download

Here's the deal:

You (the beloved Download user, the reason we're here) are out there somewhere, while I (Greg Penhaligon, product manager of Download) am way up here, sequestered in the crystalline fortress that makes up the Download Control Center. My job is to make Download into the best site of it's kind for you, but what is that exactly? What do you want? I converse with some of you in the forums, read your occasionally expletive-laden emails to customer service, but we've never had a proper way to keep you up-to-date with what we're … Read more

When I bought a gaming PC for home use a little over a year ago, I bought a middle-of-the-road machine that had everything I needed with a little room to upgrade later on down the line. I got a 2.2GHz processor, a high-end (at the time) video card so I could play the latest games, 2 gigs of RAM (on the advice of a gamer friend), and I opted for a 120GB hard drive to save a little money.

At the time, it seemed like 120GB would be more than enough. After all, I can remember when a 1GB hard drive was the pinnacle of storage capacity--120GB ought to be able to hold anything right? Games these days generally take up a few gigs each so I thought I would never run out of space. I now know I was wrong. If you wait long enough, even the biggest hard drives will fill up.… Read more

At this point in time there are many user interfaces for searching, browsing, and watching videos on YouTube. Apple's got custom interfaces on both the iPhone and iPod touch, along with the Apple TV, while YouTube's got its own mobile frontend that works pretty well, but lacks some of the polish of Apple's efforts. One of the newer companies trying to improve on YouTube's offerings is 3rd Eye Solutions which has an app called iDesktop.tv (formerly known as "YouTube Desktop"), that lets you browse, view, and search YouTube videos in a similar style … Read more

Todd Barr (Director of Marketing at Red Hat) has a great post about open-source revenue mechanics and how they shift as an open-source company becomes an established player. Net net: giving away free software is great for driving adoption, but an open-source vendor needs to figure out more than how to give things away to build a great business.

Sound simplistic? Just try it. Sexy as open source is, you spend far longer ramping revenue (revenue, mind you, not bookings/sales) to cover expenses than you would in a typical proprietary license-based software model, as Todd points out. I've argued that open-source startups have benefits that proprietary vendors can't match (a focus on ubiquity, for one thing, and the attendant benefits that derive from "abundance"), but it's not easy sailing.

Todd writes:

So, start-up open source companies necessarily need low-cost, high-impact marketing tactics. And, by golly, providing awesome software to download for free is a great tactic - it drives a lot of web traffic, builds your brand, helps you get your early adopters, and quickly builds a community of advocates that might buy your value-added services in the future. But the free download tactic is less relevant to the challenges of a mid-sized company:… Read more

With Thanksgiving only two days away, people are bringing out their favorite recipes for turkey, gravy, stuffing, and pumpkin pie. How do you keep your recipes from year to year? My father's method was to put his favorite recipes into notebooks that would be brought out every year. But even with laminated pages, eventually his notebooks got pretty messy. My mother used index cards to store recipes, but over time the ingredients would fade, especially if the recipe was popular with the family.

In the search for a better method through software, I discovered some good recipe database programs anyone can use. These handy apps let you store all your favorite Thanksgiving recipes (along with all your other recipes) in a searchable database which you can quickly print out for easy access in the kitchen. You can also catalog things like spices and ingredients on hand, and then search for results using those and other parameters. Some of these apps let you explore other databases online with countless recipe variations and varieties of foods to choose from.… Read more

A new TV download service is trying to one-up iTunes.

Though it has far less content than Apple's service, SyncTV offers themed channels of TV content available for subscription or purchase over the Web. Each channel will run about $2 each per month, and currently there are four subscription channels available.

In most cases, if you subscribe to a channel, you also get access to every episode of the shows on that channel, SyncTV CEO John Gildred says. So far, the biggest content name that has signed on is Showtime. That's not the most compelling for the average … Read more

As an Internet worker, I surf hundreds of different Web sites daily. A good portion of those--including online e-mail services, Web-based work tools, and members-only message boards--require a log-in information before I can gain access. In addition to sites and services that require only a login and password, I also occasionally need to fill out forms when I register for software, sign-up for a new service, or buy something online.

You might think it's not a huge amount of trouble to fill in log-in information, but if you're like most people, you use the same password (or a … Read more

Radiohead stuck up for its fans on Friday.

The rock band denied that 62 percent of those who downloaded the group's new album paid nothing for the music.

Last month, Radiohead announced that it was releasing a digital version of the album for whatever fans wanted to pay. Internet research group, ComScore, on Monday released a report that said only 38 percent paid anything for In Rainbows.

In a statement, Radiohead's representatives called ComScore's report "wholly inaccurate."

Radiohead's pay-what-you-want offer is groundbreaking and is being watched closely by fans, music labels and other bands. … Read more

While some 12,000 TV and film screenwriters go on strike this week, people are filling the void by turning to other forms of media, such as DVDs and the Internet. Ironically, these outlets are exactly what the members of the Writers Guild want more of the profit of (and don't want people to support). They're hoping to come to an agreement soon, although the last walk out like this (in 1988) lasted for five months. Ouch.

We'll miss The Office, Desperate Housewives and Conan O'brien, but it's not the end of the world, right? … Read more