Monday, January 30, 2006

"Voicemail Select"

I dont really check my voicemail that often. I let it build up over a week or two. Much more down with quick visual - text, email. One of the reasons I dont check my voicemail is because you have to listen to ALL vmails in the order they were received.

So my idea for voicemail is that they should be displayed on your phone like text messages. You can scroll down the list of voicemails and see the number or person they were from and then be able to manage them - i.e. delete it like a text message which will then delete voicemail on your system - or select the messages you wan to listen to.


NEW FROM VERIZON:

"SICK OF HAVING TO LISTEN TO ALL YOUR VOICEMAILS TO GET TO THE ONE YOU WANT ?

GET VOICEMAIL SELECT FROM VERIZON.

CHOOSE WHAT YOU WANNA HEAR"

[INSERT IMAGE OF SPIKEY HAIRED COOL KIDS WITH ALL CULTURES REPRESENTED]


[have weird looking "can you hear me now" dude in the background grinning]

BY THE WAY... wanna see something very funny lil vid? clik here

Friday, January 20, 2006

Did you ever give a video tape to a friend to watch ? Video swapping. The new drama.

When people download a song from an application that links them to other people's and friends libraries, you need to go back a few steps to find out how it started. Someone has ripped the audio cd into a collection of MP3 files.

So, now there are two new services that allow you to share video - one is from youtube.com and one is from murdoch owned myspace.com. What is interesting here is that you can share your own video files - now it comes down to what you think are "your own video files". if you watch them on tv and record them on your tivo and then output them as a file and upload it for everyone to view is that cool ?

What is very interesting about all this is that broadcasters are now charging for content that has aired on tv. I think its cool for convenience sake - but hey, I have already sat through the ad supported version of your content - i.e. i have paid - and sometimes its through cable - so i have paid two revenues - cable bill and watched your ads - so I am not entirely sure its fair that they try to control what i do with the content after it.

here is where the tricky part comes in. you go to youtube.com and the myspace service and you can pretty much find any tv show you want - right down to particular scenes. this is only in its first few months as well.

The lines get blurred when you get to re-broadcasting. We all know that when we had videos we could go and air it in a local hall and charge $1 per person. But we knew we could pass the video to a friend, maybe even dub it etc. Now with technology that most people dont understand or look at until millions of younger people are using it, is making it easier to connect with people interesting ways - people are not explicitly going out and saying "hey at 10pm tonight i am screening the latest laguna beach episode" - but they are casually putting links up to it. See, harder to pin it down. Even if you tried to pin that person they would say, its a show i love so i want to show people how much i am into it....

Here is an article about MySpace's new service:

MySpace Launches Video Sharing Service [by rafat] : As mentioned by Rupert Murdoch last week, MySpace has jumped into the video sharing space and soft-launched it service, pretty much cloning functionalities of other video sites like YouTube, Grouper and others. Of course, MySpace has the huge advantage of its huge base of users.
The service allows user to upload their videos, which is encoded in Flash and streamed. Other functionalities like tagging, voting and video embedding into other sites/blogs are also there...
The service doesn't seem to have any big-media content till now, but expect that to happen.
On a slight tangent, there were some rumors of YouTube being acquired, and others in the pipeline. Again, these video sharing sites are like RSS newsreaders...it is easy to build up one internally (or at least outsource the development easily), and it does not make a lot of sense to buy any of these now. It is too early in the game for any of them to have become a destination site, so the brand value is small.
Also as the economics of the business are tough: you are talking about a ton of storage. And then, the piracy issue, which hasn't yet and hopefully won't become a big issue. Anyway, MySpace's launch should be an interesting launch to watch for, for sure.
www.paidcontent.org

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Online Gaming Revenue to Triple by 2009

We think that with the onset of iTunes, people are much more comfortable in using their credit card for micropayments. This has paved the way for online gaming as well. Park Associates believe that online gaming revenue will grow from the current $1.1bn in 2005 to $3.5bn in 2009. Click here to read

Thursday, January 05, 2006

CES Vegas 2006

We are running a live coverage at Troy & Chad's CES Blog