By now you must already know that Amazon has launched its MP3 download service to contend with the likes of iTunes. This has been a much anticipated move by Amazon, who is looking forward to displace iTunes from its leadership position.
So what would Amazon do to take on the goliath (iTunes)? Build the Earth’s Biggest Selection of a la Carte DRM-Free MP3 Music Downloads. With this selection they plan to offer cheaper, DRM free high quality music (256 kbps) to its users. The beta service boasts over 2 Million DRM free songs as part of their portfolio. These songs are available for direct high quality MP3 downloads, which allows them to compatible with “Any” device in the market.
Now, I am not going to review this service again for you. I am sure you can read Om Malik’s or Paul Stamatiou’s great posts or play with the service yourself. Although I am taking a critical look at the service as a consumer to see if it convinces me to move away from iTunes. So the intent here is to use the service as a user would and offer my verdict.
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This week the carnival comes to sunny Santa Cruz California. This is my first time hosting the carnival, so I am pretty excited to present some great posts from some really great bloggers.
I have categorized these posts in broad topics for your reading pleasure.
Security and Privacy
Malcolm who runs a blog on Smart-phones has authored a comprehensive post on the growing problem of piracy in the Smart Phone market.
Charles on the other hand looks at privacy and recommends everyone to be careful on what they leave on their cell-phones.
Ben from Masabists introduces the Two Factor Authentication for bettering mobile authentication.
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Few weeks back I wrote about NBC breaking up with Apple in order to sell its content elsewhere. The popular knowledge at the time was that NBC will leverage Amazon’s Unbox service to sell their TV shows. In addition NBC also announced partnership with FOX to launch a new web video distribution service called HULU. Not to mention that NBC.com itself hosts videos of all its shows and users can access episodes for the whole season.
In that post, I predicted that NBC may dabble into alternate business models. They may offer access to free content purely based on ads, something which Apple does not provide. Following were my exact words:
I believe many more media networks will go down this path and explore their own delivery methods. Many (including NBC) will leverage ad based model to inherently make the content free.
Lo and behold, today NBC made a press release, announcing a new service called “NBC Direct“. The idea is to offer ad supported free downloads to users for its popular shows. The service will launch its beta program in October and will offer downloads on windows PC. The content will be available for viewing for 1 week after download and will expire after that.
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I have been itching to write about this service for past few weeks. I have been part of their beta test program and am managing my finances through their service. Unfortunately they had a press embargo and hence I couldn’t blog about them. They officially launched yesterday at TechCrunch40 and lifted the restriction on bloggers.
Mint is a new service, which is taking on the likes of Quicken and MS Money. I have been a long time user of Quicken and wasn’t quite happy with it. Not all my banks supported Quicken and it was too complicated to use.
Now Mint tries to simplify all of that. It has a very simple interface for adding your banks and credit card accounts. Within minutes I registered all my banks with the service. I must say that some banks require additional registration information like ING Direct, which can cumbersome at times. Once registered Mint automatically downloads all the transactions from the banks and stores it in the account.
Once you have registered all your accounts, Mint automatically organizes all the transactions into pre-defined categories. These categories help understanding the nature of the transaction. In addition to the categories the service allows you to tag any specific transactions with your own data. One can change categories can even set rules for transactions of certain nature. Very similar to email rules, but simpler.
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I finally know what I want for this Christmas. No not the iPhone or the iTouch, but iCache. Well if you are planning to buy me a iPhone, I am not going to stop you 
iCache is a device solving a problem, which has been around for a while and no one has figured out a good way to handle it. In this day and age most of us carry multiple credit cards and customer loyalty cards. Every retailer I go to has some sort of a loyalty program, which I end up taking up for its benefits. Even if it doesn’t have any monetary benefits, some retailers mandate a card (like Blockbuster and Costco) for normal transactions.
Now if you are like me, over time you must have collected 8 to 10 cards. This is after I tried consolidating last year using my drivers license. So my wallet has gotten bulky and quite frankly has become a pain in the a**.
iCache has solved this in a really smart way. They have developed a really thin device which smartly stores a generic card with a magnetic stripe. Using their service, one can load all existing credit and loyalty cards. Then they can use their intuitive menu to select the card they want to use at that moment. The device temporarily enables the generic card’s magnetic stripe with the data for the card you selected.
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Any new blogger knows that building reader traffic is long and hard process. I have been going through this process myself since inception of this blog. Bloggers typically use recommendations from experts like John Chow, ProBlogger etc. They offer multiple strategies for building traffic over time.
These strategies are sometimes expensive or really slow. BlogRush a new beta service aims to solve that in a very simple fashion. Once the blogger registers on their service, they receive code for enabling a widget (just like the one on the right column) on their respective blog.
The widget displays posts from other blogs with similar topics. However the important thing to note is that BlogRush displays posts from the registered blogger, on other blogs as many times the widget gets displayed. So if the blogger gets 100 page views, her / his blog headlines will be displayed 100 times on other blogs hosting BlogRush widget.
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Tim Trent of Marketing By Permission is hosting the carnival this time. He has a great collection of awesome posts for your reading pleasure. He has selected my post on Mobile Ads for this edition. Seems like I was close to being the “Post of the Week”. Go check it out.
Next week the carnival will be hosted by your’s truly, so don’t forget to check back.
