TinyURL.com

My brother sent me this today. Its called tinyURL.com and it esssentially shrinks a long cut and paste URL into a short 24 letter version that is handy for emails & on mobiles. The key is the link doesnt get broken by different email settings etc.

Why is this interesting?

Each URL a user gets shortened using tinyURL.com is unique i.e If I am looking at a car page and someone else looks at that same car page then it gives the same URL by TinyURL.com when the link is submitted. Therefore this interest can be tracked by them. This interest in a particular car is clearly worth a lot as there is a high chance someone is researching to buy such a car, if they have bothered to shorten the URL to get send it to someone else (maybe the wife?) to review.

Now if your an advertiser selling similar cars then you will want to place your ad right here. It really doesnt get any better in terms of targeting ad's to potential buyers of your product. For interviews and analysis go to David Berlinds blog at http://blogs.zdnet.com/Berlind/?p=200 . He thinks its the next YouTube. I'm not so sure but its certainly an interesting tool for contextual advertising.

BT Vision & Apple TV

I met with the commercial head of BT Vision today to get an update ( and sell some content of course) and I have to say as IPTV services go this is the one that I am going to sign to. OK I live in the UK so it makes sense geographically but the features that are being built into this platform - movies, TV, freeview (free to air), plus niches - sports, ethnic channels (watch out for an Aussie channel I'm working on for my own indulgence), food, etc. Plus community and user generated features like users creating channels, uploading all their media, sharing with friends, chat, video conferencing, instant messenger the list goes on. You get a free box that has 'freeview' (free digital channels) plus into into your TV and connect to a min. 2MB connection. To watch you either pay a monthly subscription or rent shorts, episodes, movies which are streamed. You will also be able to downlaod to own (D.T.O) and watch on your TV or PC.

Now I compare that to Steve Jobs announcement yesterday and while his Apple TV box 'looks' pretty and has a really nice slick interface you still have to pay US $299 for the box plus have a computer connected to serve the media &/or be tied into i-Tunes. Its damn hard to bet against Apple on this but since I'll have to wait to see their box in action I'm going to give BT IPTV a run.

I'll let you know how this baby performs once I'm up & streaming.

The Venice Project

The guys behind Kazaa and Skype plan to disrupt TV as much as they did with music and Telecoms

http://gigaom.com/2006/12/21/first-look-venice-project/

Screen shots at the bottom.

My view: the biggest thing this will do is allow you to real-time recommend a program or channels to your mates as well as ‘program’ your own channels and send them to your mates like you can do on Pandora ( see www.pandora.com )