BestBuy to launch music service with Real, Sandisk
Best Buy said it will introduce a new music service with digital music player maker SanDisk and music with RealNetworks to create the latest competing service to Apple's iPod and iTunes combination. Best Buy, said it would use Real's Rhapsody subscription service. The service is designed to work hand-in-hand with the new line of SanDisk Sansa e200R Rhapsody digital music players, much in the way that iPods work with iTunes. The service and players will both be available starting October 15. ITunes has an 88% share of legal downloads in the United States while the iPod has well over half of digital music player sales. SanDisk is a distant number two in that market. Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Samsung Electronics have all announced their plans to offer music download services combined with new devices. The Sansa 8-gigabyte model is priced at $249.99, comparable to the 8-gigabyte iPod Nano.

The Secret Venice Project Unveiled
Television corporations beware, because the innovating duo behind Kazaa and Skype are gearing up for something. Dubbed The Venice Project, Niklas Sennström and Janus Friis intend to deliver some sort of peer-to-peer video broadcasting service to give TV shows to the world, apparently. Kazaa got on the wrong foot with industry bigwigs, but not this time. Sennström and Friis are in negotiations with major corporation, but how those are working out and if indeed they are true is hard to say. Reports claims that an announcement of this new venture could be due as soon as this Fall, which certainly is big news if any. Will this service affect Youtube or Itunes in any way? How about Google Video? And what will the reactions be – at least Skype is getting the smooth treatment in the blogosphere and these guys are going to spin the hype well, that’s my bet. It’ll be interesting to see how this turns out

U.S. pushes Russia to close AllofMP3.Com
The United States is continuing to pressure Russia to shut down the music site allofmp3.com, with a top trade official saying Wednesday it would be hard to see the country being a member of the WTO with the site still operating in the country. Calls for AllofMP3's demise are again surfacing as the two countries attempt to restart negotiations for Russia to enter the international trade group. Talks stalled in July after persistent disagreements related to agriculture and intellectual property issues. Representatives from both Russia and the U.S. will meet in Geneva, Switzerland next week with a goal of having an agreement by the end of this month. However, it is likely a non-negotiable stipulation of the talks will be the shutting down of the music site. AllofMP3 claims it has licenses from Russian Multimedia and Internet Society (ROMS) and the Rightholders Federation for Collective Copyright Management of Works Used Interactively (FAIR). However, neither the U.S. nor Britain recognize those licenses, and the British music industry sued the site in July. Joining the WTO has been a publicly stated goal of Russian President Putin, and he has begun to talk about intellectual property rights issues in the country recently.

Google launches service for computer code
Google is introducing a new search service -- strictly for computer programmers only. It has announced Google Code Search, a site that simplifies how software developers search for programming code to improve existing software or create new programs. Google is applying the same machine-driven techniques it uses to help consumers search the Web for text, images, video and books to help professional programmers as well as computer enthusiasts overcome stumbling blocks to writing code. Searchers can seek out specific programming terms or computer languages and dive deep into compressed code to locate specific features. Users also can narrow a search to find software code based on specific licensing requirements, which is a big deal in warding off future patent litigation. Similar to how a consumer might type a few words into a standard Google search box to find an answer, programmers can seek out relevant lines of code and find a range of search results that link them to answers.

Apple Mac Pro fastest Windows XP PC ever

PC PRO Magazine has decided that the Apple Mac Pro is the fastest Windows XP PC in the UK. The article compared a quad core Apple Mac Pro Macinteltosh with other PCs in the same price range and it broke all records. The first thing the reviewers did was ignore the the pre-installed copy of Mac OS X and run Windows XP Professional on the machine using Apple's Boot Camp beta. Once the machine was free of its Unix based software, the beast soared. It managed record-breaking speeds in a PC Pro multiple applications test. It could run Microsoft Office, Photoshop and a music decoder at high speeds simultaneously. The reviews said that the results spoke volumes about for the ability of Intel's new 3GHz Xeon 5160 processors more than anything else. Not something that the Apple faithful want to hear much. If you have just under £5,000 to spend on a good Windows XP machine it looks like you should buy an Apple and ditch the operating system.

Scientists teleport two different objects
Scientists in Copenhagen took one more step toward the Star Trek transporter, figuring out how to teleport groups of billions of atoms from one place to another using light, quantum mechanics, magnetism and a concept they call "entanglement." Professor Eugene Polzik and his team managed to move an object about 18 inches, using an excruciatingly complicated process that amounts to some serious magic. Quantum computing requires manipulation of information contained in the quantum states, which include physical properties such as energy, motion and magnetic field, of the atoms.

Says the Prof: "Creating entanglement is a very important step, but there are two more steps at least to perform teleportation. We have succeeded in making all three steps -- that is entanglement, quantum measurement and quantum feedback."

Although the scientists admit that no humans are going to teleported a la Star Trek anytime soon, this technology might make it possible to transmit and process data at unheard-of speeds.

Is there a link between teeth and memory loss
Dentists, psychologists and neurologists in Stockholm, Sweden are cooperating on the Betula Project, a study of age, memory, senility and health. A study of around 2,000 persons in Umeå revealed a clear tendency that those who kept a full set of teeth had better powers of memory than those who lost teeth. Their conclusion that older persons with their own teeth have better memory that those without is now going to international publication. Researchers in Japan achieved similar findings on tests with mice and monkeys, with mice learning to find food in labyrinths but forgetting this knowledge when their teeth were pulled.

Today's Site To Peek At:
Competitio.us is a very useful looking competitive intelligence service built. It’s a simple but powerful way to keep track of competing companies online. The service is currently free but there are obviously any number of ways it could be monetized. Most of the functions here can be performed by various free or low cost services, but this one brings many of them into one place. The basic idea is that it’s a tool for web startup teams to keep track of their competitors. You start by creating a project like “Ajax startpages” or whatever field you are interested in. You then add competitors by home page URL. Competitio.us hits the web and brings back each company’s blog, recent blog posts, related blog posts from off site and detailed traffic data from Alexa. Each competitor page has an Ajaxdrop down to build a feature list. When one competitor on a project has a feature added, a check box for that feature is added to all the other competitors’ pages. You can then view all of the competitors and features in a full page matrix. Blog posts are displayed (via the Google Ajax Search API) on the same page as each company’s information and can be sent to the clippings section with one click. When you add something to clippings you’re asked for comments and whether you want to email the clipping to the rest of your team. There’s also a browser bookmarklet for adding news to clippings from off site. That bookmarklet brings up fields for related project, competitors and comments. All of these clippings from a team of users can be subscribed to through a secure RSS feed. Any number of enterprise social bookmarking services are slowly emerging but this single feature in a relatively lightweight service makes it really valuable. A team can work on any number of projects, each with different permission levels for individual users. Recent activity is listed on the sidebar so you can quickly check in on the newest discussion about your competitors in one place.

Average user rating

   (0 vote)