Music Service by Dell

Dell also (as Apple) will start a Music Service. They argue that they want to enter the the consumer electronics business. I still find a funny move for computer manufacturers to enter in the services business. I can understand it from Apple, as they create a very tight solution between hardware, software, peripherals and service. They do have an edge here on companies who only have a service. This is however not the case for Dell.

[by way of Wired]

iBlog

Apple introduced for its iMac customer a weblog service. It looks pretty good. Have a look at this

Nokia Jewelry

Nokia is about to produce jewellery, with an LCD-screen. On the screen you can view images that is uploaded to jewellery from a mobile phone or whatever. Interesting.

I wondered whether this should be part on my online services directory or not. I guess not. But I should define better why not. There is not much distance involved (infrared). There is transport of information (the uploading). But is only for a single user, or might I be able to beam images when i am close to the jewellery. Then it would be an interesting service. Thus it only becomes a service, when multiple customers are allowed.

[by way of BoingBoing]

Communication is not Content

Clay Shirky started an interesting thread about communication and content. He argues that once people are communicating with each other, it is not content. This seems to be a very good definition. Thus people who enter their profile on a Social Network Site, are doing this in order to communicate. I do think that this more like an advertisement and thus is some kind of content. The more profiles there are on a dating site, the better the site.

The commenters to his post argue that there exists a grey line between communication and content. The question where does this line lie? Clay Shirky sees the line at the point where people are no longer communicating with each other. Thus it comes down on the definition of communication. For me this is about two way traffic, but which can also be initiated by either party.

Thus posting something in a weblog is publishing, but commenting on it is communication. Or isn’t it? You could call a post in a weblog, the start of communication. Maybe it depends on the lurkers. If a lot of people read a post, but do not react, it is publishing. Once people start reacting and other people just read the communication (lurk), one might call it communication.

The problem lies with person-to-person communication, which is much easier defined and person-to-many communication. There always will be grey area.

I do however agree that defining dating sites as publishers is silly. It is a special category of services.

Add Your Own

A service which provides user-based restaurant reviews. Enter your own review or read what has been said about a restaurant. The service is based on a Wiki. For the moment the service is limited to Manhattan and Brooklyn. I however did find my favourite restaurant in NY. The interface is very simple, but that might b good thing. You see to many over-designed interfaces.

Marc Canter is enthusiast about this service, as he suspects people to like writing reviews. I am not sure.

[By way of Clay Shirky]

Wallie

Wallie is a prepaid card (scratch card) for doing online payments. It is introduced by Tiscali. The scratch card (5, 10, 20 and 50 Euro) can be bought in shops in the Netherlands. Behind the scratch layer there is a unique code (16 characters), which can be used to perform payments on the internet. On the wallie-site the user can see how much credit he has left. Tiscalie takes some 25-30% of the transaction.

Wallie also has a service part for shops, so that the merchant can accept the Wallie-card.

[By way of WebWereld

Weblogs, Inc.

This service provider offers various blogs on specific topics.

MSN Chat

MSN announced that it will close down its public, free, unmoderated chat channels. AOL made a similar move eralier this year. MSN Chat seems to be a very popular service. MSN claims that people misuse the chat channels for child porn and spam.

It is unclear what the real reasons are behind this move. It can’t be spam nor child porn. If you are into that, then there a much better ways to hide your conversations. The real reason is much more likely business wise (how to earn money from chat) or public opinion (they do not want to be connected to negative use of their chat channels). All in all it is a bit silly and shows what large companies can do.

[By way of Wired

Location Search @ Google

This service allows you to locate websites based on a zipcode. For the moment this works only in the US.

I tried it for “fries” around “90210” and I got 8574 hits within 15 miles of the zipcode. The top 10 locations are shown on a map.

This seems like a useful service.

Site Finder

This service redirects non-existing domain-names, to a special page. For this it uses the wild-card capability of DNS. The introduction of this service lead to a huge controversy. It is claimed that Verisign misuses its monopoly on com and net addresses.

It seems that the SiteFinder service disables some anti-spam services, some error messages in local languages .

I am not sure whether this service is right or wrong. There is a legal issue on the terms and interpretation of their license. But administering a top-level domain stays a monopoly activity. It does however not seem a good idea to take advantage of each URL mistyping error. This service will undoubtedly be very “popular”. Every user on earth makes typos and will thus be sent to that page. Verisign will get interesting statistics out of that.

TiVo

VentureBlog discusses the lack of success of the TiVo personal video player. The TiVo (a PVR - Personal Video Recorder) allows you to record RV programs. It sounds in this way like a video recorder. You can however not buy tapes and view those. Thus the functionality is much more limited. The TiVo was very enthusiastically received four years ago, but since then has only sold some 800.000 systems, which corresponds to 1% market. This is not bad for a company who created its own market.

VentureBlog argues that TiVo is not a product, but a feature. And a feature should be built into other products. It is too complex to set up and to hard to explain to customers. TiVo seems to have realised this and started with a service “TiVo inside”. This allowed other companies to add TiVo to their product. TiVo then markets the slogan “TiVo inside”.

[by way of VentureBlog]

Hosted VoIP

AT&T seems to be testing a ‘hosted Voice over IP” service. The blog call it a “bring your own access” VoIP-service. I have to think where I will categorize this service.

[By way of Tazaa]

Big Champagne

Big Champagne is a service provider that creates charts of the shopping behaviour on P2P-networks. This information is taken from P2P-networks such as Kazaa, Morpheus and Grokster. This information is then made available on their website or sold on to interested parties. One of their services is the Music TopSwap Chart: a listing of the most popular swapped songs.

[by way of Wired]

NetFlix Fanatic

I always wonder whether special clients are better for online services, than a web-browser. I just came across this client, NetFlix Fanatic, on Mac OS X for managing your NetFlix account. It seems that either the NetFlix Tele-shopping service can do better or than a dedicated client is just better.

All you cat eat services

Nice discussion by Charles Hudson on ‘all you can eat’ price model for services.