Clicking a link to certain bestselling Kindle titles on Amazon today, may find you confronting an error message. D'you know why? Let me tell you: Amazon, the mahoosive behemoth mothership of ecommerce, is punishing Independent Publishers Group (IPG) - the second-largest book distributor in the USA - for refusing to sign a new agreement that heavily favors Amazon over the hand that feeds it. Mark Suchomel, President of IPG, said in an email blast yesterday, "I am disappointed to report that Amazo... [Read more]

We at Live Toast do occasionally write technical posts, just to let all you cats know that we're down with it. Know what a mean, Dawg, DOWN with the kids? In this age of rock-star coders and cookie-stuffing affiliate marketers it's easy to become bewildered by the tech tsunami and assume bloggers like ourselves aren't part of the struggle. But we are. We're freaking NINJAS, biatch, and don't you fuh-fuh-fuh-fuh-reakin' forget it, ai'ght? Haha, juss kiddin' with yer, son. If you were right here r... [Read more]

The technology gods produced a veritable geek-smorgasbord this week. Not only did Google announce its Ice Cream Sandwich/Android 4.0 update, but Moonfruit partnered with PayPal to launch its super easy-to-use Shopbuilder tool for web, mobile and social media platforms. Moonfruit’s software allows people who don’t even know what a computer is to build slick storefronts that integrate seamlessly into Facebook and mobile, a big improvement over anything that already exists. Google de... [Read more]

When Steve Jobs stepped down as CEO of Apple six weeks ago, I don’t think anybody not in the Jedi High Council really knew how sick he was. Surely he was just going underground for some top secret stem cell treatment and would return later with super powers or worst case as a cyborg. Unfortunately the all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing Steve Jobs was still only a man and the pancreatic cancer he had been struggling with for the past seven years finally got the upper hand. Jobs made a... [Read more]

This week Vice Magazine celebrated the official launch of Vice.com, The Definitive Guide to Enlightening Information. Previously Vice’s online presence resided under viceland.com and VBS.tv because a domain squatter bought vice.com “when most people thought the World Wide Web was a Nintendo game,” according to the Vice article Finally, All Our Crap Is in One Place. In the video below Spike Jonze goes on the road with dagger-wearing Vice co-founder Shane Smith to discuss the o... [Read more]

In an interesting though not entirely unexpected turn of events, Google+ is experiencing technical difficulties. After the record-breaking growth of the service, with current estimates hovering at approximately 25 million users, Google+ was the fastest growing social media platform of all time. Despite rabid interest, partially generated by the ever-popular “invitation only” strategy, it appears that curiosity about the service is waning. Graphs provided by developers at 89n depic... [Read more]

Nobody seemed to know what was going on over at TechCrunch all week. Founder and editor Michael Arrington was on the brink of being forced out by the company he sold his popular tech blog to for a tidy $25 million after receiving $10 million in seed funding from the same company to form a separate venture capital endeavor called the CrunchFund. The split personality company in question is AOL and there are a lot of fingers pointing at AOL/Huffington Post editor-in-chief Ariana Huffington as th... [Read more]

The United States faced not one but two natural catastrophes this week in the form of a 5.8 earthquake along the East coast on Tuesday and Hurricane/Post-Tropical Cyclone Irene over the weekend, and a third if you count Steve Jobs retiring from Apple. We’re still dealing with the water and structural damage, as well as Jobs on the Board of Apple, like Putin looking over the shoulder of Medvedev telling him he’s not doing it right, and, for the adrenaline junkies out there, Tropical ... [Read more]

Google has been on a tear lately. On Monday they announced the $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility, Motorola’s mobile device arm, a move that represents Google’s first foray into hardware. With a foothold in the handset and tablet market, Google has access to all facets of the Android user experience and can finally take full advantage of all the tools in its arsenal, setting up the mother of all battle royals with Apple over content management. If the FTC thought it ha... [Read more]

With the holy trinity of capital, studio partnerships and now a deal with YouTube locked up, Movieclips.com is poised to become the next big thing on the Internet. A quick look at Movieclips.com reveals clips sorted by theme (Love), greatest moments (Falling Scenes, Car Wrecks) and popular actors. Movieclips patented technology tags scenes with over 1,000 markers including title, actor, director, mood and so on to make that Will Ferrell quote from that hockey movie a hell of a lot easier to fi... [Read more]