Australian electronics retailer JB Hi-Fi has this morning announced plans for an online music streaming service for Australian customers by mid 2012, taking on Sony and beating big names like Amazon to the local punch.

JB Hi-Fi's CEO Terry Smart dropped the streaming music bombshell this morning at the announcement of the retailer's $134.4 million net profit after tax for the year ending 30 June 2011.

The service, called "JB Hi-Fi Now", will sport around 100,000 local and international artists at launch, with an offering of between six and eight million tracks.

"We will continue to grow this number over time," Smart promised.

"The service will allow for unlimited access and listening to music from your Mac, PC or mobile device," he added.

The company's investor presentation reveals that Mac and PC users will get the streaming service first with mobile user support coming later.

Smart told ZDNet Australia that the company intends to roll the service out to all mobile platforms, including Android, Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry.

"We plan to be across all platforms over time," he said.

Smart also remarked to ZDNet Australia that the new streaming offering has been six months in the making, and is supported by an internally developed private cloud infrastructure. Pricing for the service will also be based on a subscription model rather than pay-per-song access, Smart said.

"It will be a subscription-based model, either monthly or pre-paid for a year," Smart toldZDNet Australia, adding that the service had been developed with the "blessing" of all of the major music labels. The blessing, Smart said, means that the JB Hi-FI Now service won't suffer any legal headaches over copyright.

"We're dealing with all the major labels in getting the repertoire from that. We don't anticipate any legal issues at all. This is all being done with the blessing from the labels and commercial arrangements, and that's the important thing," he said.

Amazon's music streaming service and Apple's iCloud have both been said to be heading for possible legal headaches when dealing with music in the cloud, while Google's Music offering has been aiming to carefully sidestep legal complications since its inception.

JB Hi-Fi's service will eventually become a music download store, building on the store's strong background in the music retail sector.

The electronics and media retailer hinted that the store may also become a digital software marketplace.

"Post launch, the 'JB Hi-Fi Now' digital platform will continue to develop and provide us with opportunities to leverage our existing strong software supplier relationships," the company revealed in its investor presentation, making it a future challenger for the Mac App Store, for example.

Read More: http://www.cnet.com.au/jb-hi-fi-to-offer-cloud-music-service-339319974.htm

Doc's super fast car won't do it. Neither will Bill and Ted's magic telephone booth. Physicists at the Hong Kong University of Technology and Science have just proved that no machine will ever allow a person to travel through time because time travel is flat-out impossible. Not just unlikely, or we don't have the technology yet, but, beyond the limits of the physical laws of the universe.

You might think time travel has always belonged in the world of fantasy, but 10 years ago some scientists began to believe time travel might actually be possible when superluminal - or faster-than-light - propagation of some specific medium were discovered. It was later found to be a visual effect, but the idea that a single photon could exceed the speed of light lingered, and with it, the possibility of time travel.

But in a study published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Physical Review Letters, Shengwang Du and his team measured the ultimate speed of a single photon and showed that it cannot move faster than the speed of light.

"The results add to our understanding of how a single photon moves. They also confirm the upper bound on how fast information travels with light," Du said in a statement put out by the Hong Kong University of Technology and Science.

"By showing that single photons cannot travel faster than the speed of light, our results bring a closure to the debate on the true speed of information carried by a single photon."

For more on the science behind time travel, check out "How to build a time machine", written last year by the one and only Stephen Hawking.

LA Times

Google, the most popular Web site on earth, is worried about the second-most popular site. That, of course, would be Facebook.Why else would Google keep trying, over and over again, to create a social network of the same type? Orkut, Jaiku, Wave, Buzz — Google has lobbed forth one fizzled flop after another.

And now there’s Google+. It’s the latest Google “we wanna be Facebook” project. The difference is, this one’s got a real shot.

Instead of throwing open its doors with a big splash, as it did with the hopelessly confusing Wave and the privacy-challenged Buzz, Google is letting Google+ seep into the world virally. You can’t yet just go sign up; you have to be invited by someone who’s already a member.

Even so, Google+ already has millions of members. That’s not quite 750 million (Facebook’s current tally), but watch out for the network effect.

At first, Google+ looks like a shameless Facebook duplicate. There’s a place for you to make Posts (your thoughts and news, like Facebook’s Wall); there’s a Stream (an endless scrolling page of your friends’ posts, like Facebook’s News Feed); and even a little +1 button (a clone of Facebook’s Like button), which may be where Google+ gets its peculiar name.

But there’s one towering, brilliant difference: Circles.

On Google+, you put the people of your life’s different social circles into — well, into Circles. That is, groups. Categories. Google starts you off with empty circles called Friends, Acquaintances, Family and Following (people you don’t know, but want to follow, as you would on Twitter). It’s a piece of cake to add new ones. They can be tiny circles (“Granny and Gramps”) or big ones (“Family Tree”), organization-based (“Fantasy League Buddies”) or arbitrary (“Annoying People”).

Creating them is a blast: an array of tiles represents your online acquaintances, which it assembles from your Gmail and other accounts. You drag each one into an actual on-screen circle, where they tumble into place. You can drag a person into more than one circle, of course. The lucky encircled friend will know that you’ve added him or her to a circle, but not which one, thank heaven.

From now on, every time you share something — a news item, a thought, a photo, a chat invitation — you can specify exactly which Circles receive it. In one fell swoop, Google has solved the layers-of-privacy problem that has dogged Facebook for years.

Senators embarrassed by their children’s drunken party photos. Potential employers reading about your crazy nightlife. Girlfriends learning accidentally about their beaus’ proposal plans. All of it goes away with Circles. You share each item with only the people who deserve to know. And simultaneously, you spare the masses from seeing news of no interest to them; why should the whole world be in on your discussion of this Friday’s bowling outing?

You’re spared, too. You can click a Circle’s name to filter the scrolling blurbs. You can view only the work-related posts, only your college buddies’ posts, or only your grandparents’ posts, with one click apiece.

Facebook has something similar, called Lists. But compared with Circles, it’s buried and a lot more effort to use. In Google+, you have to specify who gets each post or each photo (although it remembers your last selections). That’s actually a little annoying — you can’t just type an update and hit Enter — but over all, the benefits outweigh the hassle.

read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/technology/personaltech/google-gets-a-...

The ides of July are almost upon us. And that can mean only thing: the arrival of OS X Lion with the refreshed MacBook Air in tow. At least, that's what two Apple enthusiast sites are reporting.

9to5Mac says that a "few overseas sources" tell them that "Apple Retail stores are planning 'overnights' on July 13th." Overnights typically entail a refresh of Apple store displays and training on new products.

And AppleInsider is hearing similar chatter, citing a "bulletin" posted to Apple's internal retail news network "advising store management to perform RAM upgrades to certain Mac models on the showroom floors by Sunday, July 10th at the latest." The deduction: this is needed to ready those models for upgrades to Lion.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20077744-64/macbook-air-os-x-lion-due-next-week/#ixzz1RWMTUtaj

The Internet search giant whose mission is to organize the world's information will try to organize the world's people with a social networking service that is designed to rival the growing influence of Facebook.

The service called Google+ will let people share their lives and do the kinds of things they already do on Facebook such as post status updates, photos and links. Its focus is on sharing with small groups rather than your entire universe of friends. (That's probably what led Google to offer to buy Dave Morin's Path).

It's initially only open to a limited number of Google users who will eventually be able to invite others.

This is a risky gambit for Google, which has had a string of social networking flops, most recently Buzz. It's also a project that co-founder and chief executive Larry Page has personally overseen.

Page knows Google has to make the transition from a Web that connects pages and a Web that connects people. Facebook threatens Google's hegemony as the Web's most popular destination and one of its biggest moneymakers.

All that sharing taking place on Facebook is largely inaccessible to Google and other search engines. And Facebook is consuming a lot of people's time. In May, 180 million people visited Google sites, including YouTube, according to research firm ComScore. More than 157 million visited Facebook.  And those Facebook users spent an average of 375 minutes on the site versus 231 minutes on Google.

Why is that important? Advertisers are watching. It's not clear that gains at Facebook are costing Google –- yet. But clearly that could happen.

Does Google have it in its DNA to become a social destination? It clearly has been adding plenty of talent that have the know how. Google+ is part of an urgent effort underway for months under the codename Emerald Sea.

But many observers say Google has moved too slowly to counter Facebook. Even Google's chairman Eric Schmidt, the company's CEO for more than a decade, recently admitted that.

Schmidt said he "screwed up" in social networking. "I clearly knew I had to do something and I failed to do it," he said.

One of the most major screw ups was a social networking service for Gmail users called Buzz which automatically included their e-mail contacts in the network, setting off a firestorm. Google changed the service and in March settled with the Federal Trade Commission and agreed to 20 years of privacy audits.

Google seems to have learned a lesson with Google+ about people's desire to control what information they share. That may get the attention of the folks at Facebook