canadianfosterfamily.com

(Credit:
Amazon)

Amazon.com’s MP3 site

Amazon.com’s MP3 service is growing but not at the expense of Apple’s iTunes, according to a report issued Tuesday by market researcher NPD Group.

Only about 10 percent of the people who shopped at AmazonMP3 in February were previous Apple shoppers, NPD said.

The big question now is whether Amazon can continue to grow without snatching away customers from Apple.

But Amazon has a long way to go, says NPD. MP3 sales at iTunes are more than 10 times larger than at Amazon, the research firm said.

Amazon has at least one major advantage over Apple: Apple’s DRM-free tracks are available only from EMI Music, while Amazon offers unprotected MP3s from all four of the major record labels. Also, Amazon sells digital music at a higher bit rate and its songs are often cheaper.

This is a “healthy indication that the digital music customer pool can expand into new consumer groups who have not yet joined the iTunes community,” Russ Crupnick, entertainment industry analyst for NPD said in a statement.

“We’ll have to wait to see what Amazon can do with those people,” Crupnick said. “Does the traffic snowball or does it wane?”

Apple’s iTunes remains the No.1 digital music store. AmazonMP3, which launched in September, slipped past Wal-Mart to take over the No. 2 spot in February when comparing the individual music tracks downloaded by consumers in the U.S., according to NPD.

Amazon may be enticing its existing customers to the music store, Crupnick noted. He said that a Superbowl promotion that Amazon held in February may have drawn regular shoppers to check out the new music service. He also speculated that many music fans are visiting out of curiosity.

This afternoon, I heard about the forthcoming film, MacHeads, for the first time.

Apple’s Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan is a center of Machead lust, something the new film ‘MacHeads’ will explore.

Time will tell. There doesn’t appear to be any info available about when the film will be released. So, stay tuned. I’m sure we’ll have more as the film gets closer.

(Credit:
Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

I watched the trailer, and sure enough, Kahney–a former editor of mine when I wrote for Wired News–was in it. But it didn’t look at all like it was his film.

Either way, I’m very interested in this film. I think it will be a valuable cultural examination, and I hope that the filmmakers stayed true to the sense conveyed in the trailer that they–and Macheads–can be enamored of the Mac but also be highly skeptical of Apple.

For me, the trailer itself was gratifying enough, as from the very first frame, I recognized someone I know and it only went on from there. All told, five of the people they used in the trailer were friends or acquaintances of mine.

For it’s abundantly clear that while Apple is a consumer-focused company, it doesn’t really care about you as a customer. That is to say, its products are well-thought out; they are made with the consumer in mind. But as a consumer, you aren’t treated any better–or worse–than you would be by other companies.

Rather, it appears to be a similar look at the cultlike community and emotions that surround Apple, the
Mac, and all things non-Windows.

But more to the point, I think it’s an interesting idea, making a movie like this. Obviously, I don’t know anything about the film beyond what I saw in the trailer. But it seemed like they captured the sense of charged emotions that Mac users have about their computers and the company that makes them: devotion, excitement, reverence, frustration, betrayal, and so forth.

My first thought was, huh, someone has made a movie based on Leander Kahney’s book, The Cult of Mac.

“The web is fragmenting,” said Mika Salmi, president of global digital media at MTV Networks in a press conference on Monday, describing Flux as an “open, flat, and connected” technology. “People are attracted to niches and to what they’re really interested and passionate about, and we as a company have a history in the cable business of going after niches.”

NEW YORK–Viacom division MTV Networks announced Monday that it has turned its minority stake in software company Social Platform into a full acquisition: Social Project, formerly known as Tagworld, is the basis for Viacom’s Flux.

But the service won’t become an MTV exclusive. “Even though they’re now part of us, we still want them to work with outside Web sites,” Salmi said of the Santa Monica, Calif.-based Social Project.

MTV Networks launched Flux just over a year ago as a social-networking platform that would be used across all its digital entertainment properties as well as eventually sites outside Viacom. The original Tagworld investment started in November 2006. Flux now powers community features on MTV.com, Colbert Nation, Atom.com, and other Viacom-owned sites, allowing users to access all of them with a single login and profile.

“We will let anyone use the Flux network, with few exceptions,” Dern said, adding that the lone exception is…porn.

In conjunction, MTV promoted Joshua Dern from vice president of social media strategy to senior vice president and general manager of social media.

Earlier this month, MTV launched what is arguably its most high-profile social initiative,Backchannel, which uses Flux profiles and credentials to power a game centered around the hit show The Hills.

Rob Bearden on Open Source Business Models

Without forming a community and solidifying the community upfront you will have a very hard time getting large scale adoption. Successful companies have hit a critical mass of enterprises being comfortable with the technology.

Once you hit a critical mass point with the community then you reach the pragmatists. There is a minimum set of needs for sustainability, all of which help to reach this stability which leads to monetization.

That’s all I got for now. I am going to get a drink before I pass out.

The ultimate objective of an open source company is to be able to monetize. You want to be the “enterprise standard” in order to assure your place within an organizations infrastructure.

The traditional model of open source is commoditization. This can be measured on an S-curve of adoption and completeness of solution. How close to parity does a product need to be in order to be viably considered?

I’m trying to liveblog Rob Bearden’s talk here at OSBC but the conference room is so hot that I have to bail out. It’s like a sauna in here.

In order to achieve this you need developer awareness and the ability for developers to be able to try the software. Without this developers will not be comfortable with the product they have adopted.

(Credit:
Launchy)

The more programs you have installed on your PC, the harder it becomes to find the one you want. That’s why I’ve fallen in love with Launchy, a simple application launcher that saves you having to slog through your Start menu.

Using Launchy may seem a bit unusual at first, but trust me when I say you’ll grow to love it. And you can’t beat the price: It’s a freebie.

Launchy also serves up Web favorites. To head straight to The Cheapskate, for instance, just type “cheap.” It even indexes files and folders, so you can load, say, Word documents or iTunes music with just a few keystrokes. (If this sounds familiar, it’s because Microsoft added similar functionality to
Windows Vista’s Start menu.)

To use Launchy, you simply press Alt-Space on your keyboard, then type the first few letters of the program you want. For example, to launch Google Picasa, you’d type “pic” and then press Enter. (You may need another keystroke or two if other programs on your PC start with the same letters.)

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

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Having the server and the client OS powered by one vendor (Microsoft) is stultifying. Having it powered by a community is liberating.

Over dinner last night, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth and I talked about the industry’s (and, indeed, society’s) tendency to self-regulate. Microsoft has had its decades of dominance, but at some point technology and those that build it have decided to throw off the manacles that bind us down to old ways of thinking about computing.

As ABI research notes,

Linux solutions will be at the center of the drive to bring more content-rich environments to users who currently utilize mid-tier devices. More importantly, it looks increasingly likely that mobile Linux solutions will be an important building block in enabling an application domain that embraces Web-based applications and blended Web/native applications.

Linux has been proclaiming the year of the desktop for years, to no avail. Meanwhile, quietly, insidiously, it has been taking a rising share of the mobile and embedded market. Indeed, ABI Research pegs Linux’s share of the mobile market at 20 percent by 2013. Such growth, in part driven by Google’s Android stamp of approval and Nokia’s Maemo approval, puts a serious crimp on Symbian’s and Microsoft’s ambitions in mobile.

Mobile Linux’s rise is partly a function of its superior cost proposition, but as ABI implies, it’s also partly due to its flexibility and the
iPhone’s introduction of web-based applications. As on the desktop, the more we move applications to the web, the less necessary it is that we have Windows waiting on the client to receive them.

I believe we’ll see this most poignantly, and in the shortest period of time, in mobile. With the server world transitioning to the power and flexibility of Linux, it’s only a matter of time before developers extend that server to the mobile devices that yearn to connect with it. If the operating system serving both is communal property (e.g., Linux), all the better.

The Kidzui browser

The site launched yesterday and my 8-year-old beta tester had a great time exploring the Kidzui environment. The “stickiest” features of the site involved creating a “Zui” avatar, which collects points as kids browse and rate videos, photos and other content. There is also a social networking aspect to the site that I have also not had the chance to explore, since the site is brand new.

Kidzui is starting out by offering access to “over 500,000 websites, pictures and videos.” That may not sound like a lot of territory compared to the entire internet, but as a parent it feels good to know that there is a browsable universe that is populated with content screened to be appropriate for kids. Without Kidzui, many young kids are allowed to visit a few sites but are not allowed to explore beyond them. Browsing on Kidzui feels a little bit like visiting a park contained by well-defined borders. If the park is run well, parents can relax a bit as they give their kids latitude to roam.

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Kidzui.com)

Web content on Kidzui is screened for basic appropriateness, but not necessarily educational quality. Kids rate the sites and the most popular rise to the top of the ranks. Among those are many very commercial sites, such as Nickelodeon, Polly Pocket, and Webkinz. I have not had a chance to thoroughly explore the parental customization options, but Kidzui says parents can customize the browser based on which topics and sites they deem appropriate for their families.

Kidzui itself operates on a paid subscription model, with a 30-day trial period leading into a $4.95 a month charter subscription, $9.99 a month regular subscription. This model makes sense to me, knowing that the site requires constant editorial updating, and Kidzui wants to keep the site itself ad-free.

Kidzui is a new web browser designed for kids ages 3 to 12 years old. Rather than operating from a filtering mindset, Kidzui is trying to build the internet for kids from the ground up. Content is reviewed by an editorial staff of teachers and parents, running 24/7 and adding new content each day.

If you have young kids who are ready for browsing–with training wheels–Kidzui is an interesting environment that can appeal to kids and parents alike.

A kid playing with Electronic Arts’ ‘Spore’ on a Macintosh at Macworld in San Francisco on January 17, 2008

A fully-formed ‘Spore’ creature. Though the game is single-player, it allows players to download creatures created by others.

The ‘Spore’ creature creator allows players to choose the various body parts they want for their creatures. They also must earn in-game currency if they want to use more advanced body parts.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

After a little bit of searching–I went to the wrong hall at first–I found the booth, and there it was. They had the game playing on an iMac, and when I got there, a kid was playing around with it under the direction of an EA staffer.

One of the things that makes Spore innovative is the fact that the creature creator–which is the only part of the game that EA was showcasing at Macworld–is very simple to use. While it may take a player a significant amount of time to create a custom avatar in other games, it is possible to make a brand-new, unique, Spore creature in just minutes.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

Players start at the cell level, creating a primordial creature in the creature creator.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

Earlier this week, I ran a story about how video game giant Electronic Arts plans to release its much-anticipated evolution game, Spore, on Macs at the same time as the PC version.

Unfortunately, at the time of the story, I didn’t have any screenshots of the game being played on a
Mac, and in fact, we had to rely on out-of-date images of Spore taken from game conferences in 2006.

Now, we just have to wait until EA releases the game. The company hasn’t said when that will happen, but it’s almost certain to be this year. Spore has been in the works for more than three years, with its first public showing at the 2005 Game Developers Conference. Now, with GDC 2008 just around the corner, I think we can expect EA to announce details soon on when the game will be released. So stay tuned.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

Players must start out as a spore, otherwise known as a primordial cell. The idea is that the game has five major evolution levels: cell, creature, tribe, civilization and, finally, space.

Well, today, I finally was able to make onto the show floor at Macworld here in San Francisco, and while I was certainly interested in much of what was on display–OK, tons and tons of
iPod cases and a few other things–what I really wanted to see was EA’s small booth and, yes, Spore on the Mac.

A Sporecast lets players choose from content created by others. That means that it is possible to play on a planet, say, with creatures created by many other players.

This means that the game can be infinitely complex, with as many different kinds of creatures as its many players have and will create.

In order to begin, players must create a creature using the innovative Spore creature creator. This allows users to build their own custom character, choosing from a collection of available body parts. This ensures that each player’s creatures are unique.

Though Spore is a single-player game, it allows users to upload the content they create–creatures and the like–to a large database that’s accessible by other players. That means that while you don’t play against other people, you could download creatures created by others.

Players can create spaceships on which they fly to other planets.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

This is RIM’s opportunity, too. It’s not that it should sit back and let “the community” do everything for it. That doesn’t work. But if it will just allow more minds outside Waterloo, where it’s headquartered, to assist the minds inside of Waterloo, it will provide more value to customers like me and ensure its longevity.

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Please?

With the aim of making mobile e-mailing more like e-mailing from a desktop computer, RIM said BlackBerry users will soon be able to edit documents directly from the handheld device and to view messages in their original formatting…[RIM] also said the changes will enable users to retrieve e-mail messages that aren’t stored on the device and to check the availability of a colleague before sending a meeting request.

RIM makes great hardware and decent software. It needs to recognize, however, that it’s not the center of all original thinking. Once it came up with its idea and implemented it, it hasn’t done much in the way of innovation.

Now is the perfect time to jumpstart innovation by allowing its community of users and developers to grow RIM’s value. Look at Microsoft. Proprietary though it may be, the company has done an exceptional job of opening its platform (if only just enough) to enable third-party developers to turn vanilla Windows into center stage in application innovation.

To wait so long…for so little. At this pace, Apple’s
iPhone will leapfrog the BlackBerry. Already, I’ve noticed scads of new iPhones being used in corporate settings. But for the lack of a keyboard, I’d be on an iPhone, too.

Though Research in Motion continues to keep the BlackBerry a frustratingly closed platform (with precious few applications–my biggest complaint about an otherwise great device/service), it is upgrading its software to add some interesting new features, the Wall Street Journal reports:

Apple’s third profit center, the Mac business, is still on a roll. Both IDC and Gartner reported huge increases in Mac shipments in the U.S. compared with last year, and it seems Apple is continuing to take share from its competitors.

Other smartphone industry players, such as Nokia and Texas Instruments, are a little skittish about the high end of the phone market looking forward over the rest of the year. Apple is still so new to this market that I wouldn’t expect the broader trends to have necessarily filtered down to it, but Apple’s statements about the iPhone group will be telling. In February, Apple COO Tim Cook reiterated the company’s goal of selling 10 million iPhones in 2008.

The second group, Apple’s iPhone division, also contributed to some of the early-quarter swoon for Apple’s stock after concerns rose about the “missing” iPhones. Those iPhones turned out to be running on networks in China, India, Sweden, and other sorts of countries where Apple has yet to pay an official visit.

Nonetheless, Wall Street is expecting Apple to report earnings per share of $1.07 on revenue of $6.9 billion, while Apple’s own guidance calls for earnings per share of 94 cents and revenue of $6.8 billion. Apple is notorious for underpromising and over-delivering when it comes to its own guidance, which probably accounts for the discrepancy. But with the overall tech industry reporting healthy numbers over the past few weeks, and Apple’s Mac shipments appearing to be strong, the company should be in decent shape.

The unlocked iPhones are bittersweet for Apple. They clearly demonstrate demand for the product, and will help the company meet its sales goals for 2008. But Apple’s revenue-sharing agreements with its carriers allow it to make more money on the sale of a locked iPhone than an unlocked iPhone. Sure, Apple might not have sold an iPhone in the first place if the buyer wasn’t able to easily unlock it, but the trend could lead to problems between Apple and its carrier partners who watch their rivals take in data revenue from iPhones without having to share it with Apple.

Apple’s iPod numbers, and executive comments about that group, should also shed a little light on what’s been going on in the flash memory industry this year. Prices have been plunging, and iSuppli reported earlier in the year that Apple’s decision to buy less flash memory than the producers had expected contributed to the turmoil.

Mike Abramsky of RBC Capital Markets expects Apple to have sold 2.2 million Macs for the quarter, which would be a 46 percent increase compared with the prior year. By any measure, Apple is enjoying perhaps its most successful run for the Mac, certainly the best since Steve Jobs returned to the company in 1997. I’m interested in seeing numbers on how the MacBook Air was received, but I’m not convinced Apple will break out individual categories of its portable Macs; it doesn’t for MacBooks and MacBook Pros.

Recession fears, rampant
iPhone unlocking, and a pessimistic outlook dinged Apple at the beginning of this year, but surging
Mac shipments appeared to have the company in good shape as it closed out the quarter.

Unfortunately, AT&T declined to share the number of iPhones it activated on its network during the quarter when it reported its results Tuesday morning. That means that unless Apple chooses to report that number itself, it will be harder to track how iPhone unlocking has evolved so far in 2008.

Apple has three main businesses driving its earnings potential these days. Let’s look at the
iPod division first.

During the fourth quarter of 2007, iPod shipments grew slowly while revenue growth remained strong, suggesting that iPod buyers were shunning the less expensive models in favor of newer ones like the iPod Touch. Nonetheless, Munster thinks the price cut to the low-end iPod Shuffle in February was a bit of a catalyst for iPod shipments.

Apple is set to announce its financial results for its second fiscal quarter on Wednesday after the close of the stock market. The company has not appeared overly bullish on this particular quarter, issuing guidance well below its usual conservative outlook in January and admitting at its shareholder meeting in March that the industry is going through “concerning times” right now amid a consumer credit crunch.

It seems that while the iPod phenomenon is still chugging along, growth is slowing as the market becomes saturated. Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray, always one of Apple’s biggest cheerleaders, thinks iPod sales will come in somewhere between 10 million and 10.5 million units for the quarter, which is a little less than Wall Street had forecast.

The numbers will come out Wednesday about 1:15 p.m. PDT, and we’ll have something up as soon as they’re out. I’ll be live-blogging the customary conference call, which starts at 2 p.m. PDT, so be sure to to follow the coverage.

Apple’s stock was down almost 5 percent Tuesday, amid a larger downturn in consumer stocks. However, Shaw Wu of American Technology Research also downgraded the stock based on the feeling that Apple won’t get a significant boost until the second half of the year, when a 3G iPhone and new Macs are expected, and the potential for investors to punish Apple for anything short of outstanding results Wednesday.