Hasta La Gadget!

Coinciding with the impending abandonment of Microsoft Points, the ability to rent and purchase media from Zune Marketplace will also be hitting retirement come August 22nd. A recently-posted FAQ on the Xbox website details the changes, directing current users to hurry up and use their remaining points as they’ll be worthless come that EOL date. For future service Microsoft is unsurprisingly pointing users to Xbox Music and Video, noting that the latter will also be accessible on Xbox One, Windows Phone 8 and browsers “later this year.” Unlimited streaming will be accessible through the Xbox Music Pass as you’d expect, and your existing media will continue to function as normal. Better yet, OG Zune Music Pass subscribers will still be able to stream tunes and obtain their 10 free downloads per month. Consider it another inevitable nail in the Zune brand’s coffin, while it lives on through Xbox.

Filed under: Gaming, Portable Audio/Video

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Via: The Verge

Source: Xbox.com

It was a good ride while it lasted, but the browser wars haven’t been kind to Rockmelt, which has announced that it’ll cease supporting its socially-inclined desktop browser sometime in the next few months. The decision was made because keeping up with the steady stream of updates for Chromium, the code upon which the Rockmelt browser was based, was simply too costly.

In its place, the company has announced Rockmelt for Web, a portal that may serve to alleviate some of the Reader rage many of us are experiencing. It aggregates content from “your favorite sites, your favorite people, and a dash of crazy stuff you never would have discovered,” so it’s like a combination of RSS, social networks and StumbleUpon. It’s an invite-only beta for now, though users of the browser and iOS app have already been invited to the party. The rest of you lot can get on the list by hitting the source and signing up.

Filed under: Internet, Software

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Via: TechCrunch

Source: Rockmelt Blog (1), (2), Rockmelt for Web