Update: Erick is liveblogging the event.
The speculation over Amazon’s new ebook gadget, called the Kindle, ends on Monday afternoon during a special Amazon press conference in New York. Newsweek’s Steven Levy claims to have had the device for weeks and wrote a glowing seven page cover story review of the Kindle this weekend. He finds no fault with the device (every journalist who had the iPhone in their hands prior to launch thought that device was pretty perfect, too).
The Kindle isn’t the most elegant looking gadget ever created (in fact it looks like it came out of the 70’s), but it packs an impressive list of features and could finally bring ebooks mainstream. That’s something Sony couldn’t accomplish with its much more elegant Sony Reader.
The reason Sony failed? Perhaps because their device requires syncing with a computer to download content. That’s the Kindle’s killer feature - cellular and (probably) wireless internet access that will let users download content directly to the device from the Internet. And the cellular connectivity, which generally costs $60 or more per month, will be included with the device for free says a source close to the company.
Kindle users will also be able to browse the web, and Amazon is offering access to some blogs for a monthly subscription fee (some bloggers are wondering why Amazon is charging for this).
The Kindle will cost $100 more than the $300 it takes to get a Sony Reader. It uses the same screen technology - E Ink - as the Sony Reader. that means the display will be viewable in full sunlight and uses very little power.
Amazon isn’t supporting the industry’s open standard around eBooks. Instead they are using their own proprietary format from Mobipocket, a company they acquired in 2005.
More details will emerge tomorrow (and lots and lots of photos) during the press conference. Erick will be live blogging the event.
Classifieds search engine Oodle has just pushed through a major upgrade to its Website, which searches 30 million active classifieds listings across the Web. It is also testing an ad network across other sites that drops a local classified from Oodle’s paid listings at the bottom of a related classifieds search on a partner site as backfill, or as a contextual ad on the side of a page.
Oodle’s new interface offers better guided search across its nine categories (cars, real estate, rentals, jobs, pets, tickets, personals, services, and items for sale). This includes the ability to refine your search in a hunt-and-peck way by selecting multiple sub-categories at once (for instance, you can look for apartments in both Williamsburg and Tribeca, or for Toyotas and BMWs, all in one search).
Depending what category you are looking in there are also lots of helpful geographical sliders and other suggested ways to parse your search (by breed, for pets; by make, price, year or mileage for cars; by neighborhood, square feet, or amenities for real estate; by gender, sexual preference, marital status, smoking habits, hair color, and zodiac sign for personals). Oodle surfaces comparative pricing information in a handy graph for categories where it has enough data, such as cars. (The average price for a used Mini Cooper in New York City, for example, is $18,132 and the 2007 models show the steepest price declines). It also gives an inventory forecast—”We found 258 listings and expect 35 more next week”—based on historical patterns. Most search results can also be seen on a Google map. .
CEO Craig Donato wants to make searching for classifieds across the Web as easy as searching for any retail product or service. But classifieds are a strange beast. He describes some of the challenges people encounter when looking for something listed as a classified:
When it is gone, it is gone—because it is one of a kind. Listings are poorly described and spread across many different sites. Searching is time-consuming. You are not just searching, you are hunting. And good deals tend to go quickly.
His approach at Oodle is to make such searches easier by adding guided categories to help people refine their searches, e-mail alerts and inventory forecasts to help people keep track of listings over time, price comparison tools to help them make a buying decision, and sophisticated spam detection to help them avoid being cheated. The search engine adds more than 500,000 listings a day from 80,000 sources, such as Autobytel, Cars.com, Career Builder, Monster.com, Kijiji, locally-tagged eBay listings, real-estate broker sites, and local newspapers.
Conspicuously absent is Craigslist, which blocked Oodle from searching its listings a couple years ago. “We have a lot more listings than Craigslist,” claims Donato. “They have massive duplication. On Craigslist, you pay with your own time to list again and again.” On Oodle, you pay if you want your listing to stand out from the crowd. “What people are paying for is visibility,” says Donato.
Oodle is creating that visibility, he says, by attracting two million visitors a month. Between 25 to 30 percent of its traffic is coming from partner sites, such as TV-station sites that want to get into the local classifieds business, as well as some regional newspapers that add local listings from Oodle’s paid inventory to their own classifieds listings (and keep the lion’s share of any resulting click-though revenues). Donato say he is in the middle of rolling out about 200 of such partner deals, and expects Oodle to turn its first operating profit next year.
Besides Craigslist, Oodle faces stiff competition from other vertical search engines that focus on classifieds, such as Edgeio, Vast, and LiveDeal. Oodle raised $11 million last March from JAFCO Ventures, Greylock Partners, and Redpoint Ventures.
Disclosure: Michael Arrington is a founder and director of Oodle competitor Edgeio.
Paypal will launch a new virtual credit card payment product Tuesday.
The new service “PayPal Secure Card” generates a one use unique Mastercard number that Paypal users can utilize to make payments on sites that don’t take Paypal. According to Reuters, the software package with PayPal Secure Card automatically recognizes an e-commerce checkout page and fills out the payment information for the user.
The move is said to be in response to Google’s Checkout service (launched June 06) that also stores financial details for secure online payments.
It’s a great idea; not only does this open up Paypal accounts to shopping on sites that don’t take Paypal, it also provides credit card access to folks who don’t have a credit card (or similar credit style debit card), either by choice or because they are unable to obtain one. On the security front it also provides an alternative to using your actual credit card online, a secure way of using your credit card (if linked to your Paypal account) without the risk of your real details being disclosed.
Yahoo’s popular photo-sharing site Flickr will release on Monday the two new geography-related features we reported on a month ago: Flickr Places and a new world map.
While we have not yet had the opportunity to test these new releases, the Places feature appears to be the most substantial of the two. Flickr has chosen 100,000 locations across the globe (such as cities, states, countries, and regions) and created pages to display photos taken at them. So, for example, if you want to check out photos of Moscow, you can visit a Places page for that city and see a collection of photos from there. These pages will also show other local information such as maps, weather, and current times.
Flickr already has an interactive map for discovering geo-tagged photos taken at various locations around the world. Map improvements will largely be to the user interface; “hot tags” will now appear instead of simple, pink dots and a stream of photos called a “photo ribbon” will appear when you click on one of these hot tags. It appears as though photos will be linked to the map using traditional geo-tragging methods (there are no signs yet that Yahoo has integrated FireEagle with this mapping feature in any way).
These two improvements will be available to all Flickr users and in eight languages.
We recently reported that Flickr had passed the two billion stored photos mark.
Microsoft has quietly launched a competitor to Google Apps for your domain, Windows Live Community Builder.
The service offers customized versions of the Windows Live suite, including email, photo service, messenger, writer, livedrive and more for businesses or non for profit organizations ” looking to achieve deeper and more engaging connections with their community.”
The service includes company specific domain support with the ability to register a domain name via supported partners included in registration.
The service was first written about by one of Microsoft Australia’s evangelist team Harvey Sanchez here and does not seem to have been announced elsewhere. Sanchez does note that this is a soft launch so perhaps we’ll see more on the service shortly.
With Windows Live Community Builder, businesses or non for profit organisations or anyone looking at creating a community service can now achieve deeper and more engaging connections with their community through customised, branded online experiences. Whether they want branded, familiar email services for their community or a member’s only area on their web site, complete with calendaring, contacts, and mapping features; Windows Live Community Builder has what they, their administrators, and their technology partners need. It’s easy to get started and painless to maintain – and it includes the peace of mind that comes from the technology, experience, and market leadership they’d expect from Microsoft.
No details as to whether the service is paid or free, but given I couldn’t find any payment details I’m presuming free, at least for the base service.
