We’ve been hearing about additional perks coming to Amazon Prime members for some time, and here it is: the Netflix-style Instant Video service launched on Feb. 22, and gives Amazon Prime members unlimited, commercial-free access to 5,000 (for now) movies and TV shows, at no extra cost.

Unfortunately, members who got Amazon Prime free through the Amazon Mom or Amazon Student offers will need to ‘upgrade’ to a paid membership.

Continue reading on Examiner.com

The iPhone nano will have no memory for onboard storage of media, our source says. It will have only enough memory to buffer media streamed from the cloud.

“I’m talking strictly storage memory here,” said our source.

The iPhone nano will pull ALL it’s content from MobileMe. When users buy a movie or TV show on iTunes, it’s available to stream to their iPhone or iPad. The service is based on technology from LaLa.com, a streaming service that Apple bought last spring and then shut down.

Presumably, watching movies and playing games outside of a wi-fi or data coverage area will not be possible. Sounds like a big step backwards. If the main consideration is cost, competitors are able to offer Android smart phones that are significantly cheaper than the iPhone, complete with ‘real’ storage – expandable in many cases with Micro-SD cards (something apple has refused to offer on any iPod or iPhone, ever.).

According to publisher Activision, which will close its music game division and cease development of existing Guitar Hero titles, they’re ending the series in order to refocus efforts online.

“Due to continued declines in the music genre, the company will disband Activision Publishing’s Guitar Hero business unit and discontinue development on its Guitar Hero game for 2011,” the company said in its most recent financial statement. “These decisions are based on the desire to focus on the greatest opportunities that the company currently has to create the world’s best interactive entertainment experiences.”

…the HP Touchpad has a 9.7-inch screen very reminiscent of Apple’s tablet. The device runs on an updated WebOS 2.1 and has a resolution of 1024 x 768. It weighs 1.5 pounds and is 13.7mm thick. Under the hood is a dual-core 1.2GHz Snapdragon processor with a choice between 16GB and 32GB of internal storage.

In 2010 young-adult e-books made up about 6 percent of the total digital sales for titles published by St. Martin’s Press, but so far in 2011, the number is up to 20 percent, a spokeswoman for the publisher said.

Good trend. I’m trying to convince my daughter to take my old Nook, but so far she prefers dead tree books.

The company is stepping up hiring as it pushes deeper into mobile services, display advertising and Internet applications. Google also faces steeper competition from Silicon Valley rivals Facebook Inc. and Apple Inc. for users and engineering talent. The company aims to hire more workers in 2011 than any year in its history, exceeding its 2007 record.

More from Bloomberg

IANA’s primary address pool was exhausted on February 3, 2011 when the last 5 blocks were allocated to the 5 RIRs. Several RIRs are expected to run out of IPv4 addresses before the end of 2011; once the first RIR has run out, the end-to-end routable IPv4 Internet will be officially obsolete.

IPv6 deployment has been slow, but will be ready to meet future addressing needs.

Flickr accidentally deleted a member’s account–comments, favorites, and thousands of photos–but now has given the photographer a 25-year Pro-level subscription and all his photos back.

And more importantly for others who fear the same might happen to them, Flickr is working to update its system to prevent such a mistake from happening again and to make such draconian moves easier to reverse.

Read more at CNET.

As the Mubarak government turned Egypt into Gypt (everything “e” was cut off), Twitter quickly joined hands with SayNow (a Google company, yes,) to work around the ban and created @speak2tweet. This amazing new “channel,” created for the people of Egypt, is a game changer. It allows for anyone with access to a telephone line to leave a voice message –- which is instantly converted to a tweet.

[via AdAge]

A controversial CRTC decision that effectively imposed usage-based Internet billing on small service providers will be reversed, the Toronto Star has learned.

“The CRTC should be under no illusion — the Prime Minister and minister of Industry will reverse this decision unless the CRTC does it itself,” a senior Conservative government official said Wednesday.

“If they don’t reconsider we will reverse their decision.”

Some application developers, including Sony, say Apple has told them they can no longer sell e-books within their apps unless the transactions go through Apple’s system. Apple rejected Sony’s iPhone application, which would have let people buy and read e-books from the Sony Reader Store.

This move could have a big impact on what content is available on the iPad and iPhone, and what it ends up costing. If Amazon has to pay Apple 30% of the price of a book just because it was bought within the iPad Kindle app, that leaves a lot less money for the retailer, publisher and author to divide up. No such revenue sharing requirements exist on Android and other competing platforms.

[New York Times]

The once popular social media site now struggles in the shadow of the Facebook juggernaut. News Corp. bought MySpace in 2005 for $580 million. Almost half of MySpace’s employees got pink slips last month.

More from Google News

Let the hacking begin: If facebook needs money, instead of going to the banks, why doesn’t Facebook let its users invest in Facebook in a social way? Why not transform Facebook into a ‘social business’ the way Nobel Price winner Muhammad Yunus described it? http://bit.ly/fs6rT3 What do you think? #hackercup2011

Facebook has taken down the page — but TechCrunch has a screenshot.

The $15 plan will get you 200 megabytes of data, which AT&T claims is enough to “send/receive 1,000 emails (no attachments), plus send/receive 150 emails with attachments, plus view 400 Web pages, plus post 50 photos on social media sites, plus watch 20 minutes of streaming video”. That sounds optimistic to me, but this plan in particular will be a good option for parents who have kids clamoring for an iPhone. And for many users, free WiFi isn’t usually far away.

The new $25 plan will get you 2 gigabytes, which is far more data than most iPhone users currently use – but power users may find themselves bumping up against the limit.

AT&T says you can keep your current unlimited plan, or you can switch to one of the new cheaper plans without extending your contract.

AT&T press release

WarGames
1983 – After cracking the security of an Air Force supercomputer, young hacker David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) moves his piece in a seemingly innocent video game and accidentally tells the computer to start preparing a preemptive nuclear strike.

Housesitter
1992 – After building his dream house, architect Newton Davis (Steve Martin) proposes marriage to his girlfriend (Dana Delany), only to be summarily rejected. He seeks solace in a one-night stand with a waitress (Goldie Hawn), never imagining that a woman he slept with once would end up posing as his wife

Modern Problems
1981 – A jealous air traffic controller (Chevy Chase) is imbued with some wacky telekinetic powers after a collision with a nuclear-waste truck. This one didn’t age so well.

Feds
1988 – Gritty ex-Marine Ellie De Witt (Rebecca De Mornay) and cerebral Janis Zuckerman (Mary Gross) set out to become hard-nosed FBI agents in this satiric comedy (also starring Ken Marshall and Fred Dalton Thompson).

Wise Guys
1986 – When petty crooks Harry Valentini (Danny DeVito) and Moe Dickstein (Joe Piscopo) “borrow” a large sum of cash from a Mafia boss (Dan Hedaya), they head to the track to multiply their stolen gains. But when their bets go belly-up, they’re at the mercy of hit men hired to make them pay.

Armed and Dangerous
1986 – A slapstick comedy about two down-and-out men, ex-cop Frank Dooley (John Candy) and disbarred lawyer Norman Kane (Eugene Levy), who try their bungling hands at private security. Co-starring the adorable Meg Ryan.

Innerspace
1987 – A hell-raising Navy test pilot (Dennis Quaid) is miniaturized for a top-secret exploratory journey inside a laboratory rabbit — but is instead injected into the body of a high-strung nebbish (Martin Short) who works as a supermarket clerk. Also Co-starring the still-adorable Meg Ryan.

Free Online Flash Games

Details at Wired.

The screen resolution is lower than the Apple iPad, and there’s no word yet on performance. However, for $200 it would have to have some pretty major flaws to keep me from buying one.

No word yet on when the Pandigital Novel will be available.

The TextOnPhone Android application doesn’t support bookmarks, but it does a good job of remembering your place — even if you close and then re-open a book.

It would be nice if TextOnPhone could open text files stored on the phone’s SD card, or if I could at least figure out how to get large books uploaded, but it will do until a more full-featured application shows up.

UPDATE: Uploading books to TextOnPhone seems to be working fine now via the Facebook app. Go to the TextOnPhone web site to install the app to your Facebook account, and have fun uploading your books. The G1 application itself has also been updated — books are now downloaded to the G1′s storage card instead of to the device’s storage (only five books can be saved to storage at a time). And books can now be read online, without downloading first (like on the iPhone).

Finally, books can even be read on your desktop pc, via the Facebook app. The TexOnPhone developers are definitely on the ball, and this is easily the best (and most improved) G1 ebook application — not to mention my favorite G1 app of all. Thanks guys…I can finally stop carrying around my old Treo 650 just to read ebooks on!

There are still bugs, to be sure. Find Text doesn’t work yet, and each orientation change causes the book to re-load and start at the beginning (open the keyboard while reading, and lose your place!). And I haven’t discovered a way to set bookmarks yet, which is important. But this is a key application for me, and I’m glad it’s available. Hopefully, active development will continue and improvements will come quickly.

FBReaderJ 0.2.1 is not in the official Android marketplace yet, but the Android package can be downloaded here (you’ll need to enable “Unknown Sources” in the Settings > Application menu on your G1 first).

Thanks to FBReaderJ, I’m now closer to retiring my Treo 650 for good and just carrying the awesome G1.

FROM THE COMMENTS:
“what did you use to convert the LIT books to FB2?”

I use a free Windows program called ABC Amber Lit Converter. It does the job, converting Lit titles to a variety of other ebook and document formats. Very nice.

UPDATE: The Google Chrome browser is available for download.

Movie: We saw The Mummy: Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor this weekend, and it was an entertaining adventure flick enjoyed by all. The plot and structure didn’t deviate much from the previous two installments, despite being set in China instead of Egypt. Beyond that, the cgi was better and the battle scenes were crazy good. We re-watched the first two films after seeing this movie, and my daughter insisted that the latest was the best.