
Met UltraViolet krijgen consumenten een digitale kluis voor speelfilms, die zijn af te spelen op verschillende apparaten.
Een samenwerkingsverband van in totaal zestig elektronicafabrikanten en filmmaatschappijen, onder leiding van Sony, komt met een nieuwe dienst waarmee films voor consumenten online zijn op te slaan in hun profiel. De naam van het initiatief luidt UltraViolet. Filmbedrijven en fabrikanten beginnen binnenkort met de eerste testen.
Door films te verplaatsen naar de cloud kunnen mensen ze bekijken op meerdere apparaten zonder bestanden te hoeven kopiëren. Het UltraViolet-logo moet uiteindelijk komen te staan voor digitale content die altijd en overal te consumeren is.
Het UltraViolet-systeem beschermt de auteursrechten via diverse vormen van kopieerbeveiliging (DRM), waaronder die van Adobe, Microsoft en Marlin. Het filmplatform werkt met een nieuw bestandsformaat dat op alle apparaten van aangesloten merken af te spelen zal zijn. Er is keuze uit streamen of downloaden. Bij elk UltraViolet-account hoort een online kluis voor digitale rechten die toegang geven tot aangeschafte films.
Grote afwezigen in het consortium zijn Walt Disney en Apple. Walt Disney heeft een alternatief, KeyChest en Apple heeft natuurlijk zijn eigen iTunes Video Store, waarbij in de Nederlandse versie nog altijd geen speelfilms zijn te vinden. De komst van UltraViolet moet volgens de eerste commentaren duidelijk maken hoe groot de macht van Apple op online videoverhuur in de VS is.
Facebook is standing at the foot of a virtual cash mountain. The social networking behemoth recently announced a plan to expand the Facebook Credits program beyond its beta confines. A network-wide rollout of the virtual currency application would streamline transactions online and, in effect, pave the path to the world's first global currency.
It's also going to help Facebook scale one of its last major economic hurdles - monetizing its millions of international users. Now translated into more than 100 languages, Facebook will do more than $1 billion in revenue this year. It has surpassed the 500 million member mark, with a surge of interest across Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and points beyond. In fact, adoption rates have soared exponentially in the last year.
Chris Birk (@cjbirk) is director of content and communications for VA Mortgage Center.com, the nation's number one dedicated VA lender, and Growth Partner, a unique firm that provides angel investment and online marketing expertise to emerging companies. A recovering journalist, he also teaches at a private Midwestern university. He blogs at Write Short Live Long.
Here's a quick look from Nick Burcher.
| Country | Number of Facebook users March 2009 | Number of Facebook users 31 March 2010 | 12 month growth % |
| Taiwan | 205,500 | 6,107,100 | 2,872 |
| Philippines | 1,026,300 | 11,561,740 | 1,027 |
| Thailand | 284,340 | 2,895,320 | 918 |
| Brazil | 395,940 | 3,602,100 | 810 |
| Indonesia | 2,325,840 | 20,775,320 | 793 |
| Czech Rep | 444,120 | 2,421,720 | 446 |
| India | 1,561,000 | 7,809,800 | 400 |
| Mexico | 2,142,080 | 9,208,560 | 330 |
In all, international users comprise about 70% of Facebook's total user base, but the company has so far lacked a consistent mechanism for turning those more far-flung users into dollars. Banner advertising in most cases doesn't provide a worthwhile return on investment internationally. At the same time, bandwidth costs have forced the company to take a loss in hyper-growth countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.
Enter the power and mind-boggling reach of Facebook Credits. As Chris Morrison at Bnet and others have pointed out, the full-scale credits program will clearly lower the adoption barrier for millions of international users, who will be able to buy credits from a single point of purchase and spend them on games and apps across the network. Facebook earns a 30% cut of the revenue; there's going to be a lot of that.
Looking back, the credits program got a bit lost in the privacy kerfuffle that came out of the f8 conference. The implications of rolling out the program may also revive another popular source of frustration for users: playing makeover. With Facebook's new concentrated push toward virtual currency, could a new layout be coming sooner than expected? Many of the company's 500 million users are just getting used to the new one unleashed on the public in February.
At the same time, the potential implications of a virtual global currency are staggering, if not difficult to pin down precisely. Facebook users have already shown a willingness to shell out for virtual goods in online games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars. The software company behind these, Zynga, is expected to make more than $450 million this year, the bulk from virtual purchases.
With a beefed-up Facebook credits program, users both domestic and abroad may soon be purchasing real goods through companies that utilize Facebook Connect. It isn't difficult to imagine going to the Crate & Barrel website and purchasing a wedding gift with Facebook Credits.
Consider what one-click purchasing could do for targeted Facebook ads: Advertisers and social marketers might have unprecedented access to real-time data on spending patterns and international purchases. Mobile carriers stand to benefit, too, as international consumers are increasingly more adept at using smartphones for financial transactions.
A virtual currency could also be a boon to entrepreneurs in developing nations. Consumers could use credits to purchase directly from artisans in Brazil or Thailand. That may require Facebook to ultimately abandon the dollar as its exchange root, but it certainly presents a unique opportunity for micropayments to blossom.
There's increasing chatter about Facebook giving Google a run for its money. But in some ways it may also carry the torch once wielded by PayPal, which held a similar vision of a truly global currency.
DiscussThis new software, which will soon take its place in the Creative Suite pantheon, will be downloadable from Adobe Labs and will include tools that bridge the gap between print-oriented InDesign and software for interactive formats.
The company’s goal is to make it simpler for more publishers to create and profit from tablet magazines like Wired’s hugely successful iPad offering. Wired used InDesign and a mix of other software to make its product.
The new Adobe technologies will focus on mobile hardware-specific needs, including 360-degree image rotation and pinch/swipe gestural navigation for panning and zooming. This is currently accomplished through an AIR utility, the Interactive Overlay Creator. In future versions of InDesign, the Interactive Overlay Creator will be an integrated feature.
Adobe is also making it easier to add mobile-friendly multimedia to slick, print-reminiscent layouts. From what we can see in a brief demo, it looks like designers will have a lot of fun taking an on-screen mockup to a .issue format magazine with relative ease. We can’t wait to try it out ourselves.
Adobe will let you import layouts from InDesign to the new workflow. From there, you’ll be able to add metadata, experiment with portrait and landscape layouts, and export content to the .issue format — a brand-new, ready-to-render file for digital magazines.
Here’s an overview of what Adobe is calling the Digital Magazine Workflow/Digital Content Builder:
When the new software becomes available for download, you’ll also get some handy documentation showing you how to implement the digital content builder into your current workflow.
And although the iPad is clearly the starting point for tablet magazine publishing, don’t think Adobe’s software will be limited to creating content for this device only; other tablets will also play nicely with Adobe-created digizines.
Designers, what’s your opinion so far? Have any of you had the chance to play with this workflow yet?
More About: adobe, Creative Suite, CS5, InDesign, ipad, magazine, Wired
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Foursquare says it's in talks with all the major search engines to index the startup's location data. We're hearing that Google in particular may be in talks with all the major players in the location based social networking market. What would a big search engine do with a little startup's check-ins and annotations about locations? Here are some ideas.
The paid partnerships between Google, Microsoft and Yahoo with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and more that were launched last Fall could provide a model, but location provides new opportunities, as well. Isn't it amazing that on a web so dependent on Google, there are emergent new kinds of websites so valuable they can charge giant search engines for their content? Here are some things Google might do with that content.
Last Fall Google started including Tweets, fresh blog posts and more in a live scrolling box on the search results page for particularly hot search queries. Mobile location based social networks, their comments and tips, could help populate those kind of search results for certain keywords or venues.
Searching for the big basketball game? Why not include the notes and tips of people checking in at the game right now in the results? Check-ins in general have a lot of potential. Google-backed social TV app Miso or entertainment check-in app GetGlue could power media check-ins that would make search results much fresher.
Why not annotate map search with live and archival location check-in notes, annotations, tips, etc? Imagine searching for directions to a venue and being told how many people and which friends were currently checked-in there on Loopt, Whrrl and Foursquare. Seeing not just restaurant reviews from CitySearch and Trip Advisor but quick tips from location networks? Sounds like a great idea to me.
No need to go into too much detail about this: check-in app content would be a very logical addition to mobile search results. The growth of branded layers of content annotating locations means that a Google mobile search could become a search for nearby content published by the Independent Film Channel, the Huffington Post, etc. That makes mobile search and location networks more appealing for everyone.
Privacy, monetization, relevance, personalization, temporal strategies and other matters still need to be figured out. These networks are still very small. The largest among them, Foursquare, has a reported 2 million users. That's less than 25% the size of StumbleUpon, for example. Just over 1/3 the size of curation blogging platform Tumblr.
The potential for location based social networks is huge, though. And the search engines know it. That's why they are talking to the startups. For these little startups, this kind of monetization could be an important life-line to fund their continued innovation, too.
Discuss
Over the last three months, Amazon has sold more eBooks than hardcovers through its Kindle service (i.e. not just being read on the Kindle device, but across devices).
While paperbacks are still probably outselling eBooks (Amazon did not specify this) as Jeff Bezos was quoted as saying, “astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months.”
143 eBooks were sold for every 100 hardcover books over the last 90 days, and in the last month alone, that number has risen to 180 eBooks for every 100 hardcover books. Also detailed in the press release:
Amazon sold more than 3x as many Kindle books in the first half of 2010 as in the first half of 2009. On July 6, Hachette announced that James Patterson had sold 1.14 million e-books to date. Of those, 867,881 were Kindle books. Five authors–Charlaine Harris, Stieg Larsson, Stephenie Meyer, James Patterson, and Nora Roberts–have each sold more than 500,000 Kindle books.
Of course, hardcovers still generally cost more than eBooks, so overall revenue may still be higher from hardcover books, but volume should quickly overcome the price difference if it continues on this path. Pretty astonishing stuff indeed.
Certainly one of the major drivers over the last 90 days has been the introduction of the iPad (and Kindle for iPad) as well as the Kindle app for Android, not to mention the lower price of the Kindle itself. Amazon can’t be the only one that is happy to hear this news, as nearly all of the major booksellers at this point are firmly in the eBook game, as well as Apple and soon Google. To Amazon’s competitor’s ears, this is certainly an announcement that they will interpret as “a rising tide lifts all boats,” but is it, or is Amazon continuing to build a bigger lead?
Think about the numbers here for a second and think how many hardcover books that Amazon probably sells in a month. Now consider that if this trend continues as Amazon is reporting, eBook sales (by number) will almost certainly be at least double that of hardcovers – with Amazon’s scale already, that’s going to be a very large number, and Amazon may just be widening a gap that it had firm control over for over for nearly two years.
As our Alex Wilhelm pointed out last month, Amazon is obviously still killing it.
(Note: Sales numbers do not include free downloads of Amazon’s 1.8 million out-of-copyright downloadable books.)
Original title and link for this post: Amazon eBooks starting to blow the cover off of hardcover sales