Has the company thrown its toys out of pram on NXE launch?
At first it was thought that Sony had gone to some drastic measures to show its distaste of Xbox's new dashboard update by taking its movies off of Netflix's streaming service – Netflix Watch Instantly.
After Network Solutions introduced enhanced whois listings a little more than a year, eNom introduced a similar service today in an email going to registrants. The charge for the service is $20 per year and apparently the service also offers “featured listings” on the directory site, which is currently marked as a “private beta”.
Travel management company Egencia , a part of US-based online travel company Expedia, has launched its services in India. Egencia India will be based in Gurgaon (Delhi/NCR) and will offer an integrated corporate travel service to businesses operating in the country.
Egencia India will also provide its clients access to an innovative suite of online booking and travel management tools, besides an extensive range of reports that enable travel managers to analyze business travel information on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis.
JigTweets is a new little tool launching today that allows a Twitter user to update his or her Twitter feed with just about anything - be it a picture, a URL, an RSS feed, a location or a YouTube video.
To start using the service you will need to go to its website where you will see your regular Twitter home page with updates from your friends. There will also be an additional toolbar above the standard page - this toolbar is what you will need to use to update with additional content instead of the text-only tweets we are accustomed to.
I’ve admitted it before: I have a crush on Animoto. The service does one thing really, really well. It turns photos into slideshows, with music, instantly.
The site has done extremely well. As competitors like Slide and RockYou have wandered off to create countless useless Facebook applications, Animoto has stuck to creating really cool photo slideshows. As of August, Animoto had 250,000 users in 200 countries and 4 million or so videos have been viewed 50 million times.
Atlanta, GA-based iKobo, a company that provides a worldwide online money transfer service, is discontuining its operations, effective immediately. In an e-mail to its users, the company writes:
We regret to inform you that iKobo is discontinuing services. Effective immediately, no further money transfers to your iKobo account will be allowed. Your card issued by Palm Desert National Bank will continue to be active until November 13, 2008. Your card will no longer work after this date. However, the card funds are safe and guaranteed, even after the card is de-activated.
If you have already read Host Color’s latest news, you already know that we launched a domain name privacy product named “Domain ID Shield”. It is available with any web hosting service plan and costs only $1.95 per year. A fair price, isn’t it?
Over the many months we’ve been covering Twitter, talking about Twitter and using Twitter, one of the most common themes we keep coming back to is whether or not they’re ever going to decide to monetize the service, and how.
Interestingly enough, the idea has come back around, it would appear, and is being attempted by a European company called Magpie. The idea is simple: they’ll pay you for access to your Twitter account, and advertisers will pay them for tweets they send out in your name.
With warnings of doom coming from Web investors, and CEOs cutting back on staff in order to focus their companies on revenue, I am not expecting the Web 2.0 Summit, which opens this Wednesday in San Francisco, to be the happy and upbeat affair it's been in years past. People at the conference will be taking a dispassionate look at the business models of the services under discussion this year, as opposed to focusing on user growth amd technology innovation.
We’ve received a couple of anonymous tips that DirectTV, a $24 billion satellite TV provider, may be entering the online TV wars with a new site called DirectTV Web On Demand. The site would compete with startups like Hulu, Joost, Fancast, Sling.com, etc.
We don’t know much about the service, or even if it’s real. One of the tipsters says they’ve worked on the project and supplied us with the mockup screen shot above, which could quite possibly be real. On the other hand, we’ve spoken with industry insiders and they say they’ve heard nothing about the project.
