CreateSpace, which until last week was CustomFlix Labs, a company founded in 2002 and acquired by Amazon in 2005, today launched a print on demand book publishing service. The newly minted CreateSpace service line-up now includes print on demand books, DVDs, CDs, direct download video, audio books, and HD DVDs (Blu-ray coming soon). This puts Amazon in direct competition with Lulu, and to a lesser extent CafePress.
The implications of this announcement for Lulu could be large. Until now, Lulu has been, to my knowledge, the only print on demand publisher that offered books, CDs, and DVDs with no set up fee and offered syndication to sites like Amazon.
What's this? IBM going media 2.0? Big Blue has released a Noir-themed report entitled 'Navigating the Media Divide: Innovating and Enabling New Business Models.' It comes with a movie inspired design and pitch:
"Traditional and new media are clashing. The old rules on content and distribution: gone. Traditional alliances: unreliable. Long-established partnerships: threatened. Everything’s changing. Prepare for an epic conflict."
All it's missing is "In a world where..." as the opening line. Anyway, it looks like some IBM employees had fun with it and the report is a good distillation of current 'media 2.0' themes, albeit couched in IBM's corporate lingo.
Since French startup Zlio opened in the US in February, it has been busy making alliances with US companies (and annoying Amazon.com too). Zlio is a service that enables any Internet user to start a virtual store and populate it with products from a number of merchants. Zlio automatically figures out which of their merchant partners have the best price. They then share affiliate revenue with their users. Zlio calls this "social E-Commerce".
Today Zlio announced an agreement for their US site to partner with Shopping.com, an online shopping comparison service that is owned by eBay. This will allow Zlio "shopkeepers" to generate revenue every time someone clicks on a product in their shop. In other words, Zlio users can now be paid per click as well as per sale on their ZlioShops.
Yesterday’s Apple press event saw the unveiling of new iMacs and major updates to the company’s iLife and iWorks software suites. But it also provided further insight into the cosy relationship developing between Apple and Google, with greater integration between the two companies’ product lines.
Google announced a new feature today for their Google News web site that allows people involved in news stories to post dissenting (or concurring) view points next to published news items. From the Google News Blog:
"We'll be trying out a mechanism for publishing comments from a special subset of readers: those people or organizations who were actual participants in the story in question. Our long-term vision is that any participant will be able to send in their comments, and we'll show them next to the articles about the story. Comments will be published in full, without any edits, but marked as "comments" so readers know it's the individual's perspective, rather than part of a journalist's report."
Online video ad network LiveRail launched a public beta just about a month ago, and yesterday I caught up with CEO Mark Trefgarne to get an update on how things are progressing at the London-based start up. So far the company is not taking or sharing any real money, but rather just stress testing their system and working out the kinks in their video hosting platform, and targeting and ad serving technology.
So far the company has signed up around 500 publishers who are streaming about 30-40,000 video streams per day across the network. Those publishers are adding about 30-40 new videos per day to the system. These number certainly aren't staggering, but the site is operating right now on an invite-only basis and hasn't really begun to aggressively sign up advertisers.
I want to replace both my Windows laptop and my Blackberry with an iPhone. I love my Blackberry, but I don’t like lugging my laptop around. I know I need a laptop sometimes, but if I can just leave it behind more times that will be a big improvement. I think this is a reasonably typical use case. Mobility is the key driver.
I have faith that iPhone will get decent connectivity at some point and that the aftermarket will create a neat foldable keyboard for times when the touch-screen is not enough. So what I need to figure out is: when that happens, who will be my Web Office provider?
Personally, I will only trust a big vendor. Sorry to all the start-ups with cool new Web Office stuff and I hope one of the big guys buys you. My data is just too critical to trust to a company that might disappear, change policy significantly or simply not keep up with the emerging requirements. So with that in mind, the contenders out there currently are:
The rumor tonight is that social shopping service Kaboodle has been acquired for $30M+ by Hearst. We profiled Kaboodle and other social shopping services back in December in our Social Shopping Faceoff. Our conclusion then was that Kaboodle leads the social shopping pack, with a clean UI and the most comprehensive feature set. It also appeared to have more traffic than the others. So Hearst bought the right one! Here's our review of Kaboodle:
When Kaboodle had only 20K active users, it managed to secure a partnership with eBay - and it became clear that this company was going to be a major player in the world of social commerce. Kaboodle offers a robust and simple set of features. Users can collect shopping items from many sites using the Kaboodle toolbar. The items can then be organized into collections, reviewed and shared with other users.
Web office vendor Dabble DB has jumped on the Facebook bandwagon and launched a "social to-do list" called Dabble Do. You can get it on Facebook here. How is it social, I hear you ask? Basically you can assign items not only to yourself, but to your friends - and be kept up-to-date on their status. It comes with a variety of different actions, as explained by the Dabble DB blog:
"Whenever someone assigns you an item, depending on how you're feeling, you can respond to it in a number of ways:
* Industrious: complete it by checking it off;
* Contrarian: reject it by sending it back to the assigner; or
* Lazy: "pass the buck" and reassign it someone elseIf you have assigned the item to a friend, you can "crack the whip" to remind them of it."
In Greg Linden's guest post defining Web personalization, he notes that Google Personalized Search uses technology acquired in 2003 from a small startup named Kaltix. He goes on to say that "the current version of Google Personalized Search learns from your search queries. Searchers do not have to do anything explicitly to use it; it is all implicit. The current Google Personalized Search likely is using the same Kaltix technology, building a high-level profile of you, then biasing all of your search results based on your long-term behavior."
With that in mind, it's curious that just under half (48%) of respondents in this week's R/WW poll haven't noticed any difference in their Google search results. Only 12% have seen an improvement, but perhaps of more concern is that 9% say their search results have gotten worse! You can test this yourself by going to googlonymous, which as the name suggests allows you to do an anonymous search on Google (hat tip Mind Booster Noori for the link).
