The poor music industry… I suppose we should feel sorry for them. Sheesh!
via: cnet.com
Category Archives: News
Geek & Sundry coming soon…
There some new video content for all you Cord Cutters out there. Woohoo!
Felicia Day, of Buffy, Dollhouse, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along Blog, Eureka, The Guild, and on and on, is launching a YouTube channel called “Geek & Sundry“!
There will be a bunch of shows airing on this channel starting April 2nd. The line-up is something like this:
Monday: The Flog
Tuesday: The Guild (Season 5 starts April 10th)
Wed: Dark Horse Motion Comics/Written by a Kid (July 16th)
Thursday: Guild extras (New Bonus Content!)
Friday: Tabletop/Sword and Laser (With alternating bonus material!)
Check out Felicia’s trailer for the channel:
This is going to be EPIC!
NBC Nightly News reports asteroid to make close pass!
Oh My!
So I’m watching NBC’s Nightly News via a podcast last night when Brian Williams starts telling us about an upcoming asteroid near miss. He very briefly mentions “We’ll be hearing a lot about this in the next 11 months…”.
To be fair, the asteroid will pass pretty close. 16,800 miles at it’s closest pass and that is an estimate based on what little data astronomers have acquired since Feb. 23 when it was discovered. Some info on 2012 DA14 can be found here.
The end of the sound byte stats: “The experts all say there is nothing wrong with making sure your affairs are in order.” Wow! Talk about news sensationalism! What a load of crap. (Sorry about the stupid ad pre-roll. It’s MSNBC’s fault.)
Here is a link to the video. (Sorry couldn’t embed it, thanks WordPress.com!)
I have learned to take what the talking heads on TV say with a huge grain of salt. This because when they discuss topics I actually do know something about, they typically get the facts completely wrong or way over hyped. Case in point, Google’s new privacy policy.
I usually head over to Phil Plait’s website, the creator of Bad Astronomy, to see what a true expert has to say. It’s clear that everyone who is any one in Astronomy is saying that it will miss us next year.
Even if it did hit us, from what Wikipedia says, it would produce an event the size of Tunguska impact. If that happened over a populated city, there would be huge devastation. However, if it hit unpopulated land or water, the event might go unnoticed.
So, to offset MSNBC’s scary graph behind Brian, I’ll copy this image stolen from Phil’s website:
Update to MLB.com At Bat ’12 info
UPDATE 2/28/12: Macworld just put up a post about the app: MLB.com At Bat warms up for 2012 season.
UPDATE 2/29/12: The MLB.com At Bat ’12 app is out! Take a look!
I was looking for more info on MLB.com At Bat ’12 app and how much it will cost to use as just a way to watch the Gameday (pitch tracking, box scores, etc..) stuff that they did last season. I came across a PDF document at “mlb.custhelp.com”. It describes how the new app will work and how the in-app purchases will work on iOS and Android as well as how the app will work on Windows Phone 7.
Here is the text from the iOS section of the document:
Key Features:
- At Bat 12 will be a universal application for the 2012 season. This means the same application will contain the iPhone and iPad experience.
- At Bat 12 will be free to download. Customers will have the option between a $2.99 monthly subscription and $14.99 season pass. These purchase options will be supported via ‘in-app purchase’, and will be charged against the customer’s iTunes account.
- At Bat 12 premium features include Gameday Audio (home/away), Gameday, real time highlights, Notifications, and 1 Free MLB.TV game of the day.
- At Bat 12 standard/free features include scores, news, standings.
- An existing MLB.TV Premium customer will have access to all At Bat features upon login. MLB.TV Standard customers will have to purchase the At Bat features via in-app purchase.
- Customer will also have the ability to purchase MLB.TV monthly subscription from the Apple At Bat 12 application via in-app purchase for $24.99/Monthly. After purchase, customer can link this subscription to his account to use on
- The customer has the ability to link the MLB.TV monthly subscription to an MLB.com account and leverage across the wired web or on Android devices.
Price Point:
- At Bat 12 In-app purchase: $14.99/Season or $2.99/Monthly
- MLB.TV Monthly In-app purchase: $24.99
Supported Devices:
- Tentatively scheduled to support devices (ipad, iphone, ipod touch) on OS 4.0 and up.
- Note: iPhone is now supported on Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint.
My take on all that is that the “Free” Universal app coming out on the 29th will only give you game scores, news and standings. That’s it. No Gameday (pitch tracking, box scores, etc..), no highlights, etc… Just the bare minimum.
If you want more, you pay $2.99 a month (8 months, March through October) or $14.99 for the whole season.
The next page of the PDF kind of shows this with the screenshots:
Purchase Screen:
Selected:
Detail:
The Detail screen above shows what you get when you pay the $2.99 a month or $14.99 season price. It shows that you get the game audio, Gameday, Highlights, etc…
So, MLB.com At Bat ’12 will still cost us $15 for the season if we want it to work the way it did last season. Otherwise your getting a very basic view of the games, news, and standings. That might be fine for most people, but we buy MLB.com At Bat for the Gameday info and the audio.
News about MLB.com At Bat ’12
UPDATE 2/27/12: I just found some new info about MLB.com At Bat ’12 that you should check out. It’s in this new blog post: Update to MLB.com At Bat ’12 info.
UPDATE 2/28/12: Macworld just put up a post about the app: MLB.com At Bat warms up for 2012 season.
UPDATE 2/29/12: The MLB.com At Bat ’12 app is finally out! Take a look!
I was just informed by a friend that MLB in their infinite wisdom has drastically changed the MLB.com At Bat app for 2012. After doing a little digging, I found an article that pretty much says it all.
This year, we’ve just confirmed that MLB At Bat 12 will be free with your subscription, which remains at $119.99 for existing subscribers. New subscriptions will be priced at $124.99. This enables you to receive 150 Spring Training games and all 2430 regular season games (some games are subject to blackout), with no added cost for either the iPhone or iPad apps.
Every article I found about this change made it sound wonderful! This would be true if you were writing to all the folks that paid the $125 subscription last season.
First off, you do not get 2,430 games! There is no way that anyone will be able to stream every game! There are games that start at similar times, the AppleTV and iOS devices can only play one stream at a time. Sure, your computer can do more than one, but how many people are going to sit in front of their “computer” and watch several games at a time. I guess, if that computer were hooked up to an HDTV, they might, but that’s about it.
Secondly, last season, people were able to pay $15 for the Game Day Audio streams. Being forced to pay almost 10x that for the ability to listen to Game Day Audio again is ludicrous!
I’m having a hard time understanding why all the reviews I have read so far about this news is positive! I would much rather pay $30 or even $50 for MLB.com At Bat ’12!
In this household. We paid the $15 for MLB.com At Bat ’11 and $15 for the Game Day Audio. We were fine with that. In fact, I paid $30 for the apps because I bought both the iPhone and iPad versions!
To be fair, it’s not all that clear if the Game Day Audio can be purchased separately and used with the app, or the only subscription that will work with the app is the full $125 one.
The $125 subscription really caters best to people who root for a team that doesn’t play in the city they live in. My wife who is a huge Indians fan living in St. Louis would benefit the most from a $125 subscription, but as a Cardinals fan, there is no big advantage.
Ah well, time to look for a new app to track baseball!
Kindle Fire doing just fine…
Gamasutra just wrote up a post showing a very interesting graph about the Kindle Fire. The image below shows before the Kindle Fire came out on the left and after on the right.
It’s pretty astounding how much changed in just 2 months! Samsung had a huge lead in Android tablet application session in November. Then after the new year, they lost just under half of that to the Kindle Fire. Now the Kindle Fire actually has more Application Sessions than Galaxy Tab by .1%. Granted, that’s not much of a lead, but it’s still early days here.
Amazon’s price point for the Kindle Fire is pretty much making it the tablet to own this year. I can’t wait to see what this graph looks like in just a couple more months.
“I don’t f**king want innovation…”
That’s a quote from Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus at a meeting!
“I don’t fucking want innovation,” the ex-employee recalls Pincus saying. “You’re not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers.”
An article written up at the San Francisco Weekly described what was going on with Zynga titled: “FarmVillains”. It’s a lengthy piece, but worth the read.
One paragraph mentioned that in 2009 alone Pincus’ filed lawsuits against seven former employees.
Zynga recently released in Canada’s iTunes App Store a new game called “Dream Heights”, which has an uncanny resemblance to NimbleBit’s “Tiny Tower” which was recently awarded by Apple as iPhone’s top game of 2011.
NimbleBit apparently found out about this and created this nice little info-graphic:
(You can click on the above image to get the full image.)
I really hope that NimbleBit can succeed in getting Zynga’s game removed from the App Store. It’s such a blatant rip-off of Tiny Tower that it might just as well be a spin-off of the game.
I personally have been playing Tiny Tower for about 7 months now since the game was released June 22 of last year. It’s a nice little 5 minute, get in, buy a floor if I can, deal with all the floors that need attention, shut it down. I rarely stay in and take little bitizens to their floors.
The only Zynga games I have at this point are ones that Zynga purchased the companies to. Words With Friends, Drop7 and Scramble With Friends. Currently, Scramble With Friends is #1 in both the Category and Overall Top App’s lists.
I suppose it would be OK if the original developers of Words With Friends wrote and are getting the money they deserve for writing Scramble With Friends. However, I fear that this is not the case…
The RIAA has lost their minds!
In a story posted on The Verge, the RIAA is quoted:
Glazier sees these delays as hugely damaging, saying that each day a piracy-facilitating website stays online can cost millions of dollars to “American companies, employees and [the] economy,” and be “an ongoing threat to the security and safety of our citizens.”
As Jamie writes: “Classic scaremongering if we’ve ever seen it.”
Looks like the RIAA is running out of ideas to prevent what it thinks is a major problem.
Funny thing is, last year marked the first year that digital music sales eclipsed physical CD sales. A single song from Adele’s new album 21 sold over 5,813,000 copies! Her album sold over 1,801,000 digital copies.
To be fair, physical media, CD’s, didn’t fair as well, they dropped 20% last year.
Are we to assume that the drop in CD sales is due to piracy? One thing to consider before jumping on the piracy bandwagon is that there is been a strong upswing in adoption of subscription services like Spotify, Mog, Rdio, as well as free services like Pandora. In this economy, people are less likely to put out real cash for music that they are not sure of. The subscription services and free services give listeners options to “try before they buy” giving them a chance to make sure they will really enjoy what they are paying for.
Plus, have you tried to “pirate” music these days? I try to keep track of torrent access in general and find that it’s getting harder and harder to find torrents of albums now that it has become easier and easier to purchase DRM free music from places like iTunes, Amazon and now even Google.
I have to wonder a little if the current economy has more to do with the slight down tick of music sales rather than music piracy.
A Perfect Memorial
For Doctor Who fans, todays news has been very sad. One of the most beloved companions of the Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith played by Elizabeth Sladen passed away today.
There have been a lot of well wishing from all over the Internet. But I think the very best I have seen so far was from a web comic called Dork Tower.
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Good by Elizabeth Sladen, we will all miss you!
Thanks John Kovalic for such a great memorial comic!
Surprise, Pandora Sends User Data to Advertisers!
Ars Technica has an article posted about how Pandora.com is sending personal user data to advertisers. Oh no, say it ain’t so!
The comments on the site are mostly of outrage that Pandora would do such a thing. I have to say that it never ceases to amaze me as to how stupid some people can really be.
Looking over the privacy policy at Pandora.com, they don’t make it clear exactly what they collect on mobile devices, just “transactional” data, whatever that means. The privacy policy does state that it will grab unique identifiers from mobile devices, IP addresses from desktop computers, etc…
However, when you signup for the service you are presented with a signup form that is pretty straight forward:
The “why?” links take you to FAQ pages clearly telling you that Pandora users advertisers to help pay for the service they provide. This info is also available when you look at your account settings after signing up.
Now, when I signed up for the service, I wasn’t required to enter the Birth Year, Zip Code or Gender info so my account has blanks in those fields. You are now required to enter data into those fields. However, no one is forcing you to enter accurate data. The Birth Year is important to make sure you are not younger than 13, the rest is clearly for advertising reasons.
Still, it’s not like Pandora is trying to hide the fact that they send this data to advertisers, they clearly state it if the user dares to click the “why?” link.
You know, is so funny that privacy advocates get all up in arms over these little cases. There are so many other more egregious privacy issues to go after, like Facebook…
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