Apple Inc. (AAPL) said Thursday it will let iPhone application developers offer their users the option to buy additional content or features within a free app on its App Store.

App developers said they received an e-mail notice from Apple informing them that the in-app purchase feature was now available for free apps and that it would “simplify your development by creating a single version of your app that uses in App Purchase to unlock additional functionality, eliminating the need to create Lite versions of your app.” A spokeswoman for Apple confirmed the news.

The in-app purchase feature, which was first introduced in March, allows developers to offer fresh content for purchase within an app such as new levels in a game, additional books in an e-book app, or expanded capability in productivity apps.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Samsung Electronics Co.’s profits are on the rise again as its chip and display businesses recover from operating losses earlier this year. The turnaround recently helped push its market capitalization past Intel Corp.’s (INTC) for the first time.

But amid that success Samsung also is trying to address another concern: matching Apple Inc.’s ability to sell content and software that run on cellphones and other devices.

Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone has led the way in demonstrating that consumers are becoming more interested in devices that can tap the Internet or run clever applications. The same phenomenon is spreading to TVs and DVD players, which increasingly will be connectable to the Internet in coming years.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Chinese Web portal and mobile phone content provider Sina’s (SINA) deal to acquire the billboard operations in China of Focus Media Holding (FMCN) has collapsed today, almost ten months after it was first announced. The deal had been a thorn in Sina’s side since it was announced on December 22 last year, and has been the subject of intense scrutiny among sell-side analysts in the past week. Focus Media shares rose 20 percent from Monday to Friday last week on expectations that terms would be restructured to allow the sale to go ahead.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Oh, those clever birds at Twitter. When the microblogging service announced recent changes to its terms of service, its executives knew exactly how to spin the news. For starters, media outlets dutifully went with headlines along the lines of “Twitter Changes TOS, Opens the Door for Ads,” because in a blog post about the changes, Twitter founder Biz Stone chose to make the most noise about the possibility of advertising. Granted, the actual legal language was rather broad (“The Services may include advertisements, which may be targeted to the Content or information on the Services, queries made through the Services, or other information. The types and extent of advertising … are subject to change.”).

Read the rest of this post on the original site

YouTube, CBS (CBS), NBC, ABC are going to have an awful lot in common in the not too distant future.

Which company uses its traffic to drive eyeballs to programming on which it sells advertising? They all do.

The biggest difference between YouTube and the broadcast networks is that one actually produces content or pays a licensing fee for the content before they sell advertising around it.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Last year, we talked about some language in a contract being used by a company that was supposedly trying to help copyright holders track down content being shared online, for the purpose of sending out threatening “pre-settlement” letters. The contract appeared to indicate that the copyright holders were giving the tracking company permission to put their works on file sharing programs, for the sake of “catching” people downloading the content:

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Rupert, you didn’t ask my opinion on this, but since when has that ever stopped me.

First the good news. You can sell content on the internet. People pay for content on and off the internet every second of every day. It’s easy to do. If you do it right. But before I get to the how to, let me throw out some interim suggestions:

Read the rest of this post on the original site

It was a week after the annual Allen & Co. mediafest, and Barry Diller, the fabled former Hollywood mogul and chairman of IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI), was eager to chat. Just back from his trek to Sun Valley, Idaho, to join Herb Allen’s annual convocation of moguls, Diller was talking about content and how, despite all the hoopla over the mass of online video that folks are watching, the whole notion is hopelessly unprofitable unless the media world can figure out a way to get people to ante up for what they now get for free.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

For people who hope the openness and flexibility of the Internet will come to mainstream television, the deal announced yesterday between Comcast (CMCSA) and Time Warner (TWX) is great news. They just don’t see yet how it blows apart the tight bond between cable content and cable delivery.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

File-sharing, to the (very large) extent that it involves copyright infringement, has affected the music business. But, as a pair of academic researchers happily point out in a working paper they’ve posted online, copyright law was never meant to protect the music business in the first place—instead, it is intended to foster creative production in the arts, which happen to include music.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

A pair of researchers has discovered a way to use modern browsers to more easily build darknets–those underground, private Internet communities where users can share content and ideas securely and anonymously.

Billy Hoffman, manager for HP Security Labs at HP Software, and Matt Wood, senior security researcher in HP’s (HPQ) Web Security Research Group, will demonstrate a proof-of-concept for Veiled, a new type of darknet, at the Black Hat USA conference in Las Vegas next month.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Apparently there was a big meeting of news executives today in Chicago under the auspices of the Newspaper Association of America. The de jure name for the topic at hand was “Models to Monetize Content” but the de facto subject of the conclave seems to be building paywalls and ending what James Warren glibly calls “the age of content theft.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Curation has become a popular term in media circles, in the sense of a human editor who filters and selects content, and then packages it and delivers it to readers in some way. Many people (including me) believe that, in an era when information sources are exploding online, aggregation and curation of some kind is about the only service left that people might be willing to pay for.

Read the rest of this post on Nieman Journalism Lab, the original Web site

When Apple (AAPL) first started promoting applications for the iPhone, CEO Steve Jobs touted physician reference guides and other medical programs as an important category of software for the device. At least a tenth of the doctors in the U.S. concur with that view. Epocrates Inc., one of the big publishers of mobile electronic medical guides, estimates that 10 percent of physicians in the U.S. are actively using some version of Epocrates software for the iPhone. The company says there are 75,000 doctors that have installed an Epocrates application on their iPhone or iPod touch and synchronized it to get fresh medical content within the last six months.

Read the rest of this post

I have mentioned Google’s (GOOG) music-related activities in China a few times during the past two years; and just yesterday this topic seems to have heated up considerably. I think these developments are crucial and need further exploration.

Read the rest of this post