Netizens clamoring for Gmail
Google’s controversial Gmail e-mail service, under invitation-only testing on the Internet, is the toughest ticket in town.
Netizens are offering trades of everything from tours of Barcelona and Tokyo to home-cooked spaghetti sauce in exchange for a very rare Gmail account invitation. Those lucky enough to already have an account are auctioning invitations for $100 to $150 on eBay.
Some 20,000 technophiles have posted on Sean Michaels’ gmailswap.com Web site (http://gmailswap.revhost.net), begging those with access to let them in, in exchange for a swap.
“They want to prove their Internet credibility by getting in before anyone else and nabbing a good account name,” says Michaels, 22, a recent graduate of McGill College in Montreal.
Gmail won’t be available to the general public until late summer.
A new era for TV
Digital cable TV subscribers frustrated with having to have a set-top tuner box and another remote can celebrate Independence Day on July 1.
That’s when the Federal Communications Commission starts requiring cable systems to be ready to handle a new generation of digital cable-ready TVs and home theater units. The new gear can tune in digital and high-definition TV signals without a cable system’s proprietary set-top box.
The products have slots for a CableCard — obtained from the cable company and similar to a laptop PC card — which will ensure subscribers gets the services they ordered.
Beyond cable-ready TVs, the change will make possible a range of new product choices. For example, if the box your operator offers lacks a connection for your digital-video recorder, you can buy a different box that does — or buy a new DVR with a card slot and its own tuner.
Any CableCard-enabled product will work on any cable system. All that’s needed is the card.
Tomorrow’s best-selling authors may be writing Weblogs today. So says Kate Lee, an assistant at International Creative Management, who spends part of each day reviewing several dozen blogs in an effort to scour for publishing talent.
“Most writers are not getting published in magazines or literary journals,” she told the New Yorker. “For some unconventional voices, for people who don’t have connections, blogs can be an entryway into the game.” Lee’s got two clients at work on books: Elizabeth Spiers, writer of The Kicker, and Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com.
The cost of a legitimate music download is going up. Way up, in some cases.
Album prices are rising at all the services, including Apple’s iTunes Music Store and the revived Napster. Many titles sell for $13.95 and higher, up from a standard $9.99.
Singles had been a nearly universal 99 cents. But at Sony’s new Connect, tracks longer than a standard pop tune are priced from $1.99 to $5.99.
Adding to the confusion: Many releases are sold as “single song” purchases only, so consumers lose discount pricing for a one-click album purchase.
Music services pin part of the problem on copyright issues. Some songs haven’t been cleared for digital use. So the services sell “partial” albums, which requires a higher fee.
Unlicensed free download services like KaZaA and Morpheus dominated digital music until Apple’s iTunes launched in April 2003. Now Musicmatch, Wal-Mart, MusicNow, Napster and Sony have all entered the legitimate market, and Microsoft plans a download store. The business is expected to grow from a projected $308 million now to $4.4. billion in 2008, according to market tracker Forrester Research.
Companies are reporting a decrease in costs and an increase in productivity by using “Wikis,” Web sites where anyone can post material as easily as writing an e-mail. Business Week reports dozens of companies are using Wikis to eliminate meetings, conference calls and e-mail threads.
Calling them a “onetime nerd novelty,” the magazine reported the developer of one Wiki program said two-thirds of its downloads are going to businesses.
“I could justify the cost of the Wiki just from the lower teleconferencing bills,” said Aaron Burcell, director of marketing for Stata Laboratories. The Wiki Tourbus is a good place to find examples: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TourBus.
New software that lets anyone create unique cellular phone rings for free has some record labels worried it will kill the cash cow that is the ring tone.
The software, called Xingtone, evokes the same reaction from the labels that greeted the original Napster. The fear is that people will make ring tones out of pirated songs, compounding the file-sharing problem while robbing the music industry of a new source of revenue.
The quest for a distinctive cell phone ring has created a $3 billion global market for everything from computer-generated renditions of such classics as The Temptations “Just My Imagination,” to near-CD-quality snippets of popular songs like OutKast’s “Hey Ya!.”
Ring tones are brisk business in Europe and Japan. They’re catching on fast in the United States, where sales are expected reach $140 million by year’s end, according to market research firm Yankee Group.
But just as the record labels have begun hailing ring tones as a welcome windfall to help offset free-falling CD sales, along comes Xingtone.
The Los Angeles company’s $15 software, sold online, allows anyone with average computer skills to take an MP3 file or favorite CD track, trim it to create a 30-second ring tone and send it to the phone with the press of a button — just like a text message.