Ray-Deo

Microsoft Spinoff Wallop Launches

Wallop, previously a semi-forgotton Microsoft Research “sandbox” social network and photo sharing project, was spun off into a new, independent, venture backed business earlier this year (details here). Tonight at 9 pm California time, Wallop is launching a semi-public beta.

Wallop is a Flash based social network that will compete with Myspace, Facebook. It includes free unlimited storage for people to upload photos, videos and music.

Unlike the other social networks, Wallop CEO Karl Jacob says he has no plans to ever put advertising on the site. It just lessens the user experience, he says. Instead, Wallop wants a piece of the $3 trillion per year U.S. market for self expression items (clothes, furniture, beauty supplies, etc.). As sites like Cyworld have shown, people are willing to spend money for online expression items, too (Cyworld brings in a reported $300,000 per day in microtransactions to its users).

So Wallop has created a marketplace for “self expression” items on the site. Flash developers can create items and sell them to users. Music clips, animated widgets, artwork, avatars, clothing for avatars, etc. will all be for sale. Wallop handles payments and DRM, and takes 30% of the sale price. The rest goes to the seller.

Marketplace functionality is still being built, but Wallop says they will have the ability for sellers to create auction sales for one of a kind items, limited edition sales, etc. in the near future.

Invited users will be given five invitations each that can be used to invite others into Wallop. More invitations will be given to users based on how active they are in the service. Look for the service to leave beta and open to the general public in early 2007.

Wallop is based in San Francisco and has 27 employees. They’ve raised a total of $13 million in venture capital over two rounds, from Bay Partners , Consor Capital and Norwest Venture Partners.

Screen shots of Wallop are below.

From Techcrunch

technorati tags:Wallop, Networking, Marketplace, Flash, Community

Japan gets PlayStation 3 price cut

Sony Corp. said Friday it will slash the price of its
much-anticipated PlayStation 3 video game console in Japan by 20
percent, heating up the competition in the next-generation gaming war
against rivals Microsoft and Nintendo.The announcement comes
just days after Microsoft Corp. announced that it would roll out an
external high definition DVD player for its Xbox 360 in an effort to
match the PlayStation 3, due to be released in November with its own
Blu-ray DVD technology.

From CNN Tech

technorati tags:PS3, Sony, Pricecut, Cheap, Gaming, Console

TechMeme Invents New Kind of Advertisment

TechMeme (formerly tech.memeorandum) is a site that bloggers and others check frequently for news. It is an entirely automated web service that looks at what bloggers are talking about, and linking to, and decides what is news based on that analysis. In many ways it is an anti-Digg. Humans have no say in what appears on the TechMeme homepage, other than by blogging about it.

TechMeme is focused on technology news. It, along with sister sites Memeorandum (politics), WeSmirch (celebrity gossip) and BallBug (baseball news), is one of the more important technical innovations that has come out of the new web.

Tonight Gabe Rivera, the founder of TechMeme, just invented something else - advertisements delivered via RSS. NOT advertisements embedded withing RSS feeds, but actually using RSS as the delivery mechanism.

You can see the initial ads, which are for sale on TechMeme (details here), in the right sidebar on the home page of the site. The ads are also shown in the image to the left.

Advertisers send the ad to Techmeme via RSS (typically this would come from a blog, but any content would work). If the advertiser wants to change the ad, they simply change the RSS content.

From Techcrunch

technorati tags:Advertisments, TechMeme, RSS

Scrapblog brings powerful media layout to the web

Scrapblog is presenting at DEMO this week and their new software is a great example of just how much can be done by web based applications. It’s a Flash application that lets users drag and drop photos, video, text and audio onto a background image to build scrapbooks that can be printed as a photo-book, burned to DVD, exported as a photoset to Flickr and soon will be exportable to YouTube and other video sites as a narrated slide show.

The amount of smooth control over layout that Scrapblog allows is really impressive. It’s a tool that will appeal beyond the usual scrapbooking demographic and could be of great use in making things like artist portfolios and online graphic presentations. Even scrapbooking, though, is one of the leading folk arts in the US today. Don’t let that dissuade you if you’re an art snob; Scrapbook is lots of fun to use just for its web interface.

From Techcrunch

technorati tags:Scrapblog, Preview, Publishing