Talk about viral marketing! Recently a friend of mine told me to check out some new software that makes it possible to make VoIP calls (VoIP = Voice over IP) to anyone on the internet. Now, this has been around for years already but usually its a big hassle to set it up especially if you have a firewall our router. Without getting to technical; VOIP (which is also possible with MSN Messenger, Netmeeting etc.) uses so called port numbers to communicate (a port is an endpoint to a logical connection and the way a client program specifies a specific […]
CNN.com – 261 music file swappers sued
CNN reports this morning that261 music file swappers are sued but also that an amnesty program has been unveiled. The federal lawsuits and amnesty program are the latest moves by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in its fight against illegal music file trading on the Internet. According to them filesharing is responsible for a 31 percent drop in compact disc sales since mid-2000. So what do you do? First they tried to put the companies out of business that were making programs to share (like Napster). They did succeed in that; most filesharing sites were using a central […]
Music to go?
This weekend I almost bought a MP3 player: the iRiver iHP-100. This neat little machine at first seemed some good competition for the Apple iPod. It is very nice looking and has some interesting features. For instance it has built-in radio, 16 hours playtime (or so they claim), optical in and output and you can record with it. It also supports most current formats including WMA. They sell it here at the local Media Markt for about 475 Euro. It seemed a good deal. But now there is the brand new Apple iPod in 10-20 and a whopping 40 Gig!! […]