TechCrunch Kills Off “CrunchPad” Tablet Project….Over Supplier Problems?

If you’ve been hoping for a touchscreen Internet tablet, it looks like you’re going to have to keep waiting.

TechCrunch today announced that they were sending their much-hyped CrunchPad design to the deadpool.

According to TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington:

The CEO of our partner on the project, Chandra Rathakrishnan, sent me an email with the subject “no good news.”

Bizarrely, we were being notified that we were no longer involved with the project. Our project.

Chandra said that based on pressure from his shareholders he had decided to move forward and sell the device directly through Fusion Garage, without our involvement.

This is the equivalent of Foxconn, who build the iPhone, notifying Apple a couple of days before launch that they’d be moving ahead and selling the iPhone directly without any involvement from Apple.

Except that Apple wouldn’t wait to the day a product was to be launched to hammer out their legal agreements. And if Apple had problems with a supplier, it would find a new one.

Did Anyone Want A $600 CrunchPad Tablet?

While TechCrunch says they’re deadpooling the CrunchPad over partner/supplier problems, you have to wonder if there would be any market for it, if they could get it built.

TechCrunch puts their costs at “300ish”. Realistically, the CrunchPad would have had to have sold for $500-600 for it to be viable.

The CrunchPad had very limited capabilities, though – much more limited than already-available netbooks. It’s hard to imagine the target market for a device like this – tech geeks – paying that much of a premium to get so much less.

There’s a real need for a portable touchscreen tablet computer that offers more capabilities that the Kindle and other ereaders. There’s a need for a touchscreen tablet that’s designed with the future in mind – the Internet, rather than the past – books.

Someone will find that sweet spot in the near future – but it’s not coming in the form of a CrunchPad and it’s not going to be cheap.

Update: Fake Steve Jobs offers his take on the announcement, Arrington boned by this extremely handsome man-weasel:

Little bit of advice for you, Mike. You say you’re confused because the folks at Fusion Garage won’t return your calls and email? And now, you’re just mostly feeling all sad about the whole thing? Bitch, please. Get some guys, get in your fucking cars, and drive over there and beat some asses with baseball bats. Do you not understand this? And please don’t tell me you don’t have the stomach for physical violence, because if that’s the case, what the hell were you doing trying to get into the hardware business in the first place?

This isn’t blogging, where you pussies have your little bitch fights over someone reprinting your stuff and not giving you enough credit for the scoop. You’re not having a little Twitter fight with Kara Swisher. Good God, man, This is hardware.

Podcasting Patent

A group campaigning for online freedoms has condemned the granting of a patent which appears to cover the concept of podcasting. The Electronic Frontier Freedom is now looking for examples of podcasting from before 2003 to help it challenge the patent.

The successful patent application was granted to VoloMedia, a company which specializes in producing statistics for analyzing the use of iTunes, as well as selling mobile advertising.

Podcasting Patent

Manage Your Reputation Online

When you encounter a mention of your products or services that casts a negative implication, try not to let anger or emotion dictate how you respond. Always behave professionally when providing responses, and always try to offer solutions and assistance. This can often be instrumental in changing the public perception about your company brand when problems arise. Your reputation is important, so be proactive!

Manage Your Reputation Online

Is Social News Just A “Guy Thing”?

Royal Pingdom has taken a look at social network site use by gender, and found that social network site use is dominated by women:

Highlights of their research:

• 84% (16 out of 19) of the sites have more female than male users.
• The social news sites Digg, Reddit and Slashdot have significantly more male users than female. The standout here is Slashdot which takes male geekdom to new heights with 82% male users.
• If we hadn’t included the three social news sites, all of the sites would have had more females than males.
• Twitter and Facebook have almost the same male-female ratio; Twitter with 59% female users and Facebook with 57%.
• The most female-dominated site? Bebo (66% female users), closely followed by MySpace and Classmates.com (64%).
• The average ratio of all 19 sites was 47% male, 53% female.

All the sites are predominantly female, except for Slashdot, Reddit & Digg.

Why are these predominantly male? Is it because men find them especially appealing? Is it because women find them uninviting? Is it because the sites are dominated by technology news?

Or is social news just a “guy thing”?

WordPress VS Twitter? There’s No Contest!

There’s been a lot of discussion, growing out of the tremendous popularity of Twitter, that blogging is going to be replaced by microblogging, or some other “next best thing”.

Last year, for example, Wired magazine’s Paul Boutin weighed in on the subject, arguing that Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004.

WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg weighted in on this today, stating something that should be obvious – that “new forms of social media, including micro-blogging, are complementary to blogging”:

One of the many uses of Twitter is to link to and promote your blog posts. (And other people’s blog posts.) As we grow, so do they, and vice versa. I blog when I have something longer to say, like this. I tweet when it’s the lowest friction way to talk to my friends, or get distribution for something longer I did somewhere else.

It’s not really a “versus,” it’s an “and.”

Whether the Twitter team intended it or not, they’ve built a killer and highly addictive reader platform with dozens of interesting UIs on top of it.

The entire Twitter vs WordPress meme is a flawed view of new media technologies.

A more significant thing to consider is this: What are the best tools to use to publish new media?

Here’s what it looks like at the end of 2009:

• Microblogging – use Twitter. Twitter is often frustrating because it’s such an immature platform. It’s ten years behind blogging. That means that you can do a lot of useful things with it, but you’re going to have to deal with klunky tools, relentless spammers and, yes, your “mafia friends”.
• Web Publishing – use Wordpress. People still don’t know what”blogging” is, but it doesn’t matter. “Blogging” tools are now web publishing tools, and WordPress is the de facto standard.
• Podcasting – use WordPress plus any audio editor. There’s no standard for podcast audio editing, because so many good audio apps are available. WordPress, though, has become the go-to app for publishing podcast episodes.
• Internet Video – use YouTube, plus any video app. Video apps are still way too complicated and none has become really dominant for user generated Internet video. If your video isn’t on YouTube, though, it isn’t really published to the Internet.

Are there times when you’ll want to use Twitter over WordPress? Of course.

More and more, though, new media publishers need to look at what combination of tools to use.

This Week’s Best Selling Audiobooks – 11-27-09

This Week in Audio Books – This Week’s Best Sellers

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1. Going Rogue: An American Life

Summary: One year ago, Sarah Palin burst onto the national political stage like a comet. Yet even now, few Americans know who this remarkable woman really is. As chief executive of America’s largest state, Sarah Palin had built a record as a reformer who pushed through changes other politicians only talked about: energy independence, ethics reform, and the biggest private-sector energy infrastructure project in U.S. history. While revitalizing public school funding and ensuring the state met its res…

Click to hear an audio sample of Going Rogue: An American Life audiobook…

2. Under the Dome: A Novel (Unabridged)

Summary: On an entirely normal, beautiful fall day in Chester’s Mill, Maine, the town is inexplicably and suddenly sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field. Planes crash into it and fall from the sky in flaming wreckage, a gardener’s hand is severed as "the dome" comes down on it, people running errands in the neighboring town are divided from their families, and cars explode on impact. No one can fathom what this barrier is, where it came from, and when–or if–it will go awa…

Click to hear an audio sample of Under the Dome: A Novel (Unabridged) audiobook…

3. I, Alex Cross (Unabridged)

Summary: Detective Alex Cross is pulled out of a family celebration and given the awful news that a beloved relative has been found brutally murdered. Alex vows to hunt down the killer, and soon learns that she was mixed up in one of Washington’s wildest scenes. And she was not this killer’s only victim. The hunt for her murderer leads Alex and his girlfriend, Detective Brianna Stone, to a place where every fantasy is possible, if you have the credentials to get in. Alex and Bree are soon facing down …

Click to hear an audio sample of I, Alex Cross (Unabridged) audiobook…

4. The Lost Symbol (Unabridged)

Summary: The Lost Symbol is Dan Brown’s follow-up to The Da Vinci Code. Dan Brown’s writing shows us why he is the one of the world’s most popular author of thrillers. Just like the Da Vinci Code, The Lost Symbol is thrilling race to find the secret. Harvard Symbologist Robert Langdon is once again needed to meet the challenge. He must search the hidden codes, unravel the secrets while avoiding the bad guys.

Set within the underground of Washington, D.C., The Lost Symbol races through a t…

Click to hear an audio sample of The Lost Symbol (Unabridged) audiobook…

5. Good Omens (Unabridged)

Summary: The world will end on Saturday. Next Saturday. Just before dinner, according to The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch , the world’s only completely accurate book of prophecies, written in 1655. The armies of Good and Evil are amassing and everything appears to be going according to Divine Plan. Except that a somewhat fussy angel and a fast-living demon are not actually looking forward to the coming Rapture. And someone seems to have misplaced the Antichrist. Put New York T…

Click to hear an audio sample of Good Omens (Unabridged) audiobook…

6. The Wrecker (Unabridged)

Summary: In The Chase , Clive Cussler introduced an electrifying new hero: the tall, lean, no-nonsense detective Isaac Bell, who, driven by his sense of justice, travels early-20th-century America pursuing thieves and killers – and sometimes criminals much worse. It is 1907, a year of financial panic and labor unrest. Train wrecks, fires, and explosions sabotage the Southern Pacific Railroad’s Cascades express line and, desperate, the railroad hires the fabled Van Dorn Detective Agency. Van Dorn send…

Click to hear an audio sample of The Wrecker (Unabridged) audiobook…

7. True Blue (Unabridged)

Summary: A mysterious high-profile homicide in the nation’s capital collides with the dark side of national security in David Baldacci’s new, heart-stopping thriller. Mason "Mace" Perry was a firebrand cop on the D.C. police force until she was kidnapped and framed for a crime. She lost everything – her badge, her career, her freedom-and spent two years in prison. Now she’s back on the outside and focused on one mission: to be a cop once more. Her only shot to be a true blue again is to solve a major …

Click to hear an audio sample of True Blue (Unabridged) audiobook…

8. The Gathering Storm: Book Twelve of the Wheel of Time (Unabridged)

Summary: Tarmon Gai’don, the Last Battle, looms. And mankind is not ready.The final volume of the Wheel of Time, A Memory of Light , was partially written by Robert Jordan before his untimely passing in 2007. Brandon Sanderson, New York Times best-selling author of the Mistborn books, was chosen by Jordan’s editor – his wife, Harriet McDougal – to complete the final book. The scope and size of the volume was such that it could not be contained in a single book, and so Tor proudly presents The Gath…

Click to hear an audio sample of The Gathering Storm: Book Twelve of the Wheel of Time (Unabridged) audiobook…

9. Pursuit of Honor: Mitch Rapp Series (Unabridged)

Summary: The action begins six days after a series of explosions devastated Washington, D.C., targeting the National Counterterrorism Center and killing 185 people, including public officials and CIA employees. It was a bizarre act of extreme violence that called for extreme measures on the part of elite counterterrorism operative Mitch Rapp and his trusted team member, Mike Nash. Now that the initial shock of the catastrophe is over, key Washington officials are up in arms over whether to make friend…

Click to hear an audio sample of Pursuit of Honor: Mitch Rapp Series (Unabridged) audiobook…

10. SuperFreakonomics (Unabridged)

Summary: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance The New York Times best-selling Freakonomics was a worldwide sensation, selling more than four million copies in 35 languages and changing the way we look at the world. Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner return with Superfreakonomics , and fans and newcomers alike will find that the freakquel is even bolder, funnier, and more surprising than the first. SuperFreakonomics challenges the way we…

Click to hear an audio sample of SuperFreakonomics (Unabridged) audiobook…

11. Open: An Autobiography (Unabridged)

Summary: From Andre Agassi, one of the most beloved athletes in history and one of the most gifted men ever to step onto a tennis court, a beautiful, haunting autobiography. Agassi’s incredibly rigorous training begins when he is just a child. By the age of 13, he is banished to a Florida tennis camp that feels like a prison camp. Lonely, scared, a ninth-grade dropout, he rebels in ways that will soon make him a 1980s icon. He dyes his hair, pierces his ears, dresses like a punk rocker. By the time he…

Click to hear an audio sample of Open: An Autobiography (Unabridged) audiobook…

12. David Sedaris: Live for Your Listening Pleasure

Summary: LIVE recordings of new, previously unreleased David Sedaris stories! "Cat and Baboon" Temple Hoyne Buell Theatre in Denver, Colorado "Author, Author" Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City "Innocence abroad" Durham Performing Arts Center, in Durham, North Carolina "Laugh, Kookaburra" Royce Hall, UCLA in Los Angeles, California Diary entries Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre in Atlanta, Georgia

Click to hear an audio sample of David Sedaris: Live for Your Listening Pleasure audiobook…

13. The Help (Unabridged)

Summary: Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step. Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid, Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone. Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman rai…

Click to hear an audio sample of The Help (Unabridged) audiobook…

14. Nine Dragons: Harry Bosch, Book 15 (Unabridged)

Summary: LAPD Detective Harry Bosch is off the chain in the fastest, fiercest, and highest-stakes case of his life. Fortune Liquors is a small shop in a tough South L.A. neighborhood, a store Bosch has known for years. The murder of John Li, the store’s owner, hits Bosch hard, and he promises Li’s family that he’ll find the killer. The world Bosch steps into next is unknown territory. He brings in a detective from the Asian Gang Unit for help with translation–not just of languages but also of the cul…

Click to hear an audio sample of Nine Dragons: Harry Bosch, Book 15 (Unabridged) audiobook…

15. What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (Unabridged)

Summary: Over the past decade, Malcolm Gladwell has become the most gifted and influential journalist in America. In The New Yorker, his writings are such must-reads that the magazine charges advertisers significantly more money for ads that run within his articles. With his #1 best sellers, The Tipping Point , Blink and Outliers , he has reached millions of readers. And now the very best and most famous of his New Yorker pieces are collected in a brilliant and provocative anthology. Among th…

Click to hear an audio sample of What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (Unabridged) audiobook…

16. The Copper Bracelet (Unabridged)

Summary: LIMITED-TIME OFFER: The Copper Bracelet is on sale for only $9.95 till November 24, 2009. A peaceful picnic in the French countryside explodes in violence. A mysterious assassin hisses a deadly threat. And events are set in motion that could propel India and Pakistan down the road to nuclear confrontation. Two years after the events of the Audiobook of the Year – The Chopin Manuscript – former war crimes investigator Harold Middleton and his Volunteers once again must crack a secreti…

Click to hear an audio sample of The Copper Bracelet (Unabridged) audiobook…

17. Let the Great World Spin (Unabridged)

Summary: In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in best-selling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people. Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaim…

Click to hear an audio sample of Let the Great World Spin (Unabridged) audiobook…

18. Twilight: The Twilight Saga, Book 1 (Unabridged)

Summary: The Twilight Saga begins with Stephenie Meyer’s book Twilight. A classic tale of danger and romance set against violence of vampires and werewolfs. Bella Swan is forced to move to a remote village to live with her dad. As she gets to know Forks, she begins to discover its secrets and the secrets of a mysteries boy she finds in school, Edward. As their passion for one another grows, Edward’s secret is discovered by Bella.

This secret puts her in danger from Edward and his entire clan of…

Click to hear an audio sample of Twilight: The Twilight Saga, Book 1 (Unabridged) audiobook…

19. The Girl Who Played with Fire (Unabridged)

Summary: The electrifying follow-up to the phenomenal best seller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo ("An intelligent, ingeniously plotted, utterly engrossing thriller" The Washington Post ), and this time it is Lisbeth Salander, the troubled, wise-beyond-her-years genius hacker, who is the focus and fierce heart of the story. Mikael Blomkvist, crusading journalist and publisher of the magazine Millennium , has decided to publish a story exposing an extensive sex trafficking operation between Eastern…

Click to hear an audio sample of The Girl Who Played with Fire (Unabridged) audiobook…

20. Eclipse: The Twilight Saga, Book 3 (Unabridged)

Summary: Eclipse, book 3 of the Twilight saga, yet again brings the romance and drama to life. Stephenie Meyer’s masterful saga continues in Seattle. Horrible things are happening. Killings and revenge are everywhere. Danger threatens Bella like never before. Even while dealing with the danger of her environment, Bella has to choose between Edward, her lover vampire, and her friendship for Jacob. Bella knows that she is the key to restarting one of histories longest battles, between vampire and w…

Click to hear an audio sample of Eclipse: The Twilight Saga, Book 3 (Unabridged) audiobook…

Find more best selling audio books at Castlibrary.com

NY Times

Business Week

Publisher’s Weekly

Oprah’s Book Club

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This Week’s Best Selling Audiobooks – 11-27-09 is a post from: Digital Podcast

Free DVD Ripper, HandBrake, Gets Update

HandBrake – a free, multiplatform DVD ripper and video transcoder  – has been updated.

HandBrake is a great tool if you want to rip DVDs for backing them up or using them with Apple TV or other multimedia system.

The update should provide better quality conversions for all users and should work faster for many.

Here’s what’s new:

• x264 – Better picture quality, at a smaller size, faster.
• 64-bit support -  64-bit builds tend to perform approximately 10% better than their 32-bit brethren.
• Soft subtitles – HandBrake can now include subtitle tracks that can be turned on and off, instead of rendering them onto the video track permanently (which also reduces video compression).
• Live preview – Ever wished you could test HandBrake settings before spending hours on a full encode? Now, you can.
• HandBrake now uses a better DVD reading library called libdvdnav. This means it can now read some DVDs it had trouble with before, and it can also select different angles on a DVD.
• For non-DVD sources, HandBrake now offers improved transport stream support, especially for high definition sources.
• Constant quality encoding – No more looking for the perfect bitrate for a source–HandBrake is migrating to quality-based encoding. This means that instead of telling encoders to use a specific size and vary quality to meet it, we tell the encoder to vary size to meet a given quality level. Overall quality improves, since bits are spent only when they are needed, and are saved when they are not.
• Another result is that 2-pass encoding is not needed. A single pass at a constant quality provides just as much compression efficiency as two passes at an average bitrate.
• Audio-video synchronization has been further improved.
• Mac users can now encode AAC audio using OS X’s Core Audio, rather than using the open source libfaac. Core Audio offers far superior audio quality.

MNM 12 | Define Your Target Audience in 8 Easy Steps Pt 1

Yesterday I had a phone conversation with one of my platinum coaching students. She’s been trying to get her show launched, but every time she’d think about creating episodes she’s hit a mental block.

The answer finally came in this statement, “I’m just not sure which direction to take it. There are so many ways I can go, so many things I could talk about. Who exactly am I trying to reach with my show?”

Bingo! That’s a question that every should ask when starting a new show or business — and then revisit regularly.

So I walked her through a few questions and helped her define the target audience for her show.

By the end of the call, she was thrilled and couldn’t wait to outline her first episodes.

In this episode we discuss how you can carefully define your target market in order to more effectively get their attention and create content that will keep them coming back again and again.

Download the MP3

Download the Outline (PDF)

Watch the Video version

In this episode of Mastering New Media…

• The one that that most content creators and businesses do completely backwards, costing them precious time and money
• How to give your market what they really want
• Two questions that will immediately help you find the best audience for you

Items Mentioned in This Episode

• Survey Monkey
• Audience Amplifier Series

Take Action

1. Set up a system of capturing content ideas
2. Do the 5×5 exercise outlined in this episode
3. Pick one of the ten ideas shared in this episode and add it to your current strategy for finding content ideas

What Do You Think?

• What other ideas do you have for generating content ideas?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Digital Sound Effects

Royalty free Digital Sound Effects for podcasts.

Apple Opens iTunes LP & iTunes Extras

Apple has opened up iTunes LP and iTunes Extras, publishing Templates, Best Practices and a Development Guide so that anyone has the capability to create interactive content that can be played back in iTunes 9 or on Apple TV.

• iTunes LP lets you create digital albums that include links to listen to album songs and view lyrics, liner notes, photos and videos (such as artist interviews).
• iTunes Extras is designed to present a movie with interactive menus, bonus content, and chapter navigation, similar to those supplied by DVD or Blu-ray authors.

Apple has also published information on testing and delivering the new formats.

Complete information on building content for the new formats is available at the Apple site.

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