When Rodrigo Rosenberg turned up dead on Mother’s Day in an upscale neighborhood in Guatemala City, his murder was seen as little more than another execution-style shooting in one of Latin America’s most dangerous countries. Now, after a video emerged in which Rosenberg accused Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom of orchestrating the murder, the killing has sparked civic unrest that threatens to topple the President of this fledgling democracy. Thousands of protesters have demonstrated daily in front of the presidential palace, calling for Colom’s resignation. And politicians have said Colom should step aside during the investigation into Rosenberg’s death. “This is the most serious political crisis the country has faced since the signing of the peace accords” in 1996, said Anita Isaacs, a Haverford College political science professor who studies democratization in Guatemala. “The country is hanging on by a thread.”
The video spread across the Internet after family members handed it out during Rosenberg’s funeral on Monday. In the 18-minute tape, a seemingly calm Rosenberg, sitting behind a desk and microphone, alleges that Colom, the First Lady and two associates were involved in murder, corruption and money laundering. The group, he says, filtered public funds through a state-owned bank for personal gain and to finance drug traffickers. Rosenberg then claims that after Khalil Musa, a prominent businessman and bank board member, had learned of the Coloms’ scheme, Musa and his daughter were shot to death in front of a shopping center in April. Rosenberg says the President signed off on the killings. On Sunday, Rosenberg was shot in the head while riding his bicycle.
PLAY.FM is the most comprehensive audio database for DJ and club culture on the internet. More than 12.000 DJ sets, live recordings and radio sessions can be streamed free of charge and on-demand.
Upload, track list wiki, meta-shop
DJs can upload and release studio mixes, radio sessions and event recordings themselves and check their audience statistics. The PLAY.FM audio player visualizes the entire set in wave-form, enabling the user to set time markers in order to identify and inquire about unknown tracks in wiki form. Each identified track is linked to the meta-shop: currently 1.4 million tracks from 5 different online shops can be compared on PLAY.FM’s metashop where tracks are categorized according to quality and/or pricing – 20 further shops will follow in the next weeks.
Promotion platform for the club-music industry
Labels, clubs, bookers and organizers use PLAY.FM as an effective promotion platform: They promote their artists, releases and events by posting live recordings, radio sessions and DJ sets ranging from jazz, house, drum and bass up to techno. On PLAY.FM one can reach music industry’s protagonists, distributors, as well as music lovers from over 140 countries who are able to listen to all of PLAY.FM’s recordings for free and on-demand. Additionally, PLAY.FM’s widget offers users and content partners the possibility to embed mixes into their websites.
Further features scheduled
In order to give users a prompt insight into their desired local scene, PLAY.FM’s “Cities” pages will illustrate all of PLAY.FM’s content on city maps. A PLAY.FM “Channel” will give music magazines, online forums and advertisers the opportunity to present text, image, video as well as interactive flash formats together with PLAY.FM content.
Positioning
The comprehensiveness and depth of PLAY.FM’s content, enable the user to constantly discover new music styles, labels, artists, djs, and clubing locations. With brand-new applications such as the track list wiki, meta-shop and the exact acquisition of audience statistics, PLAY.FM provides for more transparency and intends to actively contribute to the fair distribution of music licensing.
We’ve gotten our hands on the COOL-ER, a new Ebook reader coming out in two weeks that’s sporting a (relatively) low $250 price tag and a case that looks like an over-sized iPod Nano (it’s also coming in 8 Applesque colors). Interead, the small startup that built Cool-er, is obviously trying to bring Ebooks to a new market, shunning some of the features seen on the Kindle in favor of a lower price-point and a broader appeal. And it just might work.
Unlike Amazon’s device, Cool-er has no wireless connectivety, so you can’t buy books online or browse Wikipedia, nor does it have Amazon’s oddly controversial text-to-speech functionality. But it’s also over $100 cheaper than the Kindle, and while some other devices (like the Sony Reader) are in the same price range, Cool-er also has a very unique look – I’m sure many people (especially younger crowds) would rather sport a colorful Ebook reader than the beige and black color schemes that currently dominate the market.
The device is quite light, weighing in at around 6.25 ounces (the Kindle 2 weighs in at a comparatively hefty 10.2 ounces). Cool-er has 1 GB of integrated memory, which you can expand with up to 4 more GB through the SD card slot. Battery life on a single charge is around 8000 page turns, which the company says should last around three weeks. And the device supports JPEG, PDF, EPUB, and TXT files, as well as DRM for PDF and EPUB. You can find full specs here.
So how does the Cool-er work when it comes down to actually reading?
I’ve been using the original Kindle regularly for a few months now, so any gripes I have with Cool-er may have more to do with what I’m used to rather than what’s actually wrong with the device. That said, I’m not a big fan of the navigation wheel. It’s nearly flush with the device case, and while you can still feel for it with your fingers without looking, you’re going to have to apply some force to the button to change the page. Not a lot of force, mind you, but coming from Kindle’s massive shoulder buttons I could see it getting frustrating. Aside from these issues, the device works perfectly well for reading. You can change between a number of different fonts and sizes, the device supports eight different languages (including Chinese and Russian), and you can easily rotate text if you’d like to switch to a portrait mode (you’ll have to press a button, but seriously – do you really care if your E-reader has an accelerometer)?
The biggest issue I think new Cool-er users will face at this point is actually getting books onto the device. The process is actually quite simple: drag the book from your computer desktop onto the Cool-er using Windows Explorer or Finder on the Mac. It’s very easy if you’re comfortable around computers, but many people would likely prefer some kind of content manager connected to the Cool-er book store that they could sync to their device, so they wouldn’t have to worry about drag-and-drop. For the same reason Apple’s iTunes played a key role in making the iPod popular, Cool-er will need a similar application if it wants to appeal to a broad audience.
The company is also launching an Ebook store alongside the device at CoolerBooks.com, which has over 750,000 available books. Anyone can buy books at 20% off list price, but Cool-er owners will get an extra 5% off across all books. This is a fairly good price, but when it comes to New York Times Bestsellers, Amazon leaves it in the dust – on the Kindle, a bestseller costs $9.99, while CoolerBooks appears to charge anywhere from $3-10 more per book. That said, CoolerBook does have significantly lower prices on some books that are not bestsellers, and the Cool-er’s initial sale price is obviously much lower.
Another factor that will play an important role in Cool-er’s success will be its availability. CEO Neil Jones says that deals are currently in the works to sell the device in retail stores, which could be a huge boon for the company. Cool-er may not have all of the features of some of the other Ebook readers, but if its eight colorful models are sitting on the shelf next to the Sony readers and other less striking devices, it could do quite well regardless.
Simplify your online social life with a Firefox extension that will bring together all your social network and IM services in one place, from facebook, to twitter, google talk, yahoo, etc…
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