As iFlow Reader app closes, harsh words for Apple
Update 5/12: CNET has posted an expanded Q&A with BeamItDown co-founder and iFlow Reader developer Dennis Morin.Some interesting news from the world of e-reading apps in the land of iOS: BeamItDown is shuttering its iFlow Reader app on May 31, saying "Apple has decided that it wants all of the e-book business in iOS for itself and it has has made mid-game rule changes that make it impossible for anyone but Apple to sell e-books at a profit on iOS."Just like the Kindle, Nook, and Kobo apps for iOS, the iFlow Reader app for iPhone and iPad has an integrated e-bookstore. Apple has reportedly set a deadline of June 30 for developers to alter their apps to reflect the new terms for subscriptions in the Apple Store, which requires companies to give Apple a 30 percent cut on sales their apps generate.In the past, e-reading apps like iFlow, Kindle, and Nook have avoided paying the cut by sending customers to a Web-based interface outside the app. Starting in June, however, Apple has said it will require developers to sell content from only within the app.Fear of reprisals from Apple has kept most companies mum on the looming issue, but the folks at BeamItDown Software who make the iFlow Reader let their anger--excuse the pun--flow freely. It is one of the harsher public condemnations of Apple we've seen.Here are some of the juicer quotes from the company's announcement that it would be shutting down the app:Five of us spent nearly a year and a half of our lives and over a million dollars in cash and sweat equity developing the iFlowReader app...What sounds like a reasonable demand when packaged by Apple's extraordinary public relations department is essentially an eviction notice to allebook sellers on iOS...We put our faith in Apple and they screwed us...It was the American dream that we all strive for. Sadly, the America that we thought we were working in turned out to be a totalitarian regime and the dictator decided that he wanted all of what we had. Our dream is now over.The company also was extremely critical of the "agency model" for selling e-books, saying that it was created by Apple and basically fixed prices on e-books. "All sales agents are required to sell books at the same retail price,which is set by the publisher," BeamItDown said in its blog post. "No one can sell at a different price.All sales agents get a 30% commission on the sale of a book. No onegets a different deal. Prior to the agency model, publishers typicallyoffered retailers a 50% discount. The key point here is that all sellers now get a 30% commission andApple now wants a 30% fee, which is all of our gross margin and thensome."What sounds like a reasonable demand when packaged by Apple's extraordinary public relations department is essentially an eviction notice to all e-book sellers on iOS.-- The iFlowReader staffThe post goes on to explain to iFlow customers how to save their purchased e-books and provides a link to complain directly to Apple execs Steve Jobs and VP Phil Schiller via email.What does this mean for the Kindle, Nook, and Kobo apps on iPad and iPhone? Hard to say at this point because no one from Amazon or Barnes & Noble is saying anything regarding Apple and its apps (we've asked high-level execs from those companies about the June 30 doomsday deadline, but as expected, they declined to comment).While BeamItDown says that it had more than 6 million downloads of its iFlowReader iOS products over the last three years, it's a minor player in the e-book space. Obviously, if Amazon and Barnes & Noble decided to pull its Kindle and Nook apps from iTunes, Apple could expect a huge amount of complaints from users who expected to be able to read their e-books (bought from those stores) on Apple devices. In their negotiations with Apple, large companies like Amazon and Barnes & Noble have a lot more leverage than BeamItDown, so it remains to be seen whether Apple will stick to its guns and truly lay down the gauntlet or come up with a more palatable number for profit sharing that all sides can accept.Of course, complicating matters is Barnes & Noble's entry into the tablet space with the Nook Color and strong rumors that Amazon will release its own Android-based tablet very soon.
NPD- Mac users saving music business
NPD: Mac users saving music business
The data says that 50 percent of all Mac users surveyed by NPD purchased at least one song during the third quarter, while only 16 percent of Windows users purchased a song from an online music store. And 32 percent of Mac users bought a CD during that same time, while just 28 percent of Windows users did so.NPD says this means Mac users are "more active" when it comes to digital music than their PC counterparts. It also says that the data "helps debunk the myth that digital music consumers stop buying music in CD format."So, what conclusion should we draw, then? Mac users are more honest than piracy-loving Windows users? Mac users are more satisfied with the current craptacular state of popular music than Windows users? NPD has a vested interest in keeping one of its clients happy with press releases such as this one, which basically reinforces Apple's branding as the computer company for cool creative people?The whole "Mac users are younger/smarter/richer/better looking" argument has been going on for years, and while there is some demographic data to support parts of that debate, it seems a bit too much to assert that a "cultural divide" is responsible for the tendency of Mac users to buy music more frequently than Windows users. I thought Peter Kafka at Silicon Valley Insider made the obvious point that the survey did not: iTunes is bundled with Macs. I'm willing to accept the premise that people buy Macs with entertainment applications in mind, but does this conclusion from the press release really make sense? "Apple's growing share in the personal computing environment--and continued success with iPod sales--is a potential harbinger for the continued growth of digital music."If Apple's Mac market share were to increase to say 20 percent--which would be about in line with market leader Hewlett-Packard's share--would that mean that all those former Windows users who didn't want to pay to download digital music would suddenly see the light and turn into online music shoppers simply because they switched to a Mac and jumped that "cultural divide?" It's not like the Windows world doesn't have options for legally purchasing and organizing music online; in fact, Apple offers the most popular one. That statement seems to be saying that the computer, not the person using it or even the songs themselves, is the thing that drives digital music sales, and I find that hard to believe.Anyway, for the record, NPD said that Apple did not commission the study nor had anything to do with its content or conclusions. An NPD representative said "the Apple info we included in the press release consisted of just a few small nuggets in the overall report that (analysts) thought might get some press coverage during the dog days of the holidays, that's all." Fair enough, although I'm going to be really skeptical if the next report is entitled: "Survey: Mac users more likely to get dates, consistently hit jump shots."
The data says that 50 percent of all Mac users surveyed by NPD purchased at least one song during the third quarter, while only 16 percent of Windows users purchased a song from an online music store. And 32 percent of Mac users bought a CD during that same time, while just 28 percent of Windows users did so.NPD says this means Mac users are "more active" when it comes to digital music than their PC counterparts. It also says that the data "helps debunk the myth that digital music consumers stop buying music in CD format."So, what conclusion should we draw, then? Mac users are more honest than piracy-loving Windows users? Mac users are more satisfied with the current craptacular state of popular music than Windows users? NPD has a vested interest in keeping one of its clients happy with press releases such as this one, which basically reinforces Apple's branding as the computer company for cool creative people?The whole "Mac users are younger/smarter/richer/better looking" argument has been going on for years, and while there is some demographic data to support parts of that debate, it seems a bit too much to assert that a "cultural divide" is responsible for the tendency of Mac users to buy music more frequently than Windows users. I thought Peter Kafka at Silicon Valley Insider made the obvious point that the survey did not: iTunes is bundled with Macs. I'm willing to accept the premise that people buy Macs with entertainment applications in mind, but does this conclusion from the press release really make sense? "Apple's growing share in the personal computing environment--and continued success with iPod sales--is a potential harbinger for the continued growth of digital music."If Apple's Mac market share were to increase to say 20 percent--which would be about in line with market leader Hewlett-Packard's share--would that mean that all those former Windows users who didn't want to pay to download digital music would suddenly see the light and turn into online music shoppers simply because they switched to a Mac and jumped that "cultural divide?" It's not like the Windows world doesn't have options for legally purchasing and organizing music online; in fact, Apple offers the most popular one. That statement seems to be saying that the computer, not the person using it or even the songs themselves, is the thing that drives digital music sales, and I find that hard to believe.Anyway, for the record, NPD said that Apple did not commission the study nor had anything to do with its content or conclusions. An NPD representative said "the Apple info we included in the press release consisted of just a few small nuggets in the overall report that (analysts) thought might get some press coverage during the dog days of the holidays, that's all." Fair enough, although I'm going to be really skeptical if the next report is entitled: "Survey: Mac users more likely to get dates, consistently hit jump shots."
Chilirec records Net radio music to your PC
Chilirec records Net radio music to your PC
"We have had our law firm verify in detail that this is a recorder which is legally ok," Chilirec CEO and co-founder Carina Dreifeldt told CNET News.Chilirec is yet another digital music venture from Sweden, where a debate on piracy and copyright issues seems to have inspired alternatives such as Spotify and Tunerec, all offering listening for free.Tapping into lots of Internet radio stations, Chilirec software records dozens of songs every minute, adding up to thousands of songs on your hard drive in a single day.The legality of this and other similar software such as Ripcast and StationRipper is based on the right to record music and make a few copies for personal use."The hitch is that the individual must perform the actual recording," explained Dreifeldt.This is the reason why Chilirec now launches a software that runs on users' PCs. In October 2007, an earlier test version was launched in a cloud-based model, with a patent filed for the technology. In the cloud-based model, each user had his or her own disk space on Chilirec's servers and managed the recordings via the Internet with the PC serving as a kind of remote control. The service soon became very popular.But record companies considered this a service in which Chilirec was making the recordings and thus Chilirec was making copyright-protected material available illegally, since licenses weren't paid. A similar case regards the U.S. cable provider Cablevision's network-based DVR."We could either fight and go to court, or transform the product from a cloud-based model to a personal recorder," Dreifeldt said.As Chilirec didn't want to go up against the recording industry, the cloud-based model was abandoned at the end of 2008, at least for now. Dreifeldt expressed some disappointment over the industry's standpoint."We wanted to cooperate with the record industry. The basic idea was to have a place where you could listen to the world's music, and (then) if you wanted to download a song with better quality and without radio jingles," you could, she said. That would give the record industry more music-selling opportunities.The new software, a second beta version, was initially released only in Swedish, and the full Web site at Chilirec.com can currently only be reached from Sweden. The software is free to use until the end of August. But eventually, Chilirec plans to offer both a free advertising-based version and a premium version that would cost about one euro a month.CNET News gave the software a try and loaded our hard drive with a couple thousand songs in a few hours, even after narrowing the genre down to jazz.Recorded songs are stored as MP3s and quality varies with different radio stations. Sometimes a song starts off with a radio jingle or with the end of another song.Users can choose from a long list of radio stations and, in addition to genres, can narrow recordings to categories like "most played on radio in the U.K."It's also possible to copy various top lists on the Internet as playlists, and to explore music already stored on the hard drive.Chilirec is Java based and runs in the browser. Initially only Windows is supported, but Dreifeldt told Cnet News that versions for Mac and Linux will be coming later.
"We have had our law firm verify in detail that this is a recorder which is legally ok," Chilirec CEO and co-founder Carina Dreifeldt told CNET News.Chilirec is yet another digital music venture from Sweden, where a debate on piracy and copyright issues seems to have inspired alternatives such as Spotify and Tunerec, all offering listening for free.Tapping into lots of Internet radio stations, Chilirec software records dozens of songs every minute, adding up to thousands of songs on your hard drive in a single day.The legality of this and other similar software such as Ripcast and StationRipper is based on the right to record music and make a few copies for personal use."The hitch is that the individual must perform the actual recording," explained Dreifeldt.This is the reason why Chilirec now launches a software that runs on users' PCs. In October 2007, an earlier test version was launched in a cloud-based model, with a patent filed for the technology. In the cloud-based model, each user had his or her own disk space on Chilirec's servers and managed the recordings via the Internet with the PC serving as a kind of remote control. The service soon became very popular.But record companies considered this a service in which Chilirec was making the recordings and thus Chilirec was making copyright-protected material available illegally, since licenses weren't paid. A similar case regards the U.S. cable provider Cablevision's network-based DVR."We could either fight and go to court, or transform the product from a cloud-based model to a personal recorder," Dreifeldt said.As Chilirec didn't want to go up against the recording industry, the cloud-based model was abandoned at the end of 2008, at least for now. Dreifeldt expressed some disappointment over the industry's standpoint."We wanted to cooperate with the record industry. The basic idea was to have a place where you could listen to the world's music, and (then) if you wanted to download a song with better quality and without radio jingles," you could, she said. That would give the record industry more music-selling opportunities.The new software, a second beta version, was initially released only in Swedish, and the full Web site at Chilirec.com can currently only be reached from Sweden. The software is free to use until the end of August. But eventually, Chilirec plans to offer both a free advertising-based version and a premium version that would cost about one euro a month.CNET News gave the software a try and loaded our hard drive with a couple thousand songs in a few hours, even after narrowing the genre down to jazz.Recorded songs are stored as MP3s and quality varies with different radio stations. Sometimes a song starts off with a radio jingle or with the end of another song.Users can choose from a long list of radio stations and, in addition to genres, can narrow recordings to categories like "most played on radio in the U.K."It's also possible to copy various top lists on the Internet as playlists, and to explore music already stored on the hard drive.Chilirec is Java based and runs in the browser. Initially only Windows is supported, but Dreifeldt told Cnet News that versions for Mac and Linux will be coming later.
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