News written by Petteri Pyyny (August, 2006)

After we launched our "innovation contest" couple of weeks ago, we have received quite massive amount of suggestions on how to improve our site. And unlike some companies, we actually do read all the feedback we receive and try to learn from the feedback.

Several changes to the site have been made during the last couple of weeks, all of them based on the feedback we've received from our users. Here's a quick summary of the improvements we've launched so far:

• New layout for our top menu
  • We have had this "wtf" face on ever since we started reading the feedback from our users. Several suggestions included ideas to "have a software section on your site where users could download tools that relate to your site's subject" or "news section would be nice". We have double-checked our code during the last two weeks way too many times to see whether there's some kind of a catch that prevents regular users from seeing our top navigation. As we couldn't find such bug, we came to a conclusion that the top navigation was simply not visible enough. Well, I assume that is sorted now..
• Google search
  • Large proportion of the suggestions received complained about our site's search and how bad it is. Many of you suggested to replace the internal search with Google. Well, we did exactly that.
• Better BBML/UBB code support
  • We have added several improvements to the UBB-support of our forums. These changes are still in "beta", but they'll soon be visible to all forum users, alongside with an improved forum message editor.
• Ability to view number of unread private messages easily
  • This has been suggested many, many times. And now its there -- if you're logged in, the site's main page shows you how many unread private messages you have.
• "Quick jump to last page" added to discussion forums
  • Many people hoped to see an ability to quickly jump to the discussion thread's last page from thread list pages. Done.
• Mobile/PDA version more visible
  • This is not a new feature, but instead a new placement for a link. We were one of the first sites in the world to have PDA and WAP versions of our site available back in 1999, but those versions aren't promoted very much. Now there's a link at the top of the site that will direct visitors to a page explaining how to access our site using mobile phone or PDA.
• ...tons of minor changes to the system back-end..

This is just the tip of the iceberg and we have tons of new stuff coming up during this autumn. Also, as the competition is still in its infancy, we truly hope that people send us their ideas on how to improve our site and how to make it more accessible for people using the site for the very first time. You can send your ideas to us using this form -- and have a chance to win 1,500 euros..

World's largest record label, Vivendi's Universal Music has signed a deal with an upstart music download company SpiralFrog that allows consumers to download Universal's music for free.

SpiralFrog's business model is based on advertising revenue rather than charging for downloads. With Universal's music catalog available to the service, the company seems to be poised to challenge Apple's dominant position in legal music downloads. And, most of all, Universal is putting its hopes that by providing their music for free -- even with the ads -- would reduce the number of people using P2P networks to download music illegally.

Very little details about the service are revealed so far, and huge question marks loom over the service and its features. It is not known whether the service will allow user to really download the songs to their own computers where they could be transferred to portable audio players, or whether the songs need to be played using a specific web application or software.

According to SpiralFrog's website, the service should launch in December, 2006.

Source: FT

Corel announced on Monday that it has agreed to buy a DVD software maker InterVideo for $196 million.

InterVideo has been a major player in PC DVD software market for years now and its most famous product is its DVD player application, WinDVD. Company also develops variety of other DVD-related products, including DVD backup software called DVD Copy and DVD creation program called WinDVD Creator.

InterVideo also owns a majority share of Ulead Systems, one of the market leaders in DVD authoring and video editing software market.

The deal is still subject to InterVideo shareholder approval and regulatory approvals. Corel expects the deal to close in the fourth quarter of 2006.

Source: Corel press release

As we have been working on AfterDawn.com for almost eight years now, it quite often happens that we become "blind" to the site's features, navigation, etc. And as the most people who we deal with on daily basis, are regular users of our site, they've managed to develop the same problem, making it impossible to find out how the site looks like and appears to Joe Sixpack who happens to visit the site for the very first time.

In an attempt to "think outside the box", we have set up a competition that asks all of our users to innovate how AfterDawn.com should work. This can be small things, like bugs that simply drive you crazy that should be fixed immediately which we haven't noticed. Or better yet, a whole new concept how the material on the site should be arranged and made available. Or even a new layout.

There are no rules on what you can suggest -- you can suggest a whole redesign of the layout, an idea for a new section, a fresh way to find content from the quite massive archive of knowledge that we have on our site to small things, like font colors, etc.

The idea can relate to any AfterDawn's section, whether "my", the main site, the forums, the software section, guides, FAQ, etc. Just be creative, don't just improve existing stuff, think a new way how things could be done!

Read more...

Study by NPD Group finds that Apple's iPod continues to dominate the U.S. digital music player market.

Apple's market share of the U.S. digital music player markets was a whopping 75.6 percent in the second quarter of the year 2006, according to the NPD study. Second in the market was SanDisk with 9.7 percent market share, followed by Creative (4.3 percent), Samsung (2.5 percent) and Sony (1.9 percent).

Study, however, warns that stand-alone digital music players might be heading to the way of PDAs (pretty much the same direction where dodos went..) once mobile phone giants start making their phones more user-friendly in terms of music playback and add more capacity. To prove this point, earlier this year Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia launched N91, its first phone specifically aimed at digital music market, and recently acquired a digital music company Loudeye.

Source: Yahoo!

The first hearings in Finland's largest P2P piracy case were made today in district court of Lahti where two users distributed copyrighted movies, music, games and software via BitTorrent network, sharing their torrent links via site called Finreactor (back then, Finland's largest BitTorrent and ed2k site). The two men were among those who got singled out by media corporations as being "major contributors" when the Finreactor site was busted by Finnish police back in 2004.

Media corporations and software companies are seeking total damages worth 3.5 million euros (appx. $4.5 million) from the two users now in court. The two users now facing court are just the tip of the iceberg in Finreactor case. In other district courts across Finland, appx. 60 former users or operators of the site will face similar court cases brought against them. All of the people facing legal challenges against them, were, according to Finnish police, either administrators of the Finreactor site or people identified as the "first sources" of illegally distributed material.