It's been a week since the Android Market - the primary location for downloading applications for the Google G1 Android mobile handset - opened its doors for business. And while the noise surrounding the opening of a marketplace for Android applications hasn't met with the same cacophonous reverberations of the handset it hopes to unseat, adoption of Android applications is showing steady growth, according to a recent report released by Medialets.
Start-ups should have a simple value proposition that is easy to understand. In a recession, that proposition should be "we save you money, NOW". Or maybe, a tad harder, "we bring you new revenue, NOW". With the emphasis on urgency. You can always save money by making sacrifices. But if you can save money by simply reducing a bill, without reducing the service, who would not do that? That is what Validas says they can do: "lower your wireless cell phone bill". You can cut your landline bills by using Skype, but don't you just love figuring out all the ways your cell phone company manages to increase your bill?
If you live in the U.K. and you have 100 British pounds to spare, you can now subscribe to the Datz Music Lounge, where those 100 pounds can buy you unlimited access to DRM-free MP3s for one year. According to Music Week, Datz features about 2 million tracks from EMI, Warner, Beggars Group, and The Orchard. While the service is encumbered by technical problems like having to use a USB dongle, as well as a relatively limited selection of songs, we can't help but wonder whether this all-you-can-eat plan for DRM-free MP3s points towards the future of the digital music business.
According to the latest data from Comscore, 6.5 million Americans watched videos on their cell phones in August. YouTube-style amateur videos ranked as the most popular type of content, followed closely by music and comedy videos. Comscore also released some data about general mobile media consumption trends, where the survey found that, year-over-year, more users are now using their mobile devices to access social networking services and read news stories, while fewer users are downloading ringtones and games.
DataViz, makers of Documents To Go, a Microsoft Office editor app for mobile devices, has confirmed that they are developing an application for the iPhone. The application would allow for editing of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files on your iPhone, or, presumably, your iPod Touch. According to a company representative, the application will likely be available in early 2009.
While Twitter has been less than forthcoming on how they plan to monetize their service, there is no shortage of ideas from third parties on ways to get paid for spending time with Twitter. From pay-to-tweet to selling off the real estate on your Twitter background, there are any number of ways you could be making money off the service.
Now, there's another service that - much like RSS-based advertising - offers to pay you for advertisements that run in the midst of your tweet stream. Meet Magpie, an ad network for Twitter.
Blogging is fast, informal and easy to do. Spelling, grammar and factual errors happen - but do they make a material impact on the success of a blogger? A small but interesting survey run by crowdsourced copy editing service GooseGrade concludes that they do.
Approximately 200 respondents told GooseGrade that while blogs aren't a major source of news for most of them, they often find errors on blogs and that makes them less likely to share the content they find there with other readers. While unsurprising, these numbers are a good illustration of just how much things have changed in media - or not.
Update: We've been contacted by members of the OpenID community who argue that we've mischaracterized the controversy in this post. Additional complications not discussed here include the now-ceased process of whitelisting domains that could use Google OpenID.
After we wrote about Google becoming an OpenID provider yesterday, a number of reports suggested that Google was not following the OpenID guidelines closely and that it was basically forking OpenID to suit its own agenda.
Straight out of Belgium comes a really interesting life streaming service, yes another one, but this one brings a few unique and much needed features to the market.
The service is called Storytlr (a play on story teller) and it allows members to create their own lifestreaming service at their own URL. It's similar to the recently launched services Swurl (our review) and Sweetcron, but Storytlr has a few really neat tricks up its sleeve.
Today, Microsoft will release a major update for Live Mesh, its consumer oriented cloud storage and synchronization service. Among these updates are more granular permissions for sharing folders, better support for large monitors during remote connections, and support for drag and drop between the online desktop and local devices. Live Mesh is now also available for Mac OS X (10.5.1 or later) and Windows Mobile devices. Microsoft also announced the worldwide availability of Live Mesh.
