After years of struggling, photographic services giant Kodak is preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the Wall Street Journal reported. The company, which was long known for selling film and other photography-related products, had tried everything from branching out into more modern offerings to using its trove of patents to sue others. Alas, the times have caught up with Kodak.
The news comes almost exactly one year after the last roll of Kodachrome film was developed and at a time when the most widely-used camera on Flickr isn't even one of the many digital point-and-shoots or SLR's that had already chipped away at Kodak's dominance; It's the iPhone 4.
For most print publishers, the transition from ink to pixels has been at least somewhat painful. Over the last few years, the industry has seen widespread layoffs, furloughs, bankruptcies and newspaper closures. The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News are no exception. The company that previously owned the two daily papers filed for bankruptcy in 2009 and ended up selling them the following year. The new owner, a company called Philadelphia Media Network, has since been trying to reposition its publications for the twenty-first century.
Today, PMN fulfilled a promise it made last year by doing something few would expect a newspaper company to do. Project Liberty, the company's tech startup incubator, is now open for business.
In 2012, anybody who starts a band or begins recording their own music at home is probably not quitting their day job and awaiting huge financial returns. If they're good at what they do and the Web helps them build a huge audience, then great, but that's unlikely to be their chief motivator. Of all the ways for artists to make money early in the game, selling music is generally not seen as a cash cow. For many, making their music available for free and getting it on streaming services is a better way to get exposure and monetization is a strategy best saved for later.
The state of online music sales for independent artists may not be as abysmal at it feels though, according to some data recently shared by Bandcamp. The artist promotion and e-commerce site found that some of their paid music downloads were being initiated by users who had searched explicitly for pirated content.
We may still be a few years away from the mainstream adoption of mobile payments, but that hasn't stopped a whirlwind of buzz and product development from going on in the space. Some of the biggest players in tech, telecommunications and finance are all working on solutions that will enable people to pay for everyday items using only their phones.
So what's the hold up? For one, there are technical challenges. Technologies like NFC are not yet ubiquitous in handsets, and smartphone adoption itself is still growing. Few and far between are the retailers who have the infrastructure in place to support accepting payments this way. Another issue is consumer demand and trust. Only 23% would be willing to us their mobile device to pay for things, according to a recent report from KPMG.
During the week between Christmas and New Year's Day, users downloaded more than 1 billion apps for the first time ever in a week-long period. Across iOS and Android, over 1.2 billion apps were downloaded, according to a new report by Flurry Analytics. That was a 60% increase over early December.
The holiday season typically sees a surge in mobile application downloads, especially once Christmas Day arrives and countless consumers all over the world unwrap their new Android devices, iPhones, iPads and iPods. In a true testament to the continued proliferation of these devices, this year's holiday spike in app downloads was a one for the record books, according to Flurry's data.
The Wikimedia Foundation, parent organization of Wikipedia and other super-wikis, closed out its annual fundraising campaign with another record-breaking haul. The campaign raised $20 million, about 71% of its planned operating budget this year. Donations have risen every year since the campaigns began in 2003.
Wikipedia serves more than 470 million unique visitors every month, and it doesn't pay for all that bandwidth with advertising. This annual fundraising campaign provides the bulk of Wikimedia's funding, and the rest comes from gifts and grants like the one Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki made for $500,000 in November.
Just as SOPA opponents in the United States prepare for round two in their battle against far-reaching anti-piracy legislation, it appears that their Spanish counterparts just lost theirs. On Friday, the Spanish government approved the Sustainable Economy Law, (SEL) which enables rights holders to have infringing websites shut down within 10 days after a complaint is filed.
Once a complaint is made, a judge can order ISPs to block access to sites that host copyrighted material or have them shut down entirely. The law, which was officially passed early last year but never implemented, was approved by Spain's new, more conservative government last week and will now be enacted as planned, much to the delight of the film and music industries, as well as other media companies.
Computers keep getting closer and closer to making people obsolete. The latest step towards human obsolescence? Dropbox Automator, a Web-based tool for setting up actions that happen as soon as you put a file in a Dropbox folder. It’s not flawless just yet, but it might provide a useful service for many Dropbox users.
The service is powered by Wappwolf, an online “action store” that features a set of Web actions that can process files. For example, it has ready made actions to encrypt and decrypt files, extract text from PDFs, convert documents to PDF, generate QR codes and manipulate images.
Compared to how things used to be done with desktop computers, accessing your smartphone seems as instantaneous as it gets. You just pick up the device, tap a button, slide a finger to the right, enter (or Swype) your passcode and you're in. The whole process takes about two seconds and requires virtually no physical energy on your part. Piece of cake.
As quick and painless as this seems, Apple wants to simplify things even further for owners of its iPhones, iPads and other iOS devices. Imagine walking up to your phone or tablet in its dock and seeing the screen light up with a greeting. You pick it up and pull it a few inches closer to your face, and voilà! the screen is unlocked and the digital universe is instantly at your finger tips.
Not unsurprisingly, this holiday season was a big one for the world's biggest e-commerce retailer. But it wasn't just all those remote-controlled, inflatable flying sharks and Forever Lazy pajamas people ordered. Among the biggest winners this year was Amazon's line of Kindle e-readers and, naturally, the e-books that go on them.
Kindles flew off Amazon's digital shelves at a rate of over 1 million per week during the month of December and occupied the top three slots on the company's site-wide bestseller list. The #1 position was held by the Kindle Fire, which was also the most gifted and wished-for item on the entire site, according to data released today by Amazon.
