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The recording industry hasn’t had much of a strategy for dealing with the changing marketplace over the past decade (and, no, I don’t consider lashing out and suing music fans as a “strategy”), so far be it for them to start now. That’s why it’s amusing to see articles about how the recording industry honchos are now betting on a new generation of mobile phones to save them. Funny how that works. This is the same group of executives who will claim that the phones themselves have no value without the music — and yet here they are hoping and praying that the devices will save their industry.

But the real problem is that this isn’t a strategy. It’s wishful thinking. It doesn’t involve any actual insight into what’s happening in the market. It doesn’t involve any proactive movement towards accepting new business models and changing the way business is done. It’s merely the old way of thinking, trying to figure out what the “next” platform will be on which to sell music. It went from vinyl to cassette tape (we’ll skip 8-track) to CD to computer… and now they want it to go to mobile. But they’re missing the fact that the more popular mobile devices get, the sooner it is that we’ll see file sharing apps for mobile devices pop up. Rather than waiting and praying that some new platform will be the savior, isn’t it time that the industry started taking lessons from the past 10 years, and worked towards adapting to the age of digital content?

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Filed under: Cellphones

We weren’t too thrilled with the Touch Diamond’s resistive touchscreen when we got a chance to play with HTC’s new hotness, but if you’re envious of that updated soft keyboard, you’re in luck: the Diamond’s ROMs have already been pulled apart and the .cab files are just a click away. Installation is said to be slow and you’ll have to jump through some hoops to switch the default language from Italian, but things will eventually work out for you — although we doubt anyone’s going to be nearly as impressed as if you had a real Touch Diamond.

[Via MobilitySite]

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I don’t want to spoil anything here more than the headline already has, but the visually hilarious Onion News Network has a biting critique of the movie rental chain Blockbuster. We actually like…

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icknay writes “Here’s an interesting rant on the OLPC from someone who worked there, including: ‘The core mistake of the present Sugar approach is that it couples phenomenally powerful ideas about learning — that it should be shared, collaborative, peer to peer, and open — with the notion that these ideas must come presented in an entirely new graphical paradigm. We reject this coupling as untenable. Choosing to reinvent the desktop UI paradigm means we are spending our extremely over-constrained resources fighting graphical interfaces, not developing better tools for learning.’ I have an OLPC, and the OS itself seems quite unfinished. I buy the argument that it would be better to focus on Sugar as educational software, and let it run on Linux, Windows, whatever.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Filed under: Gaming

Sounds like that rumor about a new, smaller Xbox 360 coming next year might have a shorter life than a red-ringing console. A Microsoft representative let us know today that “While we don’t normally comment on rumors like this, we can tell you that we have no plans to release a new console in 2009″. Yep, rumor assassinated, just like that. Of course, there still exists the possibility that Microsoft’s just playing coy to prevent a little bit of Osborne effect from creeping in during their heated battle with the PS3 — but they did go out of their way to directly comment on the rumor, so take it as you will.

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Last month, we wrote about how MySpace had won its case against Sanford “Spamford” Wallace — the infamous 1990s “Spam King” who (despite losing many court battles and owing millions in fines) simply can’t seem to give up his obsession with scammy marketing techniques. The win was a default judgment, mainly because Wallace simply disappeared and stopped responding to court requests. Today, a judge ruled on the punishment, officially awarding MySpace $234 million from Wallace and his associate Walter Rines. Given Wallace’s disappearing act (which he’s done in the past as well) it’s unlikely that MySpace will ever see a dime of the money, but that hasn’t stopped the company from touting this as the largest ever award under CAN SPAM. Amusingly, the extremely short court ruling also bars Wallace from setting up any new MySpace profiles. It doesn’t say anything about Facebook, though, so perhaps that’s where we’ll see him next…

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Facebook’s latest move to open up its data is coming in the form of instant messaging. The company is working on a way to connect your list of Facebook friends on its new chat service to other instant messaging services, using an open-standard instant messaging technology called Jabber/XMPP.
The significance is that application developers — and [...]

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Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

The OS updates are coming fast and furious these days, and the latest off the block is Fedora 9 Sulphur. Improvements include better KDE Desktop 4.0.3, betterBluetooth support, a revised Anaconda system installer, support for persistent Live USB key installations, and lots more. Should be all over the torrents now — get downloading and let us know how it goes!

[Via Digg]

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Nick O’Neill / All Facebook:

Breaking: Facebook to Launch Jabber/XMPP Support for Chat  —  Facebook will announce momentarily via their developer blog support of Facebook chat via Jabber and XMPP.  These are two of the primary standards for instant messaging protocol on the web.  The new format will enable developers …

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If you have ever lost sleep thinking about what military labs the world over are cooking up to shoot up, blow up, or otherwise maim their enemies (and sometimes innocent civilians), you may want to…

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Remember that Microsoft Surface model? The one that was a competitor on American Gladiators last season and actually managed to win the whole thing? She’s actually a Gladiator now (her name is Jet),…

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Here’s the first look at the new largest Apple Store in the U.S, courtesy of John Sheehy. Last time we saw the glass mammoth, it was covered up in an unsightly green sheet. Upon viewing this pic,…

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On our hunky God-mayor’s “Gavin Newsom for Governor” tour that included stops in donor-rich New York and Los Angeles, a stop in Israel got the excitable pol talking about Israeli startup Project…

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bsk_cw writes “Brian Nadel got hold of cellular network cards from AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon, and tried them out with a Lenovo ThinkPad X300 notebook. He watched videos on commuter trains, worked with e-mail at cafes, listened to Internet radio at the airport, and downloaded large files while in a moving car. AT&T came out on top in his tests in the New York area (summary here). Some of the reader comments report different conclusions, so a YMMV is in order.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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