What do you get when you mix a train wreck ravaged by a tornado then washed away with the torrents of a tsunami? That would be BlackBerry maker Research In Motion. Now the company has a new chief executive, as co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis are turning over their tightly held reins of the once-powerful smartphone manufacturer to chief operating officer, Thorsten Heins.
Who is Thorsten Heins? He is a product designer and engineer that rose to be the COO under Balsillie and Lazaridis. Most people outside of the smartphone industry may not know of him for precisely that reason. RIM's co-CEOs have never been known to share the spotlight. Heins has said that he is willing to license RIM's QNX-based smartphone operating system and perform with "rigour and flawless execution." Execution of what, exactly?
Not even two years after reaching 1 million users, social audio service SoundCloud announced today that it has surpassed the 10 million user mark. The Berlin-based company has risen to become a major force in audio content creation and sharing on the Web, becoming a sort of "YouTube for audio" used by musicians, journalists and pretty much anybody with a need to record and share their own audio files.
To celebrate the milestone, the four-year-old startup has released an audio slideshow storytelling app called Story Wheel. It uses the Instagram API to grab a set of pictures, from which you can select the ones you want and order them. Once the photos are arranged, a brief narrative can be recorded in the browser. The end result is a shareable photo slideshow annotated by you.
Owners of Apple's newest mobile gadgets can now break their devices free from the confines of the company's restrictions. The iPhone 4S and iPad 2 can be jailbroken without being tethered to a computer for the first time thanks to a new tool called Absinthe A5.
Last month, hackers released a jailbreak for iOS 5 that covered all compatible devices except for those with an A5 processor. That meant that iPhone 4S and iPad 2 owners were out of luck if they wanted an untethered jailbreak solution. Today that changes, thanks to the efforts of the Chronic Dev Team and other developers in the jailbreaking community.
After yesterday's dramatic, international sting operation, the people behind Megaupload are in custody, their Web empire and fancy cars having been seized by authorities. Founder Kim Dotcom and his associates are charged with piracy on a massive scale, among other things.
As for Megaupload.com, the site is inaccessible, perhaps indefinitely. That's a bummer for the millions of people who used it to share copyrighted albums, movies and software. It's an even bigger let down for users who used the service to store personal files, sometimes without a backup.
In 2011, we collectively listened to 64,876,491,602 songs on the Internet. Whether it was on YouTube, SoundCloud, Rdio or MySpace, the citizens of the Web listened to quite a lot of music last year. Bands and musicians made over 3 billion new fans, who viewed artist profiles over 16 billion times. These are just a few data points recently released by Next Big Sound, a startup that tracks the popularity of music and individual artists across a range of digital music providers and social services.
Digital music only continues to grow and mature, as streaming services explode, Internet radio companies go public and developers begin using the power of open APIs to mash up sounds and services. SoundCloud alone saw 231% growth last year, while Twitter saw a 104% increase in music-related activity.
When the concept of libraries lending out e-books first came about, the idea had its skeptics. Some in the publishing industry worried that the practice could eat into e-book sales, while others questioned whether such a system would be popular or effective among consumers. Some recent statistics suggest that library e-book lending is taking off.
Driven in large part by the proliferation of tablets and e-readers, digital book lending is on the rise, according to OverDrive, a leading supplier of digital content to U.S. libraries. The company, which partnered with Amazon for its Kindle lending program, reported recently that it saw a 130% increase in traffic to its "virtual branch" websites last year. OverDrive works with 18,000 libraries to offer e-books and other digital content to members.
Twenty-four hours after an Internet-wide protest against controversial anti-piracy legislation, big media and pro-copyright interests won a major victory with the shutdown of Megaupload and related websites. The company's flagship file-sharing site allowed users to upload files and share them via a unique URL. The service, which garnered several million visitors per month, was frequently used to share pirated music, movies, software and other copyrighted media.
While the site's owners long argued that they were legally protected by the "safe harbor" provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), federal authorities in the United States evidently saw things differently and have arrested four people connected to Megaupload and charged them with online piracy. Three other people are still at large.
The unveiling of the third generation of Apple's iPad is still, unofficially, weeks away. That isn't stopping the company from taking a crack at the way tablets and other mobile devices could change the way people learn. Tomorrow, Apple is expected to reveal its latest plans in the education space at an official press conference in New York City.
Exactly what they'll unveil tomorrow isn't yet known, but some hints and leaks have started to paint the picture. That the event is centered around education is no mystery, as the official press invite wasn't shy about making that point. As for which area of education is set to be targeted by Apple, all available evidence points to the textbook.
Wikipedia, Reddit, Craigslist, Mozilla, and many other vital websites have gone dark today to protest SOPA and PIPA, the twin online piracy bills Congress is working on. The blackout is certainly attracting attention, but it's also causing frustration, especially for unaware Wikipedia users.
The Washington Post, the Guardian and NPR are collaborating on an experiment to see if they can fill the knowledge void left by Wikipedia's blackout. Using the Twitter hashtag #altwiki, these news outlets want to answer factual questions for Web users who can't get to Wikipedia. The Washington Post calls it "a single-day Band-Aid" for the missing encyclopedia.
Today hundreds of websites are participating in a virtual anti-SOPA/PIPA sit-in: Google, Reddit, Craigslist, Wikipedia, WordPress, Mozilla, MoveOn.org, O'Reilly and The Oatmeal, to name a few. Syracuse University's School of Information Studies (iSchool) is the only higher education institute to join the list of Internet powerhouse sites.
Syracuse's iSchool offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in information technology and graduate degrees in library science with an emphasis in new/digital librarianship. "Students are very plugged in and interested in the tech world," says J.D. Ross, Communications Director at Syracuse's School of Information Studies. "This was already on their radar, and it's a perfect opportunity to raise awareness among students who don't know about it."
