Adobe announced earlier this week that it plans to lay off almost 10% of its workforce. At the same time, though, the company also announced that it plans to expand its investment in e-books and digital publishing. Adobe is creating a new organization within the company that will focus on products for book, newspaper and magazine publishers. With Bill McCoy, however, the company is also losing one of its most visible advocates for open e-book standards in this week's layoffs.
After years of waiting, FeedBurner users can finally see their stats in Google Analytics. Google acquired FeedBurner in 2007. Since then, there has been a lot of grumbling about how Google handled the transition and the lack of innovation in FeedBurner since the acquisition. The integration with Google Analytics is still hidden and incomplete - right now you can only see feed item click data - but Google promises to slowly add more data in the coming weeks.
In what's got to be the most amusing celebrity tech endorsement of the season so far, Dolly Parton has gone on YouTube endorsing Microsoft's IE8. It's got this great webslices feature, you see. "You've got to have Internet Explorer 8 to use webslices," she says, "shoot, I didn't even know there was a 1 through 7."
It's an awfully charming video by one of the greatest musicians of all time. This 63-year old mega-millionaire is downright folksy when talking about web browsers.
Earlier this week, the news of the first iPhone worm made its way around the net. Since the worm only targeted jailbroken devices and then only those which had the SSH program installed, there wasn't a need for concern on the part of most iPhone users. However, a second hacker tool which uses the same security hole as the so-called iKee worm has reared its head and this one is far more dangerous. According to security firm Intego, the new hacker tool goes after personal data stored on the device including email, contacts, SMS messages, calendars, photos, music files, videos and any other data recorded by any iPhone app.
In other words, if you're the owner of a jailbroken phone, you should now be concerned.
A federal lawsuit filed on Wednesday is charging an iPhone development firm with collecting users' cell phone numbers without their permission. The developer, a game-making firm by the name of Storm8, is the entity behind popular games like iMobsters, World War, Racing Live, Vampires Live, Kingdoms Live, Zombies Live and Rockstars Live, among others. The company has five titles ranked in the top 50 free apps list in iTunes and seven titles in the top 100.
According to the pending class-action suit, Storm8 used a well-known backdoor method to "access, collect, and transmit" the wireless phone numbers belonging to their software's users.
Now the company has publicly responded to the suit by posting on their forums a sort of mea culpa as well as their plans to ask for a dismissal of the lawsuit due to its "complete lack of merit."
Yesterday we wrote about how Demand Media produces 4,000 new pieces of content every day - and whether it can sustain quality at that scale. There was vigorous discussion about the quality issue in the comments, including from some of Demand Media's thousands of freelance writers.
In this follow-up post, we look at the type of content that Demand Media outputs. It turns out that much of it is driven by advertising demand. Again we feel compelled to ask: is this good or bad for the Web's future?
TodayYouTube has announced its plan to support 1080p videos.
This means that those amazing, high-definition videos you uploaded last year will now finally be converted to their original resolutions and will finally look as good as they do on your desktop. The new resolution represents a significant improvement over the current 720p maximum resolution, which leaves all those glorious, pirated segments of old movies tragically blurred and pixelated.
Vook is a new company that's come up with a method for blending text and premium video to create an interesting mobile multimedia experience around popular literature.
It combines the (relatively) old skool readability of a Kindle with the engagement of a YouTube series, all wrapped in the delicious flavor of a usable, interactive UI for web users and iFanboys alike.
This week, Justin.tv is rolling out new measures to protect copyrighted live video streams from being pirated on their site. The technology the company is using will allow them to remove pirate channels without having to issue a takedown notice first.
Using technology from Vobile, an online video publishing company, Justin.tv partners (including FOX), will be able to use VideoDNA™ "fingerprinting" technology to watermark their digital content. If the content is spotted elsewhere on the site, Justin.tv will automatically remove the infringing channel. Think of it as DRM for real-time, streaming media.
With Google's Social Search experiment, Bing's integration with Twitter and Yahoo!'s partnership with One Riot, social search clearly has both potential and momentum. But what will social search look like, and will it help us search better? And if it will, how?
I've written previously about how social search won't replace traditional search, how social relevancy rank can be used to deliver good results, and why the concept of social search is a return to a familiar state rather than something to fear. Today, I'll get more specific about the three flavors of social search that will improve user search experiences.
