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likeZEBRA is a new music site that only carries artists not signed by one of the major labels. Unlike MySpace Music, Coldplay isn’t around to steal Sound of Sulfur’s potential fans’ attention spans. It’s hardly an original idea — think dmusic, WeAreListening, or LaunchYourMusic.com — but my take is that sooner or later, one of these sites will figure out how to make it work.

Company spokesman Braven Greenelsh sent me an email last week in which he said, “Any struggling musician knows that breaking into the music industry is next to impossible. likeZEBRA is unique in that it allows artists to gain exposure in new areas, sell and distribute their music, book their own shows, get signed, and ultimately monetize their music in the process.”

likeZEBRA’s tools include text message and email blasters that allow bands to send mass messages to fans. That’s the best way today to keep them up to the minute on show and new releases. A likeZEBRA widget makes it easy for fans to download free ringtones.

likeZEBRA’s mission — to make music a profitable business, rather than a life-eating hobby — seems on the verge of quixotic to me. As a former struggling rockstar-in-training myself, I learned that even freelance writing is a much more reliable source of income, and that a major label contract is the best way to land a lump some of money to get the band off the ground. But likeZEBRA’s site seems like it could at least ramp up musicians’ fan bases and add to their potential incomes. Not a bad start.

The company, based in Los Angeles, is privately funded.

Self-publishing site FastPencil has launched a new program aimed at helping aspiring thought leaders publish the books in their heads.

It’s been years since Amazon began allowing authors to sell their self-published books. Wired magazine sage Kevin Kelly did it and wrote about it in February 2005.

But as a professional writer since 1996, I know that what most aspiring thought leaders need to make their dream book a success isn’t a publisher. It’s a different writer.

FastPencil to the rescue! The company’s new Thought Leadership program is designed specifically “to help CEO’s and today’s business leaders to write a quality book that will establish and solidify their credibility with customers, prospects and partners.” FastPencil now offers these services to turn your big book idea into a book:

• A personal book authoring team to manage the entire book writing process. You run your business, they co-write your book.
• Full print and eBook distribution services to Amazon and elsewhere.
• Social media promotion services. Sorry, you’ve got a business to run. Let FastPencil have all the fun on Twitter for you.

I couldn’t resist having FastPencil co-author my post about them. CEO Steve Wilson emailed me the following paragraphs, which I edited for punchiness:

Today, Thought Leadership books are the new calling cards. These books are a proven way to open doors, close prospects and partnerships. They serve as the starting point for meaningful discussions with their audiences.

But these leaders struggle to clear the many hurdles of traditional publishing. They are unable to take full advantage of self-publishing and social media. They are often simply too busy.

The Thought Leadership program promises to deliver a bookstore-quality thought leadership book in 90 days. FastPencil’s Concierge Book Program simplifies an often time-consuming, costly, and laborious book authoring process.

Because Thought Leaders are busy, it includes their own ghostwriter, editor, and cover designer. A dedicated producer keeps the whole project on track.

This program is for CEOs and other key executives, politicians, influencers, and others who desire to build their brand in well-defined communities of prospects, voters, peers, and organizations. By combining the power of self-publishing with community social networking, thought leaders can promote their views and co-create with their communities of interest, without having to type every single keystroke themselves.

FastPencil’s program is probably the best opportunity a Thought Leader will have in 2010 to publish a book.

The company’s basic self-publishing services cost nothing up front. They take a cut of sales. But the Concierge Thought Leadership Book Program will cost real money. FastPencil won’t talk about pricing yet — it’s negotiated case by case — but they claim to have several books near completion. When the first one hits print, we’ll check it out. From experience, I doubt most readers will know that FastPencil titles aren’t written by the author on the cover. What will matter is the quality of the writing and the actual thought-leaderdom of the ideas.

FastPencil, a Campbell, California company founded in early 2009, is privately funded.

Hewlett-Packard recently announced the latest revision of the HP TRIM information management software today, HP TRIM 7. Version 7, says HP, will “help organizations better manage all of their business information, including Web 2.0 content developed in Microsoft SharePoint.”

TRIM is an information management tool for large companies. It lets them store every single piece of data related to a specific business transaction — say, a stock options purchase — as a single record in TRIM’s database. So, years later, they can go back and find all the relevant emails, faxes, spreadsheets, Word files, and everything else as a single database search result.

This is the important part: Employees are completely unaware of this. They do their jobs, and TRIM, carefully configured by the company’s information management experts, automatically stores all records. So there’s no extra work pawned off on employees to figure out how to store their own records. It just happens as they work.

In the last few years, Microsoft’s SharePoint — a social/collaborative tool — has become a popular way to collaborate among global offices. But as you might expect, the rapid pace of content creation and technology updates among Web 2.0 teams often outpaces the rules of information governance and regulatory compliance.

The Radicati Group estimates that 87 percent of organizations using Microsoft SharePoint are using it for collaboration with Web 2.0 content such as calendar items, discussions, wikis and blogs.

TRIM 7 lets IT managers configure Sharepoint just as they do other office tools, so that every blog post and shared document related to a specific topic is automatically stored in the right record for later finding.

TRIM is designed to meet complicated U.S. Department of Defense rules, as well as a series of standards set by ISO, the International Organization for Standardization. To be honest, most of the bureaucrats who include these standards as a requirement for all paperwork don’t really know what they mean. What matters is that companies working with them can honestly say they comply with the rules.

As the world’s largest technology company with more than 300,000 full-time employees worldwide, HP has already learned how to live with all of them.

Direct sunlight — is there anything more terrifying for an OLED screen? Up until now, you had to sacrifice some outdoor performance from your phone’s display in order to get the spectacular contrast and viewing angles on offer from OLEDs. Up until now. Samsung’s Wave has been taken for a quick spin by Dutch publication portablegear and while we’ve no idea what their feedback on the phone was, the moving pictures speak for themselves. The phone remains entirely readable and usable in spite of the bright environment around it — if you question how much light is hitting it, just take a look at the hand of the person holding it — and color saturation is maintained throughout. Samsung promised us a great media experience on the handset, but this quick demo places its Super AMOLED tech a clear step above… well, every other display out there. The wildly impressive video awaits after the break, and you can find more imagery and our hands-on impressions here.

Continue reading Samsung Wave shows what’s Super about its AMOLED display by going outdoors (video)

Samsung Wave shows what’s Super about its AMOLED display by going outdoors (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Feb 2010 05:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve just gotten into our seats and things are about to get underway. Blow-by-blow coverage will be commencing momentarily.

Live from HTC’s MWC 2010 press event originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Feb 2010 04:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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During Deutsche Telekom’s press conference this morning at MWC, Cole Brodman — T-Mobile USA’s CTO — went on record with the news that it’ll be launching its first 21Mbps HSPA+ USB modem next month across the country, the webConnect Rocket. Of course, there isn’t a lot of live 21Mbps footprint in T-Mobile’s network right now — in fact, only Philly is fully operational — but there should be plenty more cities from coast to coast where you can enjoy DSL-shaming wireless speeds later this year. That might not be the most exciting news, though: Brodman also finally fessed up to the HD2 (unbranded version pictured above), which will be exclusive to T-Mobile in the US. It’s arguably pretty bad timing in light of the Windows Phone 7 Series announcement yesterday, but a huge win nonetheless — the phone is a legitimate beast. Like the webConnect Rocket, it’ll be hitting in March, though exact dates and prices for either have yet to be revealed.

T-Mobile launching 21Mbps webConnect Rocket, HTC HD2 next month originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Feb 2010 04:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Steve Jobs is reportedly cooperating on a biographical book about himself, according to the New York Times.

The book is being written by Walter Isaacson, former managing editor in chief of Time magazine, according to anonymous sources in the Times piece. That’s a very interesting choice for a biographer, considering that Isaacson isn’t a technology writer or Silicon Valley insider. Isaacson is currently chief executive and president of the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit education and policy studies organization in Washington, D.C. He has written books on Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin.

There are lots of books about Steve Jobs. But they’re all missing a key ingredient: cooperation from Jobs himself. I’ve read many of these books over the years, from Steve Wozniak’s iWoz (which of course is about the Apple co-founder but has tales about Jobs) to The Second Coming of Steve Jobs by Alan Deutschman. There are many unflattering stories that have surfaced over the years about Jobs, as well as admiration. But in every book, I always wished that the writer had more access to Jobs himself. The challenge in writing about book about Jobs is to stay far enough away from the reality distortion field to get an objective view of the man and his life.

Apple declined to comment on the book to the New York Times. Given Jobs’ recent brush with mortality — he survived a liver transplant last year — it seems likely that he is concerned about the legacy he leaves behind and how his life is perceived.