Personals sites gaining popularity
Personals Web sites have proven to be big money makers, thanks to 30 million visitors a month, according to ComScore Media Metrix. And what are all those people doing? Results of the Elle/MSNBC.com Cybersex and Romance Survey offer some answers.
For instance, 73 percent of women who’ve gone on dates with cybermates have slept with one or more of them. Just over half of women have looked at adult content online, and 35 percent said it helped them find “more ways to look or act sexy.”
However, one-quarter of divorced respondents said online porn or chat contributed to their breakups, according to Janet Lever, a sociology professor at California State University at Los Angeles who analyzed the survey’s data.
Russian site offers cheap songs
A Russian Web site called AllofMP3.com is offering digital songs for as little as a nickel a song — suggesting the music industry still has a ways to go it if hopes to get a grip on the digital distribution of music.
The site ( www.allofmp3.com) sells tunes by the megabyte — a different method than the monthly subscriptions or per-song prices offered by most American music sites. The Moscow-based site charges a penny a megabyte, allowing buyers to choose among compression formats and quality levels. Even CD-quality sound at AllofMP3.com costs much less than the 88 to 99 cents per track charged by American sites.
The legality of the Russian business, however, appears murky. U.S.-based sites pay wholesale charges to the record labels that distribute the music, fees that don’t leave much room to cut prices below a buck a song.
In response to an e-mail query, a spokesman for AllofMP3.com replied that the site pays fees to the Russian Organization for Multimedia and Digital Systems, a trade group he said is authorized to manage copyrights in Russia.
Ebay sellers speaking out
As many as 100 of the biggest businesses selling products on eBay are reportedly considering forming a trade association to try to get a better deal. Hundreds of other active sellers also participate in an online discussion group to vent about eBay’s fee increases and listing procedures, the Wall Street Journal reported. One irritation is the auction site’s practice of charging the same comparable fees on individual auctions, whether one or 20,000 items are sold. Many large sellers think they should get a discount for volume.
Intel focusing on faster processor
Switching gears for its next-generation microprocessors, Intel Corp. said it has canceled an existing project so that development efforts can be focused on a more advanced technology that’s making faster progress than expected.
The new processors, expected by 2005, will sport dual computing engines instead of the single core of today’s Pentium 4 processors. The move will boost performance over existing hardware, Intel spokeswoman Laura Anderson said Friday.
“We’re taking advantage of an opportunity to accelerate development of other products that we believe will meet end users’ needs,” she said.
Today’s single-core Pentium 4s are enabled with a technology, called Hyper-Threading, that enhances performance by essentially tricking the operating system into behaving as though there are two processors instead of one.
Anderson said the move to dual-core chips will offer more of such benefits.
Free photo software offered
A Seattle photo-album site has released a free image editor and organizer it has spent the last year developing. PhotoWorks’ downloadable, Windows-only Digital Partner software can crop and brighten photos, remove red eyes and manage collections by letting people rate their own photos and sort them by date and time. To share images, users upload them to the site ( www.photoworks.com), one of the few still offering free, unlimited storage to registered users.