Content and publishing

After an 80-year stint, Newsweek is cancelling its print publication and will go all digital come 2013.

The news was revealed today on the Daily Beast, the online news site that merged with Newsweek in 2010. Daily Beast and Newsweek editor Tina Brown and Baba Shetty, CEO of the combined company, said that the December 31 edition will be the magazine's last print version.

Known as Newsweek Global, the new digital edition will provide news and information on a worldwide scale. Access to Newsweek Global will be available via paid subscriptions for both Web and tablet users. Certain content … Read more

A full 25 million mobile users in the Middle East can now use Wikipedia without worrying about data charges.

The Wikimedia Foundation and Saudi Telecom (STC) have teamed up to offer the free access through a program known as Wikipedia Zero. The goal behind this initiative is to help people in developing countries more easily get information through Wikipedia. Many users in these countries surf the Internet via mobile devices, so the Wikimedia Foundation tries to work with local carriers to eliminate data charges and other obstacles.

The foundation has given high priority to Arabic-language countries but has reached out … Read more

Anyone with at least $3 million to spare may be able to own a 1954 letter written by Albert Einstein.

Up for auction on eBay starting today, the letter was written by Einstein a year before his death and sent to Eric Gutkind in response to Gutkind's book "Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt." As such, it offers a revealing look into the scientist's private and unadulterated attitude toward religion and his own Jewish heritage.

"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a … Read more

A tweet insulting the president and his late grandmother has gotten kitchen appliance maker KitchenAid in hot water.

During the presidential debates last night, someone posted a tweet using the official KitchenAid USA account that read: "Obamas gma even knew it was going 2 b bad! 'She died 3 days b4 he became president'."

KitchenAid took down the tweet as fast as possible. But it had already quickly spread after being sent to the company's 25,000 followers and including the hash tag #nbcpolitics, an account used by NBC News to tweet about the debate.

Obama's … Read more

The New York Times is testing the mobile waters with a new Web site optimized for the iPad.

Created using HTML5 and formatted for the iPad, the new mobile Web app is designed to supplement the paper's print edition and Web site. The app is available to subscribers of the Web site and to home delivery customers who link their accounts with one of the digital access options.

Unlike the Times Web site, which delivers stories in a traditional format, the app presents the news in a variety of different views.

The Trending section displays the top 25 trending … Read more

People in Iran can apparently once again access their Gmail accounts after the service was blocked last week.

Both Gmail and the secure HTTPS version of Google were persona non grata in the country on September 24 after an Iranian official named Abdolsamad Khoramabadi announced that "Google and Gmail will be filtered nationwide until further notice." Khoramabadi is the secretary of a committee in Iran that examines the Internet for content considered illegal or criminal, according to the Iranian Labor News Agency.

The action was reportedly taken in response to an amateur movie posted on YouTube considered critical of the Prophet Muhammad among Muslims, … Read more

GoDaddy customers are being given an apology and one month of free service after grappling with Monday's service snafu.

In an e-mail sent to GoDaddy users, the company's CEO Scott Wagner apologized for the outage that affected Web sites, e-mail availability, and other services.

"We let you down and we know it," the e-mail read. "We take our responsibilities -- and the trust you place in us -- very seriously. I cannot express how sorry I am to those of you who were inconvenienced."

To appease its customers, GoDaddy is kicking in a credit … Read more

The Internet Engineering Task Force has standardized the Opus audio compression technology as RFC 6716.

The move paves the way for much broader use of Opus for anything from playing music to online voice chats. Opus is what's called a codec because it defines how to encode and decode a stream of data for more efficient storage or transmission.

"Opus is the first state-of-the-art, free audio codec to be standardized. We think this will help us achieve wider adoption than prior royalty-free codecs," Jean-Marc Valin, a Mozilla employee and author of Opus, said in a blog post today. … Read more

Hit by legal woes that squashed its dedicated apps, Grooveshark has amped up its mobile Web site to provide users with full access to their music.

The new mobile site has been given a fresh HTML5 paint job, so it now looks and feels smoother. It also gives Grooveshark users access to their entire collection of online tunes, including their playlists and favorites. As always, users can search for specific songs by title or artist and listen to different "stations" based on jazz, rock, classical, country, and other genres.

Overall, the experience is now virtually identical to using … Read more