Ajax Girl

Wal-mart sold an option for a digital download with the purchase of the “Superman Returns” DVD when the movie went on sale today. This is the store’s first foray into the digital movie business.

According to CNN, 40 percent of all DVDs sold in the U.S. are sold at Wal-Mart. But so far, the company has left online movie sales to others. It seemed the big retailers were getting antsy about digital movie stores, particularly in October when the president of Target sent a letter to the movie studios warning that their DVD sales were down and the store could no longer be expected to reserve as much shelf space for physical DVDs if something wasn’t done. Looks like Wal-Mart is taking the if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em solution instead.

We did a review of digital movie download vendors and found several winners. But Wal-Mart’s venture into this space is the first time physical DVD are linked with the “soft copy” of the movie.

When customers buy “Superman Returns” at Wal-Mart, they can choose to pay $1.97 more to play it on portable devices, $2.97 more to play it on PCs or laptops, or $3.97 more to play it on either portable devices or PCs/laptops. But not in iPods. According to the company’s Web site, “The Portable format is optimized for on-the-go viewing using ‘PlayForSure’ portable video players. If played on a PC, the image quality will not be as good as the higher resolution Standard format. These videos are not compatible with Apple iPods. Portable format videos are encoded at a 320 x 240 resolution with an average bit rate of 500 kbps.”

Any movie that is downloaded from Wal-Mart will be stored in a user’s Wal-Mart Video Download Manager as well as their Windows Media Library. Users can only have the movie on one computer at a time, but they can re-register the license on on any number of computers, meaning it is possible to play it on the computer with the license and then move it to another computer only if you move the license. Kind of confusing for Wal-Mart.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/55286925/

An official document posted to Digg today summarizes an agreement between the U.S. and Russia in which Russia has agreed to close down AllofMP3.com, and any sites that “permit illegal distribution of music and other copyright works.”

The agreement is dated November 19 and posted to the Web site for the Office of the United States Trade Representative. It summarizes the joint efforts of the two countries to fight content piracy, an issue known to be centered in Russia and Eastern Europe.

“This agreement sets the stage for further progress on IPR issues in Russia through the next phase of multilateral negotiations, during which the United States and other WTO members will examine Russia’s IPR regime,” states the document.

The document specifically names AllofMP3.com as an example of the types of Web sites that they will shut down. We contacted AllofMP3.com and the company sent us an official statement stating their legality. It says that the company has offered to remove illegal music at the copyright holders’ requests.

“For months, AllofMP3 has stated the company will comply with the request from any copyright holder to remove any music from the site. However, the company has not heard from the Russian Licensing Societies or the record labels. Perhaps, opt-out requests are not being made because the record labels can’t clear the rights.”

Still, the company is being made an example of for all to see. Russia is instructed to terminate leases for companies that facilitate online piracy, as well as inspect plants regularly, and take criminal action where there is evidence of commercial sale piracy. The government will be expected to begin complying by June 1, 2007.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/55210997/

A company called BitWine launched an interactive search site about three weeks ago. It is much like Ether in that it is a call-an-expert service, except BitWine is integrated with Skype. In fact BitWine will be a Skype plugin when Skype 3.0 launches, which will likely be in early 2007.

With BitWine, users deem themselves experts in specific categories and establish their per-minute consulting fee. Then when another curious user needs an answer about a given topic, they can browse the experts in that category, select someone whose price and expertise they prefer, and Skype them live. As soon as the transaction is over, the “expert” is paid via PayPal.

We spoke with BitWine co-founder Alon Cohen today, trying to figure out why this site is necessary and how it is different than Yahoo! Answers or Google Answers.

“When you look at Google Answers and Yahoo Answers, you don’t really know who is answering because it’s chat based and text based,” Cohen said. “For instance, I asked a question last night and I had to rephrase the question three times for people to understand me. One question and one answer is usually not enough. You need a visual conversation with someone you trust.”

On BitWine, experts get ratings based on their consultancy performance. Cohen sees this as a way for people to make money in their spare time off of their random hobbies. After all, where else are you going to sell your consulting services on model ship making or knitting?

Sites like this really are only as good as their community size. What good is an “operators are standing by” scenario, when no one is calling in?

“This is a big issue that we have many concerns about: the chicken and the egg,” Cohen said. “You want experts there to begin with and you want enough traffic there so that the experts will stay.”

He said the company will target experts through blogs and discussion forums and also attempt to create affiliations with other Web sites’ questions pages.

BitWine was founded by Cohen, who was previously the co-founder of VocalTec, a VoIP company, and Elad Baron, who recently sold his company, Whale Communications, to Microsoft.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/55156338/

Stickis, which we covered briefly back in October last year is launching its service this afternoon. Stickis, at first glance is a FireFox and Internet Explorer plugin much like other web annotation programs, such as Fleck, Diigo, and Trailfire. Stickis does do the webpage “sticky note” annotation of these programs. However, Stickis is not just about marking up a single page. It is about creating and subscribing to “channels” of these notes and other data sources.

The channels can consist of notes left by people, RSS feeds (blogs), and even specialized data channels for web services such as OpenTable or Yelp. When you subscribe to a channel, be it another user’s “sticky notes” or Yelp reviews, that channel is added to your network and begins to populate, in reverse chronological order, a collapsible tray that’s tucked away on the side of your browser screen. Then, when you visit a page, such as TechCrunch, that tray is populated with summaries of any related notes or reviews from you network through an analysis of the url and tags of your current page and those included in the note. One click on a summary brings up the sticky note.

Stickis does a deeper analysis for the web service channels such as OpenTable and Yelp, which makes it possible for a restaurant’s Yelp review and OpenTable reservation search widget to pop up in my tray when I go a page linking to a restaurant. I believe this contextual method makes it a much more consumable service than others, which require you actively seek out information by visiting an annotated page. It also allows for greater control of what data you see because of the subscription based method.

Creating notes is done with a fairly robust WISIWYG editor, allowing users to style text and backgrounds, as well as embed photos and movies by drag and drop. This makes it very easy to go through Flickr and start commenting away. Without the plugin installed users are still treated to a proxied version of the site with an AJAX version of the Stickis layered on top like this. A note or several notes can be replied to and even leave trackbacks when they link to blogs, because your personal Stickis channel page is in fact a personal blog where notes are stored as taggble posts. This can also be changed to post to a personal blog instead. Replies to notes will not clog your tray because you will only see the channels you subscribe to. You will see that a reply was made to a note, however, and can click through to it. If you see something you like, you can add the note’s creator to your network of channels.

Stickis is based in San Francisco and currently funded by about a million dollars in angel financing. They plan to monetize the business through the third type of Stickis content channel: web services. The hope is that Stickis will provide an easier and more relevant way for surfers to get a publisher’s content, drive more traffic to their site, and use their services. Yelp and OpenTable serve as the first vertical they are testing this out with. It’s easy to imagine some other verticals as well, such as concert ticket sales or travel accommodations. There’s no specific talk about how payments would be structured but affiliate fees seem the most sensible.

Feel free to get Stickis or view a preview of the service on TechCrunch through the link below:

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/55144382/

James Surowiecki’s In Praise Of Third Place discusses Nintendo’s success and offers an interesting look at arms races, simplicity, and why companies should focus on profit over market share.

Sony and Microsoft’s quest to “control the living room” has locked them in a classic arms race; they have invested billions of dollars in an attempt to surpass each other technologically, building ever-bigger, ever-better, and ever-more-expensive machines.

Nintendo has dropped out of this race. The Wii has few bells and whistles and much less processing power than its “competitors,” and it features less impressive graphics. It’s really well suited for just one thing: playing games. But this turns out to be an asset. The Wii’s simplicity means that Nintendo can make money selling consoles, while Sony is reportedly losing more than two hundred and forty dollars on each PlayStation 3 it sells—even though they are selling for almost six hundred dollars. Similarly, because Nintendo is not trying to rule the entire industry, it’s been able to focus on its core competence, which is making entertaining, innovative games…

Nintendo’s success is not an anomaly, either. The business landscape of the past couple of decades is replete with companies that have flourished as third wheels, and with companies that have struggled to make money despite being No. 1 in their industries. (Today, would you rather be Honda or G.M.?) And while it’s true that in many industries there is a correlation between market share and profitability, one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other.

A recent survey of the evidence on market share by J. Scott Armstrong and Kesten C. Green found that companies that adopt what they call “competitor-oriented objectives” actually end up hurting their own profitability. In other words, the more a company focusses on beating its competitors, rather than on the bottom line, the worse it is likely to do. And a study of the performance of twenty major American companies over four decades found that the ones putting more emphasis on market share than on profit ended up with lower returns on investment; of the six companies that defined their goal exclusively as market share, four eventually went out of business.

Markets today are so big—the global video-game market is now close to thirty billion dollars—that companies can profit even when they’re not on top, as long as they aren’t desperately trying to get there. The key is to play to your strengths while recognizing your limitations.

Related: Build Less: Underdo your competition [Getting Real]

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/132-nintendo-thriving-in-third-place

YouTube and Verizon have partnered up to bring video clips to the mobile phone. The feature will launch in December as part of the Vcast $15 per month service.

Verizon customers will be able to view “select” video content, as well as post videos from their mobile phones. Given that most mobile-generated content, videos or photos, lives and dies on the mobile phone, this may be a valid way to enliven it.

YouTube’s deal with Verizon is only exclusive for a limited time, meaning customers of other carriers needn’t wait long to receive a comparable service.

The big question here is: What does “select” video mean? The beauty of YouTube is, (or at least has been), that it is so organic. Will corporate video selection mean that users will only have access to approved content? How boring! It may be a lose-win situation in that YouTube videos streamed to the phone will be lame, while videos streamed from the phone to YouTube could be much cooler.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/55074352/

Carlos Segura, the man behind T.26 and 5inch, and one of the original partners at 37signals, has quietly been sharing his car obsession with the public. Car lovers everywhere should be thankful.

Cartype is a growing collection of everything car. There are plenty of car sites on the net. Plenty of sites that cover one brand or provide lots of stats like Edmunds. But Cartype takes a different approach.

Besides the standard car photos and info, Cartype spews car logos, company logos, dealer tags, concepts, people parking like idiots, interesting signs, and more.

If you are looking for the standard car site content, the car section has subsections packed with info and photos for current cars, topless cars, supercars, hybrid cars, wagons, classics, comebacks, ugly, cars not coming to the US (interesting), and more.

Yes, the type on the site is a little small, and some things are tough to read, and it may not be comprehensive in the way Edmunds or Yahoo Autos is, but it’s a lovely and unique obsession. If you love cars, do check out Cartype.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/129-cartype-is-car-obsession

Opera has announced Opera Mini 3.0 which includes:

• Feed Reader: I’ve let this replace the native feed reader I have on my phone. The UI is better than what the Sony Ericsson M600i offers, and it actually supports a multitude of formats, including Atom 1.0
• Photo upload. My phone has no camera, but here it is, direct photo upload from within Opera Mini.
• Support for secure connections: You can finally use secure services and stay safe all the way.
• Since most web authors have no regard for mobile usability (and no, dotmobi won’t help), Opera Mini 3.0 has content folding, where long navigation lists and other filler fluff is collapsed so you don’t have to scroll past 323 pages to get to your actual content.

If you want to check it out without trying it on your phone, pop over to the simulator.

There is also footage of the Aida mobile desktop, which is an R&D project tested by Opera, Telenor and FAST.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/opera-mini-30-and-the-ajax-phone

An excerpt from How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later by Philip K. Dick:

Do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new…

The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.

[via DL]

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/120-quiet-refusals

The Remember the Milk folks have added task management to Google Calendar (something many wish Google had added themselves).

We know that many of you are managing your tasks with Remember The Milk and your events with Google Calendar, and we thought it would be very cool if we could bring the two together. This new feature adds a small task icon to the top of each day in Google Calendar — click on the icon to:

• Review your tasks for the day
• Add new tasks and edit existing ones
• Easily complete and postpone tasks
• Review your overdue tasks
• Optionally show tasks with no due date
• See where your tasks are located on a map (Google Maps integration)

This is really interesting. An outside group was able to add an important feature that we can not all use in a Google app itself.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/tasks-added-to-google-calendar-by-milkers