Amazon has potential to become the next iTunes

Mashable reports that Amazon might be launching it’s DRM free music download service on or around September 17th. Armed with the music catalogs of music giants Universal and EMI and selling most tracks for 99 cents or less, there are some reasons worth considering on why Amazon could become the next leader in the music download space.

• Amazon already sells a lot of music and media on CDs, and has all the necessary infrastructure and customers for this new service.
• Amazon loves APIs and webservices, it won’t be long before developers and amazon affiliates will be able to create interesting apps using ECS (Amazon’s webservice for that allows developers to access their product-related data), who knows, someone might even create an iTunes plugin that integrates amazon to your iTunes/iPod.
• This is entirely DRM free music, which means it’s not windows-only unlike many many other iTunes competitors out there, amazon will be delivering a truly cross-platform music download service.

What do you think? Does Amazon have what it takes to become the next iTunes?

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mylivesearch beta goes live, doesn’t even support Firefox!

Just got my beta invite from my live search - a search engine startup that claims to be the “first true live search engine”.

I’d been looking forward for this beta launch for some time, and was pretty excited upon getting the email with a username and password to test out the brand new SE. I logged in from an ubuntu desktop with firefox that I use as my primary computer at work. What do I see upon logging in? not a search engine, but this:

Your browser/operating system is not currently supported by Mylivesearch.

Wow! a search engine is supposed to be the most basic of web-apps. heh, what are these guys thinking by not supporting, of all things, the firefox browser?!

Update: Just checked again from a kubuntu laptop with firefox, looks like they are supporting firefox now, but I still can’t search from the linux OS - Mac and Linux support, is coming soon, states the page I am shown in place of any search results.

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The Official eBay facebook App goes live

Finally! Arguably the world’s biggest e-retail brand - eBay has launched it’s very own app for the facebook social networking platform (a.k.a - The Social OS).

eBay has finally launched its Facebook application, which enables you to share your eBay items within your Facebook profile. While there are a handful of Facebook apps that have been created to interact with eBay, this is the official application that’s been created by eBay itself.

There’s a good level of integration for your eBay account to work within Facebook, showing items you’ve found on eBay (your watchlist) and check out the items your friends have added to their watchlists as well. Security options let you pick and choose what information you want to share, and how this information is shared.

Mashable has the story…

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Happy Birthday, India!

Today, 15th of August 2007 marks the 60th year of India’s Independence from foreign rule and the birth of the world’s largest democracy.

Happy Independence day, All!

Enjoy your freedom while it lasts - before (you vote for) the communists to rule the country in the next elections.

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Twitter goes the No-Follow route

Apparently, This happened at least as early as 8th of this month.

Folks, remove Twitter from your list of PageRank sources and drop links for fun and traffic only. I wonder whether particular people change their linking behavior on Twitter or not. I won’t.

Just another victim of the nofollow plague (Sebastian’s Pamphlets)

[via Robert Scoble’s Link blog]

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YPN now using paypal to pay publishers

It is probably obvious from some of my posts here that I like paypal, and so does Yahoo!, I guess. Yahoo’s publisher network is now offering the option of receiving payments via paypal. Cool!

More on: Affiliate Fortune Cookies, Affiliate Tip

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Gmail Competing with DotMac?

heh, A couple of days ago, Apple announced increased email (and iDisk) storage for .Mac Members - from 1GB originally to a new limit of 10 GB. Today, Google Blogoscoped posts that

Some (gmail users) are reporting that Gmail is now showing almost 9 gigabyte (9,030 MB, to be exact)

Makes me wonder why the gmail team would even bother looking at what is happening at .Mac - everything google gives away for free, .Mac is selling at 99.95/year - although some people, so heavily influenced by apple’s reality distortion, actually pay for it - that is a crowd too small to consider.

Maybe it’s just a co-incidence, nothing to do with what happened with .Mac a few days ago, but an interesting co-incidence nonetheless.

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How about a 1 TB hard disk on your personal computer?

Since apple announced the new iMacs a few hours ago today, I couldn’t help checking out the apple website and see what cool new features and sexy new looks the new iMacs have.

of all the fancy stuff, one thing in particular listed on the imac’s tech specs page is something that I think would be ultra-cool to have in a new computer –

The 24 inch model has

Optional 500GB, 750GB, or 1TB Serial ATA 7200-rpm hard drive

I must have re-read that sentence like 5 times to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, a 1 TB hard drive running at full 7200 rpm speed? Cool!

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Amazon Flexible Payments Service is US only

So, Amazon just launched the Flexible Payments Service as a part of their webservices offering - what looks like, from the pricing and other details on the page to be something very useful except for the fact that they are only offering the service to those with a credit card issued by a US bank.

Translated for me and my company, this means that paypal and the international merchant account with CCavenue are the only two ways a business physically not located in the US but doing business there can accept payments.

I was totally hoping that this would be an international service not just limited to the US when this was first announced. Nevermind though, paypal still rocks! (Yes, I read all the negative comments about paypal, but it’s just a question of using the service wisely and not falling for phishing, etc. attempts, while also offering consumers a second option other than paypal to pay for their purchases. Paypal IS secure and protects from fraud as long as the sellers and buyers take the standard common-sense fraud-prevention measures themselves first, and leave the rest on the payment service)

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