Shared by M3wThr33
Class act.

Sorry Puerto Ricans, even though you bought your iPhone 4s with U.S. dollars, endure AT&T's shoddy "national" coverage, and are United States citizens, Apple doesn't think you're entitled to a free case like real Americans. Apple originally told Puerto Ricans that they would qualify for free apology cases, but decided to cancel all orders being shipped to Puerto Rico after claiming that they were "unable to ship to an international address."

One understandably pissed customer writes:

I bought my new Apple iPhone 4 from ATT two weeks ago. I live in Puerto Rico and for ATT, Puerto Rico is part of their National coverage. I have a National Data Plan with free roaming everywhere in the States and never had a problem before.

I registered my iPhone 4 with no issues with apple.com. A few days ago Apple sent me an email letting me know I qualify for the free case program and asked me to install the app in my iPhone 4 in order to be able to order my free case. I followed all the instructions and ordered the case. I received an Order Confirmation email with an October ETA for delivery.

Last night I received the following email from Apple saying that they do not ship to "International locations", therefore my free case order has been canceled. I am confused. Is Apple good enough to sell their iPhone 4 to me through their ATT partner but now they won't send me the free case? They can sell me the phone but can't send me the solution to the antenna problem they caused?

I recall hearing Steve Jobs saying that this free case solution would be for everybody who bought an iPhone 4. What kind of service is this?Is Apple discriminating us?Apple sent out the following notice:

Thank you for your recent order with the Apple Online Store. We appreciate your business.

We are unable to complete your order. We do not ship to international, freight forwarder, APO, FPO, or P.O. Box addresses.

We offer the following information:

International Shipping: We are unable to ship to an international address. Therefore your order has been cancelled. Please visit the Apple Store Worldwide for the Apple Store Store in your country of residence.

Freight Forwarders: We do not ship to Freight Forwarders. Therefore your order has been cancelled.

APO, FPO or Post Office Boxes: Our carriers are unable to deliver orders to these addresses. Please visit http://www.apple.com/orderstatus to change your address to a physical address, so that we may continue processing your order. If we do not receive a response from you within one week, your order will be cancelled. You will need to login to your account with your Apple ID to locate this order.

For Apple's Online Store Sales Policy please visit: http://www.apple.com/legal/sales_policies/

To locate an Apple Authorized Reseller in your area: www.apple.com/buy/

If you wish to reorder, please visit http://www.apple.com/store or call 1-800-MY-APPLE.

We apologize for the inconvenience and look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,
Apple Online StoreWe get it, Puerto Rico sounds exotic. But the U.S. Postal Service swears it's part of America. Mailing a letter? That costs one U.S. stamp. Mailing a free replacement case to apologize for releasing a phone that drops calls when held? You get the idea. The post office even has a helpful guide to abbreviating state names. Apple can find Puerto Rico smushed right between the equally exotic destinations of Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.

Obviously Apple should find a way to ship the free replacement cases to their Puerto Rican customers. If they can't, Puerto Ricans might want to consider calling their politiciansyou know, the ones who sit in the U.S. House of Representatives.

iPhone 4 Case Program - Puerto Rico - Canceled order [Apple Discussions]
iPhone 4 Unfair Case Program for Puerto Rico [Apple Discussions]

Shared by whenelvisdied
An interesting discussion of the role of "traditional media" in the wikileaks Afghanistan journal

That WikiLeaks went to the press with the Afghanistan war logs shows old-fashioned news organisations still have a role to play

Of all the questions raised by the Afghanistan war logs, perhaps the most intriguing is this: why would an organisation as independent-minded and disdainful of the traditional media as WikiLeaks seek out those very media as partners rather than going it alone?

My necessarily speculative answer is that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who's made a speciality of revealing embarrassing governmental secrets, learned something important earlier this year. That's when he briefly caused a sensation by releasing video of a US Apache helicopter firing on Iraqi civilians, killing (among others) a Reuters photographer and his driver.

The lesson: shocking material and a flair for public relations may be enough to get you noticed. But if it's credibility you want, then old-fashioned news organisations still have something to offer.

WikiLeaks made some 92,000 documents about the war in Afghanistan available to the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel a month ago, giving professional journalists time to sort, vet and craft narratives from jargon-laden field reports compiled by US officials.

The documents add sickening details to the broad outlines of what we already knew: that major elements of Pakistan's intelligence forces are in bed with the Taliban; that chaos and confusion in Afghanistan has led to civilian casualties; and that among the burdens the Afghan people must bear is a corrupt and ineffective government.

The Obama administration has lambasted WikiLeaks for releasing the documents, arguing that the situation has improved since 2009, when the most recent of the official reports were compiled. But no one has questioned the authenticity of the documents themselves, even if the reliability of the information contained therein appears to be of variable quality.

In effect, Assange chose to act as Daniel Ellsberg, the insider who leaked the Pentagon Papers the US government's own secret history of the Vietnam war to the Washington Post and the New York Times. But it was just a few months ago that Assange tried out the role of Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post executive editor who published those papers.

In April, you may recall, WikiLeaks uploaded two versions of the Apache helicopter video. One was an edited, 18-minute version that it titled Collateral Murder, which begins with a quote from George Orwell: "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind." The other, 39 minutes long, was raw footage with no commentary.

The American secretary of defence, Robert Gates, denounced the video as having been taken out of context. No surprise there. But as Raffi Khatchadourian notes in a profile of Assange published in the New Yorker, the media turned Gates's way within days of the release. And in fact, when you watch the video and listen to the Americans on board the helicopter, you can see that the crew members believed, rightly or wrongly, that they were firing on a legitimate target.

Even the comedian Stephen Colbert, in an interview with Assange, dropped his rightwing-blowhard persona momentarily to make a serious point, calling the edited version "emotional manipulation" and telling his guest: "There are armed men in the group. They did find a rocket-propelled grenade among the group. The Reuters photographers who were regrettably killed were not identified as photographers. And you have edited this tape, and you have given it a title called Collateral Murder. That's not leaking. That's a pure editorial."

(An aside for British readers not familiar with Colbert and thus puzzled at my quoting a comedian: it is a sad but undeniable reality that the two most incisive American media critics today may well be Colbert and his fellow fake anchorman Jon Stewart.)

Around the time that the video was released, hubris among the WikiLeakers was thick. In the New Yorker piece, we hear from a friend and supporter of Assange's, a Dutch hacker named Rop Gonggrijp, who smugly says that "we are not the press" and "the source is no longer dependent on finding a journalist who may or may not do something good with his document".

Yet here we are, several months later, and Assange is acting very much like an old-fashioned source, seeking out journalists even as he uploads the raw source documents to the web.

In the felicitous phrase of New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, WikiLeaks is "a stateless news organisation". But as the New Yorker piece makes clear, Assange and his fellow activists are less interested in news than in making a political impact. And it is an organisation only in the loosest sense of the term. Given those realities, it makes sense for them to work with journalists rather than to posit themselves in opposition to the media.

"WikiLeaks was soaking, drowning in data," Rosen's NYU colleague Clay Shirky tells David Carr of the New York Times. "What they needed was someone who could tell a story. They needed someone who could bring accuracy and political context to what was being revealed."

What I am suggesting is not that old media have triumphed over the new. Rather, I'm simply pointing out that each has its place in the media ecosystem.

WikiLeaks, with its singleminded focus on casting about for whistleblowers and protecting their identity through encryption and secrecy, can obtain material that eludes established news organisations. And professional journalists can vet, make sense of and impart credibility to that material in ways that not all new-media ventures (at least not WikiLeaks) can.

The result is a powerful indictment of the war in Afghanistan and a major challenge to Barack Obama.

Back in character, Colbert asked Assange: "What is the purpose of letting the public know? It's like you're saying it's better to know than not to know. Have you not heard ignorance is bliss?"

It's way too late for that now.

I was never one who believed that Barack Obama could - in a mere two years - repair the enormous damage of decades of unfunded entitlement and defense spending, two disastrously conceived, off-budget and negligently prosecuted wars, a financial market collapse, the worst recession since the 1930s, two burst bubbles in tech and housing, and the importation of torture into the American way of war. Maybe I over-estimated how much the GOP might learn from their appalling record in the new millennium - but that would require an admission of failure that they seem incapable of.

Nonetheless, the sheer difficulties and resistance that Obama has met with - from the FNC propaganda channel to the balls-free liberal press to the utopian activist left and deranged radical right - is remarkable. But, as P.M. Carpenter notes, this is not an inherently bad thing. We need opposition - if a more intelligent and less cynical opposition than we now confront. And no real change has come to America without slowness and resistance and division - as its constitution requires. The filibuster has become, it seems to me, a promiscuously wielded impediment, but in real context, the huge shift Obama has already achieved is quite remarkable:

I direct your attention to American history, from early 19th-century social reforms to the decades-long battle for emancipation to the century's later political-bureaucratic reforms to TR and Wilson's Progressive Era to FDR's New Dealism and to the Great(er) Society envisioned by LBJ. Each level of sociopolitical progress was grinding and grueling and packed with half-measures -- because remember, the other side gets its say, too; plus the other side, notwithstanding our oft-proper ridicule, is not always without its own version of idealism, possessed just as passionately.

And now, Barack Obama's correction of a dreadful, 30-year pseudoconservative misadventure. Step by step. Piece by piece. Half-measures by half-measures, which in time will become 60-percent measures, then 80-percent measures ...

That, quite simply, is the way it is. Indeed, that's the way it's supposed to be. If genuine conservative genius there ever was, it came in the Founders' Burkean inspiration that true and lasting progress must pass the tests of peaceful struggle and tireless debate. Achieving a national consensus is hard, but it's necessary to progress' durability; vast and overanxious progress in a consensual void only insures its unraveling.

If you backed Obama and want to see real change continue, now is not the time to give up because it's not as easy as you thought it would be. Now is the time to oppose the passionate intensity of his opponents with the reasoned conviction that elected him.

Remember: we are the ones we've been waiting for. Are we really going to substitute pique for purpose and ennui for hope now? By all means criticize when necessary, as I have. But he's the best we've got, and we are lucky to have him.

To paraphrase Mr Krugman this morning,

Mr. Obama may not be the politician of our dreams, but his enemies are definitely the stuff of our nightmares.

(Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty.)

Today at our Social Currency CrunchUp in Palo Alto, CA, James Lamberti, VP of Global Research and Marketing for InMobi, sat down with our Michael Arrington to tell us a bit about mobile advertising.

InMobi is the largest independent mobile ad network in the world. Overall, they're number two behind Google's AdMob. That earned them an $8 million investment from Kleiner Perkins and Sherpalo Ventures a couple weeks ago. But what's particularly interesting about InMobi is how well they're doing outside the U.S.

Out of inMobi's 16.9 billion mobile ad impressions globally, 2.6 billion are in Africa, more than the US's 2 billion. 10 billion are in Asia, no surprise considering inMobi was founded in India and had more time to develop reach, while Europe follows Africa with 1.6 billion and the Middle East .5 billion. InMobi's mobile eCPM development is highest in Europe at 29%, with North American coming in a close second at 24%.

When inMobi's development rankings, are stack ranked by country, Australia comes in first due to its high adoption of the iPhone and Malaysia performs at number two. Not surprisingly the iPhone platform dominates inMobi's marketshare the US, being responsible for 38.2% of all mobile ad impressions. Globally Nokia trumps other platforms serving inMobi ads, at 22.2% of the market.

Lamberti says that InMobi's biggest growth markets are in the US, Japan, and South America and the US, partially because of the benefits from Google Ad Mob changes on the iPhone. While 60% of all mobile iPhone impressions are still in the US, inMobi is now poised to to monetize the 40% that aren't.

Slides from their presentation below.

Filed under: App Review

Gallery: American Museum of Natural History Explorer app

TUAWThe American Museum of Natural History's Explorer app for the iPhone and iPod touch originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 30 Jul 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

President Barack Obama delivers remarks at General Motors Auto Plant in Hamtramck, Michigan. The Hamtramck GM plant is one of nine that GM recently kept open during a scheduled summer shutdown in production.

Today the President was in Detroit visiting workers at a Chrysler plant and a GM plant that have not only survived, but found success after critics looking to score political points claimed there was no hope for them. For those critics the President offered a lesson: "Don't bet against the American worker."

During the two years since the economy took its hard downward turn, millions of Americans have had to fight with everything they had to stay afloat, to keep food on the table, to keep their businesses in business and nowhere has that been more true than in Detroit.

The President has also been fighting alongside America's workers from the Recovery Act that's saved or created about 3 million jobs, to the fight today over small business lending and of course for the workers in Detroit and across America who contribute to the decades-old craft of American cars. When political opponents said that helping the American auto industry survive was a lost cause, and tried to turn public frustration against the President, he stepped in and made the hard choices anyway. There couldn't necessarily be a life raft for everybody, but he was not going to let a million American jobs fall by the wayside simply because it opened him up for cheap political attacks.

read more

Images of Russia, during World War II and today:

At Geekosystem, Robert Quigley writes:

Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov is a master of a technique called, alternatively, perspective-matching photography or the fancier computational rephotography, which consists of precisely matching the points-of-view of vintage and modern photographs and exploring what happens where they merge. Since last year, Larenkov has been assembling a series of such photos on World War II

Some Photoshop whizzes have criticized Larenkov's work on the grounds that the mergers are too jarring in their contrasts and could be executed with greater smoothness on his part, but, in the absence of an explanation of his work, I think that's kind of the point: It clearly takes a great deal of patience and technical aptitude to create these photos, and the harshness of imposing war and its devastation on pristine modern European cities works better when it's not too slick.

Browsing through Larenko's gallery, the work is pretty uneven, but in a way that's actually revealing. Some of them just put photos of groups of people from WWII against contemporary backgrounds, or vice versa. It looks sort of like one of those kitschy sepia-tinted photos of your family dressed in old-timey clothes you might get at a theme park. Overwhelmingly, the best images, like those above, blend outdated or obliterated buildings and vehicles into the existing cityscape. It's the materiel, not the men, who matter.

Partly, this is because vintage photos of destroyed cities are just so compelling. This is an underappreciated contribution of Matthew Brady and the other photographers of the American Civil War. They kicked off a new kind of photorealist aesthetic focusing on machines and the worlds destroyed by them. All those strange geometries and fragmented buildings then funnel into the first waves of photographic abstraction. Here are some pictures of Charleston and Fort Sumter (after the allies retook the fort, bombarding it with heavy guns):

Like me, Ta-Nehisi Coates is fascinated by the way that the Civil War is a war driven by and brought to bear on stuff (human beings in the form of slaves and soldiers being just the most visible, contested, and precious kind of stuff) He quotes the historian Daniel Walker Howe:

While the growing of cotton came to dominate economic life in the Lower South, the manufacture of cotton textiles was fueling the industrial revolution on both sides of the Atlantic During the immediate postwar years of 1816 to 1820, cotton constituted 39 percent of U.S. exports; twenty years later the proportion had increased to 59 percent, and the value of the cotton sold overseas in 1836 exceed $71 million. By giving the United States its leading export staple, the workers in the cotton fields enabled the country not only to buy manufactured goods from Europe but also to pay interest on its foreign debt and continue to import more capital to invest in transportation and industry. Much of Atlantic civilization in the nineteenth century was built on the back of the enslaved field hand.

Neil deGrasse Tyson likes to point out how it's a mathematical certainty that the air we breathe and the water we drink passed through the lungs and kidneys (respectively) of everyone who ever lived. Likewise, in these Civil War photos, both the destroyed Southern buildings (one of them a US army fort) and the Northern cannons that destroyed them result from the profits of American slavery. Americans like to think about victories in World War II without thinking about the cities and people destroyed in Russia and dozens of other countries (including Japan, Italy, and Germany) that stand behind that war in no small part because we don't have to live with them, to walk down those streets, to feel those ghosts. But we're haunted all the same.

AOL is offering a robust platform for political advertising, called the Politics hub, that will allow marketers to create targeted campaigns across AOL's growing properties across the web. The move should be one of many as ad networks work to take advantage of spending by political groups.

According to Jeff Levick, President of AOL Global Advertising and Strategy, the goal is to create a clear resource in AOL for political marketers to use:

Our Politics hub lets campaigns and issue advocacy groups take their messages directly to voters and key influencers in a proactive way through display advertising, and we make the on-boarding process something that is simple, easy and intuitive.

AOL's network has grown as the company has concentrated on acquisition of new content sites hitting specific niches and creating content for those sites to draw more users. The result is a network of more than 80 sites and an audience of more than 250 million.

One figure sure to attract political marketers is that according to AOL, 83 percent of voting age Americans use the Internet. The platform will feature display ads that will take advantage of geo-targeting, being able to focus down to the congressional district level, and make no mistake local is the key to all of this since political battles usually ebb and flow district to district. Combined with targeting AOL is hoping to leverage their more traditional user base combined with their in-display to provide a political marketplace that most sites short of Google won't be able to match.

Political Advocacy Groups Have Adopted Social and Search, Will They Adopt Display?

Facebook has already seen an influx of political advertising because of the network's ability to slice up user data by sex, age and other lifestyle interests allowing political marketers to more accurately select the type of audience they want to target.

This cycle, we don't have a major Republican candidate who isn't asking about Facebook or isn't doing it, said Peter Pasi, the Executive Vice President of Republican online consulting firm Emotive LLC, in an TechPresident article.

The Supreme Court's recent ruling to loosen limits on corporate spending coupled with the successful blueprint of online and social media outreach which helped vault President Obama into the White House in 2008, should create a large push in political dollars this year online. Republicans in general are taking a page out of President Obama's playbook and investing in online outreach. The Tea Party activists found success on the conservative side with social networking activity. It helps stretch the advertising dollar.

As Lauren Dugan of SocialTimes looks at it:

Dollar-for-dollar, Facebook advertising money might not directly equal more votes. But with larger budgets, politicians are able to do more with their online presence and ultimately increase their visibility, attractiveness and reputability on social networks like Facebook. New media, including social networks like Facebook, might not actually be all that new in terms of how politicians reach the people, with higher campaign budgets bringing in more supporters in the end.

AOL is looking to be the next choice for those advertising dollars after Facebook as it can sell eyeballs that are reading very narrow content while at the same time bringing bring more strategy and campaign assistance to the table. It also has a slightly more conservative base than Facebook another point that AOL is banking on to win some dollars.

While Google still sits at the top of the political advertising food chain, AOL's move highlights the trend of another traditional vertical moving away from traditional media in order to find green pastures online, thanks to rich metrics. As long as traditional media offers sketchy information about who is watching and who is engaging, online advertising markets will increasingly hold the edge.

OK, this has been an interesting two weeks on th e-book front.

If your life is like mine, everyone is asking you, the librarian, for your personal and professional opinion on e-books and e-readers.

So, to prepare you for the family, neighbourhood and friends' BBQ's this weekend, here's some interesting tidbits to throw about in conversation:

First read the full post for this one:

Top 10 Myths about our e-Book Future

Here's the highlight list:
1. Due to an avalanche of self-published and poorly edited e-books, readers will be submerged in a big pile of suck.
2. Publishers are going to disappear.
3. Paper books will disappear.
4. E-books are going to destroy libraries.
5. All authors will have an equal shot.
6. The book world will be divided into a few megabestsellers and everyone else selling only two copies. It will be impossible for authors without platforms to get anyone to pay attention to them.
7. We're all going to drop our e-readers into our bathtubs amid a massive, world-wide power outage and multi-government e-book deletion conspiracy that causes us to permanently lose every book the world has ever published.
8. The reading world will be divided between those who can afford an e-reader and those who can't.
9. Bookstores will disappear.
10. E-books will evolve into all-knowing robots that will implant carnivorous baby e-books inside our brains and devour our heads from within.

Of course the big news was Amazon's anouncement:

Amazon: Paper Books Are Dead, Or Something

Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books. Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books. Peace. Out. Trees.

KINDLE DEVICE UNIT SALES ACCELERATE EACH MONTH IN SECOND QUARTER;
NEW $189 PRICE RESULTS IN TIPPING POINT FOR GROWTH
Amazon.com now selling more Kindle books than hardcover books

SEATTLE-July 19, 2010-(NASDAQ: AMZN)-Millions of people are already reading on Kindles and Kindle is the #1 bestselling item on Amazon.com for two years running. It's also the most-wished-for, most-gifted, and has the most 5-star reviews of any product on Amazon.com. Today, Amazon.com announced that Kindle device unit sales accelerated each month in the second quarter-both on a sequential month-over-month basis and on a year-over-year basis.

We've reached a tipping point with the new price of Kindle-the growth rate of Kindle device unit sales has tripled since we lowered the price from $259 to $189, said Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon.com. In addition, even while our hardcover sales continue to grow, the Kindle format has now overtaken the hardcover format. Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books-astonishing when you consider that we've been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months.

Kindle offers the largest selection of the most popular books people want to read. The U.S. Kindle Store now has more than 630,000 books, including New Releases and 106 of 110 New York Times Best Sellers. Over 510,000 of these books are $9.99 or less, including 75 New York Times Best Sellers. Over 1.8 million free, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books are also available to read on Kindle.

Recent milestones for Kindle books include:

Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books. Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books. This is across Amazon.com's entire U.S. book business and includes sales of hardcover books where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the number even higher.

Amazon sold more than 3x as many Kindle books in the first half of 2010 as in the first half of 2009.
The Association of American Publishers' latest data reports that e-book sales grew 163 percent in the month of May and 207 percent year-to-date through May. Kindle book sales in May and year-to-date through May exceeded those growth rates.

On July 6, Hachette announced that James Patterson had sold 1.14 million e-books to date. Of those, 867,881 were Kindle books.

Five authors-Charlaine Harris, Stieg Larsson, Stephenie Meyer, James Patterson, and Nora Roberts-have each sold more than 500,000 Kindle books.

Readers are responding to Kindle's uncompromising approach to the reading experience. Weighing 10.2 ounces, Kindle can be held comfortably in one hand for hours, has an e-ink display that is easy on the eyes even in bright daylight, has two weeks of battery life, lets you buy your books once and read them everywhere-on your Kindle, Kindle DX, iPad, iPod touch, iPhone, Mac, PC, BlackBerry, and Android-based devices-and has free 3G wireless with no monthly fees or annual contracts-all at a $189 price.

To reiterate, those stats don't include free Kindle books. A tipping point indeed.

Of core,you'll want to remmeber that: Amazon isn't only place peole buy books and e-books, the Kindle isn't the only reader, some people borrow books (grin), paperback books are by far the biggest part of the market and Internet buyers and brodband users represent a different demographic than the average or general population at this time.

See this post:

How Many Kindle Books Has Amazon Sold? About 22 Million This Year By Jay Yarow (Silicon Valley Insider)

Yesterday Amazon announced a big milestone: In the last month, Amazon's e-book sales outpaced its hardcover sales on Amazon.com nearly two to one.

It's a nice stat, but what does it actually mean? How big are hardcover sales, anyway?
According to Nielsen Bookscan, only 23% of total dead-tree book sales this year come from hardcover books.
The rest are from paperback books. In other words, assuming Amazon's book business reflects the overall industry, Amazon is still probably selling twice as many paperback books as Kindle books.

Amazon is estimated to have 19% of the book market, which implies the company sold 15.6 million hardcover books so far this year.

In its announcement yesterday, Amazon said it sold 143 Kindle books for each 100 hardcover books last quarter. (Last month alone, it sold 180 e-books sold for every 100 hardcover books sold.)

If we use the ratio from the last quarter, it implies Amazon has sold around 22 million Kindle books so far this year. That's just the equivalent of 6% of the total print book market, which remains tiny.

Another factor that Amazon doesn't mention is that it makes less money per e-book than it does on print books, and in some cases is losing money on e-books. It's good for Amazon to attack the e-book market and try to own it, even if costs a little early on, but let's not forget that e-books don't generate the same income or sales.

Five Reasons Amazon E-Books are Outselling HardcoversBy Steven

PC Worlds Are you still holding out to see what happens with this whole ebooks fad before deciding whether to embrace it for your business? Well, the times they are a changin' and there are a variety of reasons that ebooks are outpacing printed books. Amazon reports that ebook sales are three times higher than last year, and that Kindle versions of books have outsold their hardcover equivalents by 43 percent over the last quarter. The traditional written word printed on paper will not be fading to oblivion any time soon, but here are five factors contributing to the success of the ebook

1. Cost.
2. Portability.
3. Accessibility.
4. Cross-Platform. (A device like the iPad provides access to various e-reader platforms.)
5. Conservation.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/07/20/urnidgns002570F3005978D800257766005BA5CF.DTL#ixzz0v6aeSFx4

Lastly, we have your first million seller (downloads) this month with Steig Larson.
It's a shame he didn't live this milestone.

Stieg Larsson is the first author to reach one million books sold on Amazon

So there's some interesting soundbites to throw about over hot dogs. Hey, you're the book professional so you're in the know!

Stephen

According to Nicholas Keung, "All immigrants face mandatory language test", The Star, 7/20/2010:

Born and raised in New York, Dodi Robbins graduated from Harvard University and has been practising law for 13 years.

Her first language is English. Yet like all other skilled immigrants applying to settle in Canada, the American corporate lawyer must now take a language test to prove her English is good enough to settle here.

I was outraged, insulted and floored, said Robbins, who obtained her law degree at Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School in New York. A mother of two, she has been working in Toronto on a work permit for four years as compliance and regulations counsel for an international financial services company.

I almost fell off the chair. I've been practising law here for years and I have to prove my proficiency in English?

Last month Ottawa made its language proficiency test mandatory for all skilled immigrant applicants, including native English and French speakers. The so-called ministerial instructions stipulate officials are not to process applications without language test results, starting June 26.

There seems to be some substantive controversy over the way the policy was introduced:

Critics say the government is now trying to use the ministerial instructions to circumvent public scrutiny and consultation, ramming through changes without parliamentary oversight.

But Ms. Robbins' case seems to be an odd one to lead with. It's legitimate for her to be annoyed at having to spend a half a day and $285 taking the IELTS. But the article describes her as sweating the outcome:

Robbins says she is juggling her full-time job and two kids to prepare for the IELTS test in August.

Does a native speaker with a college education really need to "prepare for the IELTS test"? If so, it must not be a very well-designed instrument.

I recognize that "language exams" can be (and sometimes are) designed to test something other than language proficiency. When I was a graduate student, we needed to demonstrate proficiency in two languages other than English. In principle, all that was required was the ability to translate a linguistics article, with access to a dictionary. Having achieved roughly that level of competence in German, I planned to take the German exam. Then one of my fellow grad students, a native speaker of German who had an undergraduate degree from a well-regarded institution in Austria, told me that she had failed that exam.

Apparently the gentleman who administered the German exam had a chip on his shoulder about all the grad students who didn't take the courses his department offered. In any event, he apparently set my friend to translate a particularly fiendish passage from von Humboldt, which she found so impenetrable that she occasionally got confused about who did what to whom. Or perhaps she suffered the fate that Mark Twain described in The Awful German Language:

You observe how far that verb is from the reader's base of operations; well, in a German newspaper they put their verb away over on the next page; and I have heard that sometimes after stringing along the exciting preliminaries and parentheses for a column or two, they get in a hurry and have to go to press without getting to the verb at all. Of course, then, the reader is left in a very exhausted and ignorant state.

Anyhow, I abruptly changed course and arranged to take my German exam in Latin.

And then there's the traditional Japanese method of determining English proficiency, which apparently is a version of the cloze test that in effect requires students to commit large numbers of classic works to memory.

But I find it hard to believe that the IELTS is designed in such a way that a highly educated native speaker really needs to study for it. Can someone who's taken it recently comment?

If I understand the situation correctly, this is roughly the Canadian equivalent of a U.S. H-1B visa, for which a language proficiency exam is not required, rather than the Canadian equivalent of the U.S. Naturalization process, which does have a language proficiency requirement, though a rather minimal one:

During your interview, a USCIS officer will test your ability to read, write, and speak English and your knowledge of civics. You must read one sentence out of three sentences correctly in English, and you must write one sentence out of three sentences correctly in English. Your ability to speak English is determined during your interview on your naturalization application. Finally, you must answer 6 out of 10 civics questions correctly to achieve a passing score.

[Update other stories suggest that Ms. Robbins has had a Canadian work permit for several years, and is now applying for citizenship. But it seems that what she is actually doing is applying for status as a "permanent resident" like having "green card" in the U.S. which may or may not be a step on the way to naturalization. It's not clear to me yet whether similar language tests are required in order to get a work permit.]

[Update #2 Apparently there is no "passing grade" on the test. According to this page,

You must provide proof of language proficiency by taking a language test from an agency designated by CIC. With your test results, you will be able to see exactly how many points you will receive for the language selection factor.

The "points" are part of the system described here:

Also, this is part of the application for admission as a "permanent resident" under the "skilled workers and professionals category", which is not the same as applying for citizenship, but is a bigger deal than getting a limited-term work permit.]

Listen to the story of Aye Moah. She grew up in one of the poorest countries on earth. She shouldn't have many opportunities. Yet here she was, talking with me at a Silicon Valley party after the Always On conference. The route she took? She went to MIT. How did she get in? Was one of the top-scoring students in Burma. One of the top 10, in fact. Then she scored a perfect 800 on the SAT. That's a cool story alone.

But now keep listening. She is one of the top talented people in the world. The kind that help start companies that hire thousands of people.

Yet she can't work here in the United States.

Let me get this right. One of the smartest people in an entire country gets an invite to come to the United States to study. Does so. Gets a great education from one of the top universities in the world. And we can't employ her because of our screwed up immigration laws.

Shame on America.

Even if she were to get a work visa, it probably would be from a bigger company that would treat her poorly (I keep hearing stories of how immigrants are treated like crap and can't leave, otherwise their work visa will be yanked). These laws are unjust and not American. Worse yet they are anti innovation because it's these smart, highly educated, people who will start the next companies. It isn't lost on me that eBay was started by an Iranian.

But, standing next to her was Ronald Mannak. He is an entrepreneur who lost everything he owned. In Holland if your company fails and you've taken venture capital you are personally liable for the losses. So, Ronald owes the Dutch government $200,000 and lost everything, even his fridge, he told us.

Here in Silicon Valley it's different. We let you fail, multiple times, and you aren't personally liable to the venture capitalists.

So, here, in one video, you have a demonstration of how American policy is both brilliant and idiotic at the same time.

It's amazing how anti immigrant we've become. Stupidly so, too.

This is why I support the Startup Visa project and urge you to support it too.

According to Billboard, Spotify's negotiations with U.S. record labels have broken down and are back to square one. Apparently, the startup is still aiming for a 2010/early 2011 U.S. launch, but there's no telling how long label negotiations could take or if they will be successful at all.

When we last heard from Spotify CEO Daniel Ek at SXSW 2010, he projected a Q3 U.S. launch and the unveiling of several new mobile applications. And while the service's social and music features just keep getting better, the company is actually farther from a U.S. debut than they were this spring.

In Europe, Spotify operates under a freemium model. Users can get unlimited streaming music in an ad-supported interface. Users can also choose to pay for an ad-free experience that also includes mobile access. But elements of this model have been sources of contention for the major record labels stateside, notably Warner Music Group, according to Billboard's sources.

In the meantime, Spotify competitors abound Pandora in particular stands out as having been able to navigate political and record-label hurdles to keep itself operational and profitable. And Google and Apple are both rumored to be working on streaming music solutions, too.

Perhaps the larger question is whether American music lovers will still care about Spotify once it finally comes to our shores if, indeed, it ever makes it here.

What do you think: Will Spotify's leadership be able to play nicely with American record labels and launch their highly anticipated app in the U.S. this year? How about next year? Feel free to share your speculations in the comments.

More About: music, spotify, Warner

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Ian Drew, executive vice president of marketing at ARM Holdings, a Cambridge, U.K.-based company that makes semiconductors powering a majority of the smartphones, tablets, 70 percent of world's hard drives and half the world's printers, is on a whirlwind tour of Silicon Valley. And what everyone (including me) wants to talk to him about is servers, or rather low-power server chips that can power the data centers of tomorrow.

With this foray into the fast-growing data center business, the company, which can trace back its roots to Apple Computer, is slowly becoming a bane to Intel's existence. And the funny thing is, it does so not by making chips, but instead it develops technology and licenses it to all comers.

Some special companies Qualcomm, Marvell and Infineon get access to all of ARM's entire technology stack, so they can build their own chips which in turn compete with Intel. The latest company to sign-up: Microsoft, the long time partner of Intel and the other half of the Wintel' monopoly. What Microsoft will do with ARM's technology remains to be seen, but it is a notable move nonetheless. It is a sign that the company is killing it.

Check out their American Depository Receipts: at the close of trading they were up nearly 165 percent over past twelve months. In the second quarter of 2010, its revenues jumped 42 percent to $150.3 million versus $105.5 million in Q2 2009. Earnings per share leaped 147% percent to $2.34 a share versus 95 cents a share it earned in a year ago quarter. From the looks of it, things seem to be going well for these guys.

The main reason ARM has done so well is because it has focused on developing low-power technologies that it licenses in turn to others, thus eschewing the headaches that come with manufacturing and selling your own chips. More importantly, ARM as a company sits at a unique position in the technology ecosystem. Because it licenses its chip technology to others, it has a good idea of what kind of products are coming to market, how well certain type of products are doing and more importantly where the industry is headed. In short, it talks to chip makers, device makers and these days even software companies that are developing software for these consumer devices.

And what Drew and his cohorts are seeing is a radical revolution in the data centers. While the x86 world focused on pure megahertz, we have focused on the megahertz per milliwatt, Drew said during our conversation earlier today. We focus on quarter-to-half milliwatts as a key metric. Most of the new devices such as the iPhones don't have heat sinks in them, he joked.

If you look at our heritage (of low power chips) it makes perfect sense for us to be looking at the servers and the data centers, said Drew. With cooling making up nearly half the capital expenditure and almost two-thirds of the operation expenses, Drew said power is going to be a bigger part of the conversation.

Everyone is using the Web and the Web is more demanding today which means all of the stuff is going to run through data centers, he noted. Two things are very clear: there is going to be a lot of data and need for less power. By getting the world to buy more edge devices (iPhones, iPads etc.), ARM is at the same boosting demand for back-end computing infrastructure. Now by diversifying into the data center server business, it can make more money selling its low-power chip technology to server makers. In other words, ARM wins on both sides of the trade.

Stacey, in a post earlier this year noted:

The news shouldn't come as a surprise to our readers, since I profiled Smooth-Stone, one company trying to build low-power servers earlier this month, and in that same post pointed to ARM's server ambitions. And it's not just startups that are interested in using the low-power ARM architecture inside data centers, either. Google recently acquired a secretive startup called Agnilux that was rumored to be making a server with the ARM architecture.

We also reported on a Microsoft job listing that sought a software development engineer with experience running ARM in the data center for the company's eXtreme Computing group. For the last couple of decades, Intel's x86 chips have gained dominance in the data center, but as power considerations begin to outweigh the benefits of a cheap, general purpose processor, other chip makers have started to smell blood. Nvidia is pushing its graphics processors for some types of applications, while Texas Instruments is researching the use of DSPs inside servers.

But don't expect this to happen overnight, Drew cautioned. We are going to see some pilots over next year, but this is a long term initiative. He believes that this long, continuous transition to lower-power server chips is going to take between three to five years. When I asked Drew what are those pilots, he declined to comment. From our reporting, we can easily tell you Microsoft, Smooth Stone and Marvell are experimenting with ARM-based server processors.

And while ARM tries to build a server business, the company, Drew said has plenty on its plate. For instance, the upcoming/next generation Cortex-A class processor codenamed Eagle, which is likely to help redefine the smartphone landscape again.

Related content from GigaOM Pro: (sub req'd.): Are Green Enterprise IT Pastures Within ARM's Reach?

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At least Apple pays taxes...

Here in the America, the CIA's drone program targeting extremists in the tribal areas of Pakistan is the subject of heated debate. The CIA calls it a uniquely valuable and precise counterterrorism tool. The Obama administration, which has stepped up the program significantly since taking office, considers it legal under the 2001 congressional Authorization to Use Military Force. The human-rights community, along with many security experts, fear that the program will create more terrorists than it kills due to anger at civilian casualties.

Pakistanis, however, think the drones are sorry; huh? What are you talking about? Did you say clones?

That's according to a new Pew poll on Pakistani attitudes (PDF) that's filled with surprises. Top of the list: Just over one-in-three Pakistanis (35%) have heard about the drone strikes. Apparently, Pakistanis barely know this program even exists. Forty-three percent say they've heard nothing at all about the drones. You can hear the champagne corks popping at Langley.

But it's not exactly time for bottle service. Amongst those Pakistanis who have heard of the drones, opinion skews predictably negative. Ninety-three percent say they're a bad or very bad thing. Ninety percent say they kill too many innocent people. While some researchers claim that if you limit your pool of respondents to the tribal areas, support for the drones actually goes up, 32 percent of overall respondents think they're a necessary measure. (Although perhaps that's a robust total of people saying a foreign government should shoot missiles at their fellow countrymen.) And almost half of Pakistanis believe the fiction that the drone strikes occur without Pakistani government approval.

That's not all the poll found: Pakistanis are freaked out about their economy; highly anti-American; and less concerned about terrorism than they used to be although that latter part might not be such a bad thing.After a $7.5 billion aid package passed Congress last year to bolster Pakistan's civilian government and reeling economy, here's what the U.S. has to show for it: Pakistanis exhibit as much anti-American sentiment as any populace on earth. According to Pew, 59 percent of Pakistanis consider the U.S. an enemy, and only 17 percent consider the U.S. a friend. Pakistanis give the U.S. its lowest ratings among the 22 nations included in the spring 2010 Pew Global Attitudes survey, the poll notes. You have to go to Egypt or Turkey to find similarly negative views of the U.S. in Pew's findings a fact, perhaps, that helps contextualize why the Pakistani intelligence apparatus funds U.S. enemies in Afghanistan, as WikiLeaks reminded us this week. Still, 64 percent say they want better relations with the United States.

Then there's Pakistani attitudes on terrorism, something the poll considers ominous. As Pakistani forces continue to battle extremist groups within the country, nearly all Pakistanis describe terrorism as a very big problem, it warns. However, they have grown markedly less concerned that extremists might take control of the country. Specifically, 69 percent worried in 2009 that the Pakistani Taliban and affiliated groups might rout the government. Now only 51 percent feel that way. Is that necessarily bad?

Haider Mullick, a Pakistani scholar at the U.S. Joint Special Operations University recently returned from a wide-ranging trip surveying Pakistani military development during the army's 18-month campaign against the Tehrek-e-Taliban, or TTP. The effort brought Pakistani troops into tough battles in South Waziristan. In his view, it's natural for Pakistanis to be less concerned about an enemy that they see their army battling, especially considering that last spring, the Taliban were entrenched barely 60 miles from the capitol city of Islamabad.

TTP lost major territory in Swat, Buner, Shangla, Bannu, South Waziristan. That's very signficant, Mullick says. Also, historically speaking, once an insurgent group becomes weak, popular support for reconciliation goes up. And the fight against the insurgents still has popular backing: 49 percent of Pakistanis support it, far more than the 20 percent who oppose it, though 30 percent register mixed feelings.

The Pakistani military effort in the tribal areas is a mixed picture. By January 2010, the United Nations Refugee Agency accommodated 114,000 refugees from the fighting in camps it set up in the Northwest Frontier Province, with nearly a million more living in nearby host communities. The military is apparently holding territory in Swat and South Waziristan, though there's not much of a civilian government presence there. Militants have been making their way to the Punjabi heartland of the country and the military has yet to advance into North Waziristan, the remaining safe havens of al-Qaeda, the TTP and their allies. But the campaign has won persistent accolades from generals David Petraeus and Jim Mattis, who note as did the Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. this week that more Pakistani troops have died fighting Taliban than NATO troops have in nine years.

Paradoxically, the military's fight against the Taliban may have impacted Pakistani sentiments toward extremist groups. Fifteen percent of Pakistanis rate the TTP favorably, though, and 18 percent have favorable views of al-Qaeda. Both are higher than last year's 10 and nine percent favorables, respectively. But Pakistani perceptions of both groups are still down from 2008 levels, when a roughly a quarter of Pakistanis expressed approval of al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban. And the negative ratings for both groups are high, although the TTP's 65 percent unfavorable rating outstrips the 53 percent antipathy Pakistanis record for al-Qaeda.

Still, no matter how you dissect the poll, what comes through is Pakistani dissatisfaction. President Asif Ali Zardari has an approval rating of 20 percent, more than 40 percent lower than when he took office. The economy has been hit hard by the global downturn, and about half of Pakistanis expect things to get worse, while only 35 percent were pessimists last year. Corruption, economy, energy, inflation trumps the threat from terrorism in many places, says Mullick. See? We're not so different after all.

Credit: U.S. Air Force

See Also:

• WikiLeaks Drops 90000 War Docs; Fingers Pakistan as Insurgent Ally
• Pakistan's Blocking Binge: First Facebook, Now YouTube; Others
• 3 GIs Killed in Pakistan. Now Can We Start Treating This Like a
• Report: U.S. Drone Goes Down Over Pakistan. Again.
• State Department Flies Mercenary Air Force Over Pakistan
• G.I.s Slain in Pakistan: Psyop Sergeant, Two Nation-Builders

This morning's Washington Post reveals that the Department Of Justice has been pressuring Congress to expand its power to obtain records of Americans' private Internet activity through the use of National Security Letters (NSLs).

NSLs, you may remember, are one of the most powerful and frightening tools of government surveillance to be expanded by the Patriot Act. These letters allow the FBI to secretly demand data from phone companies and internet service providers about the private communications of ordinary citizens. The letters include a gag order, which forbids recipients from ever revealing the letters' existence to their coworkers, their friends, or even to their family members, much less the public.

The gag order and the lack of oversight make this power ripe for abuse. Indeed, the FBI's systemic abuse of this power was confirmed both by a Department Of Justice investigation and in documents obtained by EFF through Freedom of Information Act litigation. Yet, in the years since that abuse became publicly known, there has been no reform of the law governing NSLs.

Now, the DOJ is asking Congress to pass vague and broad new language meant to expand the kinds of data that can be acquired through NSLs. This morning's Washington Post article suggests that the new language could allow access to detailed web browsing history, search history, location information, or even Facebook friend requests.

Considering the FBI's dismal record on surveillance abuses, this is a stunning and brazen request. They're asking the Senate to reward bad behavior by allowing even more bad behavior. We're hoping that the Senate will have the courage and integrity to turn them down. Keep reading Deeplinks for more news on this as it develops.

Last week, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd aroused the ire of progressive activists when he wondered whether Elizabeth Warren, the former Harvard Law professor who is a leading candidate to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, would be confirmable. There's a serious question about it, he said on NPR's Diane Rehm Show.

Dodd's concern is legitimate given that a mere 41 votes can block action in the Senate, and that the GOP has been willing to filibuster even seemingly popular proposals. But, after surveying a dozen insiders over the last few dayscongressional aides, industry officials, progressive activists, and a few administration officialsI've concluded that the odds are good that Warren would be confirmed if nominated by the White House. (The White House itself agreesit is "confident she is confirmable," according to a spokeperson.)

Most telling is the basic Senate math. According to two senior Senate aidesone whose boss favors Warren and the other whose boss would prefer an alternativepretty much every Senate Democrat (and Independent) would find it agonizingly difficult to join a filibuster of Warren's nomination, which would mean opposing an outspoken consumer advocate at a time of deep anti-Wall Street sentiment. Simply put: Hoping the president will choose another candidatesomething that describes several Senate Democratsisn't the same as opposing his eventual nominee.

The biggest possible exception to this is Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson, who hasn't been shy about bucking Democrats on other priorities, like extending unemployment benefits. Nelson returned from the Fourth of July recess anxious about the size of the new agency's budget and its accountability to Congress. (Though spokesman Jake Thompson says the senator's concerns have largely been defused, and that he hasn't taken a position on any potential nominee.) He later fretted that it could become a rogue agency under the wrong leadership.

So suppose the entire Democratic caucus were to support Warren except Nelson and another moderate, leaving her two votes shy of the 60 she needs. There are four realistic places to find the additional votes: Republicans Scott Brown of Massachusetts, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, and Chuck Grassley of Iowa. The first three voted for the final version of financial reform; Grassley supported the Senate version in May.

For their part, Brown and Collins are playing their cards closea Brown spokesman told The Boston Globe last week that he'll review the qualifications of the nominee once there is one; a Collins spokesman gave me a similar response. But there are indications that the other two are inclined toward Warren. Grassley has been supportive of Warren when she's appeared before the Senate Finance Committee as head of the congressional panel overseeing the financial bailout. He questioned Warren sympathetically during her testimony last Wednesday, and a Grassley spokesman told me the senator has worked well with Ms. Warren in her current oversight and he appreciates that she hasn't been a rubber stamp for the administration and the fact that she's kept the Treasury Department's feet to the fire.

Snowe, who also sits on the Senate Finance Committee, has been similarly supportive during Warren's testimony. On March 31, 2009, for example, Snowe said she couldn't agree with [Warren] more on the need for clear, ex ante metrics for judging the government's financial-market interventions. One source with years of experience dealing with Congress speculates that Snowe could also chafe at the attempt to filibuster an apparently qualified female candidate. (Snowe's office did not respond to a request for comment.)

Of course, there's always the possibility that a senator leaning 'yes' could lose his or her nerve once Warren were nominated and the lobbying began in earnest. (Recall that both Grassley and Snowe both flirted with backing health care reform before ultimately voting no.) And it's hard to believe the swing senators won't face pressure from the financial services industry. Warren has made her distaste for big banks clear over the years, and it's a feeling that's generally reciprocated. Privately, the banks worry that Warren will make certain types of consumer lending unprofitable; they warn that this will constrict the supply of credit.

But, for the moment, what's interesting is the banks' silence. Three industry officials I spoke with took care to assure me that their organizations aren't actively opposing Warren. O