UK-based SetYourRate.com, which officially launched out of private beta on Tuesday, is attempting to bring Priceline-style economics to the local services industry. The site is cultivating a services marketplace that matches buyers to services providers with a catch: buyers are allowed to name their own price, while service providers compete with one another to meet that price. To me that sounds similar to the service Priceline offers for airline tickets, hotels, and car rentals.
For decades in American households the most dreaded morning sound
was that of an alarm clock. Sometime between 6 and 7am a beep or radio music
signaled that it was time to get up and head to work. But in the early 21st century
two things have begun to change. First, the alarm clock is going off a little bit later. And second,
instead of putting on suits and driving to work, people are heading to the basement in their pajamas
and turning on their personal computers. These are the early days of the new Work From Home generation.
Monthly political and cultural editorial magazine, The Atlantic, announced in an editor's note this week that it would be ditching its subscriber registration requirement to view online content. The magazine's printed content, including archives from 1995-present, is now free for the general public on its web site. Archives dating back to 1857 are available as part of a for-pay premium pass program (though some of those articles should be in the public domain, right?), excluding articles from January, 1964 - September, 1992, which are left out for copyright purposes.
outQuib, which has been developed over the past four months, launches today in private, invite only beta. (ReadWriteWeb readers can click here for access to a limited number of invites to the beta -- the invite code is 'READWRITE' and will expire in about 48 hours.) outQuib is a social network focused on debate and discussion. The site encourages people to initiate and participate in debates on any subject, and gather the responses in a wiki that co-founder Fariz Chowdhury says will help the site "to become the world's source of opinionated information."
After several years of talking about it, YouTube made a surprise move today and launched m.youtube.com - a site with nearly all content and functionality available on the website proper now available on mobile. Users are also able to upload mobile video through the new site.
Though initially limited to 3G phones with the ability to stream video (my Blackjack tried to load Windows Media Player), David Kaplan at MocoNews says a Java version for Nokia and SonyEricsson phones is in the works.
Are you interested in a mobile YouTube?
Semantic analysis service Inform.com announced today that the company has received a $15 million investment from Spark Capital. Inform analyzes content from online publishers and inserts links from a publisher's own content archives, affiliated sites or the web at large to augment content being published. The company says it already has more than 100 clients, including CNN.com, WashingtonPost.com and the Economist. Those who would contend that semantic web technology has not arrived can stick that in their pipes and smoke it.
MTV announced that on February 1 it would end the user generated content television channel Flux, which it started in the UK in September 2006. Flux will be replaced by "MTV One Plus 1," which is a one hour timeshift of the programming on its flagship station. Though MTV is abandoning the idea of a completely UGC-oriented television channel, it is not giving up on using user generated content in its programming and will actually continue to build out the Flux brand online.
A survey of 25,000 people in 12 countries by the Institute for Innovation and Information Productivity (IIIP) shows what they are referring to as "innovation confidence" among the world's population. The most acceptance of innovation in the 12 nations surveyed was observed in the United Arab Emirates, the least was in the Netherlands. The US and the UK fell somewhere in the middle of the pack. "The difference in innovation confidence across the countries in our sample is striking. In some continental European countries, over half of working-age people lack confidence in new innovations. We found a more positive acceptance of innovation in fast-growing economies," said the report's author Dr. Jonathan Levie of the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow.
Chris Saad, Chairman of the Data Portability Working Group, confirmed to me this morning that Microsoft's David Treadwell, a VP at Windows Live, will be joining the organization. Microsoft is expected to make a formal announcement in the coming days. News first leaked out via a shadowy post at Computerworld this morning.
The Working Group aims to foster standard protocols for users to port their identities, friends and digital assets from one site online to another, as they see fit. See the explanatory video at the end of this post for another explanation of the general concepts. Still another good explanation can be found in John Battelle's excellent post earlier this month on how companies should compete on quality of service more than data lock-in.
Music sites Songza and Last.fm separately announced major upgrades to their streaming music libraries. In Songza's case, the additional tracks came via partnerships with competing web sites, while Last.fm snagged the support of major labels for their new streaming music services. The Last.fm news ends days of rampant speculation after the company sent out cryptic invitations to press conference a few days ago, which had some betting the company would morph into a video service.
