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The Apple iPad was released a little over a month ago in the U.S. and just this week in Canada and Japan.  The starting price is about $550USD.  Unless you’re in China, where you can get knockoffs for as little as $50.

The city of Shenzhen in China is well known for its black and gray markets and street vendors selling everything knockoff.  Popular items nowadays include various forms of the iPad.  Knockoffs, called “shanzhai” (meaning “fake”) of everything under the sun are everywhere.

Probably the most copy-cat is the iPed (bet you thought the title was a typo, eh?), which comes in a box that looks exactly like Apple’s and has a layout very much like the iPad’s too.  It runs with an Intel chip and Google’s open-source Android OS and features many of the same mutli-media functions.  It sells for about $105USD.

Another popular ripoff has no official name, but is a Shanzhai iPad running Windows Mobile and featuring much of what the iPad offers.  It is markedly heavier and of obvious lower quality, however, and sells for just over $50USD.

Other iPad knockoffs run Linux and some are even bare units that come out of the box OS-free, allowing the user to install whatever they’d like.  Most are similar in function to the iPad and look as identical as possible.  The most popular, however, is definitely the aforementioned iPed device.  Unlike the iPad, the iPed plays Flash.  SNAP!

In fact, for about $200 American, you can get both an iPad and iPhone knockoff – often from the same vendor.  No warranties included, however.

Newly born news distribution platform, News Exchange, made its debut on Monday and has been making waves since. The company behind News Exchange, Publish2 is hoping to challenge Associated Press (AP) with their new platform. Even though AP is a not-for-profit organisation, it is reported to generate revenue of almost $700m, and News Exchange wants a slice of the cake by making an “…AP for the 21st Century…”

Publish2 has engineered a collaborative journalism network where free and paid-for content is distributed to subscribers who can publish free or purchased content via their respective media channels, be it print or online. Squarely aimed at news providers and publishers, Publish2 has signed several new media publishers including Mashable, engadget and TechCrunch to feed the co-operative. This should enable content normally limited to an online audience to be distributed via other more traditional media.

Currently in beta, News Exchange has a limited feature set but Publish2 is using the $2.75 million dollars it raised during it’s initial funding round to implement additional features. Upcoming features include analytics which would allow publishers to quantify views and other important metrics as well as a fully featured tagging system.

A particularly interesting feature is the News Exchange marketplace. Providers could set their own prices and business models for news buyers allowing pay-as-you-go or unlimited access fees.

There’s a big hill to climb in terms of recruiting enough content providers to attain some momentum but as a finalist in TechCrunch’s Disrupt competition, News Exchange looks set to give AP a run for its money.

What do you get when you hand over control of radio stations to their listeners and cut out the DJ? That’s a question that Jelli, an application that links radio listeners directly to a station’s playlist, hopes will answer. Thanks to the $7 million dollars raised during the first round of funding, the public we might just be taking back the airwaves.

Jelli lets listeners interact and control radio stations to create collaborative playlists in real time. Jelli adds game elements into the mix, where users can bomb choices that stops tracks mid play or rocket choices right to the front of the queue.

There are many alternative crowd based music stations – Pandora being one of the most popular. However, Jelli isn’t competing with the net based stations but instead is partnering up with old-school FM radio. This should allow Jelli to tap into the more established advertising revenue streams and avoid internet music royalties. Listeners vote directly via the web or even via social networking sites such as facebook or twitter, which enables voting with a mobile phone.

Pilot slots on CBS Radio’s LIVE 105 – which broadcasts in internet savvy San Francisco – went well with Jelli attracting a lot of traffic. Following that initial successful run it’s no surprise that Jelli is now used in 17 markets across the US and in Australia.

Traditional broadcast radio may be in decline but innovations such as Jelli could help bolster the listener numbers of old-style FM stations.

The shopping portal 6pm.com, sister-site to Zappos.com, both owned by Amazon.com, announced on Friday that they had accidentally mis-priced hundreds of items in their online store and lost $1.6 million because of the short sales.  The mistake took place when 6pm price capped their entire inventory (not including those cross-posted with Zappos) at $49.95.  This put many items, such as expensive GPS units and high-end shoes, at well under cost for the discount house.  That resulted in a $1.6 million loss to the site before someone at 6pm noticed and the problem was fixed.

The company is honoring all sales during the period (which lasted about six hours, from midnight to 6am Friday) and taking the loss, says Director of Brand Marketing and Business Development Aaron Magness at Zappos in a blog post Friday afternoon.

This causes one to wonder whether this was really a “mistake,” or whether the company planned to do this as an advertising campaign.  Whether planned or not, it surely has resulted in a huge glut of viral marketing for 6pm.  The news almost immediately appeared on Gawker and then on CNet News, Silicon Valley Watcher, and others.  Now that is some good publicity.

One commenter on Gawker points out that the Zappos blog entry detailing the mistake starts out with what is basically the company tag line and sales pitch, which is what would be picked up by news aggregation sites and most social media posts.  This may have been a calculated plan by Magness, but it didn’t necessarily have to be planned as part of the event and could have been just a good marketing ploy by Magness in the aftermath.

However you view it, 6pm stands to gain more than they’ve lost with the good publicity and the (so far) good public sentiment over them honoring their sales despite the mistake – the law doesn’t require them to.

Adobe has released an HTML5 developer pack and plans to use the new VP8 codec from On2 Technologies, recently made open source by Google. This comes after Apple’s refusal to support Flash on any of their products, including the iPad, and instead choosing to support the open HTML5 standard.

Adobe’s announcement, made at the Google I/O annual developer conference, included details about the developer pack which will be made available as an extension to Dreamweaver CS5.
Apple founder Steve Jobs has gone on record to say that Flash has a bad record when it comes to security , doesn’t perform well on mobile devices and is the primary cause behind Mac system crashes.

However, many users still remain disappointed when confronted by the dreaded empty squares whilst browsing the web – empty squares that would otherwise be filled with rich content on PC’s. Earlier this year, Apple began writing software to bring flash onto the iPhone, but this project has now been canceled – a bold move considering an estimated 75% of online videos require Flash support to play.

The web is a fast moving place, and Adobe is not unique in suddenly finding its business model under threat. The preponderance of Flash content on websites, while free to view, is not free to create – and Adobe derives a substantial part of its revenue from Flash developers. Whether open standards can really replace the capabilities of the Flash platform remains to be seen, but Apple, Microsoft and others may force the issue.

For Adobe there may be little choice other than to accommodate open source standards (such as HTML5) as far as it can, whilst it tries to find ways to keep Flash ahead of the game.

Windows Live Hotmail, one of the first free web-based email services, has undergone another facelift. Since it’s birth in 1996 and its subsequent acquisition by Microsoft, Hotmail has built a large and loyal user base, but user numbers remain under pressure from other web-based email providers – including the increasingly popular Gmail from Google.

New features for Hotmail include automated sorting and filtering, an addition that sorts email into categories, for example a category for key contacts and a category for notifications sent by social networks. There are now slide show previews of photos, videos and other attachments. Thumbnails from Flikr and YouTube also now appear at the top of messages.

The interface for sending emails has also been improved. Hotmail users can now send up to 10 GB in attachments using the new insert bar in combination with SkyDrive, the cloud storage service from Microsoft. Hotmail now also features tight integration with Microsoft’s search engine Bing, allowing content from the search engine to be included in an email automatically. Synchronising with smartphones should be easier thanks to new apps and tools that allow push notifications, including Exchange support. As with Gmail, Hotmail now uses secure SSL encryption for browsing sessions.

Hotmail is now on par with it’s competitors, but there are still a few problems that need fixing. For one, Hotmail currently doesn’t work on iPads, possibly due to the advanced coding a rich user interface needs. With its dedicated following as well as the latest improvements, Hotmail is set to remain one of Microsoft’s more successful online ventures.