blogging break...

I'll be taking a break from abigideaing over the next month as Im off down under to explore Australia...happy christmas and have a great new year!

Yahoo eats del.icio.us

Oooh - del.iciou.us got bought buy Yahoo last Friday. Dunno for how much, but its clear that Yahoo understands how tagging is going to make our web so much easier and intelligent to navigate. I've noticed a couple of months back how my search preference for particular topics was increasingly moving over to del.icio.us. If it was/is a topic related to technology, internet or mobile I would tend to go to del.icio.us first.
The Yahoo acquisition now has the capability to make the del.icio.us experience avaialble to everyone and to grow the topic and tag spread away from the geekish to more mainstream common requests. This in turn will feed a more time sensitive, friend relevant and context targeted search experience which may just be enough to tackle Google?

One other thing - the Yahoo M&A team are doing a damn good job - Oddpost, Flickr, Dialpad, Del.icio.us, all in under 18 months. They dont appear to be paying over the odds, and these targets are all examples of high growth synergistic (is that a word?) complimentary businesses that can add real value (usage data, IPR, engineering and product knowledge) to the Yahoo product stable. Yahoo brings a mass market productisation engine and an exit!

previous posts:
15/06/05 Yahoo buys Dialpad
04/05/05 Intelligent Bookmarks
08/07/04 Yahoo eats Oddpost

Mobile micro payment via SMS - SMSAXS

A neat (and simple) micropayment service that works via SMS in most of Europe (US coming soon). Current tariff rates include 0.49€, 1€ and 3€.






1. Your customer selects an item to purchase and chooses "Pay with smsAXS"
2. Your customers are sent to smsAXSís secure site to enter their mobile numbers. smsAXS accepts, authorizes, and processes payments instantaneously by connecting directly to the major Mobile Network Operators. smsAXS enables you to accept Vodafone, Orange, 02, T-Mobile, Virgin Mobile all through one provider.
3. Once your customers are billed a password is sent directly to their mobile phone.
4. When they enter the password in the smsAXS form, they are automatically redirected to your site to collect their item. The smsAXS-hosted pages can be customized to match the look and feel of your website
5. You customers can access the premium content for the entire period of validity agreed on the transaction page (pay-per-view or pay-to-subscribe)

Mobile Flickr - mobup + shozu

"Mobup is a small J2ME application that manages photo uploads on Flickr from your mobile device built using the Flickr APIs. Once installed it gives you the possibility to shoot your photo and add title, tags and description from the same applications with optimal user experience and to post the shooted photo on your blog".

"ShoZu is a FREE cool app that makes uploading images from your camera-phone to your Flickr photostream simple".

SillyAnt - Encrypted mobile voip

"Free download of encrypted voip software for Nokia 6630, 6680 and N90 Symbian phones - realtime, full duplex, encrypted voice-over-IP connection for subscribers of GPRS and 3G networks. The initial version has GSM codec without encryption, but next releases will support elliptic curve cryptography based on private/public keys".

Thanks for the link Ian :-)

Million Dollar Homepage

I realy wish I had thought of this!

Skype clutter

I took a look at the Skype website this morning and was amazed at how much product there is - maybe too much? Recent months have given birth to a number of new OS platform versions, beta versions of the standard windows version, SkypeIn Beta, Skype Zones Beta, Skype Groups, WeeMees, Skype Buttons - ok, you get my point?
Their web designers and product managers do a good job of laying it out clearly and explaining it well but there is a real danger that Skype ends up running ahead of itself and alienating a growing segment of curious mass-market customers who, as a result of the skype PR blanket, are checking them out and seeing if they "get it" in order to sign-up. Skype needs to somehow seperate the key sign-up benefit and process from the peripheral benefit for the more adept and accustomed user. Maybe they should put the additional product options behind the customer sign-in and match the product placement with the activity profile of the sykpe customer? This way, the prospective new user will clearly understand why and how they should sign-up, and they will be able to upsell more services as customers get more confident and explorational with the service. Ebays 10 years of knowledge in web-apps should be put to good use in doing this.

KidsOK

Mobile phone tracking technology allows you to send KidsOK a two-word text whenever you wish, wait a few seconds and receive a pictorial map with the location of your child's mobile marked, without ringing or texting your child's mobile. More info here