Blockbuster is making more news just to keep users’ eyes on it and today it expanded its online rentals for Video Games. The rentals will begin offering rentals for games on various consoles including, XBox360, Playstation2/3 and Wii, bringing it in direct challenge to GameFly. There isn’t much information on what pricing model is Blockbuster going to follow, but I hope they don’t limit rentals at a fixed rate. If it does anything stupid to just cash in every rental it may very well lose the race before it even begins.
There has to be some controversy, issue springing up whenever a product makes a successful launch, same comes attached with the release of Kindle 2. Paul Aiken director Author’s Guild thinks that the ebook readers Text-to-Speech system is an infringement of copyright that makes an audio-book. I just don’t get it, I mean if I go about reading a book to a group of people I am myself violating the laws, if this is what they accuse Kindle 2 of. Paul Aiken doesn’t care about and his own uni-dimensional views, the WSJ voices them:
Outbrain, the recommendation engine that enables users to recommendation for blogs and news content has raised $12 million Series B. The funding was provided by existing investors and new investors, Zohar Gilon and Rhodium. Outbrain was last in news when in launched link zapper, a feature that enabled its partners to remove any recommendation that didn’t match the original content. Big bucks coming its at times when other services are digging their own graves.
Loic Le Meur released an update to its Twitter desktop client, Twhirl bringing in a lots of new features. The latest release enables users to watch video clips from anyone and not just from ones you follow. Seesmic users will also be able to record and post their video comments directly from the client, fulfilling the promise that Loic Le Meur had made a couple months back. More importantly, the desktop client also supports LinkedIn, Ping.fm, MySpace and Facebook.
Backchannelmedia provider of interactive TV technology provider announced an agreement with Gray Television to deploy its Clickable TV solution. Users will see non-intrusive icons at the bottom of their screens and will be prompted to interact with them. This would let users bookmark the content to their email or a web portal, letting them keep a directory of content that they find interesting. In a press release, Robert S.Prather Jr. President of Gray Television stated:
We have been saved of the horrendous memories associated to the Fail Whale. Twitter was down for almost an hour and micro-blog that only made it to the 100 most visited sites in the UK had all sorts of excuses; from technical issue to regular database management. It’s safe for now, working as it usually does. I guess the idea of charging companies for using the service wasn’t digested at all by it, leading to a failure in service. The good news is that it didn’t last that long as it has in the past and users can just tweet their updates again. Just in case you get to see this more frequently, do give Twiddict a try as it lines up all your updates and publishes once Twitter is up and flying.
