Free Song Promotion Is Expected From Amazon

The major record labels lined up with Pepsi-Cola and Apple four years ago to give away 100 million songs through Apple’s online store, unveiling the promotion in a Super Bowl commercial with music from the band Green Day. The effort helped spread the word about Apple’s iTunes offerings.

Pepsi’s promotion is back this year on a much bigger scale — but with the star wattage provided by Justin Timberlake instead of Green Day, and Amazon in place of Apple.

The switch is an indicator of the continuing tension between the music industry and Apple. Pepsi’s earlier ad, set to Green Day’s version of the song “I Fought the Law,” prodded music fans to quit pirating music online and instead buy songs — legally — from Apple’s then-fledgling iTunes. Four years later, iTunes is by far the biggest digital music store, and the industry is taking a liking to Amazon’s rival music service, introduced in September.

Though iTunes blazed a trail in encouraging fans to pay for music online, record executives now complain that Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, wields too much clout in setting prices and other terms. At issue now is whether the labels can help popularize a more industry-friendly service and accelerate the pace of digital sales.

Behind this strategy is a growing desperation: sales of digital albums and songs are rising far too slowly to offset the rapid decline of the CD, the industry’s mainstay product. CD sales slid 19 percent last year; after adding in the 50 million digital albums sold last year and counting every 10 digital songs sold as an album, overall music sales were still down 9.5 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

In trying to nurture Amazon’s service, the four major record companies have offered it one potential edge. One by one, they have agreed to offer their music catalogs for sale on the service in the MP3 format, without the digital locks that restrict users from making copies of the songs. (Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the second-biggest company and the last holdout, signed on last week. Sony BMG is a joint venture of Sony and Bertelsmann).

All of the companies except the EMI Group still require Apple to sell their music wrapped in digital rights management software, or D.R.M., which is intended to discourage rampant copying. Some consumers say D.R.M. creates confusing problems, like a lack of compatibility between most songs and the devices sold by Apple and Microsoft. In fact, it was Mr. Jobs who, in February, called on the industry to drop its longstanding insistence on the use of the software, saying it had failed to rein in piracy.

In any case, the industry is waiting to see whether — and how quickly — Amazon can grow into a credible alternative to iTunes, and whether Mr. Jobs will stand by as his service, which commands as much as 80 percent of digital download sales, is challenged.

“This is really a stare-down,” said one major label executive who was briefed on the new Pepsi promotion and who requested anonymity because he had not been authorized to speak about it.

Industry executives say the rivalry could intensify if the two services jockey over who will be given exclusive rights to some songs or special promotions. A senior executive at another record company, who requested anonymity out of concern about irritating Mr. Jobs, said he was prepared to keep copy restrictions on his label’s songs on iTunes for six months to a year while Amazon establishes itself. Apple insists on selling all single tracks for 99 cents, while Amazon sells them for 89 cents to over a dollar.

Danny Socolof, president of Mega, the Las Vegas marketing agency that developed the promotion, which is called “Pepsi Stuff,” said the industry’s collective shift away from D.R.M. would “unleash a new age in the music business, and it’s sorely needed.” He said Pepsi’s alliance with Amazon reflected in part the record companies’ “desire to increase the retail space” online “and help level the playing field.”

In the promotion, to be announced Monday, consumers who buy Pepsi drinks will receive points that can be redeemed for music downloads at a special section of the Amazon site. Amazon and Pepsi, a brand of PepsiCo, will give away up to a billion songs, along with prizes like DVDs and electronics, though only a fraction of the eligible Pepsi packages are expected to be redeemed.

The biggest of the four music companies, the Universal Music Group, has declined to join the offer, executives briefed on the situation said, over a pricing disagreement. (Universal, a part of Vivendi, will still sell music through the Amazon service.) The Warner Music Group is also expected to participate.

Amazon is expected to pay the record companies around 40 cents for each track that is given away in the Pepsi offer; Amazon’s usual payment ranges from 65 to 70 cents, executives briefed on the deal said.

Industry analysts said they expected Apple to treat the situation as a minor annoyance. And an expansion of the digital music market is likely to increase sales of iPods, which are more lucrative than the iTunes store and dominate the digital player market.

Forcing Apple to continue selling restricted music is “kind of like a couple of pebbles in the shoe,” said Michael McGuire, an analyst at Gartner. To Apple, he said, “maintaining parity is probably somewhat important, but in the end, they’re still selling iPods.” He noted that Amazon also sells many iPods.

An Apple spokesman declined to discuss the company’s competitors but pointed to Mr. Jobs’s letter of February, which said Apple would embrace a D.R.M.-free world.

It is far from clear that Amazon’s unrestricted music files will be an advantage. Russ Crupnick, an analyst at the NPD Group, joked that D.R.M. should stand for “doesn’t really matter.” Mr. Crupnick said he did not think many iTunes customers were bothered by copy restrictions or would defect to Amazon to buy unencumbered music.

But, he said, Amazon may find an opportunity to expand the overall market. “The much bigger target is all of the people who don’t do digital downloading yet. How do I convince them that digital music is a good thing to begin with? I think Amazon is in a good position to do that, but it’s a long struggle,” Mr. Crupnick said.

Others suggest that the struggle may be so long that the industry will decide to experiment with other ideas, like the offering of music free through ad-supported Web sites, or subscriptions attached to cellphones.

“I’ve never thought that the pay-per-song model was really a replacement” for the CD, said David Goldberg, a former general manager of Yahoo’s music service who works at the investment firm Benchmark Capital. But the industry may endure more suffering before an answer emerges, he said. “It’s going to be a very dramatic change in the business. It’s just a question of when, not if.”
Source :http://www.nytimes.com

Today's Mercury Flyby To Be the First Since 1974

Right around noon today, if all goes as planned, a spacecraft called Messenger will swoop past the planet Mercury and begin two days of unprecedented picture-taking and data-collecting.

The flyby, the first visit to Mercury in more than 33 years by an emissary from Earth, will mark a key moment in a NASA mission that will ultimately place the first satellite into orbit around the tiny planet that sits closest to the sun.

The planetary science community is eagerly awaiting images and information that should shed light on some of the enduring mysteries about the planet -- such as where in the solar system it was formed and why its hard metal core is so large and its outer rock crust so scant, compared with those of Earth and the other rocky planets.

"Mercury is a difficult place to get to, and it's taken a long time to get back," said principal investigator Sean Solomon, who has worked on the mission for more than 11 years. "But now we're in place to learn things about one of our few sister rocky planets, and we're ready for some real surprises."

The desk-size spacecraft was launched in 2004 and has taken a circuitous path to Mercury, swinging twice by Venus and once by Earth for gravity assists. Messenger will make two more passes by Mercury to let the planet's gravity slow it down enough for it to swing into orbit in 2011.

Still, today's whisker-close flyby will be, NASA officials say, a high point of the mission. Not only will the spacecraft pass within a record 124 miles of Mercury's surface at a relative speed of more than 16,000 mph, but it also will quickly begin sending back its first observations of the physical and magnetic makeup of the planet, to be made by instruments that could answer some of the most basic questions about Mercury's character and history. It will be the closest pass by Messenger in the entire mission, and the nearest to the planet's equator.

"The biggest mystery of Mercury is why it has so much heavy metal -- a core very different in size from other planets," Solomon said. "We think we can begin to unravel the mystery once we know the chemical makeup of the planet's surface."

There are several competing theories on how Mercury came to be what and where it is. One is that the searing heat of the sun stripped the crust off a once-larger planet and left primarily the core. Another is that the planet collided with another celestial body during a time when the early solar system was cluttered with them. Under this theory, Mercury's outer crust and mantle were smashed away and the planet was knocked into its close-in orbit.

Because Mercury is so close to the sun, designing a spacecraft that could stand the heat and calculating a trajectory that would place Messenger into orbit -- rather than plunging into the sun -- were daunting tasks. Temperatures on the ceramic-cloth sunscreen that protects its instruments will reach 600 degrees Fahrenheit.

The spacecraft's instruments were designed never to face the sun because they would otherwise quickly overheat and be destroyed, and even pointing them at Mercury will be done for very limited periods. On the side facing the sun, the planet reaches 1,100 degrees at the equator, and on the dark side, it drops to as low as 300 degrees below zero.

The name of the probe, Messenger, is an the acronym for Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging. It is the first spacecraft to visit Mercury since Mariner 10 in 1974, at a cost of $446 million for the life of its mission. Reflecting the new technologies and logistical knowledge that made the mission and its unprecedented orbiting possible, the European and Japanese space agencies will also be sending spacecraft to Mercury soon.

The planet they will scrutinize has craters, volcanoes, and many unusual and unexplained features, including what might be frozen water in polar crevasses protected from the sun. Its mass is only 5 percent that of Earth's, but its metal core accounts for 60 percent of that mass (compared with about 30 percent for Earth and Venus, and 20 percent for Mars). Mercury also has an active magnetic field in its thin atmosphere, the only rocky planet other than Earth with that feature. And it contains one of the largest impact craters in the solar system -- the Caloris Basin, which is 800 miles in diameter, or about a quarter of the planet's diameter.
Source :http://www.washingtonpost.com

Google launches wire service for Google News

Google has recently announced that they are launching a new service allowing direct access to wire services such as the Associated Press (AP), Agence France-Presse (AFP), UK Press Association (UK AP), and the Canadian Press (CP). In the past, content publishers have complained about, while at the same time benefiting from, the links on Google news and the brief overview of the content hosted on the site. Several newspapers and sites have threatened to sue Google over the issue, some having said outright that Google is attempting to kill traditional print media. Maybe now Google is looking to force the issue, scrubbing their index by removing duplicate links that most of these sites use to get listed.

“Our goal has always been to offer users as many different perspectives on a story from as many different sources as possible, which is why we include thousands of sources from around the world in Google News,” Josh Cohen of Google said in the announcement for the new wire service. “However, if many of those stories are actually the exact same article, it can end up burying those different perspectives,” he added.

Those cloned articles, known as reposted wire feeds, are what many sites use to gain traffic to their website, thus gaining readers and profit from advertising. There is nothing bad about this, but when those same sites blame Google for their lack of revenue or loss of readership, then there is an issue.

Not too long ago Google News faced all sorts of problems when print media attacked them. Several newspapers said Google News was to blame for the loss of print reporting and the shift to ad heavy news websites. Anyone who uses Google News to read news and visit sites online knows this to be false. If it were not for Google News, the rants of how bad the service was would never be seen or read. Yet, they complained. Regardless, Google moved forward with a year old deal they had worked out with the Associate Press. This time however, they added more to it. The bulk of the plan is content and duplicate detection.

“Duplicate detection means we’ll be able to display a better variety of sources with less duplication. Instead of twenty ‘different’ articles (which actually used the exact same content), we'll show the definitive original copy and give credit to the original journalist. (We launched a similar feature in Sort-by-Date and got great feedback about it.) Of course, if you want to see all the duplicates on other publisher websites with additional analysis and context, they’re only a click away,” Cohen wrote.

Google explained that by, “removing duplicate articles from our results, we’ll be able to surface even more stories and viewpoints from journalists and publishers from around the world. This change will provide more room on Google News for publishers' most highly valued content: original content.”

“The amusing back story here is that AP is owned by the newspapers, who are screaming the loudest about the collapse of the newspaper industry, and that Agence France-Presse (AFP), sued Google for alleged copyright infringement on the News site, despite the clear and present rules regarding Fair Use,” reads the Raving Lunacy blog.

“The question AP member papers should now be asking is not how Google could be so mean, but how they, themselves could be so blind about their relationship with the AP,” writes Steve Boriss over at thefutureofnews.com. “Being a member of the AP made sense when papers were necessary middlemen for people to get their news — papers would pay the AP for electronically-transmitted stories, then reprint them and sell them for a profit to a public that had no better access to the freshest news. But now that the Internet and Google News have essentially installed an AP News Terminal on the PC of everyone with broadband service, newspapers who are members of the AP are funding their own destruction.”

The original content is what gets the most views; there is no loss of fact there. The little websites who post only wire feeds in order to gain traffic will suffer; this includes the small local newspaper websites. Therefore, by removing much of the fuel for their recent attacks by the press they have both helped and hurt them. Sites will need original content to get listed on Google News. Those who serve only feeds will be lost to the fold. For the professional reporter, this is good news as their work will get the credit due and their publisher will get the readers they claim to have lost because of Google.

Another point that was mentioned in several articles about the recent move by Google is that most of the smaller local papers who complained about this deal with the AP and others covered world news in wire reports. If the local paper cannot cover local news, why are they worried about the world news feeds? Readers will want local headlines first, and will then skim over the wire reports for international news.

Say what you will but Google has just made a move that will ultimately help the way news is reported online, many have often complained that the wire reports were slanted and biased, so with a focus on original content that could add some balance to what you read online.
Source : http://tech.monstersandcritics.com

Google Shift on Handling of News

Google is playing host to articles from four news agencies, including The Associated Press, the company said Friday, setting the stage for it to generate advertising revenue from Google News.

The news agencies — the Press Association of Britain, Canadian Press, Agence France-Presse and The A.P. — now have their articles featured with the organizations’ own brands on Google News. The companies have agreed to license news feeds to Google.

The five-year-old Google News service previously searched the Web to uncover links to news articles from thousands of sources, and clustered links on similar subjects together.

Josh Cohen, business product manager of Google News, said his company would consider eventually running advertising alongside the agencies’ articles.

The changes will not affect the ranking of articles in search results on Google News, Mr. Cohen said. If an Associated Press article ranked eighth among different versions of an article previously, it would still rank eighth under the new service.

To avert legal challenges, Google does not now run ads next to automatically generated links. Agence France-Presse recently dropped a suit against Google for using its text and photos on Google News without permission.

The four news agencies act as wholesalers supplying news to other news organizations, and do not try to attract customers to destination sites of their own. Google News has inevitably linked to the customers of the agencies instead.

For example, an article on Google News credited to The Seattle Post-Intelligencer could in fact have been originally from The Associated Press.

The changes will have little impact on news organizations that receive traffic directly from Google News, Mr. Cohen said.

Google’s licensing of articles from news organization partners is similar to the way rival news sites like Yahoo News or the MSNBC portal of Microsoft have licensed news from news organizations for more than a decade.

Jane Seagrave, vice president for new media markets at The Associated Press, which is based in New York, declined to comment on the terms of the deal, and on whether Google would run ads alongside AP articles.

Because of Google’s campaign to simultaneously reduce duplicate articles, the original wire service article is likely to be featured in Google News instead of versions of the same article from newspaper customers, sapping ad revenue to those newspapers.
Source :http://www.nytimes.com

NBC responds: nuh-uh

This is turning into a regular soap opera. First NBC Universal says it's not renewing its iTunes Store contract with Apple. Then Apple responds with a press release saying NBC wanted to double the wholesale pricing for shows, which would push per episode prices to $4.99. Now NBC is back saying that isn't true, that they only wanted "flexibility in wholesale pricing, including the ability to package shows together in ways that could make our content even more attractive for consumers." Further they complain that Apple is more interested in making money on hardware than money for content provider (no, who would have thought that Apple wants to make money for itself rather than other people). Anyway they emphasize that NBC shows will be available until December, and they left open the possibility that a new contract might be negotiated in the meantime. In general I think it's unseemly for companies to air their dirty laundry in public like this, but I'm starting to get the sense that this is a negotiating tactic on both sides. Personally I have the sneaking suspicion that something will get worked out before December.



Source :http://www.apple.comwww.tuaw.com

Wii outguns opponents

Nintendo’s Wii continues to dominate the gaming console wars, outselling Sony’s Playstation 3 three-to-one and Microsoft’s Xbox over twenty-to-one according to Enterbrain’s Japan sales figures.

The Wii has proven to be a very popular choice among gaming enthusiasts, consistently outselling its rivals the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3. Its popularity is closely linked to its lower price and innovative controls, which saw it becoming the fastest selling gaming console in markets like the UK.

According to the Japan sales statistics released by Enterbrain, Nintendo sold 245,653 Wii consoles, Sony 81,541 PlayStation consoles and Microsoft a mere 11,288 Xbox 360s.

Both Sony and Microsoft have announced price cuts in the hope that their gaming consoles will be able to compete more effectively against the Wii, but Nintendo’s product’s popularity seems to be based on more than merely price.
Source :http://mybroadband.co.za

US court allows navy to use sonar

The US navy has won the latest round in a court battle over whether it can use sonar equipment which environmentalists say can kill whales and other mammals.

An appeals court overturned a decision banning the use of sonar equipment in tests to be held off California.

National security needs must be weighed against protecting the safety of marine mammals, the judges ruled.

Wildlife experts say noise pollution from sonar disorients whales, causing them to become stranded on beaches.

The navy argued that it had monitored waters off southern California for 40 years and had not seen any whale injuries from the use of sonar equipment.

It says the device is necessary to track submarines.

'At war'

The ruling the latest stage of a long-running battle between environmentalists and the US Navy over marine safety.

In a split decision, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a two-year ban on the equipment ordered in earlier August, in a case brought by a coalition of animal welfare groups.

It criticised the navy for not taking action to minimise harm done to whales during exercises in California, but said the district court that had imposed the ban had not proven that the move would prevent "irreparable harm to the environment".

"The public does indeed have a very considerable interest in preserving our natural environment and especially relatively scarce whales," Judge Andrew Kleinfeld wrote in the ruling.

"But it also has an interest in national defence. We are currently engaged in war, in two countries."

In 2006, a UK government-commissioned report called for more research into the effects of noise pollution on marine animals.

It concluded that there were many noise sources in the seas, including seismic surveys for oil and gas, shipping, offshore wind farms, military sonar and scientific research.

The study identified 13 cases of strandings by whales and dolphins that appeared to be linked to noise, adding that most of the cases did involve naval vessels.
Source : http://news.bbc.co.uk/

Nintendo Raises Profit Forecast on Sales of Wii, DS Players

Nintendo Co., maker of the top- selling Wii game console, raised its annual earnings forecast to a record after reporting first-quarter profit surged fivefold as the company widened its lead over Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3.

Net income climbed to 80.3 billion yen ($668 million) in the three months ended June 30, from 15.6 billion yen a year earlier, the Kyoto, Japan-based company said today. Nintendo raised its profit forecast for the year ending March 2008 to a record 245 billion yen, 41 percent more than its April projection.

Nintendo, whose market value doubled last year, plans to build on the success of the Wii's motion-sensor remote controller with new products including a steering wheel and exercise pad. The company today increased its Wii sales target by 18 percent to 16.5 million consoles this fiscal year, compared with Sony's shipment forecast for 11 million PlayStation 3s.

``Nintendo continues to knock the cover off the ball in the video-game market,'' Daniel Ernst, a New York-based analyst at Soleil Securities Corp. with a ``buy'' rating, said prior to the earnings release. ``Nintendo not only creates great hardware that is low-cost to make and easy to play, but also great software.''

Sales, also driven by the DS portable and the ``Mario'' games series, more than doubled to a record 340.4 billion yen. Operating profit, or sales minus the cost of goods sold and administrative expenses, tripled to 90.6 billion yen.

Revenue will reach 1.4 trillion yen this fiscal year, 45 percent more than the April estimate, the company said. Sales of Wii software titles will rise to 72 million units, compared with an April forecast for 55 million. Nintendo plans to sell 140 million games for its DS portable, up from 130 million.

Six of the top 10 selling games in the U.S. in June were made for Nintendo's game systems, with ``Mario Party 8'' leading the pack, according to NPD Group Inc.

Record Share Price

Shares of Nintendo, the world's largest maker of handheld players, rose 3.5 percent to a record 56,800 yen on the Osaka Securities Exchange. The stock has gained 83 percent this year, compared with a 4.3 percent advance in the Topix index.

``The earnings results and upward revision have already been largely factored into the share price,'' said Junichi Misawa, who oversees $655 million including Nintendo stock at STB Asset Management Co. in Tokyo. ``The overall trend for the stock remains positive.''

Nintendo today raised its full-year dividend to 960 yen, up 37 percent from its previous plan.

The company revised its outlook on the yen projecting the Japanese currency to trade at an average 118 yen against the dollar and 155 yen to the euro this fiscal year, compared with 115 yen and 150 forecast in April. The yen traded at 118.05 per dollar and 157.33 against the euro as of March 31.

Demand for the Wii will probably continue to exceed supply this Christmas season, Nintendo said earlier this month. Tokyo- based Sony earlier this month offered a discount on the PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Corp. is considering a price cut for the Xbox 360 to catch up with Nintendo.

Leading the Pack

The PlayStation 3, launched in late November, was outsold by the Wii by two to one in the U.S. as of May, according to Port Washington, New York-based NPD Group. In Japan, the margin is three to one, researcher Enterbrain Inc. in Tokyo said.

Nintendo's two-year-old handheld DS player, its best-selling machine, uses a stylus instead of button controls, making it easier for users to play Frisbee with their virtual pets, practice calligraphy and draw pictures. Nintendo is also capturing an older audience with a ``brain-training'' game and tutorials for cooking and languages.

Hit DS game titles include ``New Super Mario Bros.'' and ``Brain Age,'' a quiz game designed to test mental agility. Titles for the Wii include ``Wii Sports'' and the role-playing ``The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.''
Source :http://www.bloomberg.com

First native third-party applications running on iPhone

Late last week, one "Nightwatch," an anonymous hacker familiar with the ARM processor family, wrote a "Hello, World!" program and ran it. Ordinarily, that wouldn't really be sufficient fodder for an Infinite Loop post, but this particular program is Kind of a Big Deal™. It was run on an iPhone—the first known non-native application to do so.

According to the iPhone Dev Wiki (http://iphone.fiveforty.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page), Nightwatch's ARM/mach-o toolchain kit has successfully compiled its first non-AJAX iPhone application, a significant step forward in unlocking the secrets of the device (if not the device itself). Granted, it's rather a messy process at the moment, involving multiple installations of various and sundry open-source bits and the binaries that, once compiled, don't have much access to little things like OS X header files or whatnot. But the major hurdle, knowing it can be done, is now out of the way. Just don't expect to see Pocket Quicken in the next couple of weeks or anything.
Source :http://arstechnica.com