July 25, 2005
Wow, didn’t see this coming.
Yahoo is stating that they are doing this for the developer community:
Yahoo! said the reason they purchased Konfabulator was that they wanted an easy way to open up its APIs to the developer community and allow them easy access to the information on the Yahoo! Web site. In doing this, Widgets could be built without having to scrape sites in order to get information.
“What we can do with Konfabulator is wrap these services that we are opening up into an environment that is really easy for people to now become developers,� Tony Schneider, vice president of the Yahoo! Developer Network, told MacCentral.
They’re also making it free and refunding those who have purchased it! 
The Konfabulator site is announcing the acquisition by Yahoo on their home page.
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July 13, 2005
Pressdisplay shows newspaper content from many newspapers all over the world (they claim 225 Newspapers from 55 countries)…and they do it with a pretty interesting UI. Note: Requires registration to go beyond 1st page. You can use a free 7 day trial but must pay between $9.95 and $29.95 based on how much access you want (i.e. number of papers, etc). Searching through the papers is also available.
How do they do it? Well, they probably get high quality digital images/pdfs/etc from the newspaper publishers but then they pay a royalty most likely on a per user (rather than per visit or pageview) basis to each newspaper viewed by the user. They state that they’re willing to pay the royalty for your trial since they believe you will like it enough to subscribe…and I’m inclined to agree with them. The key to this business has got to be the business relationships with the papers.
Found via Robert Scoble
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July 12, 2005
A lot of people have been unhappy about Technorati’s push to monetize their search results (they index blog entries) by pitching the use of their data for data analytics by PR & Marketing individuals.
I don’t see what the big deal is. Google and Yahoo, among others, have been monetizing results pages for quite a while.
Additionally, based on what I’ve seen regularly on this blog, corporatations have been coming to my site, referred by technorati and other blog engines, to read what I have commented about them or their companies for a long time (you can see what they searched for on those engines by looking at the query string in the referring URL).
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June 28, 2005
Filed under:
misc — emad @ 8:34 am
Silicon Beat has an article on how Yahoo Mail will, like Google Mail (formerly GMail), will be more desktop-like…basically implying the use of javascript (esp through AJAX-like technologies).
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June 24, 2005
Filed under:
misc — emad @ 8:04 am
I cam across this site about Theo Jansen.
He builds multi-ton machines that move with the aid of wind. Pretty cool.
More movies.
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June 21, 2005
New site I created: Los Angeles Earthquakes on a Google Map.
There is also the Last 20 National Earthquakes on a Google Map which, at least lately, looks just like the L.A. one since that’s where most earthquakes are.
The pushpins are color-coded based on the magnitude from “cool” colors (blue) to “hot” colors (red).
Your comments/criticisms, as always, are welcome.
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June 20, 2005
Jim talks about Paypal’s new API which allows for direct payments without leaving your site.
As a sidenote, Search Engine Watch is reporting that Google may be looking at setting up its own payment service (and potentially being called “Google Wallet,” potentially a play on MSN Wallet which was a slightly different service located at http://wallet.msn.com but appears to be gone???).
My guess is that google may do a few things with this including:
- providing customers with a full end-to-end CPC and billing solution
- tracking (and providing to customers via their reporting) performance of ads and better ROI calculations/estimations for both themselves and their customers. This also simplifies things for SMEs that tend to be unsophisticated and would give them powerful toolsets for no additional costs other than CPC/payment processing costs and could increase adoption.
- potentially scouting out other business models such as Snap’s Cost per action model that charges cusotmers not on clicks but on actual “actions” such as an acquisition, etc.
- They already have another product that enables buying/selling of products as well…froogle. This could also be tied into froogle as a merchant paid-for tool. I don’t think any merchant currently using the free listings would argue froogle’s value (especially, in relation to its cost).
The big assumption here, of course, is that SEW’s report is true…more info at WSJ.
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June 17, 2005
YubNub provides a search box where you search similarly to a command line where you can create your own commands, have text spoken back to you, list commands, go directly to other sites, do google image searches, and more! Interesting UI.
File this one under cool (via slashdot):
Speaking of command lines, here is a terminal app and a shell written entirely in javascript! I tried out the shell and it included many basic unix commands including cat, ls, CD, cal, even a fully-functioning vi editor that saves your files (alas, there was no emacs editor so they only get 4 stars instead of 5). However, many other commands like top were missing (though ps is there). Many of the paths were standard paths and you could see /etc, /tmp, /var, etc. The /etc/passwd file was there and user-readable…go ahead and brute-force it Going to the bin directory and deleting “cat” removed it and prevented me from being able to use it (gave an error message just like unix). Logging out, then back in, restored it. I didn’t do a view source to dig into it a bit more but someone must have put a lot of effort into this. Pretty impressive.
NOTE: I’ve upated the shell link since the original broke.
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June 7, 2005
Filed under:
misc,
tech — emad @ 4:48 pm
Well, it had to happen eventually.
One of the largest subscriber bases, AOL AIM is now providing 2GB of free email! I first mentioned info about the service here.
If the service is good enough, these may have a chance to compete with the big guys since they already have a large subscriber base and will allow these same users to use existing username/passwords.
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June 6, 2005
I remember when Yahoo Auctions actually had a chance to compete with Ebay. I don’t think they charged a fee for the service and provided a cheap alternative to ebay. At some point, I remember they started charging a fee and I switched over to ebay which had more features along with their fees.
Well, shortly after Ebay bought Shopping.com, Yahoo says they’ll drop the fees!
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