Hasta La Gadget!

It was last summer when we first heard the rumblings that Apple was preparing to launch a retail presence in Russia, and a year later, it’s arrived. The company has opened a localized version of its online store, letting locals snap up the fruity devices without resorting to a middle man. There’s no word on if this’ll be followed up with a retail presence, but we imagine Apple will have to amend its T-Shirt-based retail uniform for those unyielding Siberian winters.

Filed under: Cellphones, Desktops, Laptops, Tablets, Apple

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Via: 9to5Mac

Source: Apple Russia

If you love reading stuff on the Internet, you know that most independent publishers earn their living by selling advertising space on their websites. While this is definitely an important part of keeping small online businesses up and running, publishers and content creators are always looking for new ways keep the lights on and cover their operating costs.

Now, there’s a new startup called CentUp which aims to put a little spare change in the pockets of publishers, while giving readers the satisfaction that roughly half of their money is going to a charity of their choice.

CentUp works similarly to the Facebook “Like” button, but when you click it, you can show your support for your favorite websites and blogs by paying them a small amount of money. Keep in mind that CentUp doesn’t block content in any way. You only contribute if you like the site and got value out of the content. In fact, it’s recommend that publishers place the CentUp button at the bottom of their content.

In addition to your pennies going to your favorite sites, your money will be split with one of several diverse small charities. When you first sign up for the service you select a charity of choice, and charge a preloaded donation amount on your credit card. This amount can be set to automatically reload if and when you use it up.

Donation amounts are paid in “CentUp credits” – which each represent one cent of your cash balance, and can be increased beyond your default amount at the time you decide to contribute to a specific piece of content. CentUp automatically splits each credit into three pieces and distributes them – 45% to the publisher, 45% to the charity, and a 10% fee for operating the platform and covering credit card fees.

At any time you can log into your CentUp profile to see who you have contributed to, view a list of publishers, and edit your preferences.

To date, there are just a handful of publishers and six charities participating in CentUp, but its founders expect that to grow substantially in time.

If you like what CentUp stands for, you can sign up for the service by simply clicking the CentUp button at the bottom of this post, or by visiting their website.

Online storage services seem like a must, especially if you’ve ever suffered from a local hard drive failure. These services will help you back up a number of items from your computers, so that you can access them from anywhere and in the event that a computer fails, you’ll have an offsite backup.

Tresorit is a new service, and it works for Windows only for now. Mac, Android and iOS apps are coming soon. The differences between Tresorit and some other services is that they locally encrypt all of your data. The program will encrypt your files and folders with AES-256 before they’re uploaded to the cloud – protecting them from prying eyes in the event of a network compromise.

Tresorit just came out of a limited beta, and you can now get 5GB of free storage space. If you’re wondering at how secure this service will be, starting April 15th, The company is inviting the world’s hackers to try and break its encryption and win $10,000. The service doesn’t yet have web-based access, so you’ll need to have the software installed in order to use it.

If you were ever paranoid that your employer was reading your social media missives, imagine being the subject of some future student’s grad school thesis. From tomorrow, Britain’s six biggest libraries will be entitled to crawl and archive the web in an attempt to create the UK’s official digital repository — in the same way the sextet must receive a copy of every book, newspaper and magazine published in the motherland. The first crawls will begin in the next few weeks, and your drunken holiday photos could be accessible from terminals in the British Library, national libraries of Wales and Scotland as well as the Bodleian, Cambridge University and Trinity College libraries from as early as the end of this year. As far as we’re concerned, we’re hoping those long forgotten Livejournal entries will be packed off to Leeds, where the British Library’s unloved texts go to sit on a shelf die.

Filed under: Internet

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Via: The Telegraph

Source: British Library, (2)

Best Buy started matching prices of online retailers in time for the holidays last year, and now it’s set to make the practice permanent in an effort to cure its showroom syndrome and turn window-shopping visitors into paying customers. Come March 3rd, the policy will go into effect for the outfit’s website, typical brick and mortar locations, Best Buy mobile shops and even phone orders. Officially dubbed the Low Price Guarantee, the plan will meet prices for all local competitors and a total of 19 online storefronts, including the likes of Amazon, Apple, Staples, NewEgg and Target. Also, the pricing arrangement has been expanded to additional products, but it still doesn’t cover on-contract smartphones and other items. While customers might end up saving some coin with the new deal, they’ll see the item return period drop from 30 days to 15. By the looks of it, company founder Richard Schulze might be getting his way with plans to save his struggling creation.

[Image credit: Daniel Oines, Flickr]

Filed under: Misc

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Via: Bloomberg

Source: Best Buy