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August, 2009

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Xbox 360 Elite drops to $299, loses HD cables

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

By Dave Rudden
August 27, 2009 04:53 AM PST

After weeks of rumors, Microsoft’s finally confirmed it–the Xbox 360 Elite is dropping to $299. But that’s not all that’s getting dropped…

With a new box, and without HDMI cables, the Xbox 360 Elite is now $299.

While numerous info leaks from retailers have made it known for weeks, Microsoft made it official this morning, announcing that starting this Friday, the 120GB Xbox 360 Elite will be dropping in price to $299. Additionally,the 60GB Xbox 360 Pro will see a cut to $249 on the same day to clear out its remaining stock.

It seems like the Elite may be losing some of its appeal after the price drop, however. Recently released images of the system’s new packaging on Xbox spokesman Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb’sFlickr page (one of which is shown above) seem to show the system without the previously-included HDMI cables. Instead, the system will be sold with composite cables, which cannot display the system in high-definition.

The news comes a little over a week after Sony announced its price drop of the PlayStation 3 to $299 alongside the unveiling of a new PS3 slim model. Here’s Microsoft’s official announcement.

Xbox 360 Drops Elite Console Price by $100

Xbox 360 today invites you to experience more fun, more entertainment and more ways to connect with friends and family at an even better value. Beginning August 28, the price of an Xbox 360 Elite console will drop by $100, now priced at just $299.99 estimated retail price in the United States.

On top of that, the Xbox 360 Pro console will now be priced at $249.99, reflecting a price reduction of $50, while supplies last. Starting at just $199.99 for the Xbox 360 Arcade console,Xbox 360 puts all your entertainment in one place so you can play games, watch movies and TV shows, listen to music, and, coming this fall, keep up with your Twitter and Facebook social circles, all from your Xbox 360. And, as announced earlier this year, the Xbox 360 you buy today will work with code-named “Project Natal” and controller-free gaming in the future.

“With the holiday season right around the corner, it’s already time to start looking for entertainment and gifts that everyone will enjoy,” said Shane Kim, corporate vice president of strategy and business development for the Interactive Entertainment Business at Microsoft Corp. “If you’re looking for deep experiences that don’t require deep pockets, now is the time to purchase an Xbox 360. We’ve got the best games, a vast library of TV shows and movies, new music experiences, more ways to connect friends and family, and so much more on the horizon including ‘Project Natal’?no controller required.”

Source: Gamepro.com

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Jitterbug, operationally profitable, jumps onto Verizon’s network

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

By pgoldstein

Created Aug 26 2009 – 4:05pm

Jitterbug, the MVNO that makes phones for the elderly, announced it will use Verizon Wireless’ network as part of the carrier’s open development program. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

[1]David Inns, the CEO of Jitterbug’s parent company GreatCall, said in an interview with FierceWireless that the new relationship with Verizon would give Jitterbug nationwide coverage as well as access to data and location-based services. The company had previously leveraged roaming agreements with several CDMA carriers across the United States, Inns said, though he declined to name the carriers.

Inns commented on Verizon’s recently introduced open development initiative, an effort by the nation’s largest carrier to more quickly certify devices and services onto its network. “The device approval process was very, very efficient and fast,” he said. “The thing that took the longest period of time was figuring out the contractual terms.”

While other MVNOs have crumbled under market pressure in recent years, Jitterbug is still going strong, Inns said. He said over the past two and a half years the company has raised more than $100 million in venture capital and is currently operationally profitable. “We will no longer need to be raising money, which allows us to focus on the business,” he said. “We’re really happy to say we’ve gone through that critical point, and we’re here for the long term.”

Jitterbug’s deal with Verizon will give its customers greater access to services they want, Inns said, such as the ability to get weather updates and health and wellness applications. ”Jitterbug customers are not interested in the shotgun app,” he said. Inns said Jitterbug is creating a services store that will allow customers to have applications automatically downloaded onto their phones.

Published on FierceWireless (http://www.fiercewireless.com)

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Download Over a Million Public Domain Books from Google Books in the Open EPUB Format

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 11:05 AM

Posted by Brandon Badger, Product Manager

Over the years, we’ve heard a lot from people who’ve unearthed hidden treasures in Google Books: a crafter who uncovered a forgotten knitting technique, a family historian who discovered her ancestor once traveled the country with a dancing, roller-skating bear. The books they found were out of copyright and in the public domain, which meant they could read the full text and even download a PDF version of the book.

I’m excited to announce that starting today, Google Books will offer free downloads of these and more than one million more public domain books in an additional format, EPUB. By adding support for EPUB downloads, we’re hoping to make these books more accessible by helping people around the world to find and read them in more places. More people are turning to new reading devices to access digital books, and many such phones, netbooks, and e-ink readers have smaller screens that don’t readily render image-based PDF versions of the books we’ve scanned. EPUB is a lightweight text-based digital book format that allows the text to automatically conform (or “reflow”) to these smaller screens. And because EPUB is a free, open standard supported by a growing ecosystem of digital reading devices, works you download from Google Books as EPUBs won’t be tied to or locked into a particular device. We’ll also continue to make available these books in the popular PDF format so you can see images of the pages just as they appear in the printed book.

To get started, just find any public domain book on Google Books and click on the Download button in the toolbar.

Of course, these public domain books weren’t born in EPUB format–or even in digital format at all. Let’s say you download a free EPUB copy of Treasure Island. You’re taking a final step in a long process that takes a physical copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s book and transforms it into something you can download for your iPhone. The process begins with a book that has been preserved by one of our library partners from around the world. Google borrows the book from one of our library partners, much like you can from your local library. Before returning the book in undamaged form, we take photographs of the pages. Those images are then stitched together and processed in order to create a digital version of the classic book. This includes the difficult task of performing Optical Character Recognition on the page image in order to extract a text layer we can transform into HTML, or other text-based file formats like EPUB (if you’re interested, you can read more about this process here).

Digitizing books allows us to provide more access to great literature for a wider set of the world’s population. Before physical books were invented, thoughts were constrained by both space and time. It was difficult for humans to share their thoughts and feelings with a set of people too far from their physical location. Printed books changed that by allowing authors to record their experiences in a medium that could be shipped around the world. Similarly, the words written down could be preserved through time. The result was an explosion in collaboration and creativity. Via printed books, a 17th century physicist in Great Britain could build on the work of a 16th century Italian scholar.

Of course, it can be difficult and costly to reproduce and transport the information that older physical books contain. Some can’t afford these works. Others who might be able to afford to purchase them can’t unless they can find a physical copy available for sale or loan. Some important books are so limited in quantity that one must fly around the world to find a copy. Access to other works is only available to those who attend certain universities or belong to certain organizations.

Once we convert atoms from physical books into digital bits, we can begin to change some of that. While atoms remain fairly expensive, digital bits are on a trend where they become ever cheaper to produce, transport, and store. For example, providing every student in a school district with a paper copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet might cost thousands of dollars. Yet if those same students already have cell phones, laptops, or access to the Internet, then they can access a digital copy of Hamlet for just a fraction of the cost. Often times, public domain texts in digital form are more affordable and accessible to the public than their physical parents.

All of this of course assumes that a digital version of the book exists. I love going into work each morning knowing that we’re working to convert atoms into bits and that by doing so, we hope to make knowledge more accessible. In a world where educational opportunities are often disproportionately allocated, it’s exciting to think that today anyone with an Internet connection can download any of over one million free public domain books from Google Books. Who knows. Maybe some kid will read Treasure Island on their phone and be inspired to write their own great novel some day.

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