MyGadgetFinder.com

Interesting story on the BBC’s dot.life blog about potential challengers to Apple in the music download sector. The correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones has been looking at the chances of a new entrant into the market called 7digital:

Taking on iTunes

Could a tiny business based in London’s Shoreditch take a bite out of Apple’s digital music empire? It seems unlikely and even 7digital will admit that it’s a David facing a Goliath. But this week’s deal between the download service and Warner Music could at least make Apple sit up and take notice.

The seamless integration between the iPod and iTunes – and the manner in which the Apple ecosystem makes rival devices and services less useful to music fans – has made Steve Jobs the most powerful figure in digital music, with Apple commanding around 80% of the market. The big four labels – who saw iTunes as a saviour when it arrived promising users a viable alternative to pirated tracks – are now chafing at the bit.

They don’t like Apple’s insistence on a single price for tracks and albums, and they’re waking up to the fact that they’ve handed the retail end of their digital business to one player.

So Warner is striking a blow for the whole industry by offering its catalogue DRM-free and in MP3 format to 7digital. Read full article here…

Interesting times…

Whether it’s the future of personal computing or of the way we build relationships, of the humble headphone or the printed word – here’s a look at some of the thoughts and happenings coming out of the tech blogosphere this week:

• Over at Circuits, NY Times technology writer David Pogue is on the trail of wireless earbuds (we think that’s up-to-date American-speak for what we Brits used to call ‘headphones’) after seeing them featured in the movie Definitely, Maybe. He concludes: “Yes, they exist… Most of them are a bit bulky around the ear, as you could probably guess [and] like all wireless ear gear, come with a transmitter than must be attached to your iPod or whatever.” Great for listening to the TV if you’re the only person in the room that wants to hear it…
• Stephen Fry is begging for someone to Deliver Us From Microsoft in his latest column for The Guardian’s Dork Talk slot – and he thinks he can see the saviour coming: “The two great pillars of Open Source are the GNU project and Linux. I shan’t burden you with too much detail, I’ll just make the outrageous claim that your computer will be running some descendant of those two within the next five years and that your life will be better and happier as a result.” If you’ve ever chewed your fingernails to the quick in frustration with Windows, Explorer and Outlook, then Fry is the columnist for you.
• The blog of writer Neil Gaiman is probably not where you’d usually go for cutting-edge tech and entertainment news. It’s like a creaky old Gothic mansion full of shadows, spiderwebs and things that disappear unaccountably round corners when you look straight at them. However something is happening over there that is big, very big. Gaiman’s a hugely successful writer with a very mainstream publisher in Harper Collins. This same publisher has consented to experiment with making Gaiman’s novel American Gods available free online, unabridged and with no strings attached, to see whether it will boost sales of the hard copy and of his other books. See for yourself, the first few grains of dust that could start an avalanche.
• Over at The Guardian’s games blog Aleks Krotoski is investigating how gaming made it into mainstream thinking. She says: “I set about waiting for the medium to come to a place where adults outside the industry would look upon games as creatively inspiring, culturally challenging and an asset in the quiver of innovation. That has finally arrived. Since 2001, games have undergone a transformation. There’s a flurry of excitement about them from the outside: the internet and traditional media industries, boosted by the maturation of the web, are watching these enfants terribles closely for best-practice clues.” Tell this to anyone who accuses you of having wasted the last decade in front of your console of choice.
• Do you lie awake at night wondering if the Internet is altering your brain? In which case a recent post on Salon’s Machinist blog might not be for you… OK, seriously now, maybe not your brain. But definitely your relationships, opinions and ways of relating to the world. In which case its interview with Clay Shirky, the author of a recent book on the subject, should be required reading. Check it out…
• Tom Reynolds is an employee of the London Ambulance Service, and mainly focuses on that in his acclaimed Random Acts of Reality blog. But he’s also a self-confessed “nerd and a shameful first adopter” and frequently writes about tech issues. Today, on his return from a holiday in the US, he explains how he’d love to pay for e-book downloads for his shiny new Sony PRS505 Reader – but, as a Brit, the company simply won’t sell them to him. His only option? Illegal downloading, even though what he really wants to do is hand over cash…

Charlie Brooker’s in typically uncompromising mood in his latest outing for The Guardian. He reckons TV remotes should have more stuff on them: dials and joysticks and flashing lights. He dreams of a remote with its own mouse. And he doesn’t want a manual:

I love complex gadgets. What I can’t stand are idiots who don’t know which buttons to press

According to a survey, two-thirds of people think gadgets are becoming too complicated. They’re packed with features they don’t understand, and subsequently never use. One newspaper illustrated the story with a photograph of “a typical TV remote” featuring “43 baffling buttons”, annotated with captions telling you what each of these buttons did, just to make it look even more complex and bewildering: “cursor up”, “cursor down”, “a/v input connector 1″, “device mode”, and so on.

Thing is, there weren’t enough buttons for my liking. I love a complicated TV remote. They should have more stuff on them: dials and joysticks and flashing lights. I dream of a remote with its own mouse.

And I don’t want a manual. I like to work out what each nubbin does through trial and error, poking it and staring at the screen. Best of all is the “menu” button, which grants you access to a whole new array of on screen options, replete with little icons and sliding scales. Sit me in front of a brand-new telly and it’s the first thing I’ll reach for, because new tellies often come with surprising and exotic new features provided by the gods of technology. Read full article here…

On his blog, Stephen Fry asks: “Is Tim Berners-Lee the greatest living Englishman?”

It would be hard to argue against [his] merits, the sole begetter and inventor of the world wide web, an organism whose initials, www, have (in some languages, including our own) three times more syllables than the phrase they’re abbreviating, which is perhaps the only flaw in Berners-Lee’s grand design.

The story of how he devised the hypertext transfer protocol (http) and the entire language and structure of the web on a Steve Jobs NeXt computer at Cern in Switzerland in 1990 has passed into legend, though I would certainly recommend reading his own excellent and highly readable account, Weaving The Web. Sir Tim remains an idealist, passionately committed to an open, free and wholly public web as he guides the W3 Consortium towards an unknown future from his base at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Read the full, fascinating piece here >>