Digital Trends
Microsoft isn’t making its vast profits any more, it’s shedding 5,000 jobs, and, according to a new company blog posting, it’s also going to delay its plans for a new data center in Des Moines, Iowa. The center was set to host Hotmail, Live Search and Windows Live services.
There are plenty of kids under 18 who spend a lot of time playing video games. But just because they’re compulsive about it doesn’t mean they’re addicted, according to Keith Bakker, head of the Smith & Jones Center in Amsterdam, Europe’s only gaming addiction clinic.
Instead, he feels, the problem might well be social, and the clinic has begun changing its treatment accordingly. The more usual abstinence therapy has worked where the young people have also displayed other addictions, such as alcohol, but that’s only 10% of the patients. For the other 90%, Bakker feels, activity-based and social skills are more effective.
Think of Amsterdam-based Sellaband as record label 2.0. Artists can put tracks up on their site for fans to hear. Those listeners eager enough can pledge moneyto the musicians, and once they’ve reached $50,000 in pledges, the label will help them record and release an album. So far there have been three releases and a total of 11 bands have reachedthe magic money milestone. But in a new move, Sellaband will now be working with Amazon, at least in the UK. The label will have its own dedicated store,with the CDs selling for around $18 (which is cheap by UK standards), with the revenue shared between the label, the artists and fans. Amazon will also bring something to the deal, beyond avery high-profile outlet. Once any band has $30,000 in fan investment, Amazon will add credits to that band’s account, then give extra promotion as they pass the $35,000 mark, according to areport in the Guardian.
Johan Vosmeijer, SellaBand managing director, told the newspaper,
Number one mobile handset maker Nokia announced at its annual Nokia World conference in Amsterdam that it has inked a deal with Universal Music which will bundle a year of free access to music from Universal artists with selected Nokia handsets under a new program dubbed “Comes with Music.” And, once the year is over, customers can keep all the music they downloaded—it won’t expire or de-activate itself.
Dutch digital mapmaker Tele Atlas has been pursued by Amsterdam-based GPS maker TomTom since mid-year: TomTom announced its intent to aquire the company in July for €21.25 per share—kind of a low-ball bid—and formally announced the offer in early October. The question was whether TeleAtlas shareholders would bite: although Tele Atlas formally endorsed the TomTom offer, Tele Atlas’s shares had been consistently trading above the level of TomTom’s offer, and Nokia’s recent move to acquire competing mapmaker Navteq for some $8.1 billion applied more pressure to the possible deal.
You’ve heard of lawsuits to close illegal download sites. But in raids in England and Holland, police arrested the man believed to be behind the file-sharing site site OiNK and closed down its servers. Don’t be surprised if you haven’t heard of Oink. You needed an invitation to become one of its 180,000 members, and that invitation was only forthcoming if you had a “donation” of music to share – as well as money to pay for downloads. In fact, OiNK was one of the main sources of illegal pre-release music. According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the site has leaked 60 major pre-release albums this year, often weeks before their official release date. Oink members distributed recordings in the torrent file format to other OiNK members, and had to keep posting such music to the site to maintain their membership. Once an album had been posted on the site, the users that downloaded it then passed the content to other websites, forums and blogs, where multiple copies were made. In a statement, Jeremy Banks, Head of the IFPI’s Internet Anti-Piracy Unit, said: “OiNK was central to the illegal distribution of pre-release music online. This was not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure. This was a worldwide network that got hold of music they did not own the rights to and posted it online. This operation was a classic example of how the recording industry can work with law enforcement agencies to prove that illegal operations on the internet are not immune from detection.” The man arrested was an unnamed 24 year-old IT worker from Middlesbrough, England. According to the BBC, he worked for a multi-national company, whose offices were searched, along with the home of the man’s father. The site’s servers in Amsterdam had been shut down last week. The arrest was the culmination of a two-year investigation by Interpol. Police are now trying to trace the money involved, which is believed to amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In the first case prosecuted under the United States’ CAN-SPAM Act to be tried before a jury, spammers Jeffrey Kilbride of Venice, California, and James Schaffer of Paradise Valley, Arizona, were sentenced to five and a quarter and six years in federal prison, respectively, for sending pornographic spam, as well as engaging in fraud, and money laundering. Each defendant was also fined $100,000 and ordered to pay AOL $77,500 in restitution; the U.S. government is also seizing $1.1 million in revenues earned by the operation.
A new peer-to-peer system called Tribler has been created which rewards those who share selflessly and penalizes lechers. One of the biggest problemswith peer-to-peer networks is that all too often people are taking from the system rather than giving to it. If too many are downloading content at any one time, the networks can become sluggish. Tribler uses bandwidth as a currency, so those offering upload capacity receive a credit for future downloads.
Dr Johan Pouwelse, an assistant professor at Delft University of Technology, Amsterdam, is the co-creator of Tribler. He’s been working with associate professor David Parkes from Harvard University to add an accounting system to Tribler to encourage users to upload as often as they download.
At Nokia’s Capital Days event in Amsterdam today, the world’s largest mobile phone maker announced four new handset models—and unlike many recent Nokia announcements which target the high end of the mobile ecosystem, these new units aim squarely at the mid-range and (in one case) the entry levels of the cellular phone market. “These new products underscore our commitment to offer a range of mobile phones that give consumers a choice in selecting the right balance of technology and design to meet their lifestyle and budget,” said Kai Oistamo, Nokia’s Executive VP and General Manager in a statement. The question is when (and if) these models will be picked up by North American wireless operators?
A new line of messenger bags coming to American shores from Netherlands-based UrbanAccess will sport a variety of designs and be sold in white corrugated pizza boxes. No, this isn’t a late April Fools joke – the “Pizza Courier†collection is priced at $49.95 and will be available for sale later this month.
The Pizza Courier collection from UrbanAccess, said the bag maker, is made up of slim, multipurpose satchels with laser cut, embroidered and mixed media graphics on their front flaps. They will come in dozens of international city themed designs, with Berlin, New York, Amsterdam and other cities already represented in sometimes reportedly provocative “tributes to urban destinations around the worldâ€.
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