Online retailer Amazon.com has been in the news a lot this week. Yesterday it was announced that Amazon.com will start their own digital music store and will sell DRM-free music downloads in the MP3 format. The MP3s will be compatible on all computers and digital music players including Apple's popular iPod.
This announcement follows one made last month when Apple announced it would be selling DRM-free music in the AAC format from the EMI group of music labels through the iTunes Music Store. EMI is one of the 4 biggest record label conglomerates in the world owning such labels as Capitol and EMI Records.
Amazon's service is slated to be launched in the fall. Pricing for the DRM-free MP3s have not been announced. Apple meanwhile was slated to start selling their DRM-free AAC files at $1.29 each per song this month through the iTunes Music Store. Apple will continue to sell copy-protected AAC music files for 99 cents.
Hopefully the DRM-free AAC and MP3 file formats find success in the marketplace to a point where they will eventually replace all copy protected music and audio content. This is good for the consumer as it allows us to purchase once and use the files on any device we own.
In other Amazon.com news, it was announced earlier this week that they were buying dpreview.com, a popular digital camera and photography review website based in England. I like dpreview.com, and hope the purchase does not change how the site is run.
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Thursday, May 17, 2007
Monday, May 07, 2007
24 Hours of Flickr
24 Hours of Flickr was a worldwide photo contest held by Flickr.com (owned by Yahoo.com) to document this past Saturday, May 5, 2007. Thousands of Flickr members had a chance to submit one photo for the 24 Hours of Flickr contest from which the best photos will be chosen and published in an upcoming book.
I heard about this through a post at HawaiiThreads. I decided late Saturday afternoon to go out and shoot some pix at Ala Moana Park and see what I could come up with. Shown on this page are three of 277 photos I shot that afternoon. Six of them are posted to my Flickr page. One of them I chose to enter into the contest. Now I sit back and wait to see what's next.
