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<title>Haaze.com / sevenForuxxtyvi / All</title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com</link>
<description>Test Web 2.0 Content Management System</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 17 Mar 2011 07:10:16 +0000</pubDate>
<language>en</language>
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<title><![CDATA[Criminal probe into iPhone prototype nears end]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=criminal-probe-into-iphone-prototype-nears-end</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=criminal-probe-into-iphone-prototype-nears-end</comments>
<pubDate>Thu, 17 Mar 2011 07:10:16 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>sevenForuxxtyvi</dc:creator>
<category>Mobile &amp; Electronics</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=criminal-probe-into-iphone-prototype-nears-end</guid>
<description><![CDATA[A probe into a prototypeiPhone 4 purchased by a gadget blog is nearing its end, with investigators expected to report their findings soon.Stephen Wagstaffe, district attorney for the county of San Mateo, Calif., told CNET today that &quot;the investigation is ongoing&quot; and he expects it could conclude as early as next month. Investigators are close to finishing their interviews and will present him with their findings, he said.The investigation began early last year when Robert Gray Powell, a 28-year-old Apple computer engineer, left an unmarked prototype iPhone in a German beer garden in Redwood City, Calif. Brian Hogan, a 22-year-old student, found the prototype and sold it to Gawker Media's Gizmodo for $5,000. Gawker editors and Hogan could be charged with crimes.Wagstaffe, who was elected district attorney last June, said the investigation has taken this long because his colleagues have been busy on other cases. San Mateo County encompasses part of what's known as Silicon Valley, with San Francisco to the north and Apple's headquarters of Cupertino to the south in Santa Clara County.District Attorney Stephen Wagstaffe, shown in his office in Redwood City, Calif., last year(Credit:Declan McCullagh/CNET)Court documents unsealed last May at the request of CNET and other media organizations show that Apple pressed local police to investigate the loss of a next-generation iPhone a day after Gizmodo published photographs, telling investigators that the prototype was so valuable, a price could not be placed on it. Apple CEO Steve Jobs formally introduced what became known as the iPhone 4 last June, and it appeared in stores later that month.Prosecutors have confirmed that they are conducting a felony theft investigation, but no charges have been filed. They previously have said that media organizations that commit crimes should not expect to be immune from criminal laws. A possible target of the investigation is Hogan, who could be accused of violating a state law dealing with misappropriating lost property. Another, which law enforcement officials have indicated is an option, is Gizmodo and its parent company Gawker Media. Police obtained a warrant to search the home of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen last spring.Neither Gawker Media founder Nick Denton nor an attorney for Hogan immediately responded to a request for comment today.Gizmodo editor Jason Chen in an April 2010 post titled &amp;34'This is Apple&amp;39's next iPhone.&amp;34'(Credit:Gizmodo/Screenshot by CNET)Complicating the situation are allegations raised by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and other advocacy groups that police violated the federal Privacy Protection Act, which broadly immunizes news organizations from searches--unless the journalists themselves committed the crime. In addition, California law may provide protections to writers for newspapers, magazines, and &quot;other periodical publications,&quot; a term that a state court has applied to an Apple blog before.But courts also have ruled that journalists suspected of criminal behavior do not benefit from the legal shields that newspapers and broadcast media have painstakingly erected over the last half-century. &quot;It would be frivolous to assert--and no one does in these cases--that the First Amendment, in the interest of securing news or otherwise, confers a license on either the reporter or his news sources to violate valid criminal laws,&quot; the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled.Under a California law dating back to 1872, any person who finds lost property and knows who the owner is likely to be--but &quot;appropriates such property to his own use&quot;--is guilty of theft. There are no exceptions for journalists. In addition, a second state law says any person who knowingly receives property that has been obtained illegally can be imprisoned for up to one year. Knowing that an item probably belonged to someone else has previously led to convictions. &quot;It is not necessary that the defendant be told directly that the property was stolen. Knowledge may be circumstantial and deductive,&quot; a California appeals court has previously ruled. &quot;Possession of stolen property, accompanied by an unsatisfactory explanation of the possession or by suspicious circumstances, will justify an inference that the property was received with knowledge it had been stolen.&quot; State law says that lost property valued at $100 or more must be turned over to police. Powell's LinkedIn profile says that he's still employed at Apple. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak publicly came to Powell's defense last year, saying &quot;it's a bad accident that could happen to any of us.&quot; <br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Google unveils anti-content farm Chrome tool]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=google-unveils-anti-content-farm-chrome-tool</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=google-unveils-anti-content-farm-chrome-tool</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 14 Feb 2011 08:10:05 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>sevenForuxxtyvi</dc:creator>
<category>Mobile &amp; Electronics</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=google-unveils-anti-content-farm-chrome-tool</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Google&amp;39's Personal Blocklist Chrome extension will allow users to block what they consider low-quality sites from their personalized Google results. (Please don&amp;39't block the hilarious content farm parody site The Content Farm.)(Credit:Google)Google has launched one of its first experiments aimed at fighting back against content farms, asking the public to help identify the worst offenders. Chrome users can now download an extension from Google called Personal Blocklist that will allow users to block certain domains from appearing in a personalized list of search results. Google will also track the domains that users flag &quot;and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for our search results,&quot; wrote Matt Cutts, principal engineer at Google and a prominent anti-spam spokesman for the company, in a blog post. For several weeks Cutts and Google have been acknowledging frustration over the proliferation of content farms in Google's search results, or sites that write content for really no other reason than to appear within search results and draw traffic from Google. Most often that content is poorly written and sometimes nonsensical, as site editors try to understand what people are searching for on Google and commission low-cost posts with enough keywords to show up on the first page of results. The product may not be pretty but it can be lucrative, as sites like Associated Content and Demand Media look attractive to content companies like Yahoo and investors. Last month Cutts vowed that Google planned to take action in 2011 against such sites, previewing the user-generated blocklist concept as a similar idea to a user-generated spam-labeling extension available for Chrome. Google took great pains to label Personal Blocklist &quot;an early test&quot; and &quot;experimental,&quot; but it's now available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. It can be found here. Cutts did not say in the post how long it might take Google to amass enough data to change how blocklisted sites appear in regular Google search results.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Start-up hopes to profit from Kindle lending]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=start-up-hopes-to-profit-from-kindle-lending</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=start-up-hopes-to-profit-from-kindle-lending</comments>
<pubDate>Tue, 11 Jan 2011 08:10:06 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>sevenForuxxtyvi</dc:creator>
<category>Mobile &amp; Electronics</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=start-up-hopes-to-profit-from-kindle-lending</guid>
<description><![CDATA[(Credit:Kindle Lending Club)A small company called Kindle Lending Club plans to launch a beta site today or tomorrow that will let it profit from Amazon's e-book ecosystem.The five-person start-up has a simple business model. First, connect people who are willing to lend the electronic books to those who want to borrow them. Second, when the borrowers discover that they didn't finish with Amazon's 14-day lending window, offer a link to buy the e-book and share a portion of the resulting revenue through Amazon's affiliate program.It might not be enough to acquire Facebook, but site founder Catherine MacDonald--a 40-year-old Canadian mother of three who lives in Malta and Tunisia--believes it'll pay the bills. &quot;I'm anticipating that Martin (my husband) and I will be able to work on this full-time, so a full-time living for the family seems realistic,&quot; she told CNET News.And it could be enough to raise Amazon's eyebrows. It's no Napster, but the Kindle Lending Club probably has facilitated the lending of more than 1,000 books among strangers. At scale, it holds the potential to automate free book lending on a global scale when Amazon would prefer to see an actual sale.It's an interesting concept, one that's spun up rapidly since Amazon launched Kindle lending on December 30. MacDonald started with a Facebook group, quickly concluded that wouldn't accommodate the interest, raised an angel investment commitment of $12,500, signed up two Web developers, and is launching a site--all within two weeks.&quot;Last Thursday, December 30, I heard about the introduction of lending (I missed the October announcement) and I was thrilled,&quot; said MacDonald, who's worked in Web development and search marketing since 1998. &quot;While my husband and I were going to sleep that night, an idea suddenly occurred to me, and I told him, 'Martin, you have to remind me to start a Facebook page in the morning to get people together to lend each other books!' So, that's what I did, and it just took on a life of its own.&quot;A look at the Kindle Lending Club beta site (click to enlarge)(Credit:Kindle Lending Club)Time was of the essence, too, since others had the same idea, she said. &quot;It became apparent really fast that we had to move decisively and do social media and software development in tandem,&quot; she said. Another social media angle: The site will broadcast lending possibilities and desires through the KLCfeed on Twitter.She estimates that the Facebook site has facilitated more than a thousand loans. &quot;It seems that most of the book loans on offer are snapped within a day of being posted,&quot; she said.Amazon didn't respond to a request for comment. It can't have been a complete surprise, though, to a global-scale Internet-company. If nothing else, Barnes &amp; Noble beat Amazon to market with a sharing option on its rival Nook e-reader system, and that option has spawned Nook book-sharingsites.The existence of the Kindle Lending site sheds a revealing light on Amazon's move to add a lending option.E-book limitsFrom a customer point of view, one of the big drawbacks of e-books compared to physical books is that digital rights management (DRM) technology, including encryption, typically restricts a person's ability to lend or resell a book. If you buy a Kindle or Nook book, it doesn't become the sort of communal family property a physical book might. And of course systems such as Google Books, Amazon Kindle, and Barnes &amp; Noble Nook aren't compatible.Even though a physical book can be physically copied, it's a pain, and the results aren't likely to match the original. But digital content is famously easy to copy. That makes it tough for a company such as Amazon to strike the right balance between a totally locked down Kindle ecosystem and one that's got some measure of the freedoms of physical books.Amazon's 14-day lending constraint, along with a limit of one lending per book and the fact that publishers don't make all books available for lending in the first place, puts a pretty significant brake on those freedoms while still permitting a person trying to infect a friend with enthusiasm for the latest good read. But the Kindle Lending Club shows that there's a big appetite for free books and a corresponding urge that people have to share.&quot;I have seen people who have said that they will save their loans for friends and family, but the number of lenders who are just entirely altruistic has really impressed me,&quot; MacDonald said. &quot;We have seen it in action over hundreds of loans already, so I think it's reasonable to imagine that people will continue to be altruistic.&quot;MacDonald wants to keep money out of the core lending activity, too.&quot;I do not want to associate money or even credits with book lending on our platform,&quot; she said. &quot;I like the idea that someone who does not have access to a credit card, for whatever reason, can still borrow a book from someone--I could imagine someone in a developing country borrowing a book on business start-ups from someone in America. We enable people to do something simple: just lending a book like we've all been doing for years' but the scale and reach now makes this action potentially transformational on a global level. That gives me a great feeling when I lend an e-book, and I trust that the majority of our community members will feel the same.&quot;Publishers might not get a warm feeling of happiness pondering the possibility of free exchanges of their books. But one factor that doubtless weighed into Amazon's calculations is how often lending actually hurts sales directly. It's not clear how often book borrowing supplants book purchasing, but it's not hard to imagine people might read a free book that they wouldn't pay for.Bear in mind also that the ease of copying isn't just a threat to publishers. It also drastically lowers their production costs, giving them an incentive to embrace the e-book revolution as long as it's not Napsterized.And even if 100 percent of the lending replaced actual Kindle e-book book sales, the idea still might be good for Amazon in the big picture. Here's why.Expanding ecosystemKindle is an ecosystem. Amazon sells Kindle e-readers as well as books, and some number of freely available Kindle books makes a Kindle more valuable. And of course, once somebody has bought a Kindle, they're more likely to buy future e-books through Amazon.Even if a person doesn't buy a Kindle reader, using Amazon's free Kindle apps fortablets, phones, and computers instead, that's another customer in the ecosystem. The more books in a person's Kindle library, the less likely that person is to jump ship for a Nook--and probably the more likely that person is to purchase or upgrade a Kindle reader.&quot;In our view, as the Kindle ecosystem expands, Kindle device users will not only continue buying more e-books but also subscriptions, accessories, hardware warranties, and eventually use Kindle's wireless and computing capabilities for other data and content consumption (e.g. pictures, music, videos, e-mail, etc.),&quot; said Sandeep Aggarwal, an analyst with Caris &amp; Company, in a Kindle report today.Last, don't forget that the site is funded by sales of Amazon products, and a lot of Kindle customers will be using her site.&quot;I borrowed [Jonathan] Franzen's 'Freedom' on December 30,&quot; she said. &quot;I know I'm not going to get it finished, so I'll have to purchase a copy.&quot;<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Google eBooks: Is That All There&nbsp'Is]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=google-ebooks-is-that-all-therenbspis</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=google-ebooks-is-that-all-therenbspis</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov -001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>sevenForuxxtyvi</dc:creator>
<category>Latest News</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=google-ebooks-is-that-all-therenbspis</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Two weeks ago the Google eBookstore finally launched, and the world was briefly amazed. Google Editions, as it was known until launch, was the book world&amp;'s Duke Nukem Forever: vaporware for seven years, depending on how you count. Its actual emergence was like the birth of a unicorn. A mewling, misshapen, half-baked unicorn.Some background: a4AIn 2004 Google digitized the entire contents of several major US libraries, and made a lot of material available on-line, mostly in snippet form as part of its Google Book Search program. It did this without the consent of rightsholders,a4 to quote an April 2009 email from my agents. (I&amp;'m the author of half-a-dozen books, mostly technothrillers.) The resulting legal jihad remains unresolved, and Google&amp;'s dream of scanning, indexing, linking, and selling the contents of every library in the world has fragmented into a hodgepodge that includes their Book Search, Library Project, Books Partner Program, and now eBookstore, all of them semi-intermingled. Confused yetMany hopes and dreams were projected onto Google Editions&amp;' vaporware. It would index every published word since the dawn of humanity, and make it possible to search your personal library, and deep-link to individual chapters, sections, and paragraphs. It would somehow singlehandedly resurrect the dying bookstore trade. Instead, when the fog finally cleared, all we got was Kindle Lite.Oh, it does what it does well enough. You can buy books from Google and read them on your Android, iWhatever, e-reader, or the Web' authors and publishers can upload their own books, with or without DRM' and it&amp;'s all been expertly implemented. But now that you can read Kindle books on the Web, Google&amp;'s new eBookstore is little more than a carbon copy of Amazon&amp;'s Kindle ecosystema4sa4&quot; except that you can&amp;'t (yet) read DRMed Google ebooks on a Kindle (which remains, I note, the world&amp;'s most popular e-reader) or email them as gifts.There are some good features. The best is that you get public-domain books for free, though they seem to have missed the Creative Commons train: neither of the books I&amp;'ve released for free appears in their catalog. You can link to a specific edition of a book. Authors and publishers without PDFs can send physical books in to be scanned. Publishers get some of the ad revenue from their books&amp;' web pages. And it has the world&amp;'s greatest error page. Nice little touches, but mostly inconsequential.A ridiculous amount of ado has been made about the eBookstore&amp;'s one innovative feature: they&amp;'re allowing independent bookstores to sell Google eBooks through their own web sites. I don&amp;'t know what it is about indie bookstores that makes otherwise hard-headed analysts go all misty-eyed and misty-minded, but anyone who thinks this is a game-changer is on crack. a4AA middleman&amp;'s business is to make himself a necessary evil,a4 quoth William Gibson, and love &amp;8216'em or hate &amp;8216'em, bookstores are to ebooks what travel agents are to online travel' unnecessary and irrelevant. Leaving that distraction aside, when you compare Amazon&amp;'s ebook ecosystem to Google&amp;'s, the latter finds itself in the unfamiliar position of inferior copycat.That isn&amp;'t entirely their fault. Most publishing companies are terrified dinosaurs, and book rights are a legal morass in which the dream of Google Books will languish for some time yet, alas. (Their recently releaseda4&quot;and completely awesomea4&quot;Ngram corpus search offers some idea of the possibilities.) If only Google had decided six years ago to ask for permission instead of forgiveness. Now their much-vaunted eBookstore launch is a tepid anticlimax, and they have mostly themselves to blame.CrunchBase InformationGoogle Book SearchInformation provided by CrunchBase<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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