Be careful about what you wish, as it might come true. This is exactly what happened with a Greenwich High School student who is pursuing a career in the film industry. Karma struck him when he decided to write a letter to none other than Steve Jobs to ask for a student discount on Final Cut Studio 2. Apparently Stevanta Jobs responded not with a discount but with a free copy of Final Cut shipped right to his door steps.
Having a disposable email account sounds pretty nice as you can create a temporary account to send/forward your mails. Melt Mail is another one of those services that collaborates fully with your present email and lets you set up a forward address with “@meltmail.com”. A user can allocate time periods (3, 6, 12 or 24 hour), at the end of the desired period your email is terminated and no further forwarded messages are sent to your primary email. Users can create a notification for their account as well along with a counter to let you know of when your address will expire. It’s a nice alternate but it needs to do something about ensuring users of protecting their ids, I mean there’s no assurance that one’s email wont change hands with spammers.
eBay might be the next Yahoo, as its core business continues to fall apart. The current share price of eBay is almost what it was in the mid of 2003. The company has been facing excessive competition, erosion of market share due to over pricing, competition in different emerging economies of the world since past couple of years, but the current economic crisis might prove to be the final nail in the coffin.
Display ads are on a decline, and with the U.S. economy struggling to make a comeback it seems the advertising business will have a hard time. Though AdBrite, an online display business with an ad network that reaches 85,000 sites has come out with a different strategy to combat this decline. The idea of selling banner ads on a cost-per-click basis has been implemented by the company recently.
AdBrite CEO Iggy Fanlo states that there is a massive supply-demand imbalance in the cost-per-impressions department and this move would better their business. Fanlo further states:
Opera Mini 4.2 has now made its way onto Android G1, giving users an option to experience an alternative browser as compared to the default one that ships with the device and is built on top of WebKit. Mini has the capability to synchronize the bookmarks in all your mobile devices in a consistent manner. Opera’s success on Android, if it so happens, would be a slap on the face of Apple which rejected to allow it to enter the App store as it directly competes with Safari, Apple’s mobile browser offering.
Sumner Redstone, who was a billionaire with a net worth of more than $5.1 billion just three months ago, might not be left with a penny after settling all his debts which could be as much as the valuation of all his stocks in Viacom and CBS. NY Times has now seriously questioned the fact that he is even a billionaire now, although the question should have been if he is even a millionaire:
PlaySpan, a virtual goods marketplace, has raised $16.8 million in second round of funding from Easton Capital Group, Menlo Ventures, Novel TMT Ventures, and STIC. PlaySpan’s million dollar idea is to create a marketplace for online gamers to buy and sell virtual goods, like a new gun or a sword for your avatar in return for real world cash. According to CEO Karl Mehta the company is already working with more than 50 titles to enable buying and selling of goods for those games and has processed more than 50 million transactions in the past year.
Virtual goods is such a big market that China has officially acknowledged it as a form of commerce by imposing tax on virtual commodities.
As hundreds of tweets poured in about the change, it was learnt recently that YouTube changed all of its videos to run in widescreen format. Whether this is being done permanently on all servers is confirmed through YouTube’s blog post about it. Videos normally play on YouTube with horizontal black bars on both sides, though some videos played taking full space.
Imeem after only recently cutting short its employees has launched its mobile ad platform. This will enable publishers to target consumers via its Android based application (Imeem for Android). The move is already on as Kia Motors has already been signed up as an advertiser and Imeem pages will feature Kia’s ads along with many more as they sign ad deals with others.
News of Twitter hiring Rael Dornfest to strengthen it’s team came in as the company announced acquiring Values of n. Twitter takes over the startup that created services like Stikkit and I Want Sandy. Dornfest would boost Twitter’s workforce as he had been working as CTO at O’Reilly Media, having responsibilities of editing O’Reilly Hacks series, where he is also the founder of Values of n. Dornfest had previously worked as the head of the RSS-DEV group. Values of n shall be dis-functional from December 8, though it may be pulled on as part of Twitter’s services.
