The second

My first Anker building

It took some time but here is my first Anker Building. My late uncle left me many sets of Anker stones. Over the last couple of years together with the secretaris of the Club van Ankervrienden I filed and organized the many stones, catalogues etc. Yesterday I took some smaller boxes and started building my first one, a small Church.

Fortune 500 company considers using Macs

Fortune 500 company considers using Macs

Despite Apple's historical tendency to shy away from the enterprise IT market, the company's new Intel-based Macs have begun turning heads at big businesses looking to accommodate a broader spectrum of users. An IT manager of a Fortune 500 company is considering purchasing Macs for mainstream enterprise deployment, according to PC Magazine, as well...

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iPods soothe tempers in Holland

iPods soothe tempers in Holland

The iPod nano has been turned into an unusual form of stress reliever, according to a news report from the Netherlands. The southeast city of Maastricht handed out iPod nanos to its 280 sanitation workers two weeks ago, hoping to improve their moods by letting them tune into music during their shifts. The giveaway had been prompted by numerous co...

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Mozilla To Build Social Networking Into Firefox: Bad News For Flock?

Mozilla To Build Social Networking Into Firefox: Bad News For Flock

 

Mozilla has released details on The Coop, a new product that will incorporate social networking features directly into the Firefox browser. This is not good news for the privately-backed social browser Flock (also built on Mozilla), which is yet to release a 1.0 version of its browser. Many of the proposed features and some of the mockups created by Mike Beltzner (see above) suggest a significant overlap in the two products.

In fact, Coop even has an example screen shot of Flock on the wiki page describing the product, along with the description “The design will likely resemble [formerly of Flock] Chris Messina’s mockup for “People in the Browser”, with a horizontal bar containing avatars for a user’s friends, and icons overlaid on those avatars to indicate the presence of new content.”

The Coop product will allow Firefox users to “subscribe” to friends in the browser, bringing those friends into a sidebar. Those friends can share content and web pages with you (receive content from you, and send content to you).

Adding a friend will mean getting access to a broad array of their published web content. Content will be pulled from that person’s Flickr photo feed, del.icio.us tag feed, MySpace status , YouTube favorites, etc. When you want to share content with that user, you simply drag it into their avatar (see mockups below).

As Larry Dignan notes, The Coop could also have an impact on social networks that depend on constant user page refreshes to maintain pageview growth. Having status information on your friends directly in the browser could significantly lessen the need to visit those sites directly.

 

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PC World ranks 50 best products of all time

PC World ranks 50 best products of all time

PC World has ranked its view on the 50 best products of all time...

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EMI Selling DRM-Free Music

EMI Selling DRM-Free Music

 

Wow. Mere hours after April Fool’s Day — sorry, fanboys, for our attacks on your sacred cows yesterday — and we get work that Steve is hitting London-town to announce that EMI will start selling DRM-free music.

In a major reversal of the music industry’s longstanding antipiracy strategy, EMI Group PLC is set to announce Monday that it plans to sell significant amounts of its catalog without anticopying software, according to people familiar with the matter.

The London-based music company is to make its announcement in a press conference that will feature Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs. EMI is to sell songs without the software — known as digital rights management, or DRM — through Apple’s iTunes Store and possibly through other online outlets, too.

What does this mean for you and me? Not much, but picking out a music player just got a lot easier if you have any interest in the EMI catalog, which includes the Beatles and Queen. DRM-free music, as many folks are pointing out, is a huge gamble for EMI since they’re in dire straits and might be sold to Warner, which considers DRM as important as air.Blogged with Flock