Hasta La Gadget!

Making the Raspberry Pi affordable involved some tough calls, including the omission of MPEG-2 decoding. Licensing fees alone for the video software would have boosted the board’s price by approximately 10 percent. Now, after many have made media centers with the hardware, the foundation behind the project has whipped up a solution to add the missing codec. For $3.16, users can purchase an individual MPEG-2 license for each of their boards on the organization’s online store. Partial to Microsoft’s VC-1 standard? Rights to using Redmond’s codec can be purchased for $1.58. H.264 encoding is also in the cards since OpenMax components needed to develop applications with the functionality are now enabled by default in the device’s latest firmware. With CEC support thrown into the Raspbmc, XBian and OpenELEC operating systems, a single IR remote can control a Raspberry Pi, a TV and other connected gadgets. If you’re ready to load up your Pi with its newfound abilities, hit the source link below.

Update: The Raspberry Pi Foundation let us know that US customers won’t have to pay sales tax, which means patrons will only be set back $3.16 for MPEG-2 and $1.58 for VC-1 support, not $3.79 and $1.90 for the respective licenses. We’ve updated the post accordingly.

Filed under: Misc

Raspberry Pi lands MPEG-2 and VC-1 decoding through personal licenses, H.264 encoding and CEC tag along originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 26 Aug 2012 07:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It was inevitable the game-like features of Foursquare’s ‘mayorships,’ ‘badges’ and ‘check-ins’ would ultimately pave a path to paid advertising. Yes, that unassuming little geolocation-based
app that launched three short years ago at South by Southwest and has
amassed over 20 million registered users has decided to monetize.
Finally slipping into their big boy pants, Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai’s company have launched "Promoted Updates," with clients Madison Avenue ad agencies have been known to court over the years.

We’ve heard a lot of rumors in the last year, but now Barnes & Noble has finally unveiled its first official  plans for taking its Nook tablets and e-readers to markets outside of the U.S. Today it announced that it will be launching the devices, starting first with the e-readers, in the UK in October, along with a new UK online storefront for the Nook digital bookstore (2.5 million digital titles) and “partnerships with leading retailers” to sell them.

The move comes as B&N’s arch rival Amazon gears up to launch the Kindle Fire in the UK — in a deal with leading book retailer Waterstones that includes other Kindle devices as well as e-books. Both the Kindle Fire and the Nook are built on forked versions of Google’s Android OS.

The news also comes at a time when people are scrutinizing how well the Nook line of devices is performing, questioning what sort of an impact Microsoft’s $300 million investment in B&N will have longer-term.

Prior to Amazon announcing a Waterstones agreement, many had thought that B&N would partner with the UK bookseller itself as a way of getting its Nook line of readers and tablets into the UK market. The CEO of Waterstones had publicly praised Waterstones, and reviled Amazon as a devil.

In the absence of a Waterstones deal, B&N now promises “partnerships with leading retailers,” although it has yet to specify any names. It also says that pricing for the Nook readers and tablets will be revealed closer to the date of commercial launch.

Amazon already offers its Kindle e-readers in a number of global markets, and in that sense this is about B&N catching up: “The first products to be available when the company begins offering its products in the UK in mid-October,” it notes, “include Barnes & Noble’s line of…E Ink Readers, NOOK Simple Touch and NOOK Simple Touch with GlowLight.”

The company does not specify when its tablets will be entering the mix.

B&N has for months now been building up its presence in the UK and the rest of Europe, so this may well be a first-move into the rest of the region. In March, the company incorporated in Germany and started to hire there. It has also been running events to cozy up to Android developers in the UK — although in the absence of local billing, and more concrete details on device launches here, that perhaps hasn’t been as buzzy as B&N would have hoped.

The company is due to report its quarterly earnings this week, and all eyes will be on how well its digital and device strategies are holding up, in the wake of people reading less paper books and general problems that have befallen other traditional booksellers like Borders.

Judging by how B&N has marketed the Nook in the U.S., its retail partnerships in the UK will be key to how well it does here. The company doesn’t have any physical stores of its own, and yet its sales strategy in the U.S. has been heavily based on promoting the devices in-store, creating reading areas and offering users free reading time while in the retail location. Whether it will take the same approach here has yet to be made clear. But again the fact that Waterstones, the biggest physical bookseller in the UK, is not going to be among those stocking it will inevitably be a setback in that sense.

The Nook tablet has less than 5% of the U.S. market for tablets at the moment, according to IDC. B&N says that it has sold “millions” of Nook devices to date.

Just one year after its Zagat acquisition, Google has made a move on another trusted lifestyle brand. John Wiley & Sons Inc., the current owner of the Frommer’s network of travel sites and guide books, confirmed the Mountain View acquisition, with a closing expected shortly. According to The Wall Street Journal, Google hasn’t made a call concerning Frommer’s printed guidebooks, which don’t necessarily fall in line with the company’s otherwise online-only model. It’s also unclear whether or not the new content arm will fall under Zagat’s leadership, though a department executive did comment on the acquisition in an interview, saying that Google planned to keep Frommer’s on its current path for the time being. Neither company was able to confirm pricing for the buyout, which could help Google boost its reviews portfolio, backing user-submitted travel content with professional credibility. Full details are at the source link below.

Update: As it turns out, Google will reportedly be keeping the print staff on board, moving the team to its NYC offices. Online editors are less fortunate, however, with layoffs having already begun.

Filed under: Internet

WSJ: Google set to acquire Frommer’s from Wiley, add trusted travel reviews originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Aug 2012 11:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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"Wannabe" is a comedy film starring Craig Robert Young, Octavia Spencer,
Matt Dallas, Tate Taylor, Adam Huss, written by Craig Robert Young and
Richard Keith and directed by Richard Keith. It’s being promoted as one
of the only films to be released on Facebook.
However, while that may be true, if one was to research the movie on the Internet, it is evident this flick was first produced back in 2005?