Abhishek Tiwari

This morning during my daily FeedGrazing (yay, I invented a new term ;-)), I came across an interesting job related video on Xobni’s blog. For those who don’t know, Xobni is a hot new start-up trying to address Email overload challenges (that topic is left alone for some other post).

They have created this video as a Job post to attract new talent to join their workforce. The video, created in a very fun and cute way does the job very well. It explains the work environment, the people and the overall culture of the company. Here is the video (more on their Jobs page):

Frankly this is a very unique way for companies to lure in the right talent. Most posts on any job sites are text based and inherently dry. Most of the time they are copied from other places. They almost never convey the culture and environment of the company. go on reading »

Share This

This is an update to my previous post on this subject. Amazon MP3 downloader does support storing songs in iTunes. It’s a preference option hidden in its menu. Thanks to Scott for catching that.

So that makes things a bit easier to deal with. I would still like to see Amazon get rid of the downloader and directly place the song in my iTunes.

Eliminate as many steps as possible and make the experience seamless. That will be a great way to compete with iTunes.

Alternatively Amazon can go fully in the other direction. They can develop a full blown iTunes replacement application. Their developer community already enables great applications with the amazing set of AWS framework. They will have to ensure that its as seamless as iTunes.

Share This

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.

go on reading »

Share This

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.

go on reading »

Share This

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.

go on reading »

Share This