Amazon Cloud Player App Comes to iPhone, iPod Touch -- At Last

Amazon today released its long-awaited Cloud Player App for the iPhone and iPod touch. The free app allows users of iOS devices, including the iPad, to stream or download music stored online in their Amazon Cloud account.

After launching its cloud drive and music service in March 2011, Amazon has certainly taken its time before releasing a native app for iOS. In May of last year, Amazon made its Cloud Player compatible with the mobile version of Safari. But a native app, essential to making the music service appealing to iOS users, was missing until today.

Cloud Player also lets you manage and create playlists, and play music already stored on your mobile device.

Amazon customers get 5GB of free cloud storage and can buy additional space as well, including 20GB for $20/year or 50GB for $50/year. Users who buy a storage plan receive unlimited space for MP3 and AAC (.m4a) music files at no additional cost, but only for a limited time, the company said. Read More

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Intel says Android not ready for Dual Core

Operating system needs work

Chipzilla is claiming that not enough work is being done to adapt the Android operating system to work on dual core CPUs. Intel is currently having a crack at entering the market with its single-core Medfield Atom processors and running Android on multi-core chips might be a disadvantage.

Mike Bell, general manager of Intel’s mobile and communications group, said that in mobile power use was constrained and multi-core chews up a lot of juice. He told the Inquirer that if you did not have to worry about power, multiple cores would make a lot of sense. Namely, you can run the cores full out and heavily load them if the operating system has a good thread scheduler.

But when it comes to Android, things like thread scheduling and thread affinity are not there and when the operating system goes to do a single task, a lot of other stuff stops. Bell said that moving into multiple cores on Android means that Intel has to put a lot of investment into software to fix the scheduler and fix the threading so if we do multi-core products it actually takes advantage of it.

Its other problem is that more cores generate too much heat. At the moment with the multiple core implementations in the market, "it isn’t obvious to me you really get the advantage for the size and the cost of what’s going into that part", Bell said. Read More

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Zuckerberg's wealth down $4.5 billion as Facebook tumbles on NASDAQ

The drastic fall in the share price of Facebook has significantly eroded the personal wealth of its 28 year-old co-founder Mark Zuckerberg by a massive USD 4.5 billion in just three weeks.

Zuckerberg's fortune has declined to USD 11 billion from USD 15.5 billion on May 18 when the company went public as investors have dumped the stock amid concerns over growth prospects of the social networking giant, according to the data available with stock exchanges.

Within three weeks of making an entry into the secondary market, the stock value of the company has collapsed by about 29 per cent to USD 27.10 apiece on Friday from USD 38 on debut.

Zuckerberg's about 408 million shares were valued at USD 15.5 billion based on debut price of USD 38. However, on Friday's closing price of USD 27.10 apiece, his wealth has shrunk to USD 11 billion, a erosion of around USD 4.5 billion. Read More

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Oracle Cloud Makes Public Debut

The Oracle Cloud is an effort that Ellison's company has been working on for at least seven years under the guise of its Fusion application suite. At Oracle's OpenWorld event in 2011, the company first took the wraps off the Oracle Cloud with a preview of the platform. Oracle's cloud includes versions of all its software products including database, CRM and collaboration tools.

Oracle is also taking specific aim at rival Salesforce.com with a Social Relationship Management offering that is different than traditional CRM (Customer Relationship Management). Ellison explained that the goal is to enable users of the platform to work with people before they are customers and to build relationships so that they will become customers.

Ellison onstage demonstrated the platform, which is fully integrated with social media management capabilities for Twitter and Facebook. Going a step further, the system can be used to analyze and understand what customers are saying in order to drive them to acquire more products. Read More

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Facebook rolling out App Center

(CNN) -- Make room, Apple, Google and Amazon. One more major Internet player now has an app store.

The Facebook App Center gives users a one-stop shop for Draw Something, Instagram, Pinterest and hundreds of other apps that run on the social-media mega-site.

In all, the center, which began rolling out Friday to users in the United States, will open with about 600 apps available. And, for the first time, Facebook will be offering paid apps as well as free ones from the center.

The center will be available on the Web and on Apple's iOS and Google's Android operating systems.

 Facebook: Is now the right time to buy? Facebook's history remains unwritten

According to Facebook, the center will offer personalized suggestions to users based on their interests and will only include "high-quality apps" based on feedback from people who use them.

When plans for the center were announced last month, Facebook said developers will now be given the option of charging a one-time fee for their apps.

"Many developers have been successful with in-app purchases, but to support more types of apps on Facebook.com, we will give developers the option to offer paid apps," Facebook's Adam Brady wrote.

Many of the apps featured in the App Center are already available on Facebook (although the site expects new ones to spring up). But with the App Center, users will be able to browse for new ones instead of randomly discovering them. Read More

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How IT Can Reclaim Social Relevance

Social technologies are spreading through the business in a decentralized way, not via IT leadership. How can organizations and IT leaders make the most of this trend?

If there's anything that's striking about the changes taking place in technology today, it's that many of the most transformative new advances are bypassing the IT department entirely. One only has to look at the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) phenomenon to see this clearly. Most IT departments are planning to enable (if they haven't already) BYOD, a form of user-led computing adoption. It's easier and easier to make the case today that technology, especially on the edges, is increasingly moving out of IT's hands.

It hasn't always been thus: Graphical user interfaces, computer networks, the Internet, e-mail, and the first and second generations of mobile devices. All of these were embraced and realized by technology leaders as primary computing capabilities in relatively short order. Read More

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The Second Coming Of Facebook

Facebook's eye-watering IPO has raised some awkward questions for the future of social networking. The record breaking $100 billion valuation was greeted with skepticism from some quarters, which will only have heightened in the wake of a less than stellar trading performance.

Investors and analysts are nervous. Facebook may have almost 900 million users, but the company only makes an average of $5 profit from each of them per year. Finding ways to increase that figure without alienating people is an urgent task.

Cynics might even suggest that Mark Zuckerberg and company are cashing in now precisely because future growth is uncertain, but let's not forget we're talking about a man on a publicly stated mission to change the world, for whom wealth seems to be only a secondary concern. Read More

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