Web::iTunes sells 1M videos!

As I’ve blogged here, I thought Apple’s new Video iPod was cool. At the time, not many people seemed to agree. "Who wants to watch video on such a small screen!", was the overwhelming response.

However, it turns out that Apple has sold more than 1 million video contents in less than 20 days! AAPL is more than 6% up in the market and I am now way deep in the money for the options that I bought when they launched the iPod nano:)

Web::Google base?

For the past couple of days, everybody has been talking about the upcoming service from google called ‘google base’. It seems like this is a new way for people to push the content to google’s search engine, but I guess it’s called google base because it sort of looks like a database that handles any user-defined form of data.

I think it is a very cool idea – very web 2.0. I view this as a service that enables users to be more proactive in creating one’s own content in an easy, efficient way. I can see lots of people using this service instead of blogging, because you are less stressed to publish content everyday.

Many people started calling this as a threat to eBay and Amazon and I am very intrigued by that. I can see how this will push the content publishing to the very edge of the network. I am, of course, assuming that the service will not be application specific. (Otherwise, it wouldn’t be that much different from Craigslist) I am especially interested on how google is planning to handle the trust issue. When there are no application-specific reputation mechanisms, what are the basis for trust among people? I have an answer for that, but I will probably talk about that in my corporate blog:)

Web::Podcasting, I get it now

When I first heard about podcasting about a year ago, my reaction was – what’s the big deal about it? 12 months later, I bought an iPod nano and downloaded some podcasting contents for the first time.

Now I get it – well, sort of. Before sharing my thoughts on podcasting, I’d like to tell you why I didn’t think it was such a cool thing at the beginning. Technically speaking, podcasting is nothing innovative. It is just playing an audio file automatically pushed to your pc/audio player on a subscription basis. So the technology is not impressive at all.

Gadget::Apple new iPod with Video

I don’t watch live TV anymore. It’s mainly because I don’t know when I’ll be in front of my TV and so I became a big fan of TIVO. Programming TIVO sucks, but the season pass is what I loved. Then I even stopped watching TIVO, because I hated having to wait a week for every new episode.

Gadget::SIRIUS

I didn’t think I would ever subscibe to a satellite radio, neither XM or SIRIUS. But when I bought my new car, it came with a receiver installed and surprisingly with a 14 month free subscription!

So it has been a couple of months since I started listening to it, and I think I like it. Satellite radio differs from traditional FM/AM radio in many ways. First, they are 100% digital so it comes with all the benefits of being digital : excellent quality (when it works), extra information about the channel/content, and over hundred channels categorized (and thus browsable) by content type. Since the sigal is broadcasted from satellites, the contents are not local (good and bad).