Saturday, January 3, 2015

Crunchyroll Continues to Experience Outages

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The Crunchyroll anime and manga streaming service continues to have intermittent connection issues and has been down the last twelve hours. The website and streaming video library has been experiencing a Denial Of Service Attacks by malicious hackers.

Crunchyroll has incurred the ire of computer hackers when it started sending out DMCA notices to internet service providers and the users. Also, the anime company has been really going after hacking forums that specialize in password generators or selling user account information. These two things combined has resulted in a massive botnet attacking them.

During the last few days videos have worked sporadically but many users are facing constant freezing every few minutes. Sometimes the video will freeze but the timer will continue and then fast forward five or ten seconds. In other cases just the audio will be playing but the video will be blank.

Currently all platforms such as xbox 360 and Xbox One, Apple TV, Chromecast, PS4, PC and the official mobile apps are not working. The official e-commerence store is also down, so no purchases can be made and some of the incentives the company was providing due to the outages cannot be redeemed.

Crunchyroll Continues to Experience Outages is a post from: Good e-Reader

Facebook Launches a New Book Club – A Year of Books

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg set a personal challenge for himself in 2015, read a book every other week. He has leveraged his social networking site to create a virtual book club for everyone to read his selected book in tandem and foster discussion.

Zuckerberg has created a Facebook group, simply called “A Year of Books,” for anyone hoping to follow along, and blasted it out to his 30 million followers. So far, more than 50,000 people have signed up to read the first tome, “The End of Power” by Moisés Naím.

Anything to encourage people to read is a good thing, and bookstores should benefit because everyone buying the same book should stimulate sales. Hopefully major e-book retailers will be paying attention to each of the books being read and discount them in order to appeal towards deal hunters.

Facebook Launches a New Book Club – A Year of Books is a post from: Good e-Reader

Hearst Intends on Launching a New Magazine in 2016

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Hearst Magazines, the company behind Elle, Cosmopolitan, and Good House Keeping is planning on launching a new publication in 2016. President David Carey  made the bombshell announcement in his end of the year memo to employees.

“We hope to enlarge our print portfolio, through new joint ventures, spinoffs from existing titles and strategic acquisitions,” Carey wrote in the note.

Hearst Magazines has had success rolling out new print titles with launch partners, such as Food Network Magazine and HGTV Magazine, which are joint ventures with Scripps Networks Interactive.  The company also released Dr. Oz THE GOOD LIFE , piloted TrendingNY, a free-to-the-reader fashion, beauty and pop-culture magazine for millennial women, and reintroduced Town & Country Travel.

“Our goal is to launch another new title in early 2016, and we’re in conversation now with possible joint venture partners,” Carey added.

Hearst Magazines has had a tremendous year with their digital endeavors. They are in year two of their ambitious reset of their digital operations, with impressive results. One of the ways they are doing this is bringing all of their online properties managed by a custom CMS.

The publisher has also seen accelerated demand for their flagship publications, such as Cosmopolitan and Elle on the Apple Newsstand, Google Play Magazines and their international editions on Pressreader. Hearst has also seen modest success with their part ownership of Next Issue, which is seeing an influx of venture capital being poured into it, so facilitate further growth.

Hearst has also invested heavily in their editorial teams and the new centralized U.S. news operation, has driven impressive audience growth. In the U.S., monthly unique visitors have doubled, to 112 million, and social media followers have increased 90%, to 63 million.

I think part of the reason why the social media numbers are up, because of the robust sharing on sites like Facebook. I have noticed in the last few months a number of friends sharing links to articles of a sexual nature.  Most of them have heavily click baited titles, which leads me to believe Hearst is paying attention to what Buzzfeed is doing.

“Looking back, 2014 was a real roller coaster of a year for the media business,” Mr. Carey also noted. “Here at Hearst Magazines, we experienced a mix of both growth and turbulence.”

Hearst Intends on Launching a New Magazine in 2016 is a post from: Good e-Reader