www.dpingram.com

Brian Burke of eBay’s Trust & Safety department has a message for anyone wishing to unload digital products on the company’s trademark auction block: You can’t.

Instead, you’ll have to bypass the traditional transaction-based system that drives the vast majority of sales on the website and publish classified ads for things you want to sell that you can’t quite hold in your hand. The company cites the risk of feedback manipulation as a main reason for is choice to relegate sales of digital goods to a venue with non-auction parameters. The new rule was enacted March 31st.

If we’re to take human nature into account, this is a new law that understandably needs to be implemented and enforced. While it’d be an absolute pleasure to discover that all sellers looking to hawk bits to buyers work to do so through wholly legitimate means, it’d be much too much to expect for such business to be conducted entirely aboveboard. Rampant and unwarranted duplication would ensue, and because eBay is beholden to regulating activity within its auction framework (including the Buy-it-Now listings), it’s reasonable for the company to move to quash any allowance of digital sales via ordinary means.

Nonetheless, the company smartly still offers sellers interested in marketing digital goods the option to list classifieds devoid of any bidding utilities, in which it plays a sort of indirect facilitator of fully-electronic transactions. Sellers are required to pay a standard 30-day insertion fee of $9.95, plus any desired listing upgrades.

This from Mashable here

Pandora.TV, South Korea’s largest user generated video site, is expanding into new markets with additional language support and features.

Pandora.TV launched in 2004 and has grown to become the “YouTube of Korea,” ranking as the countries 24th most popular site according to Alexa with 20 million monthly unique visitors, 2.5 billion monthly page views with 2.5 million hosted videos. Notably the company has taken $16 million over two rounds from Altos Ventures and DCM, said to be the largest foreign investment made in a Korean internet startup.

Pandora.TV offers a mix of YouTube style videos and Live streaming. Like YouTube, videos can be embedded, voted upon and comments left on each page. A key selling point is unlimited video storage.

As of today Pandora.TV is now available in English, Chinese, Japanese as well as its native Korean. New features rolled out with the international expansion include:
- HD quality video playback (H.264 codec support)
- multiple video upload (up to 5 files simultaneously)
- unlimited category creation
- site widgets.

Pandora.TV has also claimed cross-browser support as a new feature, however the Live Streaming service requires a download to view and stream that is only available to Windows users.

From techcrunch here

This, summarised words from TechCrunch:
…MySpace has settled the pending litigation Universal Music. They’ll create a new MySpace Music joint venture, with equity stakes from all the major labels (except EMI, which is still negotiating).

Expect an announcement next week, and a launch of the new music property in July or August 2008.

The new company will own the MySpace music property, get a cash infusion of $120 million or so from parent company News Corp, and distribute that $120 million to Sony BMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group. In return, the litigation will be dropped and the labels will give streaming and downloading rights to their catalog to the new entity. Approximately $100 million of the News Corp. capital will go to Universal; the rest will go to Sony BMG and Warner.

Users will be able to stream music on demand, create playlists, and add widget music players to their profiles. The streaming will be advertising supported - at first via display ads (like Imeem), and later via in-stream audio ads. DRM-free downloads will also be available, either advertising supported or on a pay basis like Amazon’s Music Store.

Advertising revenue will be split among the joint venture partners according to their equity stakes, not based on play counts.

Whole article is here on Techcrunch

I love this www.twitxr.com, its a bit like twitter, but instead of twittering short text messages you post photos. Perfect for the mobile generation, publishing photos direct from your mobile. I wonder if they will extend this to let you do video?

It looks like YouTube will bring live video streaming to the masses with its new offerings, reported in The Telegraph here. The technology will potentially allow anyone with a computer of mobile device to stream live events as they happen.
The concept was pioneered by sites like Justin.tv who just over a year ago launched their 24 hour live streaming of Justin’s day to day activities. Like a live 24 hour big brother of one person, Justin.tv had Justin walking round with a pack on his back containing 2 PCs, batteries, and wireless cards. Justin.TV now provides a number of different channels.

The top facebook apps are listed here.
Ignore the first one (UADA), its some sort of association of smaller developers.

Oh, and you can ignore their ‘valuation’ figures, which the industry generally regards as being nonsense.

Daily Motion has begun offering some HD videos on its video sharing website. There’s not much there right now, but its sure to grow. You’ll need a fast internet connection to view it though.

Others offering HD include Veoh and Hulu

I was recently taking a look at which data is mandatory and which is optional when people sign up to some common social networking and file sharing websites.

The attached table summarises what I found.

We all sense that a website should collect only the data it needs, and that the more data it tries to collect the more it may turn off potential users (concerns of privacy, etc). But as business people we also have to balance this with the need to add value to user signups (i.e. more data to help us profile users and deliver to them info and offers that are relevant).

It seems like the amount of mandatory data varies between 2 and 6 items (from simple email and password, to things like zip code, town, gender, country, DOB, occupational status).

The marketeers want as much data as possible, the technicians and user advocates want less. One would think that well-known sites are probably able to ask for more data and people will still not be put off, but younger sites who do not yet have repuation may need a more softly softly approach to data collection. Perhaps one way to satisfy both user and business needs is to take only minimal (eg email and password) at signup, but then incentivise the user to add more info, not with monetary reward but perhaps by unlocking site features.

It seems everyone is opening up their platforms to allow external developers to write cool new user-grabbing-keeping features for their platforms. Most recent is MySpace, reported by Techcrunch here.

“London-based OpenAds has supposedly raised $15.5 million in venture capital from Accel Partners, according to a now invisible report on Paid Content. Participation in this round also comes from existing backers Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. This would be the open-source ad server’s second round of funding, coming less than a year after raising $5 million from Index Ventures and the rest of the previously listed investors, excluding Accel.

… OpenAds lets website publishers inserts image, movie, Flash, popup and other ads, utilizing a targeted campaign method. OpenAds currently reports 30,000 web publishers across 100 countries. With this most recent round of funding, OpenAds is looking to bring on more staff, and will most likely further its move into the commercial realm. It was announced last year that the open-source software would be moving towards commercialization, which is the same route that Mozilla took a couple of years back.”

This and more at Mashable here