SoundCloud announced today that it has reached 10 million registered users. Last January, the music platform web site only had 3 million users.
To celebrate, SoundCloud co-founders Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss launched a new feature today called “Story Wheel,” which “allows anyone to record their own narrative around a series of images to tell a personal story.”
Watch this talk from TED to understand the background and mechanisms of SOPA and PIPA.
“Student warning!” Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales tweeted on Monday. “Do your homework early. Wikipedia protesting bad law on Wednesday!”
The bad law is the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act and the backlash officially starts tomorrow. See here for more info.
Wikipedia’s decision to participate with a 24-hour blackout was a decision of the Wikipedia community, and intends to bring the lobby message to the masses.
News crowd sourcing site Reddit said they’ll go offline for 12 hours in protest, displaying a “simple message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit.” Even Mozilla is planning to participate in the protest, replacing the content on its various sites with anti-SOPA messages.
Some called for Facebook and Google to join the blackout, saying their participation alone would kill the bill. Google has been a vocal opponent of SOPA/PIPA since the beginning. Google won’t blackout, but they will provide a link to some anti-SOPA information on its homepage.
Here’s the list of companies and organizations backing the bill.
I like Michael Geist’s blog, and especially this posting of the alphabetical rundown of the year.
Seagate and Western Digital, the largest hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturers in the world, both announced that they will reduce warranty coverage on some of their hardware in the new year.
The two companies produce the hard drives in most major computer brands, and both companies recently bought out their competition (Western Digital bought Hitachi, and Seagate bought Samsung’s HDD business) making them the two largest HDD companies in the world.
It is believed the recent monsoon floods in Thailand are reason as the floods have crippled industry component factories. Thailand is the world’s 2nd largest producer of hard disk drives accounting for approximately 25% of the world’s production. The floods have impacted the industry greatly with pundits predicting a shortage and a price hike for hard drives in the coming year.
Seagate’s warranties for internal desktop and laptop drives will be reduced from five years to one year. Seagate warranties for hybrid drives will be trimmed from five years to three years. Warranties for Seagate’s external drives and enterprise-oriented drives will remain unchanged.
Western Digital warranties for the Caviar Blue, Caviar Green and Scorpio Blue hard drives will be reduced from three years from two years.
Overall, the maximum life warranty will be three years.
Seagate’s new warranty policies will become effective on Dec. 31, and Western Digital’s changes will begin Jan. 2, 2012. Hard drives bought before those dates will retain their original warranty policies.
The reason I’m writing this post is because this upset means a lot for the future of data use, as there is a growing demand for disk space – cloud or not – and this lack of supply will drive up the cost of HDDs. It may, hopefully, push other technologies such as flash storage.
Alex Reid is a Canadian who likes a lot of things. Welcome to my world.