Start Creating Playlists with vzaar

The playlist feature allows you to filter selected videos in order to create a personal playlist that can be embedded into any website or eBay listing. By using our vzaar player settings, you can also customize your playlist to suit your own style, just like you can with individual videos.

More at vzaar.com

Barnes & Noble to Offer Digital Self-Publishing

Source: Publishers Weekly

Barnes & Noble is entering the self-publishing business with the summer launch of PubIt! by Barnes & Noble that will allow independent publishers and self-publishing writers to distribute their works digitally through Barnes & Noble.com and the Barnes & Noble eBookstore. Publication and distribution will be limited to digital works with no sales through the B&N stores. The company said it will release details of the royalty model and compensation process at a later date.

To distinguish itself from other companies offering digital self-publishing services, B&N is highlighting access through the Nook and other devices compatible with the ePub format. “As a company that has achieved much of its success by building mutually beneficial relationships with publishers and authors, Barnes & Noble’s new PubIt! service represents an exciting evolution and significant opportunity in the digital content arena,” said Theresa Horner, director, Digital Products, Barnes & Noble. “Barnes & Noble is uniquely positioned to support writers and publishers and bring their exciting digital works to the broadest audience of readers anywhere.”

Google To Launch Amazon S3 Competitor ‘Google Storage’ At I/O

Read more: Tech Crunch

Amazon’s cloud storage services are going to be getting another major competitor this week: Google. We hear that this week during its I/O conference, Google will be announcing a new service that is a direct competitor with Amazon’s S3 cloud storage. Google’s service will be called Google Storage for Developers, or ‘GS’. We believe it will be available in a private beta initially. We also hear that the service will be positioned to make it very easy for existing S3 customers to make the switch to Google Storage.

Features will include a REST API, the ability to use Google accounts to offer authenticated downloads, and data redundancy. Developers will be able to use a command line tool to manage their data, and there will be a web interface as well.

We’d previously reported that Google was looking to expand its cloud service offerings, but that it would primarily be focused on ‘value-added’ services that took advantage of technology Google has been using internally, like its translation tools and video processing. We’re hearing that such value-added services will not be part of this launch, but it is highly likely that they will be coming in the future. And that’s the key here — competitors will have a hard time matching the array of technologies and infrastructure Google has spent years developing.

The truth about Flash

Adobe published a few numbers about Flash Player, numbers that we may already know:

• 98% of Internet connected PCs have Flash Player
• 85% of the top 100 websites use Flash Player (Alexa)
• 75% of web video is viewed using Flash Player (Comscore)
• 98% of enterprises rely on Flash Player (Forrester)
• 70% of web games are delivered using Flash Player (Evans Data Corp.)
• 3.5 million developers use the Flash Platform
• 19 of the top 20 device manufacturers worldwide have committed to shipping Flash technology on their devices

Read more on Adobe’s article: http://www.adobe.com/choice/flash.html

Android chugs ahead of Apple

Source: Connected Planet

Android may have started out slow but it’s made up a lot of ground in the last year. According to new data from the NPD Group, Google’s Android operating surpassed Apple’s iPhone in U.S. unit sales in smartphones in Q1.

Apple’s OS was in 21% of the smartphones sold (namely iPhones), while Android accounted for 28%. Research In Motion continues to hold the No. 1 slot with 36% market share.
Perhaps what’s most interesting about NPD’s Q1 data is that smartphones appear to be driving up handset pricing, the opposite of what we’d expect to see in an industry where devices constantly get cheaper — perhaps Apple’s anti-commoditization powers are now being used on the mobile market. According to NPD’s press release:

The continued popularity of messaging phones and smartphones resulted in slightly higher prices for all mobile phones, despite an overall drop in the number of mobile phones purchased in the first quarter. The average selling price for all mobile phones in Q1 reached $88, which is a 5 percent increase from Q1 2009. Smartphone unit prices, by comparison, averaged $151 in Q1 2010, which is a 3 percent decrease over the previous year.

Connected Planet’s take,
Kevin Fitchard

Apple may make the single most popular phone in the U.S., but it’s now starting to witness the power of the platform. By offering up Android to any device-maker and any operator, Google is ensuring its OS will be everywhere, even if the individual devices may not be able to compete head to head with the iPhone. Now we’ll have to see how long it takes Android to pass RIM.

RIM’s BlackBerry portfolio is definitely more diverse than Apple’s, and it works with any operator — Apple essentially sells one device through a single carrier to all comers, refreshing the software and hardware every summer — but it’s still a single manufacturer with it’s own proprietary operating system. The beauty of Google’s strategy — and to a lesser extend Microsoft’s and Symbian’s — is the more successful it becomes the more successful it becomes. The more its OS penetrates, the more developers hop on board, meaning more and better apps, which in turn means more interest from handset operators and carriers in supporting Android devices.

The only drawback is that Android’s quick penetration into different portfolios of manufacturers and vendors and its attempts to keep the platform fresh and up-to-date have led to a lot of fragmentation among the different versions of the Android OS. One thing RIM and Apple can do easily is control the releases of their software so they don’t have to worry about a hodge-podge of OS versions being sold simultaneously across the world. It’s not a problem for Android so far, but it well could be.

Google TV — and TV apps play — ready for debut

Source: Connected Planet

Looks like Google TV will finally get its premiere. The Wall Street Journal is reporting the Android-based TV UI will debut at the search giant’s I/O Developer conference in May. Google has apparently lined up hardware partners, including Sony, Intel and Logitech (with Samsung mulling a move too). Alongside Google’s Fiber Communities broadband project, it is beginning to put together the pieces to make a move into the video to the home market in much the way it’s tackled mobile.

According to The Wall Street Journal:

The decision to address developers suggests that the Internet giant may be hoping to kick-start a race to build applications for its TV platform, much in the same way that Google, Apple Inc. and others have courted developers for smartphones. The app-store approach has already begun to gain traction among some players in the TV market, too, aided by the advent of TVs, Blu-ray players and other hardware with Internet connections.

But before developers invest in TV apps from Google, they’ll want to see significant adoption of the software among hardware makers. Intel, the dominant player in chips for PCs, has been trying for years to play a bigger role in set-top boxes, with its efforts focusing lately around a chip called Atom that is used in low-end laptop PCs called netbooks.