Nokia snaps up Loudeye in mobile music expansion
Nokia has agreed to buy Loudeye for US$60 million (£31 million) in a bid to expand its presence in the music downloading market.
Handset ignorance presents problem for mobile industry
A new survey highlighting mobile users’ limited knowledge about their handsets will not have provided any cheer to operators or third party content providers seeking to raise interest in data services.
The study, conducted by market-research company Ipsos MORI in conjunction with LogicaCMG, found that 58% of users are oblivious to basic details of the make and model of their phones.
Rand's lovely new Page Strength Tool
Rand Fishkin’s SEOmoz.org is a great website for anybody interested in SEO as it contains search marketing news, research and analysis. It also hosts a number of tools that can help marketers, including a new ‘Page Strength’ tool.
Google launches Google Checkout, not GBuy
GBuy is here, only it is called Google Checkout and despite the chief doers of no evil claiming that it “isn’t like PayPal at all”, it is, erm, rather like PayPal, in that merchants use it to process consumer payments.
Google Checkout allows consumers to purchase products by simply logging in to Google – no need for credit card numbers or filling out forms. Obviously you need to tell Google to begin with, but thereafter Google will store your credit card and address data...
Using Web 2.0 to harness innovation in your organisation
Web 2.0 means different things to different people, yet it isn't just about the web, but is also about how your organisation works. Think intranet, as well as internet. Does your organisation work in a 2.0 way?
At the moment there seems to be three primary focuses around Web 2.0:
1) there are the technologists who are figuring out new technologies (there are many libraries and frameworks out there already).
2) there are the marketers and entrepreneurs, who are trying to figure out how use new 2.0 technologies and principles to generate profits, or help empower consumers (call them business people for now) in some way.
3) and finally, there are the users, who are increasingly using and enjoying the results of these new technologies.
But how does all that filter into your organisation in a useful way, feeding into your own innovation cycle?
MetaWeather aims to build a better forecast
Have you ever checked the weather online, only to find competing forecasts from different sites? Did Michael Fish's 1987 reassurance that a hurricane was
not
on the way leave you with a mistrust of meteorologists? If so, MetaWeather may be worth a shot.
Developed by two producers at British games content agency Ferrago, the site combines forecast data from multiple sources to round up the predictions to an average - and supposedly more trustworthy - outlook.
