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Second-Hand Songs

Posted by Harry McCracken on November 15, 2011 at 6:31 am

A startup called ReDigi wants to let you resell music you bought from online stores such as iTunes. This isn’t going to end well:

A legitimate secondhand marketplace for digital music has never been tried successfully, in part because few people think of reselling anything that is not physical. But last month a new company, ReDigi, opened a system that it calls a legal and secure way for people to get rid of unwanted music files and buy others at a discount.

The service has already drawn concern from music executives and legal scholars, who say it is operating in a gray area of the law. Last Thursday the Recording Industry Association of America, which represents the major record companies, sent ReDigi a cease-and-desist letter, accusing it of copyright infringement.

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Forty Years of Intel Inside

Posted by Harry McCracken on November 15, 2011 at 6:00 am

On November 15th 1971, Intel introduced the 4004–the world’s first single-chip microprocessor. The 4-bit chip was a breakthrough, but it didn’t change the world instantly. In fact, some of the first products with Intel Inside–including a pinball machine, an electronic voting machine, and Wang’s first word processor–didn’t make much of an impact at all. Benj Edwards is celebrating the anniversary with an illustrated look back at this landmark component and some of the 1970s innovations it made possible.

View “4004!” slideshow.

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4004!

Posted by Benj Edwards on November 15, 2011 at 5:48 am

4-bit. 2300 transistors. 740 kHz.

On November 15th, 1971–forty years ago this Tuesday–Intel publicly unveiled the world’s first single-chip microprocessor, the 4004. It was a modest start to what would become a grand silicon empire led by Intel. So modest, in fact, that many would quickly forget the 4004 as Intel churned out more powerful chips throughout the rest of the 1970s–the predecessors of the ones inside every current Windows PC and Mac.

Few commercial products used the 4004. Let’s rediscover seven of them, and learn about the chip’s history along the way.

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The Lost Interview: Steve Jobs, Unfiltered

Posted by Lincoln Spector on November 14, 2011 at 10:05 am

Even an Apple cynic like myself must admit that Steve Jobs drastically changed the world we live in, and mostly for the better. I’m writing this on a Windows computer, I have a Creative Zen music player, and my smartphone is powered by Android. Yet I doubt that any of these would be in existence today without innovations for which Jobs played a significant role.

He was also a charismatic leader and public figure, who held people in thrall with his product announcements and presentations.

But does that mean you would enjoy watching a 16-year-old, 70-minute, videotaped interview, visually consisting of one continuous close-up of his face?

Surprisingly, the answer is Yes. That charisma, combined with the simple fact that Jobs had some interesting things to say back in 1995, make Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview–a film playing in special theatrical engagements around the country this week–a reasonably interesting and informative film. But it could have been much better.

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First Kindle Fire Reviews: Promising But Rough

Posted by Harry McCracken on November 14, 2011 at 9:42 am

I haven’t tried Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet for myself yet, but the first reviews are out. For the most part, they’re neither raves nor pans–they praise the value provided for the $199 price and say the device is full of promise–but also point out that it has more than its share of meaningful rough spots. (The tone reminds me a bit of reviews of the original 2007 Kindle).

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Here Comes Google Music: Leaked Screens Show Android Interface

Posted by Matt Peckham on November 14, 2011 at 7:03 am

Google Music screen shot as shown on TecnoDroidVE.

Android, meet your not-so-shockingly exposed dance partner, Google Music, and Google, meet another Google Music store rumor roundup, this one bolstered by screens that may indeed depict the upcoming Google-powered online music boutique.

We’ve heard rumblings about a Google Music store all year, since before Google launched its Google Music cloud service last May. But Google Music arrived, ironically, music-free—a blank online storage locker into which Google hoped users would pour unlocked tunes ripped direct from personal media or rival services. The theoretical reason: Google hasn’t been able to shore up relations with labels, prompting it to forestall Google Music’s “store” component. Until now, the service has looked the online equivalent of a Self Storage acreage.

That may all change this week. The Wall Street Journal said as much weeks ago, citing music executives in the biz, who claimed Google would launch a music store at some point between late October and early November. What’s more, the service is said to include Google+ integration, giving it a social networking one-up. For instance, users of the service would have the option to recommend songs in their online library to Google+ contacts, giving those contacts the option to listen to the songs once for free. After that, the MP3-format songs would cost in the vicinity of 99 cents each.

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Borders Did Itself In

Posted by Harry McCracken on November 13, 2011 at 8:24 pm

In an excellent story, Ben Austen of Businessweek confirms that the death of Borders had more to do with bad decisions on its part than e-books rendering dead-tree books obsolete anytime soon:

Nashville’s story is not unique. When Borders declared bankruptcy in February, more than 200 of its 400 outlets were still “highly profitable,” says its final chief executive officer, Mike Edwards. There’s no question that the book industry is in flux, with digital sales last year making up about $900 million of the $28 billion-a-year market and increasing fast. But a sizable portion of the book business is still taking place in actual stores. Barnes & Noble (BKS), the nation’s largest book retailer, hasn’t been forced to close its 700 locations. Thus, it wasn’t Amazon (AMZN) —or Amazon alone—that sank Borders. “When there’s a massive transition in an industry, the strong players make it through to the other side,” explains David A. Schick, a retail analyst who covers booksellers for Stifel Nicolaus Equity Research (SF). “What gets caught up in the change are the weaker players.”

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Weekend Nostalgia: Bill Gates Unveils Windows 3.1

Posted by Harry McCracken on November 12, 2011 at 3:14 pm

At the Windows World conference in 1991, an alarmingly youthful Bill Gates recaps the history of DOS and Windows to date and previews Windows 3.1:

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Still More on Mobile Flash

Posted by Harry McCracken on November 12, 2011 at 1:38 pm

If you’re not sick of thinking about the end of Flash on mobile devices already, people are still writing stuff about it that’s worth reading:

Adobe’s Mike Chambers gives several reasons for mobile Flash’s death, but the first he mentions is Apple’s rejection of it:

This one should be pretty apparent, but given the fragmentation of the mobile market, and the fact that one of the leading mobile platforms (Apple’s iOS) was not going to allow the Flash Player in the browser, the Flash Player was not on track to reach anywhere near the ubiquity of the Flash Player on desktops.

And Mobile Opportunity’s Michael Mace–thoughtful as always–says that greed did Flash in:

So here’s what Adobe did to itself:  By mismanaging the move to full mobile browsing, it demonstrated that customers were willing to live with a mobile browser that could not display Flash.  Then, by declaring its intent to take over the mobile platform world, Adobe alarmed the other platform companies, especially Apple.  This gave them both the opportunity and the incentive to crush mobile Flash.

I agree that there were a bunch of reasons why mobile Flash never amounted to anything, but I still think one of them trumps all others: It didn’t work. If it had been fabulous, even Apple might have had to reconsider the situation.

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PC Gaming Isn’t Dead, Just Cyclical

Posted by Jared Newman on November 11, 2011 at 2:11 pm

Nvidia’s third quarter earnings are in, and apparently, quite good, with a revenue increase of 4.9 percent over last quarter. While you might expect the company’s Tegra smartphone and tablet processors to be the stars of the show, Nvidia’s actually attributing much of its revenue growth to desktop graphics cards for PC gaming.

That’s right, the gaming platform that conventional wisdom loves to declare dead is actually a big money-maker for Nvidia right now, with revenue growth of 23 percent over last quarter. And Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang is not surprised:

“This happens every major game console cycle toward the second half of its product life, because PC technology advances on a regular basis instead of once every seven to ten years,” Huang told investors.

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