While some cast yesterday’s news in the Google books saga as the death of the settlement that would have resolved the search king’s long fight with publishers, the bigger picture is that out-of-print books for all just got a lot closer to reality.

True, the New York federal court filing was officially a request to withdraw the deal Google struck late last year with publishers and authors, in the wake of objections Friday from the US Justice Department. But that version had a good chance of getting rejected by the judge, given that the regulatory concerns followed major objections from the non-profit world, other interested parties and the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo. Continue reading "Google to US: we can work it out"

In the evolution of the Amazon Cloud, Wednesday’s news of a trial service designed specifically for the core applications of large companies seems to mark a watershed.

So far, the Amazon pitch has mainly been directed at smaller companies, or at bigger ones looking for somewhere to host high-volume Web services. It is now trying to take things one step further. Continue reading "Amazon sets its sights on enterprise IT"

Amazon.com was taken to task earlier this month after it deleted unauthorised copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, with critics accusing the leader in the e-book industry of Big Brotherish behaviour.

Amazon eventually gave the affected customers refunds, and chief executive Jeff Bezos apologised for the episode, calling it “stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles.”  But the damage to Amazon’s reputation had already been done.

Now the incident has sparked a lawsuit. Continue reading "Amazon sued for Big Brotherish behaviour"

Apple is aiming to ship its oft-rumoured tablet-style touch-screen computer this fall, we reported over the weekend, combining a big screen with the functionality of an iPod Touch.

The company has been striving to perfect the device for years, while attempt by PC makers to peddle Microsoft-powered tablets have fizzled.

Continue reading "Apple ties tablet release to music sales drive"

PayPal said in March that it planned to double revenues in two years, growing from $2.4bn to $5bn by 2011. It was an audacious goal, but today PayPal gave some indication of how it hopes to achieve as much.

With the official introduction of its platform on Thursday, PayPal invited third-party developers to tap into the PayPal experience and weave it into their own applications and websites. Called Adaptive Payments, the platform should expand PayPal’s reach, bringing it to iPhone, Facebook and Twitter applications, and perhaps into the physical retail world. Continue reading "PayPal gets a platform"

• Barnes & Noble unveiled its challenge to Amazon’s Kindle e-book service with an expanded online store selling more than 200,000 e-book titles for both laptop computers and mobile devices. The chain also said it would provide the e-book store for a wireless portable e-reader being developed by Plastic Logic that is scheduled for launch next year.
• Texas Instruments, the second largest US chipmaker, reported a surge in demand for its products in the second quarter as it beat revenue and profit expectations. Following Intel’s positive outlook last week, TI gave another boost to the tech sector, forecasting solid growth in the current quarter. Continue reading "techfile 21.07.09"

Amazon’s woeful decision to delete unauthorised copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from its customers’ Kindles hammers home an uncomfortable lesson.

The idea that you can “own” digital data, in the same sense that you can own a book, was always suspect. But at least some forms of digital media have conveyed many of the attributes of ownership. With local storage, the bits have been delivered onto a device that you can unplug and put in your pocket. The information, at that point, is “yours”. Continue reading "The lesson from Amazon’s book deletion"

The FT’s John Gapper says the most influential piece of personal technology to emerge in recent years did not come from Apple, Amazon or Research in Motion. Instead, he points to the Asustek’s Asus Eee PC, which created the category now known as “netbooks”.

Few analysts grasped the significance of the Eee because they did not think that people in the developed world would buy a not-very-powerful device with a tiny screen and a small keyboard. Meanwhile, US companies from Dell to Microsoft and Apple gazed studiously elsewhere.

Yet, nearly two years on, evidence of the Eee’s influence is everywhere, from the weak outlook reported by Dell this week to Google’s announcement that it will build a rival to Windows in its Chrome OS operating system, and Microsoft’s move to offer a free web version of its Office software suite.

Continue reading “Little laptops snap at the oligopoly”