Read Kindle books on your iPhone or iPod touch

• No Kindle required
• Get the best reading experience available on your iPhone or iPod touch
• Access your Kindle books even if you don’t have your Kindle with you
• Automatically synchronizes your last page read between devices with Amazon Whispersync
• Adjust the text size, add bookmarks, and view the annotations you created on your Kindle

The amazon.com kindle store promises more than 240,000 ebooks, with prices around $9.99.
This is definitely a move that is going to change the way we read books and will possibly position Amazon as the most important bookshop on the planet.

There is one problem however, it’s only available in the USA, which means that those residing outside of the US will continue to pay higher charges for their ebooks.  Hopefully though, this will prove to be an incentive to those existing retailers and they reduce their prices in anticpation of a local Amazon launch.

What is the case?
TPB is a search engne for torrents. The RIAA alleges that the site aids copyright infringment. TPB is defending itself by stating that they do not host any illegal material, and are doing nothing that Google or any other search engine cannot already do.

So who’s right?
I think both sides have a reasonable argument, but this case is bigger  than mere copyright infringment.
On the face of it, TPB is morally (and legally) wrong, but let’s ask the question: why is TPB so popular?
This is the million dollar question. Like napster and grokster before it, TPB challenges the RIAA in it’s content delivery system. You would think that after many legal cases and with new technologies and high rates of broadband penetration that the music and film industry would finally deliver a product in a manner which suits their customers!
The success of Apple’s iTunes store would suggest that digital media can succeed, so why is the RIAA so against online delivery?

They believe it’s bad for business, but that’s nonsense, if anything online delivey can only increase your presence in amy given market.
How does this affect the artist? If anything it could earn them more money and give them a bigger following. Oh wait, is this actually the RIAA’s problem?
By empowering the artist, you risk losing them as a client and thus losing a valuable income stream. So what do you do? You control the access. Sites like TPB provide access to anyone and therefore compete
with the record labels.
I think the content creators and those who wish to distribute that content need to strike a balance. Today you can gve stuff away for free and still make money from other revenue streams.
For instance, provide your singles for free, but sell the album or promote your merchandise.
The last thng anyone should consider doing is imply that your paying customers are stealing your content, and that’s what you see every time you go to the cinema!

How many work servers go down on a semi regular basis? I know my own works internal server  struggles at times, therefore no system is fullproof.

But what about those who don’t like cloud computing because nothing is stored locally?
The simple answer is to copy your documents! Are the doom sayers really telling us not to backup? Ok, sometimes the most recent version might not be on your hard drive, but there is always a solution to this sort of problem.

When I’m asked my opinion on cloud computing, I always ask this question: how comfortable are you storing your data on another companies server? If the answer is yes, then give cloud computing a go, if the answer is no, then you need to disconnect your broadband, because someone might be hacking your pc right now!

Come on people, get over it.

Features

Synchronize your contacts.
Get your Google contacts quickly and easily to your phone. With Sync,
you can have access to your address book at anytime and place that you
need it.
Get calendar alerts. Using your
phone’s native calendar, you can now access your Google calendar, and
be alerted for upcoming appointments with sound or vibration.
Always in sync. Your contacts stay
synchronized whether you access them from your phone or from your
computer. Add or edit contact information right on your device or on
your Google account on the web.

Now I can sync my iphone’s contacts directly with my google apps contacts and calendar.  This saves me the £69 annual fee Apple want for MobileMe.

I did run into a problem, mainly that I couldn’t get m.google.com/sync to recognise my apps login – it kept defaulting to my other google account.
The solution was to remove my apps email address from the google account.  As I had my apps account as a secondary email address on my @gmail.com account when I logged in at m.google.com/sync, it just took me to my @gmail account.  Suffice it say that once I removed the apps account from my gmail account it all works flawlessly!

The service itself works very well and if you’ve tried MobileMe or another exchange service you’ll not be disappointed. 

Next step, push email?  Who knows, but as I’ve got fetch set to 15 minutes I feel like I already have push email, it’s certainly fast enough for me.

While I’m disappointed by this, I’m excited by their honesty, although I suspect that they face some strong opinion from publishing houses.

Ebooks are starting to sell in sufficient numbers to suggest that they will become the main income stream for publishers, therefore they will be keen to protect future revenues and learn from the mistakes the music and film industry have made i.e. failing to adopt digital at an early stage.

Let’s take a look at the advantages.

1. Ebooks are already popular on the iPhone / iPod touch platform.
2. Amazon are a well respected seller if books.
3. They have an existing ebook sales outlet fully stocked with the
latest titles.
4. Many consumers already have a relationship with Amazon, therefore
the trust element already exists.
5. The ebook market is still in the early stages of development, which
is where Internet shopping was when amazon launched. They therefore
have the necessary experience to launch this product.
7. The smartphone market is growing, therefore an ereader programme is
going to gain more exposure. An android is another possibility.

Ok, are there any disadvantages?

1. Cost of R&D – is the market worth the risk?
2. Piracy, how to stop your ebooks circulating on torrent sites?
3. DRM: do your customers want this?probably not.
4. Cost, ebooks have to reflect the price of physical books, but offer
up an advantage ie cheaper! Lower margin?
5. Affect traditional sales like how digital sales if music have
canabalised sales of CDs.

So, will the ebook market take off? Only time will tell.

A quick google shows up hundreds of sites offering guides and YouTube is full of selfhelp clips. I’ll provide the steps necessary for you to create your own custom SMS tone on a mac.

You need to have a jailbroken iPhone for this.  A guide on how to do this can be found here.

1. Firstly you need OpenSSH. Open cydia and go to all packages and search for it. Once found, install it.
2. You need to know your iPhones IP address. You find this in settings, wifi. Press the blue arrow and in the next screen you will see your IP address.
3. If you don’t already have cyberduck on your mac, download and install it.
4. Open cyberduck, open new connection.
5. Make sure that you have SSH FTP selected and enter your iPhones IP address.
6. Now enter your username and password. These are the same for everyones iPhones. Username is root and the password is alpine.
7. In may take a while for your mac to connect to your iPhone.
8. Once connected you will be able to browse your iPhones file structure.

To change your message tone follow these steps:

1.Trim MP3 files using Audacity (usually SMS notification should be shorter, roughly 3-4 seconds should be good)

2. Import the MP3 file to iTunes
3. Change the iTunes import to AIFF
4. Find the AIFF file and copy to desktop
5. Change the extension to “.caf”
6. SFTP to the iPhone using Cyberduck (Mac)
7. Navigate to the following directory: “/System/Library/Audio/UISounds”
8. Change one of the “sms-received.caf” file to
“sms-received_.caf” where is an integer from 1 to 6
that is least preferrable
9. For example: Rename “sms-received6.caf” to “sms-received_6.caf” to replace the Electronic with custom sound
File name mapping to notification name:

sms-received1.caf – > Tri-tone
sms-received2.caf – > Chime.caf
sms-received3.caf – > Glass
sms-received4.caf – > Horn
sms-received5.caf – > Bell
sms-received6.caf – > Electronic

Upload the file on the desktop using the old name of that was changed
For example: if “sms-received_6.caf” is changed to “sms-received_6.caf”, upload the file using the name “sms-received6.caf”
Choose on your iPhone, the replaced tone.
For example: if you replaced sms-received6.caf, then you should choose Electronic.

Thanks to Life in 0 and 1 for the guide.

Yesterday I did something I haven’t done in a long time: I purchased The Sunday Times.  I don’t normally read newspapers, especially Sunday papers which for some reason are huge unwieldy things.  None the less, of to the shop I trundled and struggled back with the times.  After some time sorting through the various sections, I actually started to read.  At this point I should state that I enjoy reading and have always been an avid reader, from fiction to non-fiction, to news and sport I read them all!

Which leads me on to the story which appeared in yesterdays Sunday Times: The plastic fantastic future of newspapers.  In his article, Alex Pell discusses the future of newspapers.
What intrigued me was not the e-reader or the new digital ink being discussed, but that publishers and presumably writers / journalists still do not understand digital content, the internet and where their future lies.

The article tells us how companies are competing with each other to develop a mobile newspaper of the future.  This will be kindle like, will always display the latest edition of your newspaper and will have a colour screen and great battery life.  BUT, it wont be available for a couple of years.  Let me ask you this, if you have a computer at work with access to the internet, if you a have a mobile phone with access to the internet, if you have a computer at home, then what need will you have for (what promises to be an expensive) device that will display your favourite newspaper?

Take the iphone, it is already the biggest ebook reader beating the kindle and Sony’s ereader.  It is not hard to realise why, give consumers a decent screen, the ability to load their own content and a device that they will always have with them and you have a success story.

So what are publishers failing to understand?  Consumers will always demand “content” whether that be the latest news or the latest thriller from a leading novelist, but as can be seen, consumers continue to read the classics.  A quick trip over to Project Gutenberg proves this.  (What is Project Gutenberg?  An ebook site that allows users to download out of copyright books in a digital format.)
Therefore whether it be new content or existing content, consumers want it.  Surely this is a market that is just waiting to be exploited.  

Is there money to be made?  Yes is the simple answer.  Just as the music business has found out and now the movie business, consumers will purchase digital content.  The newspaper industry has for a long time failed to embrace the internet.  In the early days, their websites were not uptodate, with them preferring to maintain the newspaper position of breaking news.  Thankfully today, the internet is full of newspapers delivering their content online, but some sites require users to register, or do not provide rss feeds which make it unneccessarily difficult for users to get the content they demand.

What cannot be allowed to happen is a situation where a leading newspaper tries to get its audience to pay for online content.  That business model is dead.  There are plenty of reputable news sites that exist already that are free, therefore a digital newspaper will have to rely on advertising revenue.

The quicker publishers get their content digitised and availble to the consumer the faster they will cash in, whether it be in advertising revenue or by selling ebooks.  As more and more devices come to market that are “connected” the market for digital content will explode and therefore the future in publishing is in digital.

Time will tell which newspapers will successfully migrate their entire business onto the net, but failure to do so will ultimately ensure their demise.

We still do not have themes, which are coming, but all the other cool features now work, including calendar view and tasks.

This upgrade of gmail really makes it a powerful tool, and a viable option to any desktop client.  If you are a windows user and have installed chrome, then gmail could actually function like a desktop client.  This is made possible by gmail operating inside it’s own browser window and outside of the general browsing expereince.

I’m a big fan of the google calendar and now you can view upcoming events inside gmail, but a lab feature might just be the making of gmail – tasks.  It really is simple, working in a similar way to Chat, you just click on tasks and create a to do.  That’s it.

“To enable Tasks, go to Settings, click the Labs tab (or just click here
if you’re signed in). Select “Enable” next to “Tasks” and then click
“Save Changes” at the bottom. Then, after Gmail refreshes, on the left
under the “Contacts” link, you’ll see a “Tasks” link. Just click it to
get started.”

The folks behind gmail really do keep coming up with great new features and this is just another reason why you should give it a try.

While most users will not switch, experts are indicating that now is a good time to experiment with alternatives.  Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome are not vulnerable to the IE threat, but each browser does have their own flaws.  One thing is for sure, most browser attacks are aimed at IE.  This is because IE users (are generally) less sophisticated surfers and are therefore more suseptible to viruses.  I would therefore recommend users to “upgrade” to an alternative browser.  I use firefox myself and find it great.

As a mac user, I should be using safari, but firefox’s pluggins make it a more useful browser, if not a tad slower.  I would live to try Chrome, but google have not released a mac version yet.