The Digital Reader |
- The Morning Coffee – 9 April 2014
- Pocket for Android, iOS Updated
- Proof that English is Crazy (video)
- Kobo for iOS Updated
- Amazon Passes Apple, Hulu to Become Third Biggest Streaming Video Service in the US
- Thai eBook Startup Ookbee Raises $7 Million in New Funding Round
- Feedly Announces New Integration with IFTT Competitor Zapier
- Wattpad Raises $46 Million in New Funding
- Acer to Launch ChromeOS Tablet This Month? Probably Not
- Samsung Unveils the Entry-level Samsung Galaxy Ace Style Smartphone
| The Morning Coffee – 9 April 2014 Posted: 08 Apr 2014 09:30 PM PDT Here’s a short list of stories to read this morning. (The longer lists will return soon.)
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| Pocket for Android, iOS Updated Posted: 08 Apr 2014 05:03 PM PDT Pocket Both apps now offer an interface which has been translated into Chinese, Dutch, Korean, Polish, and Portuguese. This is the second batch of languages to be added to the app, bringing the total number of supported languages to 12. (French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, and Russian were added in late March.) Aside from new language support, the iPad and iPhone app only gained a single tweak (improved detection of copied links), but the Android app gained several features. Pocket for Android now supports the immersive reading mode offered in Android 4.4 KitKat, and it can also hide the status bar on any Android devices running 4.1 Jelly Bean and up. The typography and layout has also been tweaked to h ensure that headers, images and paragraphs all flow together seamlessly – even after a reader has changed the font size. You can find the app in Google Play and iTunes. The post Pocket for Android, iOS Updated appeared first on The Digital Reader.  |
| Proof that English is Crazy (video) Posted: 08 Apr 2014 01:16 PM PDT English is widely recognized as a language with irrational and illogical syntax, pronunciation, and structure, and every so often someone likes to prove that point by demonstrating the many contradictory rules about conjugation and pronunciation. I came across a new video today, and I wanted to share the fun: English is such a confusing language because it draws from many different sources. I think James Nicoll said it best:
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| Posted: 08 Apr 2014 12:47 PM PDT Kobo In addition to bug fixes and performance improvements, the update adds a two new reading theme as well as a new option for customizing a reader’s home and library screens. You can find the app in iTunes, and in order to install it you will need to be running iOS 7 or later. Changelog: 1. A brand new Themes feature to customize your Library and Home screen, including time-based themes that subtly change throughout the day.
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| Amazon Passes Apple, Hulu to Become Third Biggest Streaming Video Service in the US Posted: 08 Apr 2014 11:56 AM PDT Amazon has According to the streaming video startup Qwilt, over the past year Amazon Instant Video has more than doubled in terms of its volume of streaming video traffic consumed by US broadband subscribers. The specific traffic details have not been disclosed, but Qwilt does say that Amazon is now second only to Youtube and Netflix in terms internet traffic. The post Amazon Passes Apple, Hulu to Become Third Biggest Streaming Video Service in the US appeared first on The Digital Reader.  |
| Thai eBook Startup Ookbee Raises $7 Million in New Funding Round Posted: 08 Apr 2014 11:05 AM PDT Southeast Ookbee announced today that Tokyo-based Transcosmos has bought a 10% stake in the company. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but sources place the deal at around $7 million. This would value the company at approximately $70 million. Transcosmos is an IT outsourcing firm, and it is joining Thai VC InVent, which owns 25% of Ookbee. In addition to buying a stake on Ookbee Transcosmos is also forming a strategic partnership which will involve Transcosmos assisting Ookbee in customer support, online marketing, and data analytics. Primarily focused on serving readers in Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam, and Singapore, Oookbee boasts 5.5 million users, more than double the number of users reported in December 2012. Membership is expected to top 10 million by the end of 2014. The startup offers reading apps for Android and iOS, and they recently launched a buffet style digital magazine service in Thailand called Ookbee Me. The price starts at 89 Baht (US$3) per month. The post Thai eBook Startup Ookbee Raises $7 Million in New Funding Round appeared first on The Digital Reader.  |
| Feedly Announces New Integration with IFTT Competitor Zapier Posted: 08 Apr 2014 09:23 AM PDT Feedly has Like its better known competitor IFTTT, Zapier lets users create tasks that are carried out automatically. But unlike IFTTT with its extensive connections to social networks, Zapier focuses on business customers. It’s a freemium service, with free users limited to only 5 tasks which can be run up to 100 times per month. If you want to share a story privately to your colleagues, IFTTT offers connections to SalesForce Chatter and Yammer (also email). Zapier offers more connections to more business apps and services than IFTTT, including project management apps such as Asana, Basecamp, Trello and Podio, team communication tools such as HipChat, Slack, Campfire and Yammer, and task management apps such as Google Tasks and Todoist. The Zapier sharing option is only available to Feedly Pro users. This $5 a month service includes better tech support, faster feed updates, search, and many more sharing options that what free users have. In addition to Zapier, Prop users can also share to LinkedIn, IFTTT, OneNote, EverNote, Buffer, and more. The post Feedly Announces New Integration with IFTT Competitor Zapier appeared first on The Digital Reader.  |
| Wattpad Raises $46 Million in New Funding Posted: 08 Apr 2014 07:30 AM PDT Wattpad
The online reading community announced on Tuesday that they had raised a total of $46 million in a C Funding round. The round was led by OMERS Ventures and included all of the company's existing investors as well as August Capital, Raine Ventures, and Northleaf Venture Catalyst Fund. Wattpad boasts that they have around 25 million monthly active users, or about 4 times as many users as when they secured their last funding round in mid-2012. Wattpad users now spend a cumulative total of over 6 billion minutes per month on the site. “To give some idea of how much content users are posting on Wattpad, they're uploading one chapter every half a second,” Lau told TechCrunch. “That’s about 150,000 uploads every day, and if you translate that to reading time, that's about ten hours of reading uploaded to Wattpad every minute.” While that puts Wattpad far behind Youtube’s claim of 100 hours of video uploaded every minute, it is still an impressive accomplishment for a niche community. Wattpad plans to use the funds to grow its user base, in particular the international membership. Wattpad has always had a strong international presence, and right now 50% of Wattpad's activity comes from users outside North America. The social network plans to capitalize on that. The post Wattpad Raises $46 Million in New Funding appeared first on The Digital Reader.  |
| Acer to Launch ChromeOS Tablet This Month? Probably Not Posted: 08 Apr 2014 06:14 AM PDT Rumors Acer sent out an invite earlier this week for a press event. Specific details are scarce, but that hasn’t stopped one pundit from speculating that Acer could be launching a tablet running ChromeOS. What evidence does he have? Close to none, actually, which is why I tend to doubt this speculation. Yes, Google has been regularly releasing updates which improved how Chrome performed with a touchscreen, and that is probably a sign that they want to get Chrome on to a tablet. In some ways it is the stronger OS, and it handles large screens better than Android, so I would think that this would be an attractive option on 10″ tablets. And yes, Google even teased us with a concept design in early 2010. But in spite of all the details pointing towards a Chrome tablet, I also know that this Chrome tablet speculation has been bandied about at least 4 times in the past couple years. It seems that every time a major tablet was about to be released, some blogger somewhere raises the possibility that it might run Chrome. Folks, I would be terribly surprised if Acer did launch a Chrome tablet at the end of this month. This is another unicorn rumor, IMO. After 4 years of speculation, I am beginning to wonder whether the tech blogosphere wants a Chrome tablet more than Google does. With dozens and dozens of tablets launched in the past 4 years from major device makers, Google has passed up untold opportunities to release a Chrome tablet. And what with the new focus on Android (Android TV and Android Wear), I suspect that Google now sees Android as their main focus, not Chrome. Google could have launched a Chrome tablet by now if they had wanted one, or if nothing else they could have gotten out of the way of a tablet maker and let someone else make it. The complete lack of Chrome tablets is probably a sign that Google is blocking them. The post Acer to Launch ChromeOS Tablet This Month? Probably Not appeared first on The Digital Reader.  |
| Samsung Unveils the Entry-level Samsung Galaxy Ace Style Smartphone Posted: 08 Apr 2014 05:13 AM PDT
The South Korean gadget maker has just announced the Samsung Galaxy Ace Style, a truly bottom of the barrel smartphone – for Samsung, at least. The Galaxy Ace Style starts with specs similar to the Galaxy S2, and then shaves off a couple features as the price drops. This smartphone has a 4″ screen with a resolution of 480 x 800, just like the S2′s slightly larger 4.3″ screen. It’s running Android 4.4 KitKat on a dual-core 1.2GHz chip with 512MB RAM, 4GB Flash storage, and a microSD card slot. It has 2 cameras (5MP and VGA) and a 1.5Ah battery.    In terms of connectivity the Galaxy Ace Style has Wifi, BT, and NFC. It’s going to be available globally in black and white, so cellular connectivity will vary based on the market. According to Samsung, the European price will be 149 euros The Galaxy Ace Style strikes me as a phone whose performance will be too laggy to be good for much more than phone calls. IMO that makes it a feature phone more than anything. As I was writing this post I was reminded of the fact that Samsung over prices and under-builds their bottom of the market devices. That’s what they’ve been doing with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 tablets, and it is a good description for Samsung’s budget smartphones like the 2011 Samsung Galaxy Ace. That had only 384MB RAM, an 800MHz CPU, and a 3.5″ screen, but it retails for $199. While the Galaxy Ace Style is a slight improvement on that older smartphone, I think the specs (and more importantly, the resulting performance) are too low to really call it a smartphone. The post Samsung Unveils the Entry-level Samsung Galaxy Ace Style Smartphone appeared first on The Digital Reader.  |
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