media

Five months after Facebook unveiled its platform initiative, the real arms race isn't among developers who want a piece of the action. Now, it's all about other Web companies looking to replicate Facebook's success.

In the past weeks, social networks Tagged, Hi5 and LinkedIn have made it clear they're working on application program interfaces (APIs) for developer platforms much like Facebook's. Rumors have been flying that Facebook's chief rival MySpace.com is working on something similar as well--though it doesn't appear it will be announced this week, as some had thought. (Representatives from … Read more

Discovery Communications, parent company of the Discovery Channel, TLC and Animal Planet, has made plans to acquire HowStuffWorks, which calls itself "the leading source of credible, unbiased, and easy-to-understand explanations of how the world actually works."

The news was originally reported in The Wall Street Journal, which named a price of $250 million.

Atlanta-based HowStuffWorks, which was founded in 1998 by North Carolina State University professor Marshall Brain (yes, that's his real name), pulls in about 3.8 million unique U.S. visitors per month, according to ComScore. Instead of issuing a press release to announce the … Read more

While there's a giant crowd of people waiting for Digg to unveil its pictures section, there are already several services available for browsing popular news by pictures, including Google News and AOL's Mgnet (coverage). There's also a smaller, more independent group of sites that have been created by fans of some of these sites who have created their own visual solutions. One of them--Reddit Media--has increasingly become so popular it's led to Digpicz (Digg in pictures), and now PicUrls--which is a play on words, and similarity to the popular aggregator PopUrls.

The site … Read more

I know this blog is about product design and innovation but let's talk about PR for a minute. Why? Because the way you talk about your product should be part of your design process. The product design ought to incorporate the product story you want to tell. Sometimes, the story even becomes the product. Moreover, some may think PR is immune to innovation, but is in fact a field that is currently going through a series of pretty radical disruptions. The rise of social media has challenged the old way of promoting messages, and today's PR practitioners face … Read more

Whether you're stocking your bomb shelter with postapocalyptic tech, or just feeling a little guilty about your USB power consumption, the Trevor Baylis Eco Media Player offers a wind-up solution for all your MP3 and portable video needs. We reported on this human-powered player back in August, but now we've finally got our hands on it and have a full review over on CNET.

The Eco Media Player has yet to be picked up by any U.S. stores, but you can always order direct.

What do a world renowned chess champion and a Mickey Mouse-loving entertainment executive have in common?

They both believe that successful entrepreneurs must put fears of failure aside in order to achieve their goals.

On Thursday, chess champion, political activist and Russian presidential candidate Garry Kasparov and the former Walt Disney CEO and chairman Michael Eisner presented their views in front of a packed house at the World Business Forum at Radio City Music Hall in New York City.

Kasparov, who in 1984 became the youngest chess champion in the world at age 22, said the key to success is … Read more

Tech gossip blog Valleywag is attempting to counter the TechCrunch-spawned rumor that MySpace.com will be following in Facebook's footsteps and opening up its site to developers.

Sources in touch with the Gawker Media-owned blog allegedly said that MySpace is indeed brewing a developer platform strategy and that the News Corp.-owned social networking site will be making an announcement at next week's Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco--but the two are unrelated.

The announcement, according to Valleywag blogger Megan McCarthy (no relation), will instead deal with MySpace's instant messaging client. Additionally, she wrote, MySpace will … Read more

The lengthy legal fight between social-networking scion Facebook and onetime rival ConnectU isn't over yet. New developments in the dispute on Wednesday probed deeper into the question of exactly what happened in 2004, when both sites were early-stage start-ups run essentially out of Harvard University dorm rooms.

The best-known component of the court drama has been ConnectU's allegation that Zuckerberg pilfered the former's business plan while he was a student at Harvard with ConnectU founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (they're twins) and Divya Narendra. In a San Jose, Calif., courtroom on Wednesday, however, the conversation turned … Read more

When Winamp 5.3 came out a year ago, it impressed many who had written it off, although that may have been simply because it hadn't died a quiet death of obsolescence. Long-needed steps to improve the old-school media player were implemented, with support for AAC encoding, CD burning, and a robust file-management system.

Thirteen months on, Winamp 5.5 ups the ante again with strong support for portable devices, including iPods, the ability to sync non-DRMed files to your PC from your device, an optional new interface layout, a built-in browser for media discovery, and other nifty tricks.

… Read more