Flickr, the best photo site

It’s not really a startup anymore, or even news. Yahoo has already bought them, and it seems everyone already know about them.

…But if you don’t, be sure to check out Flickr. Even if you hate pictures, you will have to admire the excellent user interface. This site is so well designed, on so many levels, that it makes the other photo sites look downright Soviet by comparison.

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Xiren and the music industry

Xiren is an old school friend (he went by a different name when we were in grade school together) who is having a successful career as a musician/singer.

The reason I mention him now is that I’ve just received his latest fan newsletter, and am always impressed with how creative he is with embracing technology. He keeps in touch with fans via a very comprehensive and interactive website, sends them peridic newsletters with news, offers, and schedules of shows. He offers free samples of music, records concerts, provides streaming of live radio shows, and sells merchandise directly to fans. He also records videos of shows and makes them available for streaming or download or purchase as DVDs.

In short, as technology continues to force change in the music industry, artists like Xiren are embracing the opportunity and exploring its potential. Such a contrast to the attitude of the major music labels, who seem to exist only in a state of defensive entitlement protection.

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Carphone Warehouse, please acquire Iliad

Free, the hot broadband provider of France, just released their latest numbers.

They now have 1.3 million ADSL subs, of which almost 900k are on unbundled lines. Free have kept their overall 17% ADSL market share, and 43% market share of unbundled lines.

They are innovative and profitable. For 30 Euros/month, you get blazing 20 mb/s ADSL2+, unlimited local and national telephony, 80 digital TV channels with option to get 200 channels, and a bunch of digital radio stations. All this is delivered in a single box that plugs into your TV, can plug into your home stereo, and has built in Wi-Fi to talk to your computer.

This service is SO unbelievably further ahead of what is currently being offered by its competitors and even neighboring countries like Spain, the UK, and Germany.

With this in mind, I dedicate this post to the management of Carphone Warehouse in the UK, and implore them to buy Iliad, the parent company of Free. Let me repeat that in bold: Carphone Warehouse, if you’re listening, please acquire Iliad. You have been boldly expanding throughout Europe. You are an innovative company that is achieving great success with your TalkTalk product, but even you must recognize that long-term TalkTalk as a standalone voice product doesn’t have a great future. You know that voice will be bundled with ADSL, the way Free is doing it today. You must surely see that buying Free would give you amazing technology to complement the Europe-wide retail, marketing, and distribution network you’ve built up.

If you don’t move fast….someone else, someone with much less competence (of which there is a rather long list of candidates in the telco industry), might beat you to it and ruin it for us consumers.

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Bambi knows best

Bambi Fransisco makes the case for Google needing its own IM client. At the end of her piece she coyly says that Yahoo tried to buy Skype earlier last month, but the deal fell through.

Is this a hint recommending Google grab onto Skype? She wouldn’t be the first in the blogosphere to point in this direction…(sorry, too lazy to go find the 3–4 links I’ve seen this idea tossed around).

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EasyHotel has launched!

EasyHotel has just launched, brought to you by the guy who started EasyJet and a bunch of other “easy” branded companies.

Like the other “easy” companies, the proposition comes in two parts. The first is to unbundle the traditional offering, so that customers can pick and choose what they wish to pay for rather than be forced to to pay for unwanted extras. The second is to extend yield management, which allows for pricing to vary with supply and demand. In practice, this means that the earlier you buy the service, the better the price.

The pitch of a hotel room in central London for 20 pounds per night (about 30 Euros or 35 US dollars) is appealing, but I’m not so sure about the rooms– the smallest ones are just 6 square meters (including the bathroom!) and have no window!

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Citizen journalists giving away copyright?

Jeff Jarvis has interesting commentary on Scoopt, a website that offers to represent to the media normal people who take newsworthy photographs.

So someone who takes a good picture of say, a Tsunami, would have Scoopt license the photograph to the media on his/her behalf, in exchange for a share of license revenues.

Jarvis rightly points out that this is a very “closed” old-media way of approaching content just when the current is flowing towards a more “open” model. He also mentions that much of the mainstream media in the UK solicited pictures of the terrorist bombings in London from citizens. The media asked for these contributions for free, and for the most part citizens seemed not to mind giving the content away.

Now my question is, does that content stay uncopyrighted, and in the public domain, or is the old media just taking ownership of this content itself? Seems to me citizens willing to give up photos to the media for free should do so explicitly under a Creative Commons license to prevent the mainstream media from just appropriating it themselves.

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Cool company: Intellifit

I learned about this cool company via Jean Michel Billaut, and have to say I'm really impressed. Intellifit will take hyper-precise measurements of your body in order for you to get clothes that fit perfectly! Their method is fully automated and you don't have to take off your clothes to be measured. They use what looks like a large phone booth, equipped with antennas that use low power radio waves to take a complete 3D picture of your body. The whole thing takes 10 seconds. This is the best value-add (from their website): "After stepping out of the Intellifit booth, a consumer receives a printout listing the brands, styles and sizes in that mall or store or online that will fit them best." To be honest, one I'm assured that the clothing will fit me, I would have zero barrier left to buying all my clothes via the internet.

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Touch&Glide iron has legs / knows how to use ‘em - Engadget - www.engadget.com

Engadget has a post about an iron that has little legs that come out when you let go of it.

Now, this is innovative, but what I'd *really* like someone out there to sell me is a cordless iron. I would like to keep the iron charging somewhere like a palm pilot, and when I need to use it, not worry about having to iron near a socket, and tangling with the cord which seems to always get in the way.

I searched www.become.com for this product and didn't find it anywhere...someone, please invent this!

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Interesting Iraq war coverage

Michael Yon is actually there. Full of good stuff, interesting detail that you’d never get from stale, always-read-the-same mainstream media.

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Skype worth 3 billion?

Cringley apparently has the inside scoop on how News Corp almost closed a deal last week to buy Skype for $3 billion. That number is not a misprint!

He speculates at the end that the acquisition was never serious, but to still have stirred up the market value to this amount is amazing.

If the story is true, here’s two possibilities:

1– Murdoch didn’t want to buy Skype, but knowing that some of his media/cable/telco/internet competitors are interested, is more than happy to step in and drive up the price to make it painfully expensive for whoever does buy them. Kind of like Vodafone sitting there bidding for AT&T against Cingular– one suspects that Vodafone’s participation was only to make Cingular overpay, which would effectively help Verizon (which Vodafone owns 45%).

2– Murdoch is trying to establish himself as a leading indicator of bubble behaviour. It was, after all, this same man that tried to buy PointCast for $400 million in the Web1.0 bubble days. We all remember how it was finally sold for a few million just a couple years later. Offering $3 billion for Skype could be seen as the encore to paying almost $580 million for MySpace.

It would be kind of interesting if Skype were bought for some insane amount. The inflationary impact on the Estonian economy would be pretty high, I imagine!

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