Yahoo! digital home??

I just found this new cool product from Yahoo!

Fantasy Sports on your TV
http://digitalhome.yahoo.com/sports/

It looks like a piece of Yahoo! Go for TV, which has been sidelined for a while.
One surprising aspect is, it works with the Windows Media Center instead of being a part of its own Yahoo! Go for TV which more or less is a competitor to Windows Media Center. Is it some sort of death knell to Yahoo! Go for TV, just like the Yahoo! Go for PC is left to death?

But more than that it is the URL that invokes my curiosity. digitalhome.yahoo.com redirects to Yahoo! home page. Sounds like Yahoo! is going to come up with a whole suite of applications for TV that works through Windows Media Center which is being shipped as a part of Vista Home Premium.

But I strongly believe any digital home strategy that requires a connection to a PC is bound to fail. Be it Windows Media Center or Apple TV or Yahoo! Go for TV. If you want to hit the mass market you must go with a set top box like TiVo or XBox 360.

Yahoo! Go and Yahoo! 360 are the biggest bets that Yahoo! made and failed miserably.
Hope they turn around and come up with a cool product that works.

Do No Evil (Series)

"Viacom is a company built from lawsuits, look at their history," Schmidt said on Friday.
"Look who they hired as CEO, Philippe Dauman, who was the general counsel for Viacom for 20 years," he added.

Google takes swipe at Viacom

Now it is getting personal.
You built an empire by pirating the copyright material, i.e youtube. You are making money off the content you do not own. And when they ask that you should do something about it you didn't care. And when they file a law suit, you come around and abuse them. When you can screen sexual or racist content from appearing on youtube, why can you not screen copyrighted content? Which part of it is not Evil. May be you can get out of the court unscathed but that doesn't make what you are doing any less evil.

It just shows that they all are the same, Evil Corporates.

Wii Want Wii!!

Wii is going to release a new controller called "Wii Fit" some time next year. Wii has already been a great success in united states and outselling every other gaming console in US. Even after so many months in Market, it is still very tough to get a Wii. And analysts say that it is going to stay like that even into the holiday season and further.

I think once this new controller is out, it is going to be a mass phenomenon. I think it would overtake both the iPod revolution (100million units sold) and sony ps2 revolution (90million units sold) and the first set top box that is connected to the broadband network that is going to tke over the living room.

It already has an internet channel, and an online video service with HD output would seal it for Nintendo.

Move on MS, Move on Apple, Move on SONY.

Wii and TV, lives happily ever after.

Google Socialstream??

"Socialstream is the result of a Google-sponsored capstone project in the Master's program at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. "

This seems to be a nice platform to integrate a number of Web 2.0 UG content at one place. Lets see how this pans out.

I am still bitter about Yahoo! 360. Yahoo have more user generated content than any other website. They were at the right place in the right time to bring it all together and come up with a true social networking platform. And they gave us 360, which sucked big time. Now facebook is doing what Yahoo! could've done with 360 and they are building content from ground up. But I do not feel it is adequate enough to last till the last mile.

I'm sure this war is going to be interesting.

In UGC domain, Google has youtube and blogger for video content and text content. Yahoo has literally unlimited user generated content from music preferences, movies and local reviews, flickr for images and also a lot of professional content, that it can pull together to give us a wonderful platform. I still have hopes for Yahoo! They still are in the best position to pull it off.

Google's unwanted child!!

I keep hearing about the failure of google and yahoo in the social networking arena. That myspace and facebook has taken over. But a quick look at the alexa rankings reveal that orkut.com is 8th in the rankings. And it has been that way since last october.

But why is it considered a failure? coz it doesn't make money?
True, but youtube doesn't make money either. Why does it get all the hype and media coverage and most important, a very superior treatment from its parent, The Google. Why is the youtube evolving so rapidly with wonderful new features all the time, while the orkut is more or less the same for over an year.

Simple, orkut is popular in third world countries and would never have enough money to prompt google to increase spending on this neglected child. In US, it stands at a distant 30 in the rankings and probably skewed towards the immigrants rather than americans. So we don't care about them?

If Google has the noble intentions of making the world a better place, why not spend some research dollars on Orkut and make it more stable and add some desperately needed features to it, so that the millions of loyal Orkut user can have better experience?

Answer: Show me the money!!!!

iPhone's succeess

iPhone crossed 1 million sales in less than a week.to put that in perspective, Windows has 3.2 million licences sold in the first quarter of 2007 and that account to about 60% percent market share. So total of 5.1 million smart phones. Ammaaazzzinnnggg!!!

• the iPhone is not competing with smart phones, and I think the people who bought iPhone are not existing smart phone users.



• it is clear that people have enough money in hand, but they did not find any of these existing phones worthy of their money.

It sounds like all these million users are iPod users and are upgrading to iPhone. would these guys have bought it irrespective of the features?Did they buy it just because they want to own that coolest thing in town. Does that mean iPhone is going to cannibalize iPod market to certain extent.

It is rumoured that wide screen iPod is on its way with the touchscreen goodness with out any kind of wireless connectivity (no phone, no safari). What would happen then? is ATT going to bite the dust? Or would people be willing to pay that extra money to ATT when they can still own all the coolness with one time payment and probably less upfront.

It'll be interesting to see the statistics of the early adopters, how many of them own nanos, video ipods and existing smart phones. That'll probably tell us how many iPods vs iPhones will apple sell in the future.

But when I think about it, I think you can throw all the Market research and analysis to trash. Apple would probably defy all the conventional wisdom and sell these gadgets in millions anyways.

Apple is already came to half the market cap of MS. Its probably going to reach MS very soon. On the other side, MS's hopes to get hold of the living room is under serious threat with the failure rate of 33% and less than desired success of IPTV so far. If MS doesn't get its act right and overwhelm the TV set top box market by this holiday season, it is as good as gone. Come next holiday season, I expect to see a completely revamped Apple TV that's going to storm the living room, the fourth leg.

Can MS at least get hold of the tail, i.e Cars?? By the ways things are going, it doesn't look like it.

Business Sense

I am Borders. I want to sell each and every book for $9.99.

No matter
how new or how old the book is,
how popular or how flopped the book is,
whether it is a paperback or a hard cover,
whether it is 100 pages or 1000 pages long,
whether it is written by John Grisham or Joe Writer,

And I'll pay only $2.99 to the publisher no matter what because I have 80% market share, I can dictate the terms.

Makes great business sense, doesn't it.

Do no Evil!!!

http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2007-06-30-n86.html

This is exactly what I was talking about in one of my earlier posts on why trusting Google blindly is foolish.


A huge WTF


Google is not a small start up anymore with just a handful of employees with everything under control.
This time it is a small slip up and thanks to the world watching Google with all eyes is Called pretty quickly. Just don't submit to Google with blind love. Companies change, people change and policies also change.

Get over it...

I am another guy who is tired of the iPhone coverage in the media. I can't believe that some one dropping a iPhone is worth covering. Now I see all these warnings and notes to the prospective buyers on the cons of buying an iPhone. What features it doesn't have and how pricey it is and that ATT is evil.
Wait! Ten Things You Should Know Before You Buy an iPhone


Now get over it... when does price become an issue with Apple products. iPod is always pricier than each and every mp3 player in the market. What abt the features? I would say each and every mp3 player in the market does more than what an iPod does.
You can shout over the roof tops, but you cannot stop people buying iPhones. They are not buying it for the utility, they are buying it because it is iPhone. And these guys do not even care about what other phones are in the market and what those gadgets can do. They do not do research on what kind of features it has. If they need to change their ways of using a phone and settle for less functionality, they would do so. You take out the maps, safari, youtube, weather and maps, they would still buy it. They just buy it because it is iPhone. and you made the iPhone what it is.