Until relatively recently, buying music meant going in to a shop and picking up a CD. Now, all you need is a computer, an internet connection and an MP3 player to instantly download any song you like.

The revolution in the music industry has been driven in part by the success of devices such as Apple’s iPod, which made it easy to download music from iTunes and transfer it on to a device.

Amazon has been leading the charge with its Kindle range in the US, which have won plaudits from the likes of Oprah Winfrey. A large-screen Kindle, dubbed the DX, was launched last month, and is aimed at students who can load electronic textbooks on to a single portable device.

None the less, for some people, the dog-eared paperback cannot be bettered. Many ebook readers are expensive, and getting novels on to the device can be tricky for the less technically minded.

That’s where a British company is hoping to change things. Interead, based appropriately in Reading, has launched a range of colourful, easy-to-use readers that might just persuade people to start dabbling with electronic books.

At £189, its Cool-er is substantially cheaper than Sony’s Reader, which costs around £220. It’s also available in lots of funky colours, and even has its own bookstore, meaning purchasing books and loading them on to the device is as easy as dragging and dropping a file on your computer.

The Cool-er looks rather like a giant iPod, is available in many of the same stylish shades as Apple’s music players, and has a familiar click wheel to flick through pages and navigate menus. It’s thinner than an iPhone, and, at 178g, it’s half the weight of many other ebooks, including Amazon’s Kindle.

Neil Jones, Interead’s founder, believes this portability could be the key to its success: “We have created a reader that is light enough to fit into a jacket or a purse and attractive enough to be reading it publicly.”

Jones says the idea for the Cool-er was born from the frustrating experience of getting a book published. He found himself caught up in endless bureaucracy, and believed not only that there must be a quicker way for authors to get work published, but also that there was a more elegant way to deliver that content to readers.

It took just six months to take the Cool-er from drawing board to production line, but Jones believes it meets the needs of ”normal’’ people, not gadget fiends. “Cool-er has been designed to fit the requirements of a reader. They want it to be portable, light, to fit in a jacket pocket or purse, and they want it to do what they want to do in a simple manner.”

This, he confidently says, could be the “iPod moment that ebook readers have been waiting for,” while he believes that over the next year, his company will be able to build a significant user base that will see behind only Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader in terms of sales.

In time, says Jones, Cool-ers will boast wi-fi, so that users can download books straight on to the device, rather than transferring them by USB or memory card. Likewise, the price, too, should drop.

In fact, he believes the Cool-er could be the start of a new chapter for the publishing industry. “This is not just about technology,” says Neil Jones. “It’s about being a lifestyle accessory.” Well, it worked for the iPod; who can blame publishers for taking a leaf out of Apple’s book?

Cool-er ebook reader: is this the iPod for books?

But Microsoft’s ads won’t take on Google, Yahoo, or even Ask.com directly by name. Instead, the Bing ads will try to convince you that by using “today’s search engines” you’re missing out on all that your search experience could be. To back up this assertion, Microsoft offers some internal data indicating 42 percent of all searches need to be refined after the first query, AdAge reports. Furthermore, Microsoft has found 25 percent of all post-search clicks hit the back button instead of a Website link when looking at a search results page.

The inability to find what you want on the first try may be where Microsoft believes Bing has an edge. In March, when screenshots of Microsoft’s new search engine leaked online under the codename Kumo, the photos showed a “related categories” feature on the results page. If you were looking for a set of new stereo speakers, for example, you would see links to reviews, manuals, prices, and so on related to the specific product you were seeking. There were also examples of Kumo/Bing yielding different related categories in a search for entertainers with related categories like biographies, song lyrics, and albums. The ability to refine your search with directly relevant categories could be a very helpful search tool, as opposed to starting all over from scratch with a new query if you don’t find what you’re looking for.

If Bing’s “related categories” feature can offer results directly relevant to your query each and every time you hit the search button, then Microsoft may be able to peel off some, but definitely not all, of that Google mojo. However, Bing’s competitors may already have features comparable to related categories in their arsenals. Google rolled out its own set of tools to help you refine your search at its recent Searchology event, and Yahoo will launch search refinement tools in the coming months.

Whether Bing’s features are a huge jump forward over Google’s new tools or Yahoo’s upcoming overhaul is hard to know, since no one outside of Microsoft has had a chance to try Bing. This week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is expected to demonstrate Bing during the D: All Things D conference, which runs from May 26 through 28. It’s not clear if Ballmer will announce a launch date for the new search engine from All Things D; however, once Bing is finally available to the public, I have no doubt many people will want to test drive the new search engine. But even if Bing can win over some early converts, the true test will be whether those users are still ‘Binging’ instead of ‘Googling’ a month or two later.

Service is not the only obstacle for a challenger to Google’s dominance, either. To keep users coming back for more, Microsoft must dislodge the idea from the public consciousness that the name Google is synonymous with Internet search. Will 100 million greenbacks be enough to convince people that ‘to Google’ is not actually a verb? Microsoft may think so, but what do you say?

Microsoft May Rename Live Search ‘Bing’: Massive Ad Campaign Planned

The Book Search settlement, announced in October, followed a three-year battle over Google’s right to display copyrighted books on its Web site. The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers claimed Google was violating copyrights by doing so. Google eventually agreed to pay $125 million to ensure authors and publishers could register to receive payments anytime their books were viewed within the service.

The deal is proving to be quite divisive, and now, with the Justice Department’s reported antitrust investigation, things could get even more dicey. Here’s a look at five key arguments from both sides of the debate.

GeoCities no longer accept new accounts, and recommended it’s users to Yahoo Paid hosting services. This is a meesage from GeoCities Website.

After careful consideration, Yahoo! has decided to close GeoCities later this year. You can continue enjoying your GeoCities service until then — we just wanted to let you know about the closure as soon as possible. We’ll share more details this summer. For now, please visit the help center for more information.

About GeoCities

Yahoo! GeoCities was a web hosting service founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner in late 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet (BHI).

phpBB was started by James Atkinson as a simple UBB-like forum for his own website on June 17, 2000. Nathan Codding and John Abela joined the development team after phpBB’s CVS repository was moved to SourceForge.net, and work on 1.0.0 began. A fully functional, pre-release version of phpBB was made available in July.

phpBB 1.0.0 was released on December 9, 2000, with subsequent improvements to the 1.x codebase coming in two more major installments. The final release in the 1.x line was phpBB 1.4.4, released on November 6, 2001. During the lifetime of the 1.x series, Bart van Bragt, Paul S. Owen (former co-manager of the project), Jonathan Haase and Frank Feingold joined the team. phpBB 1.x is no longer supported and virtually no websites continue to use it.

In February 2001, phpBB 2.0.x began development entirely from scratch; the developer’s ambitions for phpBB had outgrown the original codebase. Doug Kelly joined the team shortly afterwards. After a year of development and extensive testing, phpBB 2.0.0, dubbed the "Super Furry" version, was released on April 4, 2002, three days later than intended.

Work on phpBB 3.0.x began in late 2002. It was originally intended to be released as phpBB 2.2, and the first planned feature list was announced on May 25, 2003.[4] However, as development progressed, the developers realised that phpBB 2.1.x (the development release cycle for 2.2) had eliminated virtually all compatibility with the 2.0.x line, the version number for release was changed to 3.0.0, in keeping with the Linux kernel versioning scheme. In September 2005, Paul Owen resigned as the Development Team Leader and Meik Sievertsen was promoted to the role.

In March 2007, the phpBB teams had planned to undergo a short round of server maintenance, however the server crashed during the outage, suffering a double-disk failure and causing phpBB.com to be down for the full week. (The phpBB teams indicated that phpBB, the software, was not the cause of the outage.) However, due to the unexpected outage, the teams decided to change their original plans and launch their brand new website, powered by phpBB3 and the new prosilver theme. This was a big surprise to most, as the theme had been a heavily guarded secret, never before seen by the public, and was originally not intended to be revealed until the final release of phpBB 3.0.0. Initial feedback was split, with many applauding the new theme and others criticising a number of new design decisions, particularly the decision to display the user info on the right side of the viewtopic page (phpBB2′s subSilver theme had displayed it on the left).

On April 30, 2007, phpBB founder and co-Project Manager James Atkinson officially resigned from his duties towards phpBB, citing personal circumstances. With the announcement also came the announcement that phpBB was now newly independent, and that the team leaders would be collectively taking charge of the decisions in the future of the project. At the end of May, an announcement was made that Jonathan "SHS`" Stanley, the other co-Project Manager, was stepping down as well for personal reasons.

On July 7, 2007, the teams announced that phpBB had been nominated as a finalist for the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards in the category of "Best Project for Communications". At the end of the month, SourceForge.net announced that phpBB had won the award for "Best Project for Communications", and in honour of the award, SourceForge.net donated $1000 in phpBB’s name to Marie Curie Cancer Care. phpBB also won a "Thingamagoop" from Bleep Labs, and "bragging rights for a full year."

On September 6, 2007, the teams launched an official phpBB podcast. It was recorded by a rotating group of phpBB team members with occasional guests, and discussed a number of phpBB-related topics, as well as answering questions e-mailed in from listeners.

The first beta of phpBB3 was released in June 2006, and the first release candidate was released in May 2007. The phpBB3 codebase received an external security audit in September, which was done by SektionEins. Finally, phpBB 3.0.0 "Olympus" (also dubbed the Gold release) was published on December 13, 2007.

The teams launched a new phpBB weblog in July 2008. The blog is written by phpBB team members on various topics related to phpBB and provide users with a unique inside look at the activities of the phpBB teams.

The phpBB teams held their first-ever phpBB users conference in London on July 20, 2008, which was titled "Londonvasion 2008." Londonvasion featured presentations by phpBB team members on various topics important to the phpBB community, MOD authors, and developers. Londonvasion provided a unique opportunity to socialise with members of the phpBB teams. The event also represented the first time that most members of the teams had a chance to meet each other in person.

More on PhpBB

• phpBB2 was the predecessor of the present-day phpBB3. Developed during 2001-2002, the source code was written primarily to run on PHP 3.0 and 4.0 (version 2.0.13 upped the minimum requirement to PHP 4.0.3 due to a necessary security fix), and by the time that phpBB3 was released in late 2007, …
• phpBB3 is the current stable version of phpBB. Following over three years of development and an eighteen-month beta/release candidate stage, it went gold on December 13, 2007. Some of phpBB3′s major features include: Modular design for the Admin Control Panel, Moderator Control Panel, and User Control Panel Support for multiple database management systems, …

Other Information

• Developed by  The phpBB Group
• Stable release  3.0.4  (December 12, 2008)
• Written in  PHP
• Available in  Multilingual
• Type  Internet forum
• License  GNU General Public License

Links

• Website  http://www.phpbb.com/
• Downloads
• PhpBB Mods
• PhpBB Knowledgebase
• PhpBB wiki
• PhpBB powered-by.org