Ray-Deo

Read the classics in email-sized chunks with DailyLit

No time to read? Email service Daily Lit sends you a bite-sized chunk of a novel to your inbox every day.

Search for a book you’d like to read via email from an impressive list of classics in the public domain - like Gulliver’s Travels or Moby Dick - and receive it in parts, one a day, at a scheduled time, via email. The message isn’t too long and gives you the option to get the next installment immediately, or wait till the next day’s scheduled time.

From Lifehacker

technorati tags:Daily, Reading, Books, Online

Podango Launches Public Beta

Podango went into public beta today, so anyone can access the site and, if they care to, apply to be a station director.

Podango aims to combine multiple podcasts, which may only be publishing weekly, into a 3-5 shows per day channel with a single RSS feed. Podango will recruite station directors, who in turn will recruit podcasters for their channels, manage the channel using an Ajax drag and drop admin interface, and help recruit advertisers. The hope is that listeners will gain from having a person select the best podcasts for a given category as well as avoid dead air time since shows will be queued one-after-another. For more information on becoming a station director, see this page.

Podango will also generate ad sales for stations, keeping 30% and sharing 70% with station directors and the included podcasters.

From Techcrunch

technorati tags:Podcasts, Beta, NewStations

Yahoo! Mail beta to open to the public starting today

The powerful new Yahoo! Mail beta has opened up for general use starting today. There’s a lot of cool new features, but GMail still stands apart in some important ways. 

The big picture is that Yahoo! is aiming to use ajax to make it’s mail client function like a desktop client. Email messages can be dragged from one folder to another, multiple emails can be open at one time in tabs inside Yahoo! Mail and there’s calendar integration tied to Yahoo! Maps. Blog posting, possibly to a Yahoo! domain that will run more of the company’s ads, and IM both appear to be available through the webmail client as well. These sound like powerful new features.

What’s Gmail got to offer that could top that? A number of things, actually. Yahoo! Mail doesn’t offer the tabbed conversations Gmail does, doesn’t appear to allow emails to be tagged and will still have to prove itself in spam protection and mail search. There’s no word yet whether Yahoo! will increase the storage of free accounts from 1GB to something closer to GMail’s 2.5+GB or increase the 10mb limit on attachments.

From Techcrunch

technorati tags:Yahoo, Mail, Beta, GMail, NewFeatures

Zune Promises MySpace-like Connectivity

The Zune has 802.11 networking built in and you can send a song to your friend for three days or three plays, which ever comes first. The goal, obviously, is to sell music. You can use this as a MySpace-like network of users who pop music to each other with giddy abandon and infect others with their musical stylings on the train (perhaps a sandwich board that says “I’ll Send My New HARDCORE RAP Single to Your Zune. Talk to me. Please?”) Once you get back home you can connect to the Zune Marketplace - and presumably an artists home page - where you can learn more and buy music.

[Picture courtesy of Engadget]

Clearly all the data isn’t in yet, but this definitely pushes the MP3 player out of the pocket and into the realm of social networking. The question, obviously, is what is Apple going to do about this and, as a corrallary, how low Apple and Creative shares are selling as we speak? Perhaps MS could create a “Zune Inside” logo for those guys? Or maybe fund a halfway house for underconnected MP3 players?

From Techcrunch

technorati tags:Zune, Music, MySpace, Connectivity