Content and publishing

Way back in 2003, the rapper known as Chuck D got up in front of the U.S. Congress and told them exactly what "P2P" meant to him.

"P2P to me means power to the people," said the member of political rap superstars Public Enemy. The sentiment that peer-to-peer file-sharing can be good for musicians is still being debated, but at the time it was borderline revolutionary. Chuck D continued to say that he trusted "the consumer" far more than those "at the helm of these [record] companies."

Ten years and a … Read more

Less than three weeks before Google Reader shuts down, a top alternative called Feedly has begun switching the foundation of its RSS-reading service off Google's technology and onto its own servers.

Feedly released a new iOS app Tuesday that is "Now powered by the Feedly cloud," according to the app description. "Let's all wish a happy retirement to Google Reader."

Feedly got its start as a new interface to Google Reader, a service that lets people subscribe to Web site updates using the RSS and Atom technologies. But in March Google announced it's axing Google Reader on July 1, … Read more

Feedly, the feed reader whose developers are trying to pick up where Google Reader left off, announced Monday that the service will get faster, work on Windows 8, and function without a browser extension.

The Web service, also available as an app for iOS and Android, lets people read Web sites via their RSS and Atom feeds. It's a technology that's popular among those with voracious information appetites, but it hasn't made it to the mainstream. In March Google announced that it's killing its Google Reader site on July 1.

Google's table scraps are a … Read more

Anyone disappointed with Adobe Systems' switch to sell most of its software exclusively through subscriptions will have to remain disappointed.

The San Jose, Calif.-based company will make some changes to its $50-per-month Creative Cloud subscription to accommodate photography hobbyists and those who need access to files after they stop paying monthly fees, David Wadhwani, general manager of Adobe's digital media business, said in an interview Tuesday. But it won't turn back the clock to sell perpetual licenses to its software alongside the subscriptions, he said.

"We understand this is a big change, but we are so … Read more

Adobe Systems still has a lot of work to do convincing its customers it was a good idea to switch its Creative Suite software to its $50-per-month Creative Cloud subscription.

That's one of the messages from a poll of 1,642 readers conducted by CNET and analyst firm Jefferies. Of 740 people using the CS6 generation of Creative Suite products, 76 percent said they planned never to move to the Creative Cloud. And of the 612 respondents using CS5.5 or earlier, only 8 percent said they'd decided to move to the Creative Cloud.

"You should be … Read more

Unexpected instabilities forced Adobe Systems to hasten a planned outage for its Creative Cloud Connection, a service that keeps files made on mobile devices or uploaded to the Web in sync with customers' PCs.

Adobe launched it a half year ago in a preview version, and had planned to take it offline this week to update the interfaces the software uses to communicate with Adobe's servers. However, the company said in a blog post on Friday, " some updates...have caused instability in the service. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused you."

As a … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO -- Google Translate provides a billion translations a day for 200 million users, the company revealed here Friday at its Google I/O show for developers.

Google doesn't often share details about the scale on which it operates, but Josh Estelle, leader for Google Translate's front-end and mobile engineering, had a few statistics to share about the service during a talk about it.

Estelle, who's worked on Google Translate for seven years, also said 92 percent of the usage is from people outside the United States. The Internet is famously English-centric, but it's expanding … Read more

Google plans to finish defining its VP9 video codec on June 17, providing a date on which the company will be able to start using the next-generation compression technology in Chrome and on YouTube.

"Last week, we hosted over 100 guests at a summit meeting for VP9, the WebM Project's next-generation open video codec. We were particularly happy to welcome our friends from YouTube, who spoke about their plans to support VP9 once support lands in Chrome," Matt Frost, senior business product manager for the WebM Project, said in a blog post Friday.

WebM is Google's … Read more

A developer published a Chrome extension called Downloadify designed to let people download MP3 copies of the songs they stream over Spotify's Web-based player, but it quickly disappeared from the Chrome Web Store.

"Simple Chrome Extension to Download all Spotify Songs," reads the Downloadify description on GitHub. "Spotify made a great html5 player for their service...But they forgot their encription [sic]...Hey, I don't like encription but love spotify, just pay them for their magnificent content and I am sure they fix it soon."

The extension presents a dialog box that lets a … Read more