Music: Too Expensive to Be Free, Too Free to Be Expensive | Epic MySpace, rumored to be on the verge of purchasing the free music streaming site imeem, is struggling to keep up with its own payments to music copyright holders, according to a top News Corp executive — a problem that has plagued every other licensed free music service. The digital music doubters could be right with the contention that advertising revenue can’t cover the costs of licensing music. Meanwhile, illegitimate free music sources continue to proliferate, rendering paid music subscriptions irrelevant for most music fans. Advertising was supposed to be music’s magic bullet, enabling fans to get the free music they’re going to find anyway while contributing at least something to copyright holder coffers. Evidence and rumors are mounting to support the idea that free music websites are unfeasible. MySpace Music — the on-demand, ad-supported music service not to be confused with the band pages on the site — is losing money and could soon add a subscription option. See Also:
World Rankings This page contains links to tables, charts and related articles with the most recent world rankings of countries and cities according to leading indexes and indicators. Check back for new rankings and updates of last year’s rankings, as they become available. Country Rankings UNDP Human Development Report (2011) – The UNDP’s Human Development Index (HDI) measures and ranks a country’s level of development based on three fundamental indicators: income, health and education. The 2010 Human Development Report introduced three new multidimensional measures of inequality and poverty. Legatum Prosperity Index (2010) – Ranking of countries’ prosperity levels based on eight “foundations for national development:” economy, entrepreneurship and opportunity, governance, education, health, safety and security, personal freedom, and social capital. City Rankings Mercer Quality of Living Survey (2010) – Ranking of local living conditions in 420 cities worldwide. Visit the Global Sherpa home page.
Good Question! The Eight Best Questions We Got While Raising Ven Editor’s note: Guest writer Glenn Kelman is the CEO of Redfin, an online real estate broker that seeks to give consumers the information and tools once limited to real estate agents. Previously, he was a co-founder of Plumtree Software, which had a public offering in 2002 but is now part of Oracle. Below he shares the best questions from investors during a recent fund raising. For startups, Christmas comes in November. Redfin is one of the companies that just closed a round. VCs are good at asking questions. Here are the questions VCs asked Redfin that changed how we think about our business. 1. 2. Good question. 3. For us, this meant explaining what Redfin made this summer on a single home purchase, with a per-transaction account of what we spent on marketing to get customers ($27), on local data ($153), on customer service ($2,906) and so on. We knew our margin before, but hadn’t broken the numbers down into their most easily handled form. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Way.
Human Rights Watch | Defending Human Rights Worldwide The Word of the Year and How to Translate It This week, “unfriend” was chosen as the New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year. In multilingual circles, this quickly prompted many — including us — to ask the question, “How do you translate that?” According to major media outlets (including the Telegraph, MSNBC, and many others), the term originated with Facebook. So, we went straight to Facebook to see how these community translation veterans rendered this celebrated word into other languages. The response? Well, apparently the news outlets got it wrong — “unfriend” is not an official Facebook term. Locale/Translation ar_AR / ????? While we were glad to receive the translations for “remove connection,” our linguistic curiousity was piqued, and we had to ask, “So, if not at Facebook, where did ‘unfriend’ originate?” While it is unclear who first used 2009’s Word of the Year, people have been “friending” and “unfriending” each other since the advent of Livejournal.
Gapminder: Unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world view. - Gapminder.org Report from the 50th ATA conference « Musings from an overworked Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in ATA, Random musings, Translation. trackback Opening Ceremony of the 50th ATA Conference I have finally worked my way through all the mail, bills, errands, etc. that piled up while I was traveling to Myrtle Beach and NYC. The view of Times Square from my hotel room The hotel bar As I’m sure you have read everywhere else, this year’s conference had a record 2,300+ attendees. Michael Wahlster presents the ins and outs of Twitter to a packed room The presentations were without a doubt top-notch this year. Amanda showing off her double microphones and conference badge My presentations were very well-received. Tuomas at the start of our presentation I was most excited about my second presentation of the conference, Making Portable Document Format Files Work For You, with Tuomas Kostiainen. Chair massages complements of Bodyworks and ATA The highlight of the conferences for me are the free chair massages that are available to attendees in the back of the Exhibit Hall.
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