Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Chime.TV: A Prettier Way to Watch YouTube
Chime.Tv’s video player has got the kind of flash and style Ruby developers would envy, especially since it’s programmed in PHP and AJAX. The player, which dishes out 22 themed channels of viral video content, with a bunch of added utilities.
The full page player is similar to Joost and Babelgum, but in your browser. Like the IPTV guys, you can flip through pre-made channels, roll your own, or search for content by keyword. The player is pretty hands off, and will just run if you give it a channel or a search term to munch on. The player searches through videos on YouTube, Veoh, Metacafe, Google Video, and DailyMotion. You can reorganize the results by title, length, or randomize. They also have a bookmarklet so you can add content to your channels as you surf the web.
So, iIf you want to create the “bikini” channel, all you have to do is search for “bikini” in the search bar and Chime will start playing through all the results. The player also has a friend feature for sharing your channels and vids with someone else.
The player can play in full screen mode, wide screen, or anywhere in between by dragging the corner of the video. It also comes with some color controls for brightness, contrast, and color in case the original quality is less than stellar.
All this thing needs is a mashup with one of the TV show aggregators.
Sparter Launches, Go Buy Some World of Warcraft Gold
Sparter Launches, Go Buy Some World of Warcraft Gold
Sparter, a stealth startup founded by Bessemer Venture Partners, launched this evening. They are jumping into the middle of the estimated $1 billion market for buying and selling virtual currencies in games like World of Warcraft (WOW), EverQuest, Eve and others. The current spot price of 100 gold on WOW? About $10.
The company is a true person to person trading company. Users can sign up and either buy or sell virtual currencies at market prices. There are already a number of sites that sell these currencies directly to users (IGE is the largest), but they don't take sellers, just buyers. And the prices are set by the company, not the market.
I spoke to Dan Kelly and Boris Putanec, the two executives Bessemer brought in to start the company, earlier this week. They say that a major supply of WOW gold today comes directly or indirectly from "farmers" in China and India. People are paid a very low wage to play the game and gather small amounts of gold, which are then sold directly to players or to services like IGE. Those models are fine, they say, for people who want to buy currency. But it gives no way for people who want to liquidate their virtual gold into real world money.
eBay is one place where gamers currently try to trade virtual currency for real money, but the company started restricting the sale of virtual goods on the site earlier this year, and proactively removing listings that include virtual money and other items. Sparter is simply filling the void that eBay has voluntarily created, the company says.
Others note that eBay left the market due to trademark and other concerns. In particular, it is a violation of the terms of service of many of these services to exchange currency in this way. Whether these virtual worlds will turn a blind eye to Sparter's activities, or attempt to fight it, remains to be seen.
Sparter acts as the go-between for the parties, keeping payments in escrow until both sides say the virtual transfer went through properly. Users are also asked to rate each other after a transaction. Users with higher reputational ratings may be able to charge a premium.
The company only supports trading in currency for now. Other digital goods cannot be traded on the platform. They say they have no plans to deviate from that strategy, unless users show strong demand down the road.
Posted by Augustine at 11:52 AM
Virtual Sales Associates poised to harass interactively
Posted by Augustine at 10:51 AM
Labels: virtual sales associates
Epson and Philips ready mini projector for portable gaming and beyond
Posted by Augustine at 10:44 AM
Labels: mini projector
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Sxipper.com – One click logins
Posted by Augustine at 4:02 PM
Labels: single login
Find Alexa Rank of any Website using Google Talk
Imagine typing "whois xyz.com" inside GTalk to find out who owns that web domain name. Or saying "alexa abc.com" will show you the Alexa Traffic details of that website right inside your Google chat window.
You can now easily run popular network commands inside Google Talk, Yahoo!, AOL or Windows Live messenger through IMified - just add imified@imified.com to your buddy list and start using the chat window as a network command line tool.
Other than whois, commands like traceroute and ping can also be executed from GTalk.
We earlier mentioned IMified as a quick tool for publishing posts on Wordpress or Blogger blogs through messenger clients.
The service has come a long way since then and now works seamlessly with tumblr, jaiku, twitter and so on.
You can even use Imified to add bookmarks to your del.icio.us account from Google Talk. How cool is that.
imified |Posted by Augustine at 3:54 PM
Labels: alexa rank, whois
New low in patent stupidty: searching for a used car with a clean title
A method of searching for used vehicles comprising:Why does stupid stuff like this matter? It matters because every click and every idea is becoming someone's property. It doesn't matter if we've been doing it forever (like querying databases!), or if it's totally obvious, someone ends up owning it. The USPTO is open for anyone who wants to claim ownership of any idea (no wonder -- their funding comes from filing fees for patents), and once those patents end up in the hands of patent trolls, it's open season on the firms and people who make great stuff.* Using VIN numbers to look up the title status of a vehicle; * Storing the title status of the vehicle in a database; and * Providing a list of vehicles based on title status to users who search for them online.
Could this be any more obvious? Even the patent itself admits that methods of compiling title information on used cars have been around since 1991. So what's the novel aspect of this invention?
We all pay: we pay for the legal costs of fighting patent battles, built into the price of our stuff. We pay for the technologies that never come to market because of patent fears. We pay for all the ridiculous "defensive patents" filed by startups (there's no such thing as a defensive patent: having a patent doesn't mean that the USPTO won't give the same patent to someone else, and then your "defense" consists of not running out of money to fight the patent in court), which then turn into patent-troll armaments when the startups tank.
Astroturfing companies run bogus sites like this one, where they argue for "patent reforms" that consist of not reforming anything. Sites like Patent Fairness are a good place to get the real story.
Posted by Augustine at 3:51 PM
Labels: patent reform
Promising New Technology for Wi-Fi Enabled Secure Digital Memory Cards
Posted by Augustine at 7:52 AM
Labels: wiFi SD cards
Nothing Me.dium about its Funding
Me.dium, a company making a browser add-on that relates the webpages you are browsing to those being viewed by other people concurrently using the tool, today announced it had raised $15 million in a second round of funding, bringing its total amount of capital to $20 million from Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Spark Capital, Appian Ventures, Brad Feld, and Elon Musk.
Really? $15 million? I didn’t realize it had taken off to a level to attract that kind of bet. Me.dium is something I tried out for an early review and ended up uninstalling a week or so later during a plug-in purge.
I called Me.dium co-founder David Mandell this morning to ask how many users the company has. He said it had just opened up its private beta a week ago, and has 20,000 registered users total. How many were active users, he couldn’t say (though he said he would try to follow up). The users tend to be pretty geeky, he said, because the plug-in is only available for Firefox (IE is coming “in the next couple weeks”) and the sign-up process was until recently not very accessible.
The funding, Mandell said, is to be put toward infrastructure costs — “managing and making recommendations based on the real-time activity of everyone online actually uses a lot of hardware and engineering” — and also consumer marketing in the fall.
I have to say, $15 million is a pretty big bet for a company that has not proved many people will use its tools. In this latest round of post-bubble-burst web funding, I thought it was users first, money later, but here that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Posted by Augustine at 7:26 AM
Labels: me.dium, social surfing
China kicks Three Gorges Dam turbine generator into motion
Read
Posted by Augustine at 7:20 AM
Labels: three gorges dam
Virgin Charter Launches: Private Aviation Marketplace
Virgin’s most recent new business, Los Angeles based Virgin Charter, launched this evening. The company was founded by CEO Scott Duffy with the hope of modernizing the booking systems for charter aircraft. Virgin’s Richard Branson got wind of the startup, gave the company three times the funding they were looking for and took a controlling interest. The company was renamed Virgin Charter.
Today, the Internet doesn’t play much of a role in chartering private aircraft. Well to do clients have their organizations contact small operators who generally control 3-5 jets. Schedules are compared and prices negotiated. The entire process takes up to five hours on average. And inefficiencies in the marketplace result in very high prices - the average U.S. flight is $18,000 round trip, and a cross continent, Los Angeles to New York flight is generally $35,000 - $65,000. Much of the price is due to “empty legs” - flights that have to come back early instead of waiting for clients, resulting in four legs flown for a round trip. The most well known Internet site for operators to list their planes is CharterX, but it leaves much to be desired.
Virgin Charter aims to change all that by putting small operators of charter aircraft together with potential buyers. In a process that is much like booking a trip on expedia, buyers can look through available aircraft, view ratings on the companies and actual planes, and choose to big on flights. Sellers respond, and flights are booked. Payment is completed via the site using a credit card, wire transfer or EFT, and Virgin Charter keeps a percentage as their fee. Following the flights, both the buyer and seller are requested to leave feedback on the other party. And Virgin Charter will work hard to fill those empty legs, which increase marginal revenue substantially for operators.
The U.S. is most of the worldwide market for private aviation, Duffy says, with about 75% of operators based here. The company is starting out only in the U.S. for now.The company has been in private beta for a few months, with 60 operators (out of 2,500 in the U.S.) By September, when they go live, they plan on having the largest 500 operators under contract.
Posted by Augustine at 7:09 AM
Labels: virgin charter service
Kodak's new Zooms: the 12 megapixel Z1275 and ZD710 with 10x zoom
Posted by Augustine at 7:04 AM
Labels: kodak digital camera
Monday, June 11, 2007
Peonies from the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens
In Blogger/Blogspot, BE SURE to go into Settings -> Formatting and make sure "Convert Line Breaks" is set to NO. Otherwise it will add < br / >'s to every line and break the javascript.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Ztail, online listings made easy
It has been a weekend of relative quiet and peace – where most of the time was spent cleaning up the apartment, and discovering that I had more digital device clutter than any sane person should have. In other words, time to head on over to eBay and list some old stuff to make room for the new gee-gaws. Apparently I am not alone: a recent survey released by eBay shows that the average US household has approximately $3,000 of unused things in their home
Call is serendipity, but right after watching Roger Clemens right the New York Yankees' ship, I met with Bill Hudak, cofounder and CEO of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Ztail, that has come up with web service that allows you to easily create "classifieds" and then publish them to not only eBay, but to other sites such as Edgeio, Facebook, MySpace, TypePad and WordPress blogs, and of course the Ztail listings site.
The company launched earlier this week has been bootstrapped by Hudak and Dave Keefer, and the duo have lot of online commerce experience, having worked at companies such as Google, Shopping.com and Epinions.
Ztail is a dead simple and easy to use. Once you go to their site, Ztail starts you off by asking you the question, what do you want to sell today? You type in, say, Nokia E61 – and Ztail gives you all options, including photos and technical specifications that you might have to otherwise type out. You personalize this information, describe the condition of the item; add your eBay ID (or Facebook ID or your blog credentials) and hit publish. That's it! You are done.
Being someone who is flummoxed by the eBay listings process, I found Ztail a time saving utility. Of course there is the added bonus of listing my stuff in many different places and thus increasing the chances of selling makes Ztail worth giving a whirl. Okay, time for me to go make listings, create a special blog for listing the items, and then have a massive virtual garage sale!
Posted by Augustine at 9:05 PM