(AP) — Movie rentals are coming to the Internet’s most popular video site.
YouTube getting into movie rental business
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Tag Archives: Convergence
Amazon To Introduce New 70% Royalty Option For Kinde Digital Text Platform
Right off the heels of announcing an expansion of its Kindle Digital Text Platform to authors and publishers around the world, Amazon has announced that it will soon introduce a new 70 percent royalty option in the program that will allow them to to earn a larger share of revenue from each Kindle book they sell.
For each Kindle book sold, authors and publishers who choose the new royalty option – will will not replace the existing DTP standard royalty option – will receive 70 percent of list price, net of delivery costs.
Amazon says the new 70 percent royalty option will become available on June 30, 2010 and be restricted to books sold in the United States at launch.
From the press release:
Delivery costs will be based on file size and pricing will be $0.15/MB. At today’s median DTP file size of 368KB, delivery costs would be less than $0.06 per unit sold. This new program can thus enable authors and publishers to make more money on every sale. For example, on an $8.99 book an author would make $3.15 with the standard option, and $6.25 with the new 70 percent option.
Russ Grandinetti, Vice President of Kindle Content at Amazon.com says authors today often receive royalties in the range of 7% to 15% of the list price that publishers set for their physical books, or 25% of the net that publishers receive from retailers for their digital books.
The new royalty option aims to increase the revenue earned from book sales for publishers and authors, but there are certain requirements they have to meet in order to qualify, on top of the requirements books receiving the standard royalty rate have today:
- The author or publisher-supplied list price must be between $2.99 and $9.99
- This list price must be at least 20 percent below the lowest price for the physical book
- The title is made available for sale in all regions for which the author or publisher has rights
- The title will be included in a set of features in the Kindle Store, such as text-to-speech
- Under this royalty option, books must be offered at or below price parity with competition, including physical book prices
For the latter requirement, Amazon says it will provide tools to automate the process, and that the 70 percent royalty will be calculated off the sales price.
Tablet computer market to boom: Deloitte
Industry tracker Deloitte predicts the tablet computer market will boom this year with tens of millions of people deciding the notepad-sized devices are “just right” for their needs.
Robo Cafe: robot waiters make a restaurant a one-man operation
Back in the 70s, the robots were coming for our crappy manufacturing jobs. Now, it seems, they’re coming for our crappy table service jobs. Korean company ITM Technology has developed a restaurant concept around a cute little robot that fulfills the role of a waiter – it takes orders from customers, either verbally or through a touch screen, then relays them to the kitchen, and brings the food out when it’s ready. Robo Cafe eliminates ordering errors, reduces staffing costs dramatically for restaurant owners, and even brings the boss all the tips. It’s probably not going to be nearly as interesting to Tiger Woods, though…
Tags: Kitchen, Robot, Robotics, Touch Screen
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GizmagEmergingTechnologyMagazine/~3/FEpmXqNQ2dI/
Microsoft Invests Millions In Innovative Teaching Practices Research
Microsoft today announced that its Partners in Learning program is sponsoring the Innovative Teaching and Learning (ITL) Research project, which is led by non-profit R&D organization SRI International.
The global research program intends to “broadly investigate” the effects that information and communications technology has in transforming teaching and learning at the school and education system level. Microsoft says it will invest $1 million annually in the multi-year study in partnership with the governments of Finland, Indonesia, Russia and Senegal.
The primary focus of this research, which is being guided by outside advisors from the OECD, UNESCO, the World Bank, the International Society for Technology in Education and other organizations, is to assess teachers’ adoption of innovative classroom teaching practices and the degree to which those practices provide students with personalized learning experiences.
This will complement the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ACT21S) research that Microsoft announced on Monday, which focuses primarily on identifying what it refers to as ’21st century skills’, and developing ways to measure them by providing new methods of assessing students. The ACT21S research was developed through a collaboration between Cisco, Intel and Microsoft.
Teams of national researchers from universities, think tanks and other institutions will work with SRI International to conduct the research in each country. Methodologies, data and reports are open to researchers around the world, and will be free and publicly available each year (the first results are expected this summer and annually from then).
In addition, the research project will develop a set of evaluation tools that schools and education systems can adopt to measure their own progress.
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