TechnoCloud

HarperCollins is the latest publisher to say that it will delay the eBook verions of some of its new titles. From next year the News Corp-owned publisher will delay the online release of five to 10 new books each month for between four weeks and six months.

This will give it a chance to sell hardback copies of new releases at far higher prices than the $9.99 that most new eBooks cost.

This raises several questions. Will readers wait for the eBook version leading to less critical mass in the sales charts and less visibility? And will having no eBook at the critical launch time hurt overall sales, given Amazon’s incredible stat now that according to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos:

“For every 100 copies of a physical book we sell, where we have the Kindle edition, we will sell 48 copies of the Kindle edition.”

Time’s gadget of the year may well have been the Droid Android phone, but the iPhone still retains its place as my gadget of the year.

However, for all the iPhone’s improvements in graphics, the PSP Go gets special mention for delivering high end gaming experience on a handheld. The iPhone has been great for snacking, but the PSP remains my leading device for mobile game feasting!

Small fry to The Sun, which reckons it’s been the UK’s best handheld for the last 40 years with this wonderful parody of Apple’s iPhone advertising.

Spotify’s premium music service, which includes its offline playlists, is coming to the Symbian operating system (owned by Nokia).

The new version mainly supports Nokia phones, including popular models like the 5800 XpressMusic and E72, but also supports Samsung’s Omnia HD and Sony Ericsson’s new Satio.

The premium service, £9.99 a month, is already available on iPhone and Android phones.

What would be very interesting to see would be the take-up to date on their iPhone and Android offers, as I’ve yet to see any figures. With tendency to pay on mobile higher than on desktop internet, and the offline playlists a valuable feature to those accessing the service on a mobile, can mobile be the tipping point to monetising their service?

With an awful pun worthy of this blog, UMG are releasing an iPhone app, Mariah Carey-Oke.

Fans get to sing along to four of the her songs and are awarded points if they match her vocals - Singstar in an app, an interesting way to tie in the iPhone’s microphone functionality.

In addition, the app includes news and tour information, as well as integration with Twitter and Facebook, and links to buy songs from iTunes. It costs $3.99 in the US a premium on the cost of purchasing the songs through iTunes, but is as yet unavailable in the UK.

Low budget horror ‘Paranormal Activity’ from Paramount Pictures has been using events website Eventful’s ‘Demand It’ feature to market the film.

‘Demand It’ uses social networks to build local and national demand for the likes of films, musicians and plays. This has helped Paranormal Activity to increase its original release to just 200 cinemas to a nationwide US release after reaching 1 million ‘demands’ for the film.

Of course crowdsourcing demand for content is nothing new, with a number of innovations in the music industry to allow fans to make micropayments to invest in getting a new album produced. All the same, the 1m figure is notable for its scale and shows the power of social networks and the internet to find an audience.

See what’s in demand here.

Google has made concessions to publishers by scaling back some of its plans to digitise millions of out-of-print works from US libraries.

Google is nearing a book deal in the US with publishers and writers. The number of books it will digitise has come down by 60%, following the exclusion of most foreign language books, although books by UK, Australian and Canadian authors held in US libraries will be part of the programme unless the authors or publishers opt out. Furthermore, the service will only be available in the US.

According to Paul Aiken of the US Authors Guild: “Amazon (through its Kindle) has 90% of the e-book market in the United States, and 75% of the online print book market - Google has roughly 0%. Google entering the market for out-of-print books just isn’t going to change the equation.”

Google has announced an agreement to acquire AdMob, the mobile ad network and technology provider, for $750 million in stock.

The move increases further Google’s share of the advertising market after 2007’s key acquisition of DoubleClick and the mobile market after the launch of its rapidly growing operating system, Android. With mobile advertising still in its infancy and lagging behind the growth in media consumption on mobile devices (as we saw with the desktop internet), this gives Google a significant early share of the market both in terms of ad volumes and ad technologies.

YouTube’s latest experiment at live broadcasting, the decidedly A-list U2 concert from the Rose Bowl attracted a broadcast size audience of 10m. Given its premium content, it’s too early to say whether this is a tipping point for internet video or indeed YouTube’s live broadcasting ambitions, but nonetheless it’s an impressive figure.

The concert was made available to 187 countries, including China, North Korea and Iran, with a third of the 10m viewers based in the US.

Condé Nast are repurposing the entire December issue of GQ, with the same ads and articles, into an iPhone app. The app will be launched the same day the print issue will appear and will be priced at $2.99, two dollars less than the print version.

The app will also include e-commerce, audio and video functions. Turned sideways, the iPhone displays the magazine in its traditional print layout. Users can flip through pages sequentially and zoom in and out of each page. As the app is a full replica of the magazine, it will count towards its ABC paid circulation figures.

iPhone users generally view ads in paid apps unfavourably, so it will be interesting to see the consumer reaction to largely a print business model and content (newsstand, plus ads) on the iPhone.

If, like me, only a cruel lack of opportunity prevented you from being crowned F1 World Champion in Jenson Button’s place, then help could be at hand with Real Time Race.

This is a system that allows players to drive alongside the actual drivers in real-time as you watch the race. The technology maps the circuit just before the race so the virtual track would matches up to the one on TV. Although the game is unlikely to be ready until next year, a demo is available.

Of course, you won’t be able to drive Alonso off the track, no matter how much you want to, but it’s another example of the blurring of real world and digital experiences.