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Chrome: The End of Desktop Apps

John Paczkowski — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:02:23 +0000

Direct from Google headquarters and liveblogged by John Paczkowski, Google unveiled its Chrome OS. This is the first of three segments:

Google did not offer a beta of the new operating system today. Vice President of Product Management Sundar Pichai says Google is a year away from an official launch. The company, however, is making Chrome OS code available today.

According to Pichai, Google’s Chrome browser has some 40 million users one year after launch. He boasts about the browser’s speed, noting that it handles Javascript 39 times faster than Internet Explorer. There will be three more big Chrome announcements in the future: Chrome for Mac, Chrome for Linux and the debut of Chrome Extensions.

Google’s goal is to ensure that Web applications function as well as desktop apps, Pichai explains. The company is figuring out a way for Web apps to safely take advantage of the operating system in the same way that desktop apps do. A few examples: Graphics, video/audio applications, real-time communication, notification and local storage.

“By 2010 we expect to have all these things built into Chrome.”

The advent of Chrome coincides with a perfect storm of converging trends, Pichai notes, including the tremendous popularity of netbooks during the recession, the growing acceptance of cloud apps and the rapid innovation in mobile devices. Smartphones are becoming more like laptops, he adds, and laptops are becoming more like smartphones. Is there a better level of computing available for these devices? There is, says Pichai, and he believes it is Chrome OS.

Sonos All-In-One Music System: There's an App for That

John Paczkowski — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 10:00:33 +0000

Well, this is a first. Sonos, the company responsible for the wireless multiroom audio system of the same name, is today debuting a new piece of hardware designed for an iPhone app.

Last year around this time, Sonos introduced its Controller for iPhone, a free application that essentially turns the device into a remote control for any Sonos system. The software performed nearly all of the tasks of the $399 Sonos remote and drastically lowered the price of entry for the otherwise spendy wireless system.

A year later, Sonos is building on the success of that app, launching an all-in-one wireless music system specifically designed for it. The ZonePlayer S5, as the company calls it, encapsulates Sonos’s multi-component system in a single device that can be controlled by an Apple (AAPL) iPhone, iPod touch or computer.

It’s a sort of iPodless iPod speaker dock or, rather, an iPod speaker dock where the iPod can be carried with you. The S5 can stream music from the iTunes library of any computer or networked hard drive. And with five speakers–two tweeters, two three-inch midrange drivers and one 3.5-inch woofer–and a 5 Class-D digital amplifier, the sound is likely to fill a room pretty well. Priced at $399, the S5 is expected at market on Oct. 27.

Sirius XM iPhone App Surpasses One Million Downloads, 37,000 Negative Reviews

John Paczkowski — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 13:58:36 +0000

Despite some glaring omissions in its channel lineup, Sirius XM’s new iPhone app has earned considerable traction in Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes App Store. It was downloaded more than one million times in the first two weeks it was available–this despite the fact that the app doesn’t include access to Howard Stern, the personality Sirius (SIRI) often claims is responsible for driving more subscriptions than any other.

“Reaching more than 1 million downloads so quickly is a strong testament to our world-class programming and Sirius XM’s instant brand recognition,” Scott Greenstein, president and chief content officer, said in a release trumpeting the milestone. “Our goal is to give people access to the best audio entertainment wherever they go with what we think is the best music and audio entertainment application available on the App Store.”

The app, which debuted on June 18, quickly became the top free offering in the the App Store’s music category and has held that spot for some time now. So it’s certainly one of the more popular music apps available. That said, it’s also one of the most poorly rated. Sirius XM’s app has an average rating of just two stars out of a possible five. Of its 56,952 user reviews, just 8,822 give it five stars. But 37,818 rate it a single star. And most of those do so citing Stern’s absence as the reason. So while it’s true that Sirius XM Premium Online is the the top free app in the music category, it’s also seems to be its leading disappointment. Makes you wonder how many of those one million downloads were deleted, either after the user noticed Stern’s absence or the $2.99/month subscription fee.

Mozilla Foundation Announces Your New Default Browser

John Paczkowski — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:30:48 +0000

After four beta versions and nearly as many release candidates, Firefox 3.5 is finally here.

This latest version of the browser offers a number of new features. Among them: Private browsing, location-aware surfing, support for emerging HTML 5 standards such as plug-in-free video and audio playing, and better JavaScript performance. It’s that last improvement that’s most noteworthy since Mozilla claims that Firefox 3.5 is twice as fast as Firefox 3, and an astonishing 10 times faster than Firefox 2.0.

Nice features, all of them, and ones that certainly reflect the goal of Firefox’s creators at the Mozilla Foundation: To upgrade the Web. “What we’re actually trying to do,” Mozilla Chairman Mitchell Baker said at our D7 conference in May (see video highlights below), “…is improve the Web itself….Our main goal is to make more capabilities available, and right now, the browser is the main delivery mechanism….We’re trying to be the delivery mechanism upon which others build innovations.”

And upon which Firefox builds market share. Though it is currently the world’s second-leading browser, with a 22.5 percent share of the global Web browser market, Firefox faces some formidable competition these days from Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL) and now Mozilla partner Google (GOOG), which is bearing down upon it with its latest “don’t-be-evil” bulldozer, Chrome.

[ See post to watch video ]

China Delays Filtering Initiative

John Paczkowski — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:00:52 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Macworld ’09: iMovie '09

John Paczkowski — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:33:03 +0000

Next up on the Macworld agenda: iMovie. This Apple (AAPL) software has been given not just a refresh, but a full rewrite. We’ve added so much to iMovie this year, says Phil Schiller, that iMovie will be the consumer video editing software to have. And that may turn out to be so. Precision editing, drag and drop. Dynamic themes. Automatic stabilization. Animated travel maps. Randy Ubillos, Apple’s chief architect of video, takes the stage to demo the product.

He quickly demonstrates the optimization of a video clip, adjusting its audio, the angle of the video. It’s a very complex edit and he does it very, very simply. The video stabilization tool is, and I hate to sound like a fanboy here, mind-blowing at first look. It’s accurate and fast, and appears to be professional or near-professional in quality. Furthermore, these enhancements are for the most part being done in real time.

A set of new built-in animations, transitions and themes rounds out the application. All very slick.

Uh, Hello? Cut-and-Paste!?!

John Paczkowski — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 21:00:34 +0000

November 21. That’s the day iPhone 2.2 is rumored to arrive at market. And when, or if, it does, it’s expected to include some slick new features. Among them:

Enhancements to Google Maps, including support for Google Street View, plus bus schedules and walking directions
Support for over-the-air podcast updates via the iTunes Store
An app-scoring feature that allows users to rate applications purchased from the the App Store before deleting them
Support for line-in audio via the iPhone’s headphone jack

Wonderful additions to the platform, all of them. Of course, there are still quite a few missing. MMS support would be nice, wouldn’t it? As would support for Flash and the ability to compose messages in landscape mode.

And what about cut-and-paste? Seriously, at this point, it’s almost like Apple (AAPL) is purposely withholding it, out of spite.

iPod Phono: 10 Songs on Your Coffee Table

John Paczkowski — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 20:12:06 +0000

Turns out the long-playing (LP) record album may not be as much of an anachronism as once thought. As CD sales slip into the mud, and digital music outlets pop up on the Web as quickly as Starbucks stores, vinyl is staging a comeback. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, vinyl LP shipments spiked 36% from 2006 to 2007, to 1.3 million units. CD shipments dropped 17.5% during the same 2006-07 period, to 511 million.

Now, given the vast discrepancy between LP and CD units shipped in the past year, it’s entirely unlikely vinyl will ever claim a significant share of the music market–unless Apple (AAPL), for some reason, develops the iPod Phono. But it may well remain a niche market for some time to come thanks to audiophiles who prefer the LP “experience” and its so-called truer sound.

And so today Best Buy (BBY) is testing vinyl sales at some of its stores, as is retailer Fred Meyer (KR). “It’s not just a nostalgia thing,” said Melinda Merrill, spokeswoman for Fred Meyer. “The response from customers has just been that they like it, they feel like it has a better sound.”

Pull Those Engineers Off OS X 10.6 and Put Them on the Clock Radio …

John Paczkowski — Thu, 22 May 2008 19:36:01 +0000

Good thing Forrester Research (FORR) doesn’t run Apple (AAPL), because if it did the company would be well on its way to insolvency.

In an astonishingly unimaginative report called “The Future of Apple Inc.,” Forrester attempts to divine the products Apple will be peddling five years from now. “Apple will aim to become the hub of the digital home, offering eight key products and services to connect PCs and digital content to the HDTV-stereo audio-visual infrastructure in consumers’ homes,” Forrester explains. “To fulfill this strategy, we predict that Apple will launch new products, re-engineer the Apple Store, and expand into in-home installation services.”

Sadly, the speculative product and services roadmap Forrester has devised seems more a roadmap to ruin than anything else, and a laughable one at that. Among the products the company sees Apple developing by 2013:

A network-enabled “clock radio”
An AppleSound universal music controller
A digital picture frame
A “Genius Bar” that makes house calls just like the Geek Squad.

Huh. So Apple, after reinventing the desktop UI, the digital media player, and the phone, will set its sights on the lowly clock radio and picture frame. Really? If Apple’s product dev team pitched Forrester’s clock radio idea to CEO Steve Jobs, he would probably hurl them one-by-one into rush-hour traffic from the roof of 1 Infinite Loop.

The 700 MHz Club: Open Access for All

John Paczkowski — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 19:00:03 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Bezos Adds Apple Audiobooks Business to Amazon Wish List

John Paczkowski — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 12:01:55 +0000

The Amazon bears are growling this morning.

Shares in the company, which have already lost more than 20% of their value in 2008, slipped further in early trading (but recovered later), though Amazon said yesterday that profits more than doubled in its fourth quarter. “This quarter showed accelerated sales growth and record operating profits,” CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement released with the earnings. “In our view, these unusual financial results are driven by one thing: continuously improving the customer experience.”

But such enthusiastic pronouncements didn’t matter a whit to jittery investors worried about a slowing economy and Amazon’s tight margins. Shares of the retailer, which closed yesterday at $74.21, fell 8.2% to $68.15 before opening bell today. And they slipped even further, to $66.49, after Amazon announced plans to acquire Audible in a deal valued at about $300 million – a premium of more than 20 percent over the audiobook retailer’s Wednesday closing price.

Perhaps investors haven’t yet realized that Audible controls an astonishing 95% of the online audiobook market and, as Staci Kramer over at paidContent notes, is the top spoken-word provider for Apple’s iTunes Store. Amazon almost certainly plans to distribute Audible content wirelessly via its Kindle e-book reader, which may turn it into the iPod of e-book readers whether Apple CEO Steve Jobs likes it or not. “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” Jobs said recently when asked about the Kindle. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

That may be so, but as Jobs well knows they do listen. Which begs the question: Why didn’t Apple buy Audible? “We have long suspected that Apple would be the party most interested in acquiring Audible, considering the close ties between the two companies,” Richard Fetyko, an analyst with Merriman Curhan Ford, wrote in a research note this morning. “Audible’s audiobook content is sold within Apple’s iTunes online music store, which represents about 25% to 30% of Audible’s revenue. Also, most of Audible’s customers are iPod users. We would not be surprised to see [if] Apple made a bid for Audible to preserve its leadership in online-audio content distribution. There are no alternatives to Audible in the marketplace with any significant scale.”

Burst Case Scenarios

John Paczkowski — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 09:31:11 +0000

Burst has added another notch to its patent-infringement settlement belt. The scrappy three-man company, which once beat a $60 million settlement out of Microsoft over charges that the software giant had stolen its streaming media technology, has managed to squeeze a few million out of Apple as well.

Bringing an end to an often contentious legal battle that began about two years ago, Apple on Wednesday agreed to pay Burst.com $10 million to settle charges that it illegally incorporated the company’s audio and video-on-demand media delivery solutions into the iTunes ecosystem. In return, Burst agreed to grant Apple a nonexclusive license to its patent portfolio–with certain eyebrow-raising exceptions and caveats. The settlement specifically excludes from Apple’s license one issued and three pending Burst patents on digital video-recorder technology. But it also precludes Burst from suing Apple for any future infringement of the those patents. Now that’s an odd twist, isn’t it? Especially since a patent license is often little more than a covenant not to sue the licensee.

Why promise not to sue for infringement, but refuse to license? Why accept a settlement of just $10 million ($4.6 million after court and attorney fees), when a damages award might have been many, many times greater? And why announce the settlement of a bitter legal battle on the eve of the Thanksgiving holiday when so few people will pay attention to the news? Why do all that, unless there’s something more here? An acquisition in the works, perhaps. Or something else entirely.

RIAA Stamping Out Music Piracy One Single-Mother-of-Two at a Time

John Paczkowski — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 16:27:29 +0000

Since September 2003, the Recording Industry Association of America has filed more than 21,000 illegal downloading suits. Yesterday, testimony began in the first one ever to go to trial.

The case is Virgin Records America et al. v. Thomas, and it pits Jammie Thomas, a single mother of two from central Minnesota, against the RIAA, which claims she distributed more than 1,700 audio files on file-sharing site Kazaa in 2005. Thomas could have settled out of court for $3,000–perhaps even through the RIAA’s handy online settlement processing site, but refused, protesting her innocence. Now, she faces a potential liability of $3.9 million in damages, plus legal fees.

“The plaintiffs don’t have the evidence that she downloaded anything,” Thomas’s attorney, Brian Toder, told jurors yesterday. “The best that they can come up with is somebody out there in cyberland … offered on Kazaa some copyrighted material.” His point: while the RIAA has the Internet protocol address it claims was used to illegally share the songs at issue in the case, it must demonstrate that Thomas was actually using it in order to win the case. And that may well prove difficult.

“In sum, the case will be the first test of the RIAA’s ability to sell a jury on its investigative methods, which have a degree of imprecision because of the anonymous nature of the Internet,” writes Jon Healey of the Los Angeles Times. “Internet protocol addresses aren’t painted on the side of a computer like a street address, and even if the RIAA were able to trace a shared file back to a specific PC or Mac, it’s not easy to prove who was sitting at the keyboard. It will also be the first chance for a judge to instruct a jury on the legality of making songs available for others to download. And it will be the first time a jury will weigh whether to bring the hefty penalties provided under copyright law down on a consumer–in Thomas’s case, one who probably spends more on music than its members do.”

Sony CONNECT Disaster Impressively Well Realized

John Paczkowski — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 12:04:24 +0000

Sony ATRAC is at long last joining Betamax, MiniDisc, Sony Dynamic Digital Sound, HiFD, (pause for breath) Multi-Media Compact Disc, Memory Stick and Super Audio CD in the company’s Museum of Failed Formats.

After an overlong and unsuccessful campaign to spread adoption of ATRAC, Sony is scrapping the proprietary audio format. This morning the company said it would close its CONNECT digital music store and forthcoming Walkman digital media players will support formats that consumers actually use like Windows Media Audio, along with MP3 and AAC (or advanced audio coding). “Customers don’t want to be locked into one service, consumers are demanding choice in music,” said Jeffrey Van Ede, Sony Europe audio marketing VP. “There has been a fundamental shift in legal downloading, and that is toward DRM-free music.”

And what of those few Sony customers who actually own ATRAC music? For them the company’s offering an MP3 Conversion Tool and some advice that CONNECT users have been likely following for some time now: “For your purchased music from CONNECT, you can burn it to audio CD and rerip it into MP3 format to continue enjoying it for personal use.”