Amazon Introduces 70% Royalty Option For Kindle Digital Text Platform

Right off the heels of announcing an expansion of its Kindle Digital Text Platform to authors and publishers around the world, Amazon announced back in January that it would introduce a new 70 percent royalty option in the program that will allow them to to earn a larger share of revenue from each Kindle book they sell.
Well, it’s the middle of the year, and it has now landed.
For the record: the new royalty option comes will not replace the existing DTP standard royalty option but rather complement it.
As could be expected, option is currently only available for books sold to United States customers.
The new royalty option basically means that for each book sold from the Kindle Store for Kindle, Kindle DX, or one of the Kindle apps for iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, BlackBerry, PC, Mac and Android phones, authors and publishers who choose the new royalty option will receive 70 percent of the list price, net of delivery costs.
Those costs are based on file size (pricing is set at $0.15/MB), and Amazon claims today’s median DTP file size to be 368KB, which means delivery costs would be less than $0.06 per unit sold.
To qualify for the 70 percent royalty option, books must satisfy the following set of requirements:

Extra! Extra! Google News redesigned to be more customizable and shareable

There’s an old saying that all news is local. But all news is personal too—we connect with it in different ways depending on our interests, where we live, what we do and a lot of other factors. Today we’re revamping the Google News homepage with several changes designed to make the news that you see more relevant to you. We’re also trying to better highlight interesting stories you didn’t know existed and to make it easier for you to share stories through social networks.

Before:

After:

Woot Acquired by Amazon

Amazon has acquired popular deal-a-day website Woot. The announcement was made on the Woot Blog. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Woot will remain an independent, autonomous entity, much like Zappos when it was acquired last year by the online shopping giant.

Here is the full text from Woot’s announcement of the deal:

“Holy crap! Woot has signed an agreement with Amazon – yes, the Amazon – to become an independent subsidiary of the ecommerce colossus. Woot HQ will remain in Carrollton, Texas, and will operate as autonomously as other Amazon companies like Zappos and Audible. More details forthcoming after we pick our eyeballs up off of the floor. Anybody see where Lefty rolled off to?”

And now the full letter from Matt Rutledge, Woot CEO, to employees. In typical Woot fashion, it’s off-the-wall and hilarious:

RIP Microsoft Kin

Microsoft has decided to kill off the Kin, two Microsoft-branded phones targeted at teenager users, we have confirmed.

The Kin, formerly known as “Project Pink,” was revealed in April and lauched on the Verizon network in May. However, ominous signs emerged for the phone’s demise after Microsoft cut the price of the Kin in half.

However, it doesn’t look like it was enough — the Kin until will be folded into the Windows Phone 7 team after abysmal sales and millions of dollars lost in R&D and marketing.
Here is Microsoft’s official statement on the Kin:

Google Revamps Google News

Today Google is releasing a redesigned version of their Google News site to English-language users in the U.S. The update focuses on presenting news stories happening around the world and locally in a way that is more customizable and user-centric.
The purpose of the new look is all about surfacing news items tailored to individual users. The “News () for you” section is the biggest addition in this area and displays stories in a section or list view based on users’ specified interests in topics like Business, Sports () or their own preferred subject matters.
Also, Google News () now includes a feature that enables users to select which news sources they would like to see more or less often. Settings can be tweaked in the News Settings section with Google () reconfiguring the rankings for sources on stories based on users’ personal tastes.
The big news stories of the day, however, are now displayed underneath the aptly named Top Stories section in the left-hand column. Here Google News will provide links to the coverage happening around the major news items for the day.

New Network Design Could Make the Internet 100 Times Faster

A group of MIT researchers has demonstrated a method of network topology that could render the Internet 100 or even 1,000 times faster than it is today.
The “magic” behind the concept is to eliminate or reduce the most time-intensive part of data transmission, which involves converting an optical signal into an electrical signal for memory storage. Memory storage is required whenever multiple optical signals arrive at the same router at the same time, requiring said router to convert and store the extra signals coming in until they can be properly processed.

A New Low for Laptop Pricing: $37

There are cheap computers and then there are cheap computers, but $37 might just take the proverbial cake. A persistent eBay listing has just that on offer, with the bargain basement price in question netting you a 7-inch netbook with Wi-Fi running Windows CE.
Don’t plan on editing your next HD blockbuster film or running Crysis on these babies’ underpowered components, but for less than four Alexander Hamiltons you get an actually functional machine running on a 300 MHz ARM processor with 128MB RAM and 2GB storage. You also get a 7-inch screen displaying at 800 x 480 resolution, an ethernet port, two USB ports, an SD slot, Wi-Fi and a 9-volt AC adapter.