All the cool kids are playing SSDs these days. So much so that every manufacturer wants of piece of the sweet cherry pie. Even Plextor who was previously known as an optical drive/media company has a set of 64GB and 128GB SSDs available now. Too bad these options tastes more like a supermart-made pie than your grandma’s home cooking.

Features:

• 128GB capacity
• 64MB on-board cache
• SATA II interface
• MSRP of $399

Pros

• It’s an SSD so it’s quiet and rugged

Cons

• Slower than other drives at same price point
• No TRIM support

Review:

SSDs are all about speed. That’s all that really matters so I’ll cut to the chase. This drive is fast, where fast means it’s quicker than standard spinning disk hard drives. And it should be since it’s a SSD hard drive. But it’s also slow as it has noticably slower read/write speeds verses other SSDs in the same price range.

This is important. Only a niche group of computer enthusiasts are willing to drop $400 on a 128GB SSD hard drive. It’s crazy expensive when 1TB desktop drives can be had for around $70. Obviously these people are willing to spend good cash for speed.

But this first generation Plextor simply cannot stand up to late generation drives from Corsair, Crucial, or OCZ. I tested the SSD using HD Tune Pro 4.01 and it’s slower than even the year-old OCZ Vertex 120GB model.

The advice here is to pay attention to your SSD purchase. There are a ton of different options available now and not all of them are worth your money — like this Plextor drive. But that’s just because of its high price. It’s a fine drive and I would have no qualms about having it in my computer, but it needs to be priced at least a $100 less.

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When companies are dying, it’s rarely a quick and painless process. Even so, the demise of Blockbuster has felt like an especially drawn-out and painful one. The latest development came late Tuesday when the company submitted an SEC filing warning that it may file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which read in part,

Our future viability is dependent on our ability to execute these plans successfully. If we fail to do so for any reason, we would not have adequate liquidity to fund our operations, would not be able to continue as a going concern and could potentially be forced to seek relief through a filing under U.S. Bankruptcy Code… It is possible that a successful and efficient implementation of an exchange or any of the other strategies we are pursuing will require us to make a pre-packaged, pre-arranged or other type of filing for protection under Chapter 11.

That couldn’t have been a very fun moment for Blockbuster. Still, if you’ve been following the company, you’ve seen the white flag of surrender raised a few times before. It was there in the company’s last earnings call, when CEO Jim Keyes talked about how Netflix grew market share while his company focused on its balance sheet. It showed again when Keyes appeared on CNBC and, in response to rapidfire questions about Blockbuster’s strategy, he kept putting on a hard-luck smile and insisting it wasn’t too late. And again when Blockbuster re-introduced late fees in the stores — that is, in the stores it’s not planning to shut down.

But informing investors of the possibility of bankruptcy is the law, and so Blockbuster is filing to formally notify the SEC of what many investors already know. Of course, filing for bankruptcy is hardly synonymous with corporate death. It simply means you seek court protection from debt-holders while you restructure. In Blockbuster’s case, the move is seen as part of a debt exchange with its creditors.

But once Blockbuster does emerge from bankruptcy, its larger problems will still remain. It operates a chain of expensive brick and mortar stores in a world turning digital. It tried and failed to price Netflix out of the DVD-by-mail business, and sat back as Netflix built a loyal audience for its streaming movies. It passively let Coinstar corner the DVD-rental-kiosk niche that further weakened its stores.

Now, according to Bloomberg, the company is exploring a consignment-sales model where Blockbuster will, instead of buying DVDs from movie studios, rent them shelf space in its stores. The move is aimed at cutting costs, but it will also lower revenue. And revenue has already been in decline for the past several quarters. The company has also been experimenting with new ways to deliver movies, but lags behind Redbox’s rental kiosks and Netflix’s instant streaming.

Blockbuster says it’s in discussions with movie studios about allowing its customers to rent movies through Blockbuster Express (its answer to Coinstar’s Redbox kiosks) on the same day that the movies are available for sale on DVDs. Currently, Netflix and Coinstar must wait four weeks after the movies go on sale. But it’s not clear why studios will want to award special privileges to a company that may be approaching bankruptcy.

Or possibly liquidation. Because if a restructuring doesn’t work, then Blockbuster might be forced to shut sown and sell off its assets to pay its debts. Some vulture investors will lick their chops over the prospect of a distressed retailer because of the value of the real estate it owns. But Blockbuster is likely to disappoint here as well. As Keyes pointed out on the CNBC interview, it owns only 3,500 of its 6,500 stores, and rents the rest.

Related content on GigaOM Pro:

Who Wins When Movies Are Available Everywhere? (subscription required)

This is a report from our premium subscription research service The Internet Analyst.  The service is currently in free beta.  To sign up, please submit your name and email address here.

Agencies and publishers throughout yesterday's Mobile Advertising Upfront said they were using location-based marketing to get advertisers to allocate a larger part of their budgets to mobile and in some cases are getting small buys from major brands early on.  Specifically, the campaigns:

• Offer very narrow targeting (which advertisers will always pay a premium for).
• Enable advertisers to collect information from their target audience that is unavailable through other media.
• Help advertisers better understand consumers by analyzing their behavior through location-based analysis.

Mobile advertising is still a tiny portion of the overall online advertising pie (we estimate about 2% to 3% excluding text messaging).  In addition, location-based branding campaigns are currently niche, custom campaigns that likely do not drive a lot of volume for the overall category. However, large brands are starting to experiment with these kind of campaigns, which is encouraging for mobile publishers.  If this targeting is combined with scale, advertisers would likely make larger buys, growing the overall mobile advertising pie.

Read the rest of this story »

See Also:

• Google Experimenting With Different Monetization Methods For Mobile Product Search
• Mobile Commerce Growing Rapidly This Year, But Still Years From Being Mass-Market

Filed under: Design, Developer, Internet

Lifeyo is an incredible content management system for someone just trying to put together their first website. The whole system is very web2.0, but they manage to pull off this design cliché in a way which is actually useful -- all the dialogs are sensibly laid out, and the large fonts and bright colors actually make the system less intimidating to use.

Their business model is also quite straightforward, which is important for these kinds of things; after all, you don't want to build a site and find out it's gone the next day because the company went out of business. In Lifeyo's case, they work as a web host. You can either host your site for free with an address such as http://omgponies.lifeyo.com, or you can pay them about $50/year for hosting with your own .com domain name. You cannot download the site or manage it with your own tools -- you're locked in to their own platform, but it's quite comprehensive.

Now that I think of it, the aesthetic is most reminiscent of Tumblr. Looks like they really took a page off Tumblr's book, but instead of going for microblogging, they added everything needed for a small content website with a blog (optional).

All in all, I'm very impressed with how comprehensive the service is. I took some time testing the various options and took lots of screenshots which you can see after the fold. Share Note: While following screenshots show only the page editing interface, the system also features a complete blog editor (very similar to Wordpress).

Each page is composed of "elements". These can be either text, images, or embedded videos. This is a text element, and as you can see, the editor is WYSIWIG:



You can also edit the HTML directly:


Once you click an element out of editing mode you can also edit iyou can edit its contents or "style" (not actual CSS, see the next image).




This is editing the "style" for the textbox above. Basically, you get to choose the background color.



The editing interface has the requisite dropdown menu with a few elementary settings.


You can add images, which are saved.to a "photobank" so you can use them over and over again in various parts of the site.


Your site dashboard features simple analytics -- visitor/hit counts and traffic sources.


There are simple How-To explanations for just about any operation:


Bottom line: Lifeyo is one of the most impressive CMSes I've seen for the "first website ev4r!" niche. It can also be useful for one-off landing pages and other simple commercial sites. My only gripe with it is that like many other services, it too neglects to support RTL (right-to-left), and so cannot really be used for Arabic nor Hebrew.

Lifeyo is an incredible content management system for newbies originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Website - Lifeyo - Business - Content management system - HTML

AOL has recruited a few celebrity chefs and foodies; including Curtis Stone, Food & Wine’s Gail Simmons, and Marcus Samuelsson; and the famed Culinary Institute of America to launch food website KitchenDaily. Similar to Epicurious, AllRecipes, or FoodNetwork.com, KitchenDaily features a recipe database of meals that have been tested by top chefs, food magazine and cookbook publishers.

AOL has recruited a number of talent from Conde Nast’s recently shuttered Gourmet Magazine. Former Gourmet Editor Cheryl Brown is the editor-in-chief with a number of former Gourmet writers named as contributors. Epicurious’ Megan Steintrager will be the senior editor of the site.

In addition to recipes, KitchenDaily will feature a meal-planner tool, cooking lessons, cookbook reviews, and and more than 250 instructional videos created by celebrity chefs and industry insiders. AOL already has a food blog called Slashfood though its unclear how the two sites will be integrated.

The recipe site space is crowded, with a number of worthy competitors vying for traffic. And even Microsoft’s Bing launched its own recipe search product. But its seems that KitchenDaily aims to be part magazine, part recipe site, so it may be able to differentiate itself and possibly attract many former Gourmet readers. We know that AOL CEO Tim Armstrong is bullish on niche content so the launch of this site fits into the company’s strategy nicely.

CrunchBase InformationAOLInformation provided by CrunchBase

Elle court, elle court La rumeur. Amplifiée, déformée, elle occupe la toile et alimente les conversations. A la maison, au bistrot, à la machine à café, tout le monde ne parle plus que de ça : la politique de Nicolas Sarkozy serait une catastrophe sociale. En parcourant (le nez bouché) certains sites « bien informés » de la tentacule internet, on est abreuvé de chiffres extravagants. Du taux chômage au nombre de travailleurs précaires, de minimum vieillesse au seuil de pauvreté, tout est bon pour alimenter La rumeur. Jusqu'aux réductions de charges patronales, niches fiscales et dette de l'état. (...) Source: Le blog de Jean-Pierre Martin

We've pointed to numerous studies, at this point, that have all found that, when done right, free ebooks can greatly increase the sales of physical books (and, in some cases, even of ebooks). Here's another empirical example of that in action. Chris Anderson points us to a blog post by someone at a mid-list niche publisher, talking about how successful its experiments with "free" ebooks have been. In this case, the publisher would offer up the first book in a series as a free ebook, and found that it drove massive increases in sales: One of our free titles was the #1 download on Amazon for the entire month of February. The subsequent sales of books 2 and 3 in the series increased by a rate of 20 to 1. For this series, digital sales are approaching 20% of the total product sales distribution and growing. With the visibility of the digital sales on Amazon, we have seen a substantial increase in print sales to the brick and mortar book chains. In this one instance, digital is driving print sales. Basically, what this publisher realized is that with most books, obscurity is a greater threat than "piracy," and free helps deal with that: Much of the talk by the big 6 publishers has been stress over cannibalization of print sales, or the idea of replacement sales, by ebooks. For midlist publishers such as ourselves, I believe we fight against substitution. We capture the "browser" market. If our title is not available or visible, a customer will simply substitute for another one in the genre. Free gave us the visibility that we could not purchase.

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Samsung is the next consumer electronics manufacturer to come out swinging against Apple’s iPad. A senior executive confirmed plans to release a “slate PC” during the second half of this year.

The key differentiating points for this tablet will address what Samsung feels are two major shortcomings of the iPad: lack of processing power and not enough connectivity options.

“I do feel that that slate-type platform has legs but I think the legs need to be far more powerful, for example an Atom-based product which has far greater flexibility, not to mention inputs and outputs,” said Director of Samsung Australia’s IT division Philip Newton at the Samsung Forum in Singapore. “This has more potential than an iPad.”

The goal is to build a device powerful enough to become the primary computing machine for many people. The ARM chip that powers Apple’s iPad was deemed not powerful enough to make the tablet form factor truly shine; hence Samsung reports that it is looking at two platforms from Intel to power the unnamed device: Atom or the Moorestown System on a Chip.

The slate will be a device “you could take to university and do a PowerPoint presentation on it, for example, or a device that could be taken home or to the office and docked,” Samsung’s Emmanuele Silanesu said .

Samsung is no stranger to the “in-between smartphone and laptop” zone, having released the Q1 ultra-mobile PC (pictured above right) back in 2006. Silanesu assures us that the forthcoming new tablet will have a much stronger focus on the consumer market than the Q1, which “was a very niche product for a vertical market… It was limited (in functionality), the price was relatively high, and it wasn’t an attractive device for consumers.”

It’s not terribly much to go on yet, but how do you think Samsung’s planned device might stack up against the other crop of iPad alternative hopefuls? Are you interested in some flavor of tablet device, and if so, what features should it have?

[via Boy Genius Report]

Tags: apple, atom, ipad, moorsetown, Q1, samsung, samsung tablet, Tablet, tablets

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Google's first attempt at directly selling an Android-powered mobile phone is already being called a flop thanks to reports from mobile analytics company Flurry that estimate sales to have been around 135,000 units in the first 74 days on the market (compared to 1.05 million Motorola Droids, 1 million iPhones.)

However, Google's approach to selling the device is vastly different from the more common methods employed by wireless carriers: it has been primarily sold unlocked for $529 directly from Google, or for $179 with a special T-Mobile plan. Since the device was released, there's been a "Coming soon: Spring 2010" section that shows Verizon Wireless and Vodafone as the next US and European carriers.

Today, Google expanded the device's compatibility in a different direction, and rolled out a version compatible with AT&T in the U.S. and Rogers in Canada. It is now the second Android device on AT&T behind the Motorola Backflip. Rogers currently offers a goodly amount of Android devices, including the HTC Dream and Magic (known as the G1 and MyTouch 3G in the U.S.) LG Eve, Samsung Galaxy Spica, and soon the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10.

So instead of a CDMA version as expected, today we've got a device that supports 850/1900/2100 MHz 3G/UMTS bands, and one that supports the 900/AWS/2100 MHz 3G/UMTS bands used by T-Mobile.

Selling the device unlocked is unlikely to greatly expand its popularity, as it still only appeals to a niche audience.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

It's sold nearly a quarter of a million.

Sony Japan localisation specialist Yeonkyung Kim has admitted that the company's decision not to publish cult dungeon crawl Demon's Souls worldwide was an error.

"That was a mistake," Kim told an audience at GDC last week, according to 1UP. "It should have come out as a first-party title."

Sony published the From-developed PS3 game in Japan, but, assuming it to be a niche project that would fail outside the country, passed up on worldwide rights.

Read more...