purchase

On Thursday, YouTube launched a new system for partners in the U.S. to make their videos available for download and purchase. While the download feature showed up as early as mid-January for some videos, little explanation was given by Google on how video creators could offer it on their own content.

With the new system partners who are admitted into the program can choose from one of five different Creative Commons licenses, and can set the pricing of a video to anything they want. Users who want to buy the video go through a special Google Checkout page that … Read more

IT spending worldwide is expected to slip 3 percent this year, with computer makers taking the brunt of the decline, according to a Forrester Research report released Tuesday.

Global IT spending is predicted to drop to $1.66 trillion this year, marking the first time in seven years the industry has not grown, according to the report, which used U.S. dollars as its form of measurement.

"Our forecast for 2009 rests on the assumptions that the economic recession in the U.S. and other major economies will start to end in the second half of 2009," Andrew … Read more

Apple has announced that 300 million iPhone apps have been downloaded or distributed from the iTunes App Store since it first opened in July 2008. The announcement was made via ads placed in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. The ads emphasize and promote some of the more popular apps for the iPhone.

Apple has also confirmed via these ads that the App store recently passed the 10,000 mark in available apps in the iTunes App Store. Apple reported in it's last earnings report on October 21, 2008 that iPhone users had downloaded 200 million … Read more

According to a recent report by Futuresource, a consulting company that did a survey on how many of us copy DVDs a while ago, the high-definition disc markets in both the U.S. and Europe continue to perform very well, thanks to the fact that the world shifted to one format--Blu-ray--at the beginning of the year.

Currently, taking only big titles into account, the share of total sales being taken by Blu-ray has already hit 5 percent to 6 percent. By the end of the year, this share is estimated to be more than 10 percent. With many hot title … Read more

If you are a San Francisco resident considering solar panels, now is the time for action, says Lyndon Rive, CEO of SolarCity, a start-up that leases panels to homeowners.

Since the city solar-incentive program came into effect in July, it has become financially viable for even small energy consumers to install solar-power systems.

The San Francisco incentive covers between $3,000 to $6,000 for homeowners to install solar panels, as well as $10,000 for businesses and nonprofits, and $30,000 for nonprofit affordable housing. The program runs for a decade.

This initiative, together with a state rebate program … Read more

Yeah, I know, it hit me as a surprise too. However, that's one of the findings found in a recent Consumer Home Piracy market research study carried out by Futuresource Consulting and sponsored by Macrovision.

The study was done in May 2008 in the U.S. and the U.K. with the sample size of more than 5,000 people. As it turns out, one-third of all the respondents in both countries admit to having made copies of prerecorded DVDs, on average about 13 titles each, in the last six months, up from just over a quarter of respondents … Read more

SunRun, a company that offers solar-electricity financing, announced Tuesday that it has raised $12 million from Foundation Capital.

The San Francisco-based start-up is one of handful of new companies looking to make solar panels an easier purchase for consumers through financing.

Solar electric panels have a hefty up-front cost--between $20,000 and $35,000-- depending on the size, before rebates.

Although buyers will generally recoup the initial outlay in lower electricity bills in about 15 years, the high cost has restricted solar electricity to a niche audience, say solar industry executives.

Rather than buy the panels, SunRun customers buy the … Read more

One of the things that we open sourcerors need to figure out - or which the market needs to figure out - is the convenience of purchasing proprietary software. By this I don't mean any particular vendor's policies: I'm talking about the basic act of buying something that masquerades as property.

For better or (in my view) for worse, the industry knows how to buy proprietary software. Increasingly, thanks to the pull of Red Hat and Salesforce.com, it's getting used to subscription-based pricing, too.

As I re-discovered today on a call with a prospective customer, however, we still have a long way to go, because as an industry we don't really do a good job of quantifying the value of support. In the case of this prospect, as well as others with whom I meet, support gets low-man-on-the-totem-pole status when it comes to purchasing. They know there's value in it, and they even know that they need it (at least, initially), but given a choice they'll often skip it.… Read more

If computer stores were like supermarkets and had a rack of impulse purchase items right by their checkout lanes, we could easily see the $399 Asus Eee PC sitting next to the candy bars and magazines. After all, for about the same price as a current-generation video game console, you get a smart, reasonably useful 7-inch laptop, for much less than the traditionally inflated prices of other ultraportables.

Of course, we always want a little more, so the Eee PC had to grow, adding a larger 9-inch screen and more SSD hard drive space. Now that we have got our … Read more