The Berlin-based Txtr is now selling its barebones e-reader, the Beagle, for €59 in Europe. The plan was to offer it for under €10 through subsidies from mobile carriers, but those deals haven’t surfaced yet — though the company says it’s close. Read more »
While much of the attention during and after the Boston bombings focused on how one Reddit thread got things wrong, there were other important parts of the community that were doing good — and even doing something approaching journalism. Read more »
Financial markets briefly plunged after hackers took over the AP’s account and reported a disaster in Washington. Read more at GigaOM »
Looking for a job in digital media? Each week we highlight some of the most interesting positions posted to paidContent’s jobs board. Check out the latest gigs at media companies across the country. Read more »
Google’s published a blog post last week about “bad apples” in the ad industry. The meaning of the post is now clear: it was intended to rein in shady software, but also to send a message to other advertisers to clean up their act. Read more »
Aereo, a service that lets you watch live TV on your phone, is going live in Boston on May 15. Read more »
Churnalism, a new browser extension and website from the Sunlight Foundation, aims to help detect plagiarism online by checking content against Wikipedia and a database of press releases. But it won’t pick up on plagiarism from other sources. Read more »
The New York Times is no longer restricting non-subscribers’ access to its video content. The move, which comes as the Times tightens other parts of its paywall, is part of the paper’s plans to expand its brand in the video space. Read more »
What can you learn from today’s blogging elite? Check out this audio re-cast from our recent paidContent LIVE show to learn from some of the medium’s masters. Read more »
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings doesn’t really think that many people are sharing their accounts with extended family members. His remarks came in response to an estimate that 10 million people watch Netflix without paying for it. Read more »
Twitter’s love affair with television seems to know no bounds — two recent deals with BBC America and Comedy Central will bring video clips inside users’ streams, and more such deals appear to be in the works. Read more »
Netflix made more than $1 billion in revenue for the first time in its corporate history last quarter. The company also used its Q1 results to announce a new $12 family plan. Read more »
Want to know what happened last week at paidContent Live 2013? Here are links to transcripts of the sessions from New York. Read more »
Rhapsody has some advice for its competitors Spotify and Rdio: Don’t invest in splashy ads. Focus on featuring your service instead. Read more »
A new deal with a large ad-buying firm will be worth hundreds of millions of dollars over a multi-year period, the Financial Times reports. Read more at GigaOM »
Tumblr is inching toward profitability with a new mobile ad offering, announced Monday. Ads will appear directly in the content streams on users’ Android and iOS apps. Read more »
Jelly, the still stealthy new company from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, has nabbed a top Twitter engineer as its new CTO. Read more at GigaOM »
Canada is the latest country to approve the proposed merger between Big Six publishers Random House and Penguin. Read more »
For The Win wants to take a BuzzFeed-style viral media approach to sports media. The new site, which will compete with rivals like Deadspin, will focus on finding “shareable” content that will be appealing even to people who don’t follow sports. Read more »
It’s now common practice for canceled shows to find their way to fans via digital means, but there’s a big difference between uploading unaired episodes and truly coming back to life. Read more »
Although many other U.S. newspapers have shrunk, the Philadelphia Inquirer has suffered more than most. Will Steacy, whose father was laid off from the paper in 2011, has put together a photo essay showing its decline. Read more »
Feedly has faced two outages since adding millions of users in the wake of the announcement that Google will retire its Google Reader service. Now Feedly is accelerating its monetization plans. Read more »
The long-awaited Digital Public Library of America launched this week — but its collection does not include the digital repositories of many major university libraries. Meanwhile, a much bigger library collection scanned by Google is tied up in court. Read more »
While both Twitter and Reddit have come under fire for distributing incorrect information about the Boston bombings, mainstream outlets have done so as well. In a real-time news environment, having more sources is ultimately better. Read more »
YouTube notched a major victory in its long-running copyright suit with Google. A New York judge emphatically rejected Viacom’s theory that YouTube had “red flag” knowledge that made it liable for content uploaded by its users. Read more »
Google posted reports that came close to analyst expectations. CEO Larry Page talked up the Google’s more exotic products and dismissed questions about resource allocation and the impact of Facebook’s Home screen on mobile. Read more at GigaOM »
NBC may be ready to rethink its stance towards Google TV, and make its content available for free on the platform through a native app. Read more »
Congress and even some tech companies are promising to get serious about “Do Not Track” legislation, which will let consumers tell companies not to collect their personal information. But any meaningful change is unlikely. Read more »
MoPub’s report says the share of ad buying on Apple phones increase 12 percent between January and March. Android tablets saw less than 1 percent of money spent on ads for the quarter. Read more »
At our paidContent Live conference in New York, we heard about the disruption in publishing, journalism and advertising from speakers such as Alan Rusbridger of The Guardian, Jon Steinberg of BuzzFeed and blogger Andrew Sullivan. Read more »
When was the last time you logged into LinkedIn’s mobile app as a way of browsing the news or killing time? You might not have given the app much thought before, but the company’s recent push toward news might change this. Read more at GigaOM »
Twitter’s new #Music app will be available on the web and in the iTunes store on Thursday. The app integrates music from iTunes, Spotify and Rdio and lets users tweet songs from the app. Read more at GigaOM »
From PaidContent Live 2013, we brought you five different entrepreneurs who talked about ways in which they are changing up business models for media and the ways in which people consume content. Read more »
Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia wants to disrupt TV pricing again, this time by rolling out movie and news packages at a fraction of the price of traditional ones. News, he said, might even be free. Read more »
There’s more than one way to the top of the elite blogging ladder. Here’s lessons from four bloggerati that made it there. Read more »
“Native advertising” is on the lips of everyone in publishing and advertising these days. Blogger and skeptic Felix Salmon asked executives from BuzzFeed and Forbes what it really means. Read more »
How are book publishers learning more about our evolving reading habits? Not surprisingly, ebook publishers are turning the industry toward thinking more about making data-driven decisions. Read more »
New media incubator and venture firm Betaworks is increasingly morphing into an operating company and it’s got a new rapid development launch approach that will deliver five social media products in five weeks. What’ll stick? Read more »
Brands claim they’re taking to social media, but they’re really inserting ads into other people social engagement streams — not engaging themsleves, says the founder of the Dachis Group. Read more »
The Atlantic will launch a paid product within the next two or three weeks, a News Corp. is touting paywalls as “courageous,” and ProPublica wants to have paywall-free nonprofit journalism in every city. Read more »
