.
Unless Amazon embraces open e-book standards like epub, which allow readers to read books on a variety of devices, the Kindle will be gone within two or three years.
via Why Kindle Should Be An Open Book – Forbes.com.
Interesting stuff, as the E-book market was becoming less fragmented by the rallying behind ePub as a standard. The marketing clout of a company like Amazon gives it a lot of leeway, but in the end I wonder if they are able to keep this up.
OK, so I got fed up with the Serendipity blog engine. For some reason it just appeared cluttered and kludgy compared to the current release WordPress. So, I went ahead and moved this blog to WordPress. I’m in the process of migrating the old content here, so expect to see this soon!
update: All the content should be moved now!
The every excellent TechDirt blog had a nice writeup about whether or not Wikipedia should make the jump to adding ads in their site. As they state rather nicely:
Part of the genius of Wikipedia’s design is that its editing process self-selects for people who are passionate about designing a great encyclopedia. It has to, because if you don’t find editing Wikipedia enjoyable, there isn’t much else to draw you in. As a result, the senior Wikipedia editors tend to be strongly focused on making Wikipedia the best encyclopedia it can be, and while politics certainly happens, it’s a relatively minor aspect of the site’s operations.
Moving this model to a paid-by-advertising model means that although they receive large amounts of money (due to large numbers of pageview caused by Wikipedia high rankings within Google’s search engine) that would also bring along a number of editors that would become focussed on becoming senior executives in charge of that pile of money.
In Februari, Techdirt had another article on Wikipedia, sizing up Wikipedias chances against Google’s Knol offering. Although Knol is not yet open to the public, they indicate that because of Wikipedia’s permissive licensing a lot of their content may end up on Knol. Knol however can be monetized (via google ads). As it stands, Wikipedia will have a bit of a conundrum: either take the money using their own site, or idly stand by and watch that revenue go to authors who cut and past the content from Google and post it to Knol and reap the profits there.
At first, this looks like a tough problem for Wikipedia. I think this is not the case, though. First of all, Wikipedia is in the knowledge dissemination business, not in the money making business. Secondly, they always have the option of changing the license terms under which the content is disseminated in such a way that excludes the content from being incorporated in Google Knol. And last but not least: these are two different problems. It’s money flowing to Wikipedia or money flowing to the authors of the knols.
It will be interesting to see how this pans out in the future!
Well, we’re back from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. I must say that it was quite the experience. Demoing our application went well, aside from the roaring fans of the demo machine itself. Intel could have warned us that we would be standing directly below the fans of that beast! Besides all my demos, I got a chance to have a look at all of the other companies that were demonstrating as well. I’m gonna try to catch the general themes that I found in the show.
