Impatient lotharios and time-challenged romance hunters should welcome the launch of online dating service, Match.com’s new MatchMobile text application.
The new service for cell phones sends subscribers text messages when they get a ‘wink’ or e-mail from another Match.com subscriber, and if they don’t like the look of them, they can also search for other potential matches from their mobiles.
Continue reading Match.com Introduces MatchMobile Dating Service
A credit information group has warned that users of popular Internet networking sites may be putting themselves at increased risk of suffering identity theft
Continue reading Social Networkers Warned Over ID Theft
The online music social network Last.fm have announced a global deal with SONY BMG Music Entertainment to make the record company giants vast catalogue of tracks available for streaming.
The deal will make Sony’s bumper-sized music catalogue available to the 20 million users of Last.fm’s online radio streaming service, with the option to buy the tracks via the music downloads store, 7digital, or through Amazon.
Continue reading Last.fm Signs Up With Sony BMG Music
UK music service last.fm has been sold to US media giant CBS, whose empire covers TV, radio and Web.
Last.fm is the darling of the ‘new’ Internet kids, as it is based on buzzword-tastic technology. While that’s true, it doesn’t take away from the fact that it is really rather good, using the listen preferences of everyone else on the service to automatically pick the tracks that probably match the music that you like.
Its major strength is that it throws in tracks that you may well have never found under your own volition – vital in a world where personal playlists can kill variety.
At £140m ($280m) the BBC are calling it the “largest-ever UK Web 2.0 acquisition.” Quite how that’s defined is anyone guess, but it is a lot of lolly, so trebles all round.
One of the founders, Martin Stiksel told the BBC that “this move will really support us to get every track ever recorded and every music video ever made onto Last.fm,” quite an ambition, but as he added, “with a strong partner like CBS, this is now within our reach.”
It’s planned that the site and company will continue to operate separately under it’s own branding.
Stiksel also bigged up the UK’s capital city, by saying “being in London has helped us; it’s the best place to do things with music full stop. It’s the place that leads the world.” Hurrah!
(Via)
A little bird has told us that they have received an email from Christer Holloman of … shock, horror … First Tuesday. It’s time to sell up and ship out of any and all Internet-touching businesses as Christer tells all that they are to carry out a “secret launching event in London after the summer.”
First Tuesday, the Bastard child of Nick Denton (See picture) and a couple of others, quickly became a byword for greed in London back at the end on the ’90’s.
Continue reading First Tuesday Returning: Warning Bubble Burst 2.0
Just about every time you turn on the gogglebox these days there’s invariably a pair of inanely grinning monkeys gushing over some home improvement project or another, so we weren’t surprised to hear that the creators of Lastminute.com were launching a new site targeting the massive DIY market.
Continue reading Lastminute.com Founders To Launch DIY Site
You can just imagine the cries of What!!! when we heard that boo.com was relaunching.
The first time around boo.com was at the peek of stupid behaviours in the UK Internet scene in the pre-bust days and its excesses are well documented. As we’re sure you all know, they burnt through close to $160m in 18 months, trying to create a portal (as they were called back in the day) to sell clothes through. They went bust in 2000.
Well the FT covers the story (by someone with an infeasibly long name, Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson) that someone has bought the domain and has launched a travel site using it – this time with the golden charms of Web 2.0. Does this harken the cry that Web 2.0 is just about to bubble burst?
Ray Nolan, the founder of Web Reservations International, who currently appear to be doing OK with €19m of earnings last year, pointed out to the FT that “It’s catchy, and it works across languages.” True enough – and the tarnish on the name might just have faded far enough to not be negative. Well, it got them in the FT and us writing about it, didn’t it?
If you don’t live your life in the Blogosphere or on Digg – and why should you? – you’ll have missed out on many knickers getting in a twist.
It all started off about the posting on Digg of an encryption key for HD-DVD that is intrinsic to the security of HD-DVD content.
Next major thing – many alleged that the administrators of Digg were removing posts about this key and the growing number of anti-digg comments that were littering the system.
Continue reading Digg HD-DVD Censorship Fiasco
We’ve been feeling the love for the Netvibes aggregator for some time, and we look to be cuddling up a bit closer now that the company is letting users publish their home pages as personal Web portals – for free.
In case you haven’t already hooked up to this Web 2.0-tastic, AJAX-fuelled marvel, Netvibes is a customisable home page that lets you add and configure a personalised page to include live news feeds, Last.FM players, blog updates, weather reports, text, image and video search tools, email inboxes and a ton of other stuff.
The Paris-based company is now hoping to sock it to The Man by letting users publish their own standalone portals, and steal a march on the big Internet playaz like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL.
“The portal is dead. Long live the portal,” air-punched Tariq Krim, Netvibes’ founder and chief executive.
Mix’n’matching the webThe power of the Netvibes portal means that users can mix and match email accounts from the likes of Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo, and add whatever content they fancy, regardless of the source.
The Web based interface is a marvel of modern web technology too, letting users drag and drop ‘modules’ around the page without any need to delve into the dark world of coding.
The new Netvibes Universe service lets users design their own homepage and slap it on the web in minutes via the Netvibes Ecosystem. These pages can be configured to include personalised feeds such as videos, photos, podcasts, news, e-mail and eBay auction notifications.
Netvibes has also signed up over 100 publishing partners, including pop stars and media companies like Time, USA Today, and the Washington Post, who will offer their own versions of Netvibes homepages.
Welcome to the world of Web 2.0
“Netvibes provides open access to the world of Web 2.0 content,” said Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li. “Traditionally, you had to ask each company permission to do this on any Web site. Now you can read Gmail alongside Hotmail and Yahoo Mail,” she added.
Li reckoned that even folks working in Google and Yahoo felt that the big boys should give up trying to stop surfers from using competing products, as the shiny Internet of the Noughties means that services need to live side-by-side with competitors.
“With Web 2.0, no one can own the whole space. In the past, you wanted everyone to come to your site. Right now, you need to figure out how to distribute your content to the widest number of platforms,” said Netvibes’ Krim. “We try to be the glue between all these Web services,” he continued.
Netvibes Universe goes live next Monday.
Software company Smaato and mobile media types Handmark have pressed the flesh, slapped some backs and delivered mutual high-fives as the two companies announce a strategic partnership to distribute Smaato News.
Smaato News is a RSS reader for smartphones that lets users read RSS feeds of their favourite Websites and blogs and get other information on the move.
Currently available for Palm OS, Windows Mobile Pocket PC and Symbian S60 devices, the program comes with a collection of re-defined RSS feeds to get users started, and there’s the option to add custom feeds.
The program can also provide various services like weather forecasts and allows users to share their feeds with friends via SMS or email.
Feeds can be synchronised via a desktop connection (Palm OS and Windows Mobile only) or over the air via a mobile Internet connection.
Although the application is free, the program is supported by adverts which appear on the top section of the screen (“if you see something interesting, don’t hesitate to click,” implores their manual, rather optimistically).
The program can be downloaded from Smaato’s Website, although users may baulk at the amount of space the application takes up: a beefy 640k for the Palm and a positive pie-scoffing 1.80 meg for Windows Mobile.
We couldn’t find an option to save the downloaded RSS feeds to the memory card, so this isn’t a machine for users running smartphones that are already stuffed full of programs.
Funnily enough, we were half way through writing a review of some Palm OS RSS readers and without giving too much away, we’d suggest you wait for our review to go up before installing the Smaato app.
Availability:
Palm OS Smartphones (e.g. Treo 650)
Windows Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition (e.g. Treo 750; O2 XDA)
Symbian S60 (e.g. Nokia N70)