iTunes University – free online education – is booming with 100s of millions of downloads

This month both Stanford and Open University reached 50 million downloads of their iTunes U content, a major milestone for online education. Altogether, the service from Apple reached 700 million downloads in January 2012.   Stanford News: In subjects ranging from human behavior to linguistics, Stanford lectures…have been downloaded a whopping 50 million times. The …

Best Buy to close 50 stores in the U.S. and 11 in the U.K.

Selling consumer electronics isn’t as easy as it used to be for Best Buy. The big-box retailer is closing 50 stores and compensating employees based on customer service after its fiscal fourth-quarter sales fell short of expectations. The company today reported a fiscal fourth-quarter net loss of $1.7 billion, on revenue of $16.63 billion, up …

1:1 cost comparison of a tablet and textbook for elementary school children

  From a report by the FCC that included the technology companies and textbook publishers. More details at AllThingsD

Tipping point – estimated 1 billion more movies in 2012 will be streamed than watched via DVD

According to research from the IHS Screen Digest, we may have finally reached the point when streaming video services have become ubiquitous enough to take over American households. The researcher forecasts that 3.4 billion movies will be legally consumed over streaming services this year, more than double the 1.4 billion that were viewed last year …

The digital divide – newspapers are completely lost

Online advertising is booming. Already a $32 billion business, advertisers are expected to spend a full $62 billion online in 2016. But news publishers are not poised to cash in on the growth, a report released Monday by the Pew Research Center suggests. The problem? News publishers’ online advertising products simply aren’t competitive. Most tend …

Watch short films from the Sundance Festival 2012 at Yahoo Screen

Starting today, the short films premiering at Sundance are viewable at sundance.yahoo.com via Yahoo, a sponsor of the festival. Through Jan. 27, Web users can watch the films and vote on them for the Yahoo! Audience Award. The winning filmmaker will be announced  Jan. 28 and will receive $5,000. “Some of the best filmmakers started their careers …

University 2.0 – Sebastian Thrun, Stanford, and free online knowledge

Thrun engaged his audience with the heartwarming story about how an initial idea of offering his renowned Stanford classes for free to students online evolved into an education project touching hundreds of thousands of students across the world. “I hoped for 500 students. We got 160,000,” Thrun said. Thrun’s approach is more than “just” offering …

Instant Watcher turns the Netflix API into the perfect way to find a movie to watch

Instant Watcher is the perfect site for Netflix Instant users. You can quickly and easily find movies to watch and avoid the miserable search and click on Netflix’s own site. “About a quadrillion times easier to browse than Netflix’s own site” — Boing Boing Offworld, Feb 6, 2009 Within a few clicks you can figure out …