Content and publishing

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

Those of you who build and tweak your own maps via Google's Map Maker can now share them with your circles on Google+.

Any maps that you share via a post pop up on your Google+ profile, visible to the folks who follow you. They can then see your map and comment on it, according to the latest info from the Google Maps team.

Google has outlined a series of steps for sharing your maps on its social network. It's just as simple as sharing other content. Simply click on the Share button, type your message, and then … Read more

A new compression technology represents a significant improvement over today's standard, a new study found. The result could help pave the way for video with at least four times the pixels of today's 1080p standard.

The new compression technology, called HEVC or H.265, is significantly better than today's prevailing standard video codec, called AVC or H.264, researchers from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Lausanne, Switzerland, concluded.

"The test results clearly exhibited a substantial improvement in compression performance, as compared to AVC," the researchers said. "As ultra-high definition television has recently … Read more

A trade show in September will be the coming-out party for video technology called HEVC or H.265, a new arrival in a hotly contested market for the best approach to compression.

HEVC, short for High Efficiency Video Coding, is for encoding and decoding video streams so they can be stored or transmitted more economically than today's dominant H.264, aka AVC or Advanced Video Coding. Specifically, HEVC allies say it can deliver the same quality video as H.264 with half the network bandwidth.

The codec has been in the making for years, but it's now almost … Read more

Illustrating one of its selling points for its software subscription plans, Adobe Systems has updated Muse three months after it first released the tool for designing and publishing Web pages.

Adobe released Muse along with the Creative Cloud subscription service, which lets people use the full panoply of Adobe Creative Suite 6 (CS6) software along with some online services including Web hosting, Web fonts, and file synchronization. Part of the Creative Cloud sales pitch is that Adobe will update its components as new features arrive, meaning that subscribers get new abilities without having to wait for CS7.

The new version … Read more

Microsoft's new Bing app brings a simple but visually slick approach to searching the Web.

The app made its entrance on Wednesday as one of the few new features to pop up in the Windows 8 RTM (release-to-manufacturing), the same version that will officially greet consumers on October 26.

The new operating system already offers Internet Explorer, both as a Windows 8 app and a traditional desktop program. As a third option, Bing is a dedicated app that acts as a portal to Microsoft's own search engine.

Launching the app opens Bing's home page with the search … Read more

For more than three years, Skype has worked to improve online audio through involvement in a project now called Opus. But perversely, Skype's new owner, Microsoft, is undermining Opus just as a Web standards effort is poised to carry it into the mainstream.

Opus is an audio "codec" -- technology to encode and decode media streams for efficient transmission over the Internet or storage on computing equipment. Opus backers besides Microsoft's Skype division include Google, Opera, and Mozilla.

Opus has a lot of potential to improve online audio, something that's increasingly important as more communications … Read more