Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on February 26, 2007 by CyberNet.

When I think of BitTorrent, the first word that comes to my mind is illegal. While it is generally used for illegally downloading movies among other things, BitTorrent is hoping that at least one-third of the 135 million people who have downloaded their software are willing to pay for it. That’s why they are launching a store where they will rent videos and sell TV shows at prices of $3.99 for new movies and $2.99 for older movies. TV shows will be 1.99 which will be downloaded for keeps.

The problem that they are going to run into is simply that the people who know how to use BitTorrent are already cozy with getting their movies for free. The general public are not going to be willing to download the software and try to familiarize themselves with using it when there are other easier services offering the same type of thing. It will definitely come as a surprise if they’re able to get their goal of 45 million people who are willing to pay for the content that they previously got for free. From a cost standpoint, you’re better off going with something like Netflix where you have the option of getting movies in mail and/or download.

There’s also another catch.  The movies will be protected by Windows Media DRM (this means you can only play them in Windows Media Player) and will automatically destroy in 24 hours. Although, at some point, someone is bound to break the Windows Media DRM protection which will would possibly allow people to keep the downloads for an indefinite period of time. If people are willing to go to those lengths to get the full video on their computers for keeps, they’ll just download it illegally anyways.

They’ve got deals with some of the major studios like 20th Century Fox, Lionsgate, MTV Networks, Paramount, and others. The content will be plentiful, but will the customers?

Source: Associated Press [via Yahoo]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on June 23, 2008 by CyberNet.

Windows only
It’s been a long time coming, but it looks as though we might have our first full-fledged desktop feed reader that supports synchronization with Google Reader. The RSS Bandit blog announced over the weekend that they have released version 1.7 Alpha that is capable of downloading podcasts as well as synchronizing feeds with Google Reader.

The reason why something like this is nice is that it lets you have a functional desktop feed reader when you’re at your computer, but then you can always access your feeds online when you’re on-the-go. Google Reader’s mobile interface is especially nice, which is the main reason that I’m excited to see the open source RSS Bandit application support it.

Once you follow the few steps in the RSS Bandit synchronization wizard you’ll be able to access your feeds from anywhere. This includes any feeds you unsubscribe/subscribe to, renaming feeds, marking feed items as read, and you can even share items just like you can from Google Reader’s online interface. Pretty nice, huh?

Now if only RSS Bandit was cross-platform.

Get RSS Bandit 1.7 Alpha [via Digital Inspiration]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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The iOS platform isn’t the only way to make money on the mobile apps scene.

Tech news site Electricpig took a look at eight groups that have made it big — more than six-digits big — with hit Android apps.

Better Android Apps, for example, has made approximately $1.34 million from purchases of its hits Better Keyboard and Open Home. Yongzh created emulators for the PlayStation, Sega, Nintendo and Atari systems, and gathered about $1.81 million from sales of these apps.

“Conventional wisdom told us that to be successful, we had to focus on iOS. Conventional wisdom was wrong,” said Gary Gattis, CEO of Spacetime Studios.

That certainly seems to be true with the tower-defense game Robo Defense. It has also been a big winner, netting creator Lupis Labs more than $2.09 million.

An estimated 3.7 billion Android apps have been downloaded to date, according to AndroLib. Many developers wish that number would rise at a faster rate and are counting on tools like in-app payments to spur app purchases and developer earnings. However, that hasn’t stopped developers such as Eddie Kim, creator of Car Locator, or almost anyone else on this list, from netting big profits.

These high sales figures illustrate that Android’s app market is finally coming to fruition as a solid distribution platform, where software programmers can make good money. Within months of the opening of Apple’s App Store in the summer of 2008, a few lucky programmers quickly struck gold with hot sales of their apps.

Android has been around for about the same time, and only now are we beginning to see comparably high sales figures for Android app makers. Though Google’s app market has been slower to mature, these success stories should give programmers more incentive to make killer apps for Android-powered tablets and smartphones.

Beautiful Widgets netted its maker, LevelUp Studio, more than $934,000. Halfbrick Studios (maker of Fruit Ninja) has netted more than $242,000 after porting its iOS favorite to Android.

Other big winners, thanks to pop-up advertising, include Rovio, for (what else?) Angry Birds, and Arron La for Advanced Task Manager.

Spacetime Studios‘ Pocket Legends, a 3-D MMO, has managed to garner profits of $8,000 per day from in-app payments, making it a shoo-in for six-figure earnings in the not-too-distant future.

“The Android platform has seen phenomenal growth, and it’s great that new avenues for app distribution are opening up,” Rovio CEO Mikael Hed said in a recent news release.

The addition of new marketplaces like Amazon’s App Store is proof, showing that Google’s OS has the potential to be just as lucrative as Apple’s, and companies want to get in on the action.

Spacetime’s Gattis summed up the Android app scene pretty nicely: “In some ways, it’s kind of like the wild, wild West,” he said, “but that’s where the Gold Rush people made their claim.”

Image: Bad Piggy Bank (Rovio)

Meet The Android App Millionaires [Electricpig via Android Guys]

This article was written on March 18, 2010 by CyberNet.

Windows only
Don’t you hate when you’re downloading something (namely via BitTorrent) and it renders the rest of your computer nearly unusable. NetBalancer can fix this because it is a Windows program that gives you control over what apps are considered more important than others. You can, for example, designate priority to your web browser instead of your BitTorrent client. You can even specify download and upload priorities separately meaning a process can have a high download priority but a low upload priority.

The catch? The free version of NetBalancer limits you to setting upload and/or download priorities for 5 different processes. If you want to do any more than that you’ll have to buy the full version for $25, but generally I’d say there are only a handful of apps that I’d want to apply this to. So I’d say for personal use this limitation should be fine for most people.

Here’s a list of the things NetBalancer is capable of:

• Set download and upload network priority for any process. Currently supported priorities are:
  • High priority
  • Normal priority
  • Low priority
  • Block traffic
  • Ignore traffic
  • Limit traffic
• Set download and upload speed limits for a process
• Show all system processes with their in and out network traffic speed
• Show current connection for any process
• Show downloaded and uploaded traffic for any process since NetBlancer’s start
• View overall system traffic as a graph
• Show last 15 seconds traffic in system tray
• Fine tune priorities (see Level Severity setting).

This is one of the few traffic shaping applications out there that have a free version available, and being able to prioritize your traffic to ensure a quality of service (QOS) is pretty nice. Definitely worth the download if you’re in the market for such an app.

NetBalancer Homepage (Windows 2003 32/64-bit, XP 32/64-bit, Vista 32-bit, Windows 7 32-bit)
[via ShellCity]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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We noted Firefox 3’s spectacular eight million downloads in a day when discussing the recent launch of IE9, and that mark shall live on as a record for another day. Firefox 4 looks to have a had a thoroughly successful debut, going past the five million milestone within the first 24 hours of its release, but it hasn’t quite been able to overshadow its predecessor. And before you go comparing its numbers to the latest Internet Explorer, do be cognizant that FF4 released on a wider set of platforms, rendering direct stat comparisons a little dicey. That’s not stopping StatCounter, however, who notes that the latest Firefox already has a 1.95 percent share of the browser market, almost exactly double what IE9 can claim so far. Better get working on that XP compatibility, eh Microsoft?

Continue reading Firefox 4 clocks up 5 million downloads within first 24 hours, fails to beat Firefox 3 download record

Firefox 4 clocks up 5 million downloads within first 24 hours, fails to beat Firefox 3 download record originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Mar 2011 08:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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