I'm sure you've heard the news that Microsoft must pay $1.5B as the result of a lawsuit brought by Alcatel-Lucent. You can read about it, but it sure is a good lesson. You better do your homework before licensing patents. I encourage everyone to look into the use of Vorbis Ogg format. First, it sounds very good. And it's patent...

Sophie, a project to create multimedia books, is now available in Alpha release. Based on Squeak, Sophie is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Sophie is not a tool to render traditional paper books to read on your PC. The Sophie project is aimed to go beyond print and utilize the interactive capabilities...

Bert Freudenberg found a great video on the One Laptop Per Child initiative. A very informative video created by eSchool news showing the strengths of the laptop and footage of the founder and director Nicholas Negroponte. Bert has more about OLPC on his blog. Thanks Bert! ---- If you haven't already, check out TamTam's development site: a music application on...

Building on Frederic Vavrille's Liveplasm site (a visual search engine he created 3 years ago), Mr. Vavrille has created a visually-entertaining web radio where listeners select music from a mood-energy matrix or from a genre selection box. Manuel Lima states that Mr. Vavrille combined sound from Pandora and Last.FM with Liveplasm to create a dynamic mind-map of related music....

Good article in today's NY Times about the One Laptop Per Child initiative. "Mary Lou Jepsen, the chief technologist for the project, likes to refer to the insight that transformed the machine from utopian dream to working prototype as "a really wacky idea."" Check it out! ---- BTW, you don't need the OLPC laptop to check out one of the...

There is no shortage of opinions about the fate of television - be it professionally created or user generated content (UGC.) Views range from the misguided "UGC has changed TV forever! Power to the People!" — to the pensive "TV ain't what it used to be... where's Milton Berle?... I want my MTV!" To say that the future lies...

If you've been following my blog, you've been aware of the One Laptop Per Child milestones. Last week, The One Laptop Per Child initiative put a name on their first laptop device. The new name is "Children's Machine" or CM1, apparently taken from the title of Seymour Papert's book of the same name (published in the early 90s.) There...

I received an email letter today from Bob Moog's daughter, Michelle Moog-Koussa. The Moog family has established the Bob Moog Memorial Foundation for Electronic Music. The letter states that they have "...carefully chosen objectives, each tied to his life and work" * Endowed Scholarships * The Bob Moog Memorial Museum * Outreach Programs for Disadvantaged Students * Special Events for...

According to CNET, RealNetworks will release open-source software at the end of this year to allow non-Windows software to play Windows Media files (WMV and WMA.) All made possible by...

John Buckman says he created Magnatune out of personal frustration with record labels and to give artists a fair deal. Does their tagline "We Are Not Evil" ring true for artists?...