Yesterday, when we published our companies to watch list for DEMOfall 2007, Robert Scoble commented that we should have included a company called SceneCaster on our list. "SceneCaster is aimed at Second Life," he wrote. "But it gets rid of some of the real negatives that Second Life has."
SceneCaster, which will launch later today, was on our radar, but we didn't really know enough about it to include it on our list. This morning I got a chance to check it out, and after playing with it for the past hour I don't think it really is aimed at Second Life. SceneCaster is about creating 3D, virtual spaces, but it's not a virtual world.
US public broadcaster National Public Radio has released a new mobile site that allows listeners to stream local, national and international radio pieces over their mobile phones. Available at m.npr.org, I used this service throughout the weekend and am very impressed. It's simple, powerful and it works.
NPR worked with mobile site developers Crisp to enable handset detection on their mobile site - visitors are able to stream segments through whatever audio software they have on their phones or by calling a dedicated phone number for each story. A general phone number also offers an IVR menu to select stories by voice. All in all, it's the kind of inclusive service you'd hope NPR would offer. The content is fresh, the audio quality acceptable, the experience good.
Amazon's long awaited DRM-free online music store launched today. The service is called Amazon MP3. There's an estimated 2 million MP3 files there, for the low price of 89 or 99 cents each. I tried it out and am happy to report that there were four CocoRosie albums available for sale there - the desktop downloader worked well on my MacBook (see image below), the shopping experience was very simple and I'm looking forward to transferring the songs over to my other computer.
This is definitely a service I'll use when I want to buy whole albums and can't make it down to the local, independent record store. I've always felt dirty buying music from iTunes, now I think I'll feel a little less dirty buying DRM free music from Amazon. I saw the news first at Techmeme and there's good music-industry centric coverage at Steven Finch's Crenk. See a longer, more in-depth review of the new service over at our digital lifestyle blog Last100.
Read/WriteWeb network blog Last100, has an interesting piece out this morning about Microsoft's launch of the latest game in its popular Halo series. Last100 writes that Halo 3 has two features that push the game into new territory beyond video gaming and break new ground.
One of those features is a sophisticated demo recording system that saves gameplay movies with game data, allowing them to be shared and remixed, in essence allowing the creation of gameplay mashups. The second feature is a file sharing service launched by Bungie -- the game studio responsible for the Halo series -- allowing users to share screenshots, game films, and custom game objects with other gamers.
We cover the trend of Web Office closely here on Read/WriteWeb. Google Apps, Salesforce.com, Zoho, ThinkFree, Zimbra - these are some of the leading vendors of web-based office software. And last week came the big news that Zimbra was acquired by Yahoo! for $350M (read our analysis of why), so the market for this software is hot.
Another company that has been quietly, but effectively, doing business in this segment has been WebEx. They even managed to snag the perfect name for their product: WebOffice. WebEx WebOffice has 2,000,000 registered users and 27,000 businesses rely on it. The main focus of the product is to enable collaboration amongst its users - although as we'll see in this post, it isn't really competing in the same field as Google Apps or even Zimbra.
Last week I spoke to Derek Peplau, senior product manager for WebOffice, to find out more about the product. In particular I wanted to find out how WebEx WebOffice compared to the likes of Google Apps, Zoho and Zimbra. During the demo I discovered that WebEx's product has more in common with Salesforce.com, in that it's an on-demand service and doesn't offer standalone word processing, spreadsheet or presentations. So let's get this out of the way right now: WebEx WebOffice, despite the name, isn't an office suite package like Google Apps, Zoho, ThinkFree and others. Despite this, WebEx WebOffice seems to be a very good solution for small businesses - and even in parts of the enterprise (e.g. as a solution for individual teams or projects).
Orange SA, a subsidiary of France Telcom, announced today at the Digital ID World conference in San Francisco that France Telecom will act as an OpenID server-agent. That means the company will verify the identities of their 40 million users immediately, without the need for another account to be created, for any other site on the web that supports OpenID.
This according to Six Apart's David Recordon who blogged and Twittered excitedly from the event. Recordan, an expert in emerging identity issues, says that the move makes France Telecom the world's first major telco to support OpenID.
Recordan reports that the company also discussed allowing access to Orange branded mobile services using external accounts - presumably OpenID. That'll be putting their money where their mouths are - huge companies can offer to authenticate for other sites all day long without significantly changing the game.
A large group of very heavy hitters, chaired by former AOL man Ted Leonsis, has launched a new financial services company called Revolution Money. The company will charge transaction fees it says are as low as 25% of the industry average and will allow those transfers to be carried out through existing Points of Sale, an anonymous PIN protected credit card and a variety of online methods, including social networking sites and AOL's AIM instant messenger. Here's the release on Leonsis's blog.
The team at Revolution Money is staggering. The Board includes Lawrence Summers, former U.S. Treasury Secretary; Russell Hogg, former President and CEO of MasterCard International, Inc.; Franklin Raines, former CEO of Fannie Mae and former director of the Office of Management and Budget; David Pottruck, former CEO of Charles Schwab and David Golden, CFO of Revolution LLC and former Vice Chairman of JPMorgan. The company recently announced a $50 million Series B round of funding from Citi, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and others.
Will you start seeing Revolution Money as a payment option online and off this fall? You probably will. This company could have the financial smarts to succeed where Google Checkout has failed and prove a viable challenger to PayPal, at the very least.
BBC News is reporting that the One Laptop Per Child project is going to sell laptops to people in the developed world afterall. The OLPC announced the "Give 1 Get 1" scheme today in which a $399 investment will allow US residents to purchase two laptops: one for the buyer, and one for a child in the developing world.
The Give 1 Get 1 program will launch on November 12, via the XO Giving web site. Americans are known for their financial giving, 89% of US households give to charity and total giving in America reached $295 billion last year, but I'm not sure that the G1G1 program will resonate with people -- or if it's even a good idea to divert laptops from the countries for which they were made.
According to the Wall Street Journal Microsoft is in talks to buy up to a 5% stake in Facebook for $300-500 million. That would value the company at up to $10 billion. The WSJ is also reporting that Google is interested in an investment in the social network and could set up a stand off between the two rival tech giants.
The Journal reports that the discussions taking place so far are in their early stages and that Facebook could wind up not taking any investment (or could turn to financial investors, from whom they have already raised over $40 million). Spokespeople at both Facebook and Microsoft declined to comment on the matter to the WSJ, while a spokesman at Google could not be reached. I think it's safe to assume Google would be mum on this one too.
MuseStorm will be launching the next generation of their widget platform at DEMOfall 2007 this week in San Diego, CA. The company will demonstrate their Content Engagement Platform in a Wednesday session at the conference. The platform is live on their web site today, however.
The Content Engagement Platform is a complete widget solution that delivers authoring, distribution, monetization, and analytics. MuseStorm CEO Ori Soen says their platform can help businesses "take syndicated content to the next level."
