TruePosition is a ghost. Few know anything substantive about the surveillance company, yet according to Wired’s Spencer Ackerman, governments are salivating over the company’s LOCINT product, which has the ability to drudge up plenty personal info through our cellphones. More
Audiosocket, an indie music licensing and technology company, is launching a new platform today called Music as a Service (MaaS), which gives developers a way to offer users the ability to license music for applications.
So content producers will be able to search, discover and license music from Audiosocket’s catalog of over 33,000 songs from more than 1,900 artists and composers around the world. MaaS can be integrated into third party photo and video sharing services, ad agencies and more. Partners pay nothing up-front to integrate MaaS, and content creators take on the licensing charges.
The virtue of using the platform is that content creators don’t have to worry about the hassle of licensing the music they want to use, because Audiosocket takes care of this. MaaS provides worldwide music licensing with automated licensing generation and payment processing, simplifying what has been a notoriously challenging process for content creators, and creating new revenue streams for artists and partners.
For example, slideshow creation tool Animoto is an Audiosocket client, and Audiosocket says this integration helped shape the vision for the MaaS platform.
Audiosocket faces competition from Pump Audio and Jingle Punks.
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Audiosocket’s Music As A Service Allows Startups To Offer Licensed Music To Users
Illustrator Claire Hummel has taken a look at the Disney princesses with a historical eye, from Snow White’s 16th-century Germany setting to Belle’s late 18th century French environment. She found that the clothes they wore didn’t match up to the historical settings very well and decided to set things straight. Here’s what Claire had to say about her interpretation of Jasmine from Aladdin (above):
“Let’s be frank — Aladdin is hardly an exercise in historical accuracy… It took some effort to track down some midriff-baring outfits but BY GEORGE I DID, thank you Persian fashion plates. I now know what sirwal are called (besides Hammer pants), and that Persian women wore some pretty sweet little jackets that I wish I owned.”
You can read about the rest of her findings over at Flavorwire. Prints are available on Claire’s site – wouldn’t they be a lovely addition to the room of a princess-obsessed little girl?
Link via Flavorwire
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If Disney Princesses Wore Historically Accurate Clothing
Autocorrect and autocomplete can be very helpful and very funny features in iOS, but you can take control over both by adding your own custom words and terms to the dictionary. Here’s how to do it. More
Google makes a heck of a lot of money from online advertising. In fact, 97 percent of Google’s revenue, which totaled $33.3 billion in the past twelve months, comes from advertising.
WordStream, a venture capital-backed provider of hosted software that automates most of the manual work involved with creating and optimizing both paid and natural search engine marketing campaigns, has done some research to discover which keyword categories fetch the highest costs per click (CPC) in Google’s AdWords solution.
And of course, they made an infographic based on the results of their research (embedded below).
WordStream compiled data from its own, vast keyword database and the Google Keyword Tool to determine the top 10,000 most expensive English-language keywords over a 90-day period.
Subsequently, the list was organized into categories by theme. The largest keyword categories were then determined by weighting the number of keywords within each category, as well as the estimated monthly search volume and average cost per click for each keyword.
For the record, Google AdWords is an auction-based marketplace where advertisers bid on keywords to compete for top ad placement, with a minimum bid of 5 cents per keyword (update: actually, there’s no longer a minimum bid for CPC campaigns).
The top twenty keyword categories that demanded the highest costs per click are:
1. Insurance (example keyword: “auto insurance price quotes”)
2. Loans (example keyword: “consolidate graduate student loans”)
3. Mortgage (example keyword: “refinanced second mortgages”)
4. Attorney (example keyword: “personal injury attorney”)
5. Credit (example keyword: “home equity line of credit”)
6. Lawyer
7. Donate
8. Degree
9. Hosting
10. Claim
11. Conference Call
12. Trading
13. Software
14. Recovery
15. Transfer
16. Gas/Electricity
17. Classes
18. Rehab
19. Treatment
20. Cord Blood
Unsurprisingly, the list of most expensive keyword categories is clearly a result from people who, en masse, turn to the Web in search for help, whether it’s for financial, educational, professional services or medical aid. WordStream concludes that the keyword categories with the highest volumes and costs represent industries with very high lifetime customer value: in other words, companies that can afford to pay a lot to acquire a new customer because of the nature of their business.
But I would have personally never imagined that ‘insurance’ would be netting Google up to almost $55 per click. Think about that for a minute.
View article:
What Are The 20 Most Expensive Keyword Categories In Google AdWords?
Windows: Many types of malware disable booting into safe mode to prevent easy recovery. You can always get around this by reinstalling or restoring your operating system, but that may not be necessary thanks to the free program Safe Mode Fixer. More
Amazon is now allowing students to rent textbooks on their Kindle and Kindle apps. The e-commerce giant is launching Kindle Textbook Rental today, which allows students can save up to 80% off textbook list prices by renting textbooks from the Kindle Store.
Amazon says that students can customize rental periods between 30 and 360 days, so students only pay for the specific amount of time they need a book. And students can extend the rental time if they ened more time to use the textbook. The company says that “tens of thousands of textbooks” are available for the 2011 school year from publishers such as John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier and Taylor & Francis.
The company is also extending its Whispersync technology so that students can get to keep and access all of their notes and highlighted content in the Amazon Cloud, even after a rental expires.
Savings, says the company, amount to up to 80% off the print list price on a 30-day rental. For example, an accounting textbook costs $109.20 to buy the actual book, but starts at $38.29 to rent the textbook.
Kindle Textbooks can be read across both the Kindle devices and Amazon’s free Kindle Reading Apps for PC, Mac, iPad, iPod touch, iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and Android-based devices.
I’m curious how much of a threat this service will be to textbook rental giants Chegg and BookRenter, which both allow students to rent hardcover and paperback textbooks at low prices. For example, Chegg has an e-book option that could be competitive to Amazon’s new service. Other startups like Kno and Inkling are trying their hand at the digital textbook arena.
Link:
Amazon Launches Kindle Textbook Rental Service, Allows Students To Store Notes In The Cloud
Who ever said multiple personality disorder was a bad thing? Certainly not ViewSonic, whose Oak Trail powered ViewPad 10Pro — which does the dual OS dance with Windows 7 and virtualized Android 2.2 — just made its way through the FCC. The government's stamp of approval on its WiFi and AT&T-friendly WCDMA radios means it won't fry our brains, and it shouldn't be long before we see the 10Pro in stores. Of course, we still don't know the price of this device… or the psychiatric costs of its OS switching ways.
ViewSonic ViewPad 10Pro hits the FCC, feds don’t mind its split personality originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 17 Jul 2011 11:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
This is one of the first-ever photos of the Bornean rainbow toad, which hasn’t been seen since 1924. More
Earlier this week, Pandora announced that it would finally be dropping its longtime support for Flash in favor of HTML5. The move is one piece of a big redesign for the site, one which will begin rolling out to Pandora One (the $36 / year premium version) subscribers in pieces, as part of a limited testing period before being made available to the service’s entire massive user base.
The timing could have been more ideal, of course. A day after the announcement, Spotify quickly grabbed the attention of those following the online music industry by formally launching in the US. It’s important to note right off the bat, however, that these two services are not really direct competitors, in spite of how some might spin it. Spotify is an all-you-can eat subscription service, making it more akin to the likes of a Rhapsody and Napster. Pandora, on the other hand, is built largely around passive music discovery. You log-in, you enter an artist, and you let the music come to you. This redesign takes that ease of use to a whole new level. Check out our impressions below.
Gallery: Pandora redesign hands-on
Continue reading Pandora Radio’s HTML5 redesign hands-on
Pandora Radio’s HTML5 redesign hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 16 Jul 2011 12:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.