BBC:
Intel has agreed to buy about 190 patents from RealNetworks as part of a deal worth $120m (£76m).
The sale also includes a further 170 patent applications and a commitment to co-develop and share RealNetworks’ video encoding software.
Intel says the deal will help it offer “exciting video experiences” on devices using its chips.
I wonder what kind of exciting video experiences Intel will offer…
Well known for their great design team, Apple started advertising their products in late 1977 and have undergone countless re-brands in the decades since.
We have been traveling to developing countries in Asia and Africa, visiting e-waste scrapyards and small repair shops, meeting “fixers” who breathe new life into gadgets that the western world has tossed away, and photographing the journey. Part travelogue, part investigative reporting, part soapbox, iFixit.org promises only one thing: a clear-eyed, thoughtful look at global repair culture.
This looks amazing! The beautiful site design alone is worth the visit but the subject matter is essential knowledge about the world we live in. Fascinating stuff.
(via 52 Tiger)
Dan Graziano, reporting for BGR.com:
Apple may be looking to incorporate support for 802.11ac Wi-Fi specification into the company’s products this year, according to a report from AppleInsider. The new standard offers three times the speed of the 802.11n standard, capable of achieving speeds of over 1 Gigabit per second. The Cupertino-based company is expected to “rapidly deploy support” of the new standard into AirPort base stations, Time Capsules, the Apple TV, notebooks and possibly mobile devices, according to the report.
Apple have a track record for successfully pushing new technologies to market, though the iPhone was late to receiving 802.11n. It’ll be interesting to see if their adoption of 802.11ac pushes the technology to become a widely used standard.
(via @ianisted)
Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp announced today at the Digitial Life Design (DLD) conference that the service is now serving 120 million people and 15 billion pageviews every month. Speaking about how Tumblr differs from traditional “editorial” services like WordPress, Karp quoted figures from website traffic measuring company Quantcast, not directly referencing internal figures from its own analytics. (via Tumblr: Serving 120m People, 15bn Pageviews A Month)
These numbers are seriously impressive.
BBC:
The arrest of Megaupload’s founders has led to other file storage sites taking action in an apparent attempt to protect themselves from legal action.
Filesonic has disabled its sharing functions, allowing users to access only their own files.
Uploaded.to has blocked US access to its site entirely, with a message saying “sorry about that”.
I do hope that legitimate websites and services don’t shut down because of this.
Do you want to see something neat?” When he flipped it open, it turned out to be a mock-up of a computer that could fit on your lap, with a keyboard and screen hinged together like a notebook. “This is my dream of what we will be making in the mid-to late eighties,” he said. They were building a company that would invent the future.— A Highlight and Note by Rene Schaefer from Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography
Jason Lim, reporting for VentureBeat:
People outside of China often wonder why the Chinese love to copy things. The answer is that it’s the way they’re taught to learn. Follow the teacher, recite books, and don’t challenge authority. This mentality sticks with people as they mature. Moreover, I’m sure many startups think, “Why shouldn’t I copy?” if the business model has been proven overseas and they know how to adapt it for China. Not copying would almost represent a missed opportunity.
China has an interesting culture around cloning and copycatting. What I find funniest on this list of clones is just how exact of a copy some of these startups are.
We’ve huddled around the concept of classrooms— Joshua Topolsky (@joshuatopolsky)
Apple just released iBooks Author, a free Mac app for creating digital books for the new version of iBooks. I haven’t played with it much, but so far it looks like a very good tool. However, a curious thing happens when you go to export your work in iBooks format:
This restriction — that iBooks can be sold only in the iBookstore — isn’t enforced on a technical level. You can save the document, move it to your iPad in any of the usual ways (including just emailing it to yourself), and it happily opens in the iBooks app.
But if you look at the end-user license agreement (EULA) for iBooks Author, accessible via the app’s About box, the following bold note appears at the top:
…
Click through for details on iBook Authors EULA. It’s really interesting to see Apple take such an approach towards a product. It’s unheard of that a company controls the outcome of a product - as Wineman says:
It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty…
It will be really interesting to see how users react to Apples decision, and whether that will stop anyone from using iBook Author as their authoring tool.
(via @ener)
SplatF w/ Dan Frommer:
Today, the only mainstream way to read an e-book on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac is to use Amazon’s Kindle app. And it’s not like no one cares about this: The Kindle app is currently the no. 10 most popular free app in the Mac App Store.
So, where is iBooks for Mac? I don’t think Apple has anything against people reading books on their Mac, and I don’t think this is a technical issue. I assume Apple just hasn’t gotten around to it yet.
I’ve found myself buy several books on my Kindle, then read a bit on my iPhone whilst on the bus, then some more on the Kindle, then reference it on my MacBook… Kindle works really well in that sense, and Apple really do need a Mac iBooks app.
Via: @ener
