Today in Tech: Kim Dotcom's Megabox; NotFound Project; Apple Maps in China

Kim Dotcom’s Megabox Kim Dotcom, the colorful millionaire who faces charges of internet piracy and breaking copyright laws in US (He founded Megaupload, a file sharing site, that has now been shutdown) has published a promotional video of a new service he plans to launch soon. Here’s the video.

The business model seems to be simple. Megabox will tie up with artists, who will sell their music on the platform for a 10% fee. It will also have a free customers, who will have to install an application called Megakey in their devices. Megakey will replace 15% of online ads with its own to generate revenue. Again, 90% of the earnings would go to the artists, Dotcom told TorrentFreak earlier.

“I created an innovation that could solve the piracy problem,” Dotcom says. I doubt that. While selling music on Megabox is legitimate, shoving ads in other websites is what malwares do, and that will only bring Dotcom even more legal problems.

Putting 404 error pages to good use
I don’t think anyone has measured it, but the 404 error pages are probably the most underutilized real estate on the net. This New Yorker page is probably an exception, but they are almost always boring.

Fast Co Create points out to a superb initiative by The NotFound Project. The idea is to insert missing children ads – with photograph, last known whereabouts etc – in 404 error pages of the participating sites using an app. It will look like this.

“Within the first hours after the launch, the Not Found Project went from 45 participating websites to 677, and that number continues to climb”, FastCoCreate says.

That’s in Europe. Someone should do it in India too.

Apple Maps in China
In The Soccer War, Ryszard Kapuscinski writes about his encounter with some angry, armed men in Congo. They mistake Kapuscinski and his friend for Belgians. (This happened around the time Congo was fighting for independence from Belgium, and the revolutionaries were getting an upper hand.) “We told him (an interpreter who knew French) that we were from Poland and Czechoslovakia. He translated this. The people in the crowd began looking at each other searching for a sage who would know what those names meant. The officer didnt know them, which made him angrier than before.” (They escape by showing a driver’s license issued in Cairo.)

Kapuscinski is not surprised that they didn’t know that there were countries like Poland. Towards the end of that chapter he writes: “In Poland, too, there are a lot of people who don’t know that such countries as Gabon and Bechuanaland exist, even though they really do. I once leafed through a Belgian history book written for Congolese schools. It was written in such a way that you could think Belgium is the only country in the world. The only one.”

I came across this in a WSJ report on the special version of maps that Apple made for China: “If customers in China turn on the satellite image feature or layer road and place names on top of the satellite image, they can only see China, while the rest of the world is left black.” I could only think of Belgian textbooks in Congo.

Also of interest

• mChek might have suspended operations: Sources Business Standard
• Govt moves cabinet note to procure 5 million Aakash tablets: Mint
• Angry Birds maker hopes Bad Piggies will help it fly again: Reuters
• Mobility disruption: A CIO perspective: McKinsey Quarterly
• Walking on Eggshells: Anatomy of a Science Story: Scientific American
• Einstein’s Brain Now an Interactive iPad App: Techland
•  In U.N. Speech, Assange Demands U.S. End Persecution of WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning: Wired
• How to Keep Your Online Photos in One Place – ThisLife and Seagate: WSJ

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