Nintendo takes on Apple & Rim with Smartphone

My latest prediction.

How Many Billions Will Google End Up Paying For Facebook?

Imeem.com – Seems pretty damn awesome so far

imeem is an online community where artists, fans & friends can promote their content, share their tastes, and discover new blogs, photos, music and video. Here are some of the things you can do on imeem:

Discover Enjoy the latest videos, music, photos, or blogs posted by your friends “Pulse” gives you a real-time look at the latest activity on imeem Stay up-to-date with your personal network of fans and friends with “What’s New” notifications Get in-depth stats for all your content and track their popularity Interact Tag, comment, rate, and share any of your friends’ cool (or embarrassing) content Create or join groups for your favorite band, event, topic, and more! Start discussions with other imeem users and make new friends Share Embed your media on other pages (such as your blog, Bebo, etc.) Recommend stuff to your friends or add it to your “Favorites” list Easily add media to your Del.icio.us, WordPress, Blogger, or Typepad account (to name a few)

Want to know more?

The Venice Project

Given that the creators of Kazza and Skype are behind this I’m going to keep an eye on things.  Register to beta test here

What is The Venice Project?
The Venice Project is a new venture that combines the best elements of the TV experience with the most powerful internet technologies, in a way that will redefine the way people think about television. It is not a file-sharing application or a video download service.

5 Charismatic Business Bloggers (WIRED, Riya, NewsVine, Firefox, Mobius)

The Long Tail – Chris Anderson (WIRED)

::HorsePigCow:: life uncommon – Miss Rogue (Rija)

Mike Industries – Mike Davidson (Newsvine)

BlakeRoss.com – Blake Ross (Firefox)

Feld Thoughts – Brad Feld (Mobius Venture Capital)

SCOOP: Email Conversation with Hyperwords CEO on Future Direction

I scooped Techcrunch by checking out Hyperwords 6 days previous to this post made on the 28th:

“I generally don’t write about Firefox plugins, but Hyperwords is one that’s gotten my attention. Like Om says, it’s a must-have product to aid the browsing experience. And I see a business model here, too.
…
Options include searching various engines, looking up text in wikipedia and dictionary.com, emailing text, searching on Google Maps, translation, and searching on Amazon and other commerce sites. The search and commerce traffic will generate revenue (my guess is a dollar or so per year per active user). The translation service is incredibly useful.”

On December 22nd I wrote to Hyperwords and made the suggestion:

Wouldn’t it be great for bloggers if when composing a post you could highlighted and click on a name, movie, word or address you could right-click it and be presented with a popup menu allowing you to automatically hyperlink that word to the relevant page (if applicable and available) on wikipedia, imdb, dictionary or google maps (etc).

The Founder and CEO Frode writes back and cc’s Particia the COO and the Mikhail the Head Progammer:

“Yes, would be cool…You are about 1 year ahead of us, we can’t really deal with editing text yet, just reading, but yes, agree with your direction.”

I wrote this email back to try to get them more interested in me (yes I want a job with a web2.0 startup  (let me know when a better name comes around)):

Frode – with utmost respect and in an admittedly pathetic attempt to pump up my ego a bit – I must ask – am I one year ahead of you in a long term strategic plan that you have layed out? Or, am I on to something that you are 1 year away from being able to accomplish?

Hi Mikhail and Patrciai  🙂

It wouldn’t have to stop there.  Imagine being able to right click on the parent word and being able to instantly link the title of a book to amazon with your amazon affiliate code inserted.

I can picture something like this blowing away the effectiveness of every affiliate program out there and thats an understatement.

A hyperlink that on mouseover brings up a semi transparent bubble off to the side (as to not impose on the potential customer like a pushy salesman) and waits patiently for a few seconds and upon an extended mouseover…becomes opaque (similar to the way new email messages from Outlook pop up when surfing the net for example).

Users would mouseover this bubble and be shown REAL TIME price comparisons and/or reviews for the top 5 peforming products (with affiliate codes inserted automaticall for the content creators) in that category.

Content creators would have all of this link madness created with a simple highlight and right click.

Over to the most successful products become the most linked to.  Millions of blog creators with millions of permalink pages from the past always carrying the most current and relevant affiliate links.

Frode wrote back:

Hi.

And Merry Christmas!

As for your question, I cannot comment on it.

As for your suggestion, yes, different ways of displaying additional, contextual information dynamically is definitively useful and interesting and something worth pursuing  🙂

This is the kind of guy I would like to work for perhaps.  Engage me Frode.  Talk to me.  Hire me!

I’m either predicting your strategy OR giving you a better one – I must be good for something 😉

“Social Commerce” – Turnkey Stores Integrated into Blogs

Everyone is throwing around their 2006 predictions right now including these guys, Jason Calacanis and John Battelle.

For now I’m just going to point to this prediction by Steve Rubel which feels like one of the best I’ve read so far.

Watch for sites like Amazon, Froogle and Yahoo to develop turnkey stores that can be integrated into blogs. This will take affiliate programs to the next level. It’s also possible that some electronic commerce sites will partner with the major blogging platforms to make co-branded social commerce even easier. Let’s not forget that startups are hard at work here too, as David Beisel notes. Finally, we may see bloggers who have built a following in certain subject matters, like Thomas Hawk who writes about photography, to go the Treonauts route as they become disenfranchised with e-commerce sites. (via)