The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘publisher’

Were you one of the lucky few to score a graphic novel at an insanely low price thanks to Amazon’s pricing glitch last week? (If so, I kinda hate you, because I didn’t.) Well, enjoy it, because Amazon has stopped selling most graphic novels altogether while the problem continues to be sorted out.

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Amazon stops selling graphic novels completely after huge sale glitch

Online vacation rental giant HomeAway this morning announced that it is expanding its global footprint and moving into South America with the acquisition of the publisher of AlugueTemporada.com.br, Brazil’s leading vacation rental site. The terms of the deal remain undisclosed.

With its acquisition of what HomeAway claims is the largest vacation rental website in South America with over 12,000 property listings, the company is for the first time extending its virtual borders beyond North America and Europe and increasing its total vacation rental listings to a respectable 475,000 properties.

AlugueTemporada.com.br will continue to operate as an independent brand from its office in Rio de Janeiro, the city that will – conveniently – be hosting both the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics.

Seems like HomeAway is on a bit of a buying spree more than two years after it raised a whopping $250 million in a single financing round – just last week it announced that it had purchased BedAndBreakfast.com for an equally undisclosed sum.

HomeAway also operates HomeAway.com, VRBO.com, BedAndBreakfast.com and VacationRentals.com in the US and multiple vacation rental sites in France, the UK, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland.

Expect more small acquisitions from HomeAway in the months to come.

Google’s recently announced $25 million acquisition of DocVerse represented one saga of an ongoing war between Google and Microsoft over dominance in the productivity suite place. Today, Israeli enterprise software company Mainsoft is launching a Docverse-like plug-in that may up the ante in the battle. Harmony is launching free plug-ins that bring Google Docs documents and Microsoft SharePoint document libraries directly to Microsoft Outlook.

Once downloaded, Harmony for Google Docs will open in a sidebar pane within Outlook. The new Harmony sidebar enables people to share a single, centralized copy of the document, eliminating the many intermediary steps associated with sending e-mail attachments back and forth. The plug-in allows users to locate, share, and work on Google documents directly from their email client.

Once logged in to your Google account, you’ll be able to drag any files (ie Microsoft Word files, PDFs) directly from an email to the Harmony sidebar to upload and convert them to Google documents. You can drag a Google document from the sidebar to create links in your e-mail messages and meeting requests to other users and viewers. Harmony automatically shares the document with the recipients. You can decide to give recipients read or write access. Recipients simply click the link in the message to open the document in their browser and don’t need to have Harmony installed to view the document.

Harmony also allows you to search document contents on Google Docs from the Harmony search box and locate documents using the View Bar, which allows you to switch between common views, such as spreadsheets, starred items, items owned by or shared with you, and more. One of the major features of Harmony is the ability to actually open and edit Google documents from directly in Outlook. All your changes are saved online and are available to your colleagues. You can organize and create folders to store Google Docs and also save Google documents in Office format. Harmony can export Google documents to Office, Open Office, PDF, RTF, HTML, TXT, and image formats.

The SharePoint plug-in isn’t nearly as sexy as as the Google Docs app but still offers a useful set of tools for enterprise users. The plug-in aims to transform Microsoft Outlook into a collaboration console, with access to documents stored on SharePoint. Similar to the Google Docs plug-in, you can drag e-mail attachments or entire e-mail messages to publish them on SharePoint. You can search the contents of documents in your current SharePoint site or library and share documents via e-mail message, calendar appointment, or task. You can edit a document from within Outlook, view document history and more.

Harmony was built using SharePoint Web Services interfaces and Google Docs open APIs and in the process has transformed Microsoft Outlook into a more collaborative application. Most importantly, the Google Docs plug-in makes the transition between web-based documents and the desktop email client seamless. It gives Microsoft users the best of both worlds, much like Docverse did with Microsoft Word documents and web-based files. If you use Microsoft Outlook and Google Docs, the plug-in seems like a no brainer to download. Plus its conveniently free. Considering the fate of Docverse, it may only be a matter of time before Microsoft and Google come sniffing around Harmony.

Since its launch almost exactly a year ago, Foursquare’s website has largely had the same basic design. Tonight, it looks like that’s finally getting updated.

While it looks like the update is still in the process of rolling out to all the pages, Foursquare.com now clearly has new system-wide toolbars, a brand new sign-up page, as well as some new settings. You might also notice a new, name-only logo.

While it’s been clear for a while that Foursquare has been working on a site redesign, only in the past few days have signs started to show that it was coming. For example, a completely revamped History area showed up a few days ago, one allowing for venues to have categories as well as show which friends you checked-in with at places.

The biggest part of the changes currently rolling out is to the sign-up page. The new step-by-step process looks highly influenced by Twitter’s sign-up page (which they too tweaked a few times over the years). The process now allows you to sign up, easily find friends already using Foursquare via Twitter or Facebook Connect, as well as link up to those aforementioned networks. After you do that, there’s a one-page rundown of what you can do with Foursquare (such as download one of the mobile apps, earn badges, and explore cities).

These sign-up pages are important for convincing new users to not only sign up, but also showing them what to do. With Foursquare signing mainstream deals left and right, they’re going to need this.

Something else that appears to be new: an option in the setting page for  letting local businesses see that you have checked-in at their venue. When you click the link to learn more, it says:

We allow verified venue owners to see statistics about checkins at their venue. These stats include recent visitors, most frequent visitors and most popular checkin times. You can always opt out if you’d rather not share this data with the venues you visit.

Sadly, with the redesign, there is still no way to check-in from the site itself. You have to use one of the app, the mobile web, or text messaging to do that.

Speaking of mobile apps, Foursquare is about to launch a completely redesigned iPhone app as well. All of these moves are necessary if Foursquare is going to keep up with its better-designed rival, Gowalla (which also just revamped its website).

Something else interesting from tonight: apparently the concept of “checking-in” made its onscreen debut on the popular TV show Gossip Girl. Co-founder Dennis Crowley noted the move and tweeted out a picture of it captured from the show. While there is no specific mention of Foursquare, it seems obvious (at least to Crowley) what they’re paying homage to. And Foursquare actually has paid homage the other way, with its “Gossip Girl” badge.

The move towards the mainstream continues — or maybe Elizabeth Fisher was just actually checking-in to that hotel. Hard to know for sure.

You may remember Akoha, a startup which launched at the 2008 TechCrunch50 conference which uses “mission cards” that friends pass to each other along with a mission ( i.e. give someone a book or buy someone a meal.) The idea is that users will socialize their missions, using your social graph to compete against friends and determine how your missions performed. Akoha has been played in more than 65 countries since the company’s launch.

Today, Akoha is launching an free iPhone app and a redesign of its site. Akoha’s iPhone app. With the new app, Akoha has increased the number of missions that can be played. A now Akoha is rewarding players for completed missions with badges, similar to Foursquare’s badge model. Akoha is also allowing users to socialize missions by integrating with Twitter to allow users to broadcast completed tasks.

Akoha was founded by Austin Hill and Alex Eberts, who together co-founded Zero-Knowledge Systems (now Rdadialpoint) in 1997. In 2008, the startup received $1.9 million in funding from David Chamandy (co-founder, Lavalife), Ron Dembo (founder, Zerofootprint.net), film producer Jake Eberts (Chariots of Fire, Ghandi), and seed fund Montreal Start Up.

Over the last month or so, Apple has clearly been on a mission to trim down the App Store to applications that are useful and family friendly. First, it removed thousands of sex-themed applications, and it’s also been making moves to crack down on overly simplistic ‘cookie cutter‘ apps. But there may be yet another segment of the App Store on the chopping block: Books. According to a recent report, books represent 27,000 of the App Store’s 150,000 applications, making them the most abundant type of application on the App Store. And they’re becoming increasingly redundant.

Before developers get alarmed, I should make it clear that I haven’t heard anything about Apple removing the myriad book apps from the App Store. But given the impending release of Apple’s own iBooks app alongside the iPad, and the recent App Store cleanup spree, I won’t be at all surprised if they do something to change the way books are treated on the platform.

There are a few reasons why Apple might want to do this. First and foremost, there’s the user experience for new iPad users. One of the iPad’s highly touted features is its ability to read books using the new iBooks application, which serves as both a book store and a very nice looking eBook reader. But according to Apple’s website, iBooks won’t come pre-installed on the iPad. You can be sure that Apple will give its own application top billing on the App Store, but there will still be plenty of room for confusion.

Imagine what will happen when a new iPad user boots up the device for the first time and decides to buy Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but instead of doing it through the iBooks app, they simply run a search on the App Store. There are at least 25 different standalone applications featuring the book, selling for between 99 cents and five dollars. Each of these applications has its own book reading interface, many of which aren’t nearly as polished as the iBooks app Apple has shown off. And every time the user downloads a different book from the App Store, they’ll be using yet another new interface. That doesn’t seem like the sort of user experience Apple typically strives for.

And then there’s the issue of App Store clutter. As I mentioned before, Apple seems to be focused on eliminating many of the frivolous applications from the App Store. There are plenty of high quality book applications available, but there are also quite a few — perhaps even the majority — that amount to little more than a Project Gutenberg text wrapped in an overly basic reader. Which is exactly the sort of thing Apple is tired of. Books already make up the most popular category of application on the App Store; if they keep growing at this pace, they’ll eventually represent the majority of applications available.

To be clear, I don’t think Apple is going to ban book markets like Amazon’s Kindle reader or Stanza. These generally have much more functionality than a basic book app, and eliminating them would be blatantly anti-competitive. That may not have any legal repercussions, but Apple badly needs high quality applications on the iPad to make it a success — it would be unwise to scare off major developers wary of having their app blocked because Apple has a competing product (this is one reason, I think, that iBooks is not included with the iPad).

All of that said, there are some reasons why Apple may not do anything on this front. For one, Apple is probably making a decent chunk of revenue from paid book applications, so it may not particularly care whether it gets its revenue cut from the app vendor or the publisher itself through iBooks. And then there’s the PR cost. Apple got away with unceremoniously removing thousands of ’sexy’ applications because nobody is going to stand up and defend their right to view titillating bikini photos. But if Apple pulled thousands of books from the store, the headlines could be more damaging, with imagery of book bonfires abound (despite the fact that the same content would likely be available through iBooks).

Or Apple may find some middle ground. It could hide book apps from iPad search results and keep them iPhone-only  (though the iPhone will probably get a version of iBooks, too). It might just start blocking new book submissions but leave the existing apps be. Or perhaps it will include some kind of banner on relevant searches like “Did you know this title is also available on iBooks?”. In any case, while I am by no means advocating such a change, I suspect that if you want to download one of these standalone book applications in the not-so-distant future, you’re going to have to go out of your way to do it.

Update: As commenter Peter Cooper points out, iBooks is only going to be available in the US at launch, and some developers are working towards books that can do far more than ‘normal’ book readers (including iBooks). So there are clearly reasons to keep the Book section intact, but I still suspect changes are coming to the way Apple handles book applications (at least the basic ones).

Apple’s iBooks

Top image by Austinevan

Recently a war has broken out in Europe about who will power online video for media owners. The two main players tussling it out are both from the US: Ooyala and Brightcove.

Last month Ooyala, a provider of video platform applications and services, and the UK’s Telegraph Media Group signed an agreement for Ooyala to run online video on the publisher’s websites and co-develop new technologies.

Today Ooyala is partnering with Middle East based social media platform developer H2O New Media, giving it distribution rights to Ooyala’s video platform, Backlot. It wil be used to stream video content from the growing Middle East television and media sector.

But (also today) Brightcove, which already has some big partners in Europe, is fighting back with a swathe of deals in Spain.

It’s time we start implementing DRM on console games. I mean, look at this nonsense

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Because of leaks, we need to immediately implement DRM on console games

Microsoft will kill Xbox Live support for original Xbox games. Rumor has is that this is being done to increase the numbers of friends you can have on Xbox (360) Live

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Microsoft to kill Xbox Live support for original Xbox games on April 15

Stupid Steam, making me spend money whenI had no intention of doing so. This weekend’s deal is the FarCry collection, which includes FarCry and FarCry 2: Fortune’s Edition (includes DLC and other bonus items).

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FarCry, Far Cry 2 $15 bundle on Steam this weekend