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Not Dead Yet! The CD Still Rules Music (But iTunes Is Closing the Gap).
[CORRECTION: My assertion about NPD's unit sales data below is incorrect: The tracking service counts 12 digital download singles as the equivalent of one CD. That makes Apple's share of the market...
View ArticleBacking Up, Lossless Audio and Genealogy Programs
My daughter left for college and I am worried about her backing up her computer. Is there a backup service that is offsite and automatic? What about campusbackup.org? I haven’t tested campusbackup.org,...
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Game On: Time Inc. Shows Off a Tabletized Sports Illustrated
Last month, Condé Nast played show-and-tell with its concept of a digitized magazine. Today it’s Time Inc.’s turn: The publisher is demoing a concept version of Sports Illustrated it says will be able...
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Condé Nast, With Help From a Nearly Naked Rihanna, Takes Another Step Toward...
Condé Nast has taken another small step into the future of digital magazines: The publisher has put a second edition of its GQ magazine up for sale on Apple’s iTunes Store. Plunk down $2.99 and you’ll...
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Gadgets to Bring Holiday Cheer to Little Travelers
Along with many other people, I’ll spend hours flying with young children this holiday season to visit family and, like many parents, I’d do anything within reason to keep my young children busy on a...
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Are You Ready for 3-D in Your Living Room? Hollywood Can't Wait.
3-D was a big buzzword at last year’s Consumer Electronics Show, and it’s even bigger this year. It’s hard to find a TV manufacturer that isn’t showing off sets promising to let you replicate the...
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Netflix CEO Reed Hastings: We'll Be Shipping DVDs Until 2030
The digital video revolution may be hastening the DVD toward its end, but there’s quite a bit of life left in the old format yet. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said as much today when he remarked that the...
View ArticleIs Running Windows on a Mac Secure?
Q: Thanks for your review of programs for running Windows on a Mac. But, if I use them, won’t I expose my Mac’s files to Windows viruses and spyware? A: Yes, potentially, because both of the programs I...
View ArticleTwo Laptops Take Images to Another Dimension
If switching from standard to high-definition television wasn’t confusing enough, there’s another wave of TV technology on the horizon: 3D. But 3D TVs and much of the 3D content won’t be available...
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YouTube Steps Cautiously Into Mobile Ads
Another sign that Google is serious about wringing more money out of YouTube: It is adding ads to the video’s mobile site. Another sign that mobile ads are still in their infancy: Google isn’t using...
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Adobe Co-Founder: We Never Abandoned Apple, but Apple Is Abandoning Us
A couple of weeks ago, Apple CEO Steve Jobs published “Thoughts on Flash,” a 1,671-word execration of Adobe’s Flash platform. On Thursday, Adobe co-founders and co-chairmen Chuck Geschke and John...
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Google Open Sources VP8 Video Codec. Will Apple, Microsoft and Intel Use It?
Google’s plan to open-source the VP8 video codec has been rumored ever since the company acquired its developer, On2, in August 2009. After all, in the press release detailing the acquisition, Google...
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Google's "Royalty-Free" WebM Video May Not Be Royalty-Free for Long
The announcement of Google’s new WebM video format and release of the VP8 video codec as an open standard have been hailed by some as the move that will free the Web from the proprietary H.264 codec...
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The Chapter And Verse on E-Bookstores
As books go digital, much of the focus has been on which gadgets offer the best approximation of old-fashioned paper and ink on a screen. But there’s another choice that’s just as important for readers...
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Meet Flipboard: Mike McCue Talks About Stealth "Social Magazine" Start-Up...
Today, BoomTown gassed up the MINI and headed down to see one of the more innovative new start-ups I have encountered of late. That would be a new social magazine concept called Flipboard, which is...
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YouTube Leanback Freshens Up for Google TV's Debut
One of the things that Google thinks you’ll do with Google TV is watch a lot of Google video, via YouTube. That’s why the search giant introduced a “Leanback” version of the site, designed for...
View ArticleAdobe Revamps Acrobat Software, Mobile Apps
Adobe Systems on Monday unveiled the latest version of its Acrobat suite of software for creating and viewing PDF files, the company’s latest move to bolster its influence over the popular document...
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The My-Fill-In-the-Space Reset Is Here, as Struggling Social Network Morphs...
Empty bracket or no empty bracket: Will it work? That’s pretty much the big question at News Corp. tonight, as its much beleaguered social networking site, Myspace, rolls out a new beta version aimed...
View ArticleConverting Songs From AAC to MP3 in ITunes
Q: How do I convert songs in iTunes to plain MP3 files? I want to use them in another program that doesn’t recognize the AAC song format that iTunes prefers. A: Assuming you are using the latest...
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Codec Capers: Google Drops H.264 Support in Chrome
Here’s one way to spur adoption of your new video codec. End your browser’s support for a widely used rival codec. That’s what Google did today, announcing that its Chrome browser will ship without...
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