NEW YORK (AP) — It’s a maxim of technology: Invent the newest gadget and the porn industry will find a way to cash in. So when Apple Inc. launched the iPhone 4 and its FaceTime videoconference feature, it didn’t take long for adult-entertainment companies to develop video-sex chat services and start hiring workers through Craigslist. With more than 3 million of the phones already sold, the adult industry stands to make big money on this new way to reach out and touch someone – even if it puts Apple, which has always taken pains to keep its iPhone apps squeaky clean, in an awkward spot. In at least five cities, Craigslist ads seek models specifically for video sex chat on FaceTime. Many of the ads even offer to throw in a free iPhone 4 for the new employees. FaceTime lets people call another iPhone 4 user and have live video conversations over a Wi-Fi connection through the phone’s camera and screen. In one TV ad, a soldier uses it to get a look at his faraway wife’s ultrasound pictures. The adult industry wants its customers to share moments of an entirely different kind with its stars. And while the technology may be new, the idea is not. Porn providers have always been early adopters. In the 1970s, the demand for explicit videos at home helped VCRs become widespread, and the industry was the first to embrace DVDs, too. Internet porn peddlers were some of the first to make wide use of streaming video and online credit card payments. “The first time someone created a camera there was someone who said, ‘Wouldn’t it be good for someone to take off their clothes in front of this camera?’” said Michael Gartenberg, vice president at Interpret LLC, a media research company. And for years, cameras mounted on computers have helped connect people for racy online video sessions. But the portability and privacy of a cell phone makes FaceTime a new frontier for the industry. “A phone is such an intimate thing, you usually don’t lend it out or have someone else use it,” said Quentin Boyer, a spokesman for Pink Visual, an adult production company. Boyer said his company began planning for iPhone 4 video services almost as soon as the device hit stores. They should be ready in a matter of weeks. Boyer said the company will offer FaceTime sessions with some of the same women who appear in its videos. “It has a very personal feel – your mobile phone to hers,” he said. Online exhibitionism is only growing. Take Chatroulette, which randomly connects strangers for video chats. While the service isn’t explicitly sexual, it’s common for users to stumble upon people looking for more than just conversation. So far, most online video sex chat services have let the customer see the performer, but not the other way around. FaceTime may change that. “We are seeing more and more that customers want to be watched as much as they want to watch,” said Dan Hogue, owner of an adult chat company called CamWorld, which is planning FaceTime services. The rise of FaceTime porn puts Apple in an awkward position. Its competitors have products that allow video chat, too – HTC’s Evo 4G phone, for one. But Apple has made a big deal about keeping applications sold in its iTunes store clean. Apple has rejected book apps for featuring sexual content and political satires for their potential to offend. While some rejected apps have been approved after revisions, Apple has kept one strict rule: No porn. FaceTime isn’t even an outside developer’s app. It’s a main feature of the phone. An e-mail attributed to CEO Steve Jobs that was posted on technology blogs in April says it is Apple’s “moral responsibility” to keep pornography off the iPhone. Apple would not confirm that Jobs wrote it. But just as Apple can’t control whom iPhone users call, the company will have a hard time dictating how FaceTime is used. Internet experts say customers will understand that Apple cannot control what goes on in private video chats. “Apple can’t be seen as responsible any more than makers of routers or hardware are responsible for the content you are looking at,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Still, advocacy groups worry that FaceTime could connect children to pornography or predators. Parents can put computers in public areas of the home to supervise Internet usage, but mobile phones go anywhere. “Unfortunately, both children and sexual predators are often ahead of parents when comes to technology,” says Donna Rice Hughes, president of Enough Is Enough, a child safety group. Apple, asked to comment on the emerging adult services, noted that people can choose whom they chat with, just like regular calls, and parents can turn off the FaceTime feature. Hughes said it would be better if parents could create a “safe list” of people their children could call. For the adult-entertainment industry, FaceTime could be more than just another medium. It could actually change the business. For independent sex-chat workers, for instance, it could mean handing over less of their earnings to computer-based services. But FaceTime presents its own challenges. It requires that both parties in a chat have each other’s phone numbers, which could expose video-chat workers to unwanted calls from their clients. Another obstacle: The iPhone 4 camera was designed specifically for face-to-face chatting. “You can have the phone on your face, or other body parts, but not both at the same time,” said Teagan Presley, who acts in adult films and performs in video chats. “Most customers want the full package, and it’s going to be difficult holding a phone.” ? 2010 The Associated Press . All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Learn more about our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use .
July 29, 2010 | Posted in
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SEATTLE (AP) — Jeff Bezos isn’t just confident you’ll want a Kindle e-book reader. The CEO of Amazon.com is bracing for a future in which you’ll also want ones for your kid heading to college, your spouse in a book club and perhaps even Grandpa. And despite increased competition from Apple Inc.’s flashy iPad and other e-readers, that future could be coming soon – as early as August, actually, when online retailer Amazon.com Inc. releases two new Kindle models. With both versions costing less than $200, and one not far above the $99 psychological tipping point for gadget-buying, Bezos expects people to buy multiple devices for their households. If he’s right, the new Kindles could help cement the company’s status as the reigning e-reader and e-book champ, even in the face of an ever-growing field of challengers. Sitting at the head of a conference-room table at Amazon’s new headquarters on a late July afternoon, Bezos flips over a skinny, dark gray device. It’s the upcoming Kindle, and he’s excited to show it off. Bezos zips through the new Kindle’s features, rattling off a bevy of percentages. It’s 21 percent smaller and 15 percent lighter than the current Kindle, he says, though its display is the same size. Its electronic ink display has 50 percent higher contrast for improved reading in low and bright light. It turns pages 20 percent faster. Available on Aug. 27 in dark gray or white, the Kindle will have Wi-Fi access for the first time. Previous versions had only 3G cellular access for downloading books and other content. A version with both 3G and Wi-Fi will cost $189 – the same price as the current Kindle. A Wi-Fi-only version, which can just download books when you’re in a wireless hotspot, will cost $139. That second price tag makes the Wi-Fi-only Kindle $10 cheaper than the Wi-Fi-only Nook, an e-reader sold by competitor Barnes & Noble Inc. It will cost $11 less than Sony Corp.’s low-end e-reader, the Reader Pocket Edition, which doesn’t have wireless connectivity. That lower price is also less than half of the $399 that Amazon charged when it released the first Kindle in late 2007. James McQuivey, a Forrester Research analyst, expects the new price will “shatter the bottom” of the e-reader market. “Anything that doesn’t have any kind of connectivity, like the Sony Pocket Reader, has to drop to $99 by the end of the year,” he says. “Why would you buy that non-wireless device if you have the choice for the same or less money to buy a Wi-Fi-enabled Kindle?” If Bezos has his way, you wouldn’t – maybe you’d buy a Kindle with 3G and Wi-Fi for yourself, since you travel a lot, and a Wi-Fi-only one for your brother, who does most of his reading at home. But even if the lower-price Kindle stimulates new demand, it will likely be hard to gauge how well they’re really selling. While Apple happily touts sales milestones for the iPad, which starts at $499 and can be used to read e-books, surf the Web and more, Amazon has never divulged how many Kindles it has sold, beyond saying that readers have snapped up “millions” of the skinny e-readers. Bezos said Amazon is so secretive with its sales figures because releasing the information could help competitors, making it easier for them to estimate how many e-readers they should manufacture, for example. Forrester estimates that Amazon has sold 4 million Kindles so far in the U.S. and expects it will have sold more than 6 million by the end of the year. That would fit with hints from Amazon that cutting the Kindle’s price has helped. Amazon recently announced that Kindle sales growth accelerated since the company dropped the device’s price to $189 from $259 in late June, a cut that came a few hours after Barnes & Noble announced a similar slash to the price of its Nook e-reader, which now costs $199. The company also said Kindle book sales now outpace sales of hardcover books on Amazon. Amazon’s Kindle store now offers more than 630,000 books, including a number of free, out-of-copyright titles. When the device first launched, there were only 90,000. Bezos expects e-book sales growth to keep up, predicting Kindle books will outsell paperbacks on Amazon.com in the next nine months to a year. Eventually, he expects to sell more Kindle books than hardcovers and paperbacks combined. “When that happens, because of the convenience of electronic reading, people will just be reading more,” he says. Although many of them will likely be clicking from page to page on $139 Kindles, plenty of others may not even bother to buy the hardware. The company offers free Kindle reading software for several devices, including Apple’s iPhone and iPad and smart phones that run Google Inc.’s Android operating software. There’s also software for personal computers. That allows people to access Kindle content whether or not they have a Kindle device; Amazon still makes money selling the e-books. For the foreseeable future, however, Amazon will need to watch out for competitors such as the iPad and the Nook. While Apple, with its iBookstore e-book store, is less of a threat to the Kindle Store and software, its iPad is a looming presence on the hardware side, McQuivey says. The Nook, meanwhile, is unlikely to catch up to Amazon, he says, but still something the online retailer can’t ignore. “The question is, are they ready for what they started?” McQuivey asks. Bezos seems to think so, even as gadgets that can do everything from giving directions to supporting video chat proliferate. “As far as e-books go, our point of view is that reading can be made better with a purpose-built device,” he says. ? 2010 The Associated Press . All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. 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July 29, 2010 | Posted in
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FARGO, Ga. – This is what it looks like to be surrounded by 300 hungry alligators.? This group feeding only happens once every three or four years. Earlier this month, fisherman Ray Cason headed out on his boat at the Stephen C. Foster State Park in the Okefenokee swamp for fresh fish.? The gators beat them to it. Cason grabbed his camera and caught the feeding frenzy over mudfish, also known as bowfin.? He went back the next morning to capture more of it on video. A manager at the southeast Georgia park said the gators went their separate ways later that second morning. Related Articles New state law exempts kitchen inspections FWC finds non-native venomous fish in Gulf of Mexico Man accused of trafficking in prescription drugs, shipping them out of state Florida the epicenter of multi-state medicare fraud bust
July 29, 2010 | Posted in
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NEW YORK (AP) — With the release of a new album approaching, Kanye (KAHN’-yay) West is making sure he’s up to date with the social networking sites. He joined Twitter on Wednesday, one day after going to the offices of Facebook, in Palo Alto, Calif., to preview some of his new material. Videos of him rapping a cappella while standing on a conference table have been posted on YouTube. On his website afterward, West posted a letter to Facebook, thanking the staff for their support: “Your energy was a gift so electric, so genuine, that it really helped me give my best.” An e-mail request for comment from Facebook was not immediately returned. West’s new as-of-yet untitled album is expected to be released Sept. 14. — Online: http://www.twitter.com/kanyewest http://www.kanyeuniversecity.com/blog/ (This version CORRECTS APNewsNow. Corrects spelling of ‘Your’ in quote posted on Facebook page.) ? 2010 The Associated Press . All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Learn more about our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use .
July 28, 2010 | Posted in
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PUNTA GORDA, Fla. – The Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office has blocked off roads around the Punta Gorda Airport after a construction crew ruptured a low pressure gas line near Airport Road and Golf Course Boulevard. Charlotte Fire and EMS responded to the call around 5pm Wednesday evening. They arrived within minutes.? There are no injuries. Tampa Electrical Company is on scene and getting a clamp to shut down the leaking gas. Officials expect the leak to be fixed by 7pm. The jail is shut down to incoming or outgoing traffic, and Federal Express was evacuated due to a strong smell of gas fumes. Authorities are asking people to avoid the area. Related Articles Cape Coral boat victim dies from injuries NEW VIDEO: Suspect search near Punta Rassa Construction Trailer Fire Contained–NEW VIDEO Road Rage suspect arrested
July 28, 2010 | Posted in
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BONITA SPRINGS, Fla – The Lee County Sheriff’s helicopter is back at the Buckingham Airfield after spending days in the parking lot of a Bonita Springs strip mall. WINK News captured exclusive video as it lifted off early Wednesday. The chopper made an emergency landing in the middle of Bonita Beach road and U.S. 41 Monday night. Parts were flown in from Miami to repair the chopper and it is being put back into service. Related Articles Sanibel beach makes 10 ten list of most secluded beaches NEW VIDEO: Suspect search near Punta Rassa Endangered tortoises threatening Bonita woman’s home Construction Trailer Fire Contained–NEW VIDEO
July 28, 2010 | Posted in
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LONDON (AP) — An online parody of a Jay-Z hit that swaps New York’s metropolis for a modest Welsh port town has won hundreds of thousands of fans, the director of the spoof said Wednesday. The video “Newport (Ymerodraeth State of Mind),” a comic tribute to Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ 2009 single “Empire State of Mind,” has been viewed more than 1.65 million times on You Tube and drawn praise for its witty lyrics. Ymerodraeth is the Welsh word for empire. Morgan Jane Delaney, a 24-year-old filmmaker, shot a near frame-by-frame recreation of the original music video, but in the less glamorous surroundings of the south Wales city – about 140 miles (220 kilometer) west of London. She said the concept began as a private joke with her boyfriend and their comedian friend, but soon snowballed into a film project. “We just started singing different place names instead of New York, just as a joke, and we thought that Newport was funny. I don’t really know why I decided to go the whole hog and make a film of it, but it just seemed like fun,” the director said. “When you’re in Newport. Chips, cheese, curry makes you feel brand new, washed down with a Special Brew,” the lyric reads, referring to a local fast-food meal and Special Brew, a type of super-strength beer. The spoof, filmed last month, quickly won some high-profile fans – including British singer Lily Allen, who posted a link to the film on her Twitter account. ? 2010 The Associated Press . All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Learn more about our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use .
July 28, 2010 | Posted in
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SAN CARLOS PARK, Fla. – A massive fire fills the sky over southwest Florida with smoke Tuesday night. It happened in an industrial area off Alico Road and U.S. 41. The fire broke out in a storage area for modular trailers, used sometimes for extra school rooms or construction offices.? Four of them were destroyed. Nobody was inside any of the trailers, but property owner James Whitehead says they were sitting very close together, making the fire easy to spread. “Normally, they’d be out on different sites, the economy’s so bad, nobody’s got money to rent ‘em,” Whitehead said. Lightning a possible cause, according to firefighters. Thunderstorms were moving over the area at the time the fire began. The trailers’ remote location in this industrial area made the availability of water a problem for firefighters; the nearest hydrant was several hundred feet away. “When you have a distance like that, you’re going to lose pressure, and then splitting it again, going into two trucks, it became a real issue here at this fire,” said Susan Lindenmuth with Estero Fire. Fire investigators were on the scene to confirm a cause. Related Articles City of Fort Myers Poised to Raise Property Tax Rate Construction Trailer Fire Contained–NEW VIDEO Road Rage suspect arrested Boat Catches Fire
July 28, 2010 | Posted in
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ENGLEWOOD, Fla. – An Englewood singer-songwriter was angry when he saw thick black oil tarnishing Northern Florida’s white, sandy beaches. So he turned his anger into song, and now he’s using the song to raise money for the cleanup. Jack Mosley’s Florida roots go back to the 1800s. “I’m originally from Panama City, Florida,” Mosley said. “I grew up playing in the bays, and the bayous, and the Gulf Coast.” Writing songs is how he expresses his feelings. And when he saw ugly black tar balls washing ashore in the panhandle, “I got mad,” Mosley said. So he grabbed a pen and a paper. It didn’t take long for “Drill, Baby, Drill” to go from from his mind … to his guitar, then a recording studio, and now, a music video. The song includes lines like, “Would you like it if that oil was headed straight for your hometown,” and “is it worth the price of paradise to save a buck on gas?” He says the song isn’t about targeting one political party or another. “It was more about the mentality behind the spill than the actual spill, this drill at any cost mentality is gonna get us in trouble as it already has,” Mosley said. He isn’t just cashing in of the disaster. 100% of the proceeds from people buying his song will go to the National Wildlife Federation for the rescue and rehabilitation of the countless wildlife affected by the spill ? “I love the entire Gulf and to see this happening and its potential for the damage that this thing can do is just heartbreaking,” Mosley said. If you’d like to hear Jack’s song or find out where he’ll be performing next,? just head to www.jackmosley.com Related Articles Airtran adds Florida hub Florida approves benchmarks for student learning Florida among finalists for Race to the Top funds Stadium food study: Florida fails
July 27, 2010 | Posted in
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Owners of the iPhone will be able to legally break electronic locks on their devices in order to download software applications that haven’t been approved by Apple Inc., according to new government rules announced Monday. The decision to allow the practice commonly known as “jailbreaking” is one of a handful of new exemptions from a 1998 federal law that prohibits people from bypassing technical measures that companies put on their products to prevent unauthorized uses. The Library of Congress, which oversees the Copyright Office, reviews and authorizes exemptions every three years to ensure that the law does not prevent certain non-infringing use of copyright-protected material. In addition to jailbreaking, other exemptions announced Monday would: – allow owners of used cell phones to break access controls on their phones in order to switch wireless carriers. – allow people to break technical protections on video games to investigate or correct security flaws. – allow college professors, film students and documentary filmmakers to break copy-protection measures on DVDs so they can embed clips for educational purposes, criticism, commentary and noncommercial videos. – allow computer owners to bypass the need for external security devices called dongles if the dongle no longer works and cannot be replaced. ? 2010 The Associated Press . All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Learn more about our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use .
July 26, 2010 | Posted in
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