They announced today on their blog the addition of Physibles, data objects that are able to become physical. They believe that 3D printers are leading the charge into a future where we’ll be able to download everything from cars to food.

Today most data is born digitally. It’s not about the transition from analog to digital anymore. We don’t talk about how to rip anything without losing quality since we make perfect 1 to 1 digital copies of things. Music, movies, books, all come from the digital sphere. But we’re physical people and we need objects to touch sometimes as well!

The benefit to society is huge. No more shipping huge amount of products around the world. No more shipping the broken products back. No more child labour. We’ll be able to print food for hungry people. We’ll be able to share not only a recipe, but the full meal. We’ll be able to actually copy that floppy, if we needed one.

The current list of physibles available to download are a Pirate Bay pirate ship, a whistle, a tabletop robot model and a 1970 Chevelle Hot Rod model. As a joke, there is also a 3D printable Chris Dodd.

They firmly believe that the future of sharing is their new physible data. They joke that they should rename themselves The Product Bay, but they had no graphical artist to make it. They claim that in the future, they’ll be able to download one.

For those who aren’t aware, 3D printing is considered the future of art and item creation. It allows users to scan in a 3D object and create the same object via a layering technique that creates the parts. The price of 3D printers is expected to come down this year making them financially accessible to regular consumers.

For a handy primer, here’s a video explaining the power of 3D printing:

Initially, the service will only be available to the major markets: San Francisco, Seattle, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia. There are plans to roll out Extreme 105 to some of the smaller markets at a later date.

The upgrade presents a much needed speed increase, as the US struggles to catch up with other countries in terms of internet speed. Om Malik, of GigaOm, presents some caveats with Extreme 105. The service will be $105/month if you sign up for the Triple-Play plan which includes television and phone; services that cost extra. If you want the 105MBps plan on its own, it will cost you $199. Along with the price tag, the 250 GB bandwidth cap will be attached to the service as well.

Extreme 105 is based on Comcast’s DOCSIS 3.0 technology, which they rolled out with the 50Mbps service last year. With the tech, Comcast boasts that users can download HD movies in five minutes and full music albums in a matter of seconds.

It was discovered that the final release for Firefox 4 was up on their FTP server, which was then subsequently provided to users though numerous websites. Mozilla strongly discourages these direct downloads, as the current location isn’t equipped for massive traffic. So if you feel like being courteous to Mozilla, wait until tomorrow.

If you visit the index.html file on the FTP server, you’ll be met with the following message:

According to the website Fileforum, they’ve already had over 60,000 downloads for Windows since releasing the links on their site. There are also clients for both Linux and Mac.

It’s been nearly eight months since the original Firefox 4 beta was released publicly. Mozilla has been scrutinized for pushing back their initial release date which was supposed to happen last fall. We’ll all be able to find out either today, or tomorrow, whether or not the wait was worth it.

The battle for our browser usage has a new chapter, and it will certainly be interesting to see who is able to gain and who will fall back. Though I don’t condone anyone using Mozilla’s FTP server, if you get an early download, feel free to share your thoughts on it below.

The past few years, IE has steadily lost ground to the likes of Mozilla’s Firefox and Google Chrome. In 2007, IE controlled 80% of the market. The latest reports have them sitting at 57%.

Simplistic interfaces, faster load times, better security, have all been reasons behind IE losing ground. It appears Microsoft has remedied many of these problems, and reviews have pointed out these improvements.

PCMagazine gave IE9 a 4/5 rating, saying this of the browser, “Microsoft’s new browser is faster, trimmer, more compliant with HTML5—a major improvement over its predecessor. It also brings some unique capabilities like tab-pinning and hardware acceleration, but only Windows 7 and Vista users need apply.”

Unfortunately I’m unable to provide my own thoughts as I’m on a Mac computer at this time. If you have a Windows computer and use XP, you’ll be left out in the cold as well.

While it has a small window of platforms for which it’s available, IE9 has these improvements listed on their product page: pinned sites (for Windows 7 users), tracking protection, InPrivate browsing, HTML5 compatibility, and more.

One feature I’m excited to see in motion is how IE9 will share the burden of graphics rendering with the GPU on more graphic intensive websites. HTML5 is supposed to push the capabilities of graphics integration, and being the go-to browser for this integration could be a strong investment for the browser’s future.

Firefox 4 will release next Tuesday; this version has been in beta since July 2010. The release certainly will provide IE9 with some staunch competition out of the gate. In a couple of weeks it will be interesting to see how the pieces of market share will be divided up. Many have switched to Google Chrome as well, providing a third option in the market.

Has anyone had the opportunity to use IE9 yet? If so, are the improvements as great as many reviewers have been letting on? Or are you still waiting for Firefox 4?

Global mobile apps will be worth $17.5 billion by 2012, according to an independent report commissioned by app store GetJar. Mobile app downloads across all types of handset are also expected to increase from over 7 billion downloads in 2009 to almost 50 billion in 2012 – a year on year growth rate of 92%. 

This would mean that the value of apps sold would be greater than the projected $13.83 billion value of CDs sold in 2012.

Comments

UK Music fans are turning their backs file-sharing in favor of streaming and other ways of sharing music, especially amongst teens, according to the latest survey by The Leading Question and Music Ally of 1000 music fans:

• The overall percentage of music fans file-sharing every month) has gone down since the last survey from 22% December 2007 to 17% in January 2009.
• The biggest drop in those regularly file-sharing occurred amongst 14-18 year olds. in December 2007 42% of 14-18s were file sharing at least once a month. In January 2009 this was down to just 26%.

All this is despite the fact that the percentage of music fans who have ever file-shared increased  from 28% in December 2007 to 31% in January 2009.

Comments