Concierge.com goes mobile - including guides to over 200 destinations

Posted on February 27, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Entertainment, Mobile, Sites I Use, Tools and Services, Travel | Leave a Comment

Spotted a brief reference to that fact that concierge.com was going mobile in the Wall Street Journal.

“Go to Concierge.com on your mobile device to get free access to nearly 200 destination guides, plus weather updates, stunning travel images to wallpaper your screen, and Condé Nast Traveler’s Gold List of the top hotels in the world”.

The guides are very good - for example see Amalfi Coast.  From my Nokia E61 it looked like it was just the standard web page - rather than being optimised for this particular device - although it functioned quite well the scrolling made it unworkable.  I think the idea is that you find the destination guide or whatever you want and then get it sent to your phone - you can do this from your desktop machine or mobile although I couldn’t get it work for my UK phone on the T-Mobile network. 

New top level domain for mobile surfing

Posted on February 26, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Entertainment, Music, Search, Technology, Tools and Services, WWW | Leave a Comment

The International Herald Tribune reports on DotMobi - a new top level domain for sites that have been configured especially for mobile devices/cell phones.

Though still relatively unknown, dotMobi, which is based in Dublin, is backed by a powerful group of investors including Nokia, Ericsson, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Telefónica, Telecom Italia Mobile, Google, Microsoft and the GSM Association, which represents 700 cellphone operators around the world.

Sounds like a bad idea on many levels.  The article goes on to states that:

The World Wide Web Consortium, know as W3C, an organization that defines standards for the Web, and other proponents of “device neutrality” have argued that the technology already exists to send tailored content from existing Internet sites to specific devices with different screen sizes. The situation is further muddled, W3C argues, by the question of whether dot-mobi Web pages will link only to other dot-mobi pages.

National Archives of Japan - Digital Gallery

Posted on February 21, 2007
Filed Under Digitisation, Entertainment, Good Things, Search, Technology, Tools and Services | Leave a Comment

National Archives of Japan - Digital Gallery has some great maps, photograhs and posters - this is one of a series on “Air-Raid Precautions and Civil Defense, Illustrated Posters of “Air-Raid Defense”.  

“You can run the keyword or layered search, and view the detailed descriptions and digitized images of the records preserved by the National Archives of Japan. You can, according to your circumstances for the use of the Internet, view the digitized images in the formats of JPEG2000, PDF or JPEG. You can also run the cross-file search linked to various data bases worldwide to share a wide range of information and knowledge.”

Decline and fall of a music empire

Posted on January 4, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Broadband, Copyright, Digitisation, Entertainment, Future, Music, Newspapers, Paid Content, Technology, Trends | Leave a Comment

The FT reports on MusicZone’s slide into administration.  There is upside for the industry in terms of the growth of digital revenues but this growth is no where near enough to cover the dramatic decline in the revenue from physical formats. This will all sound very familiar to newspaper executives.

The downward trend has been clear for five years but recent figures suggest that the decline in CDs and DVDs has accelerated. The IFPI, the music trade association, reported a 10 per cent slide in physical format sales in the first half of the year around the world.

Ged Doherty, the head of Sony BMG’s UK operations, predicted two months ago that CD sales would halve over the next three years.

“We predict digital growth of 25 per cent per year but it is not enough to replace the loss from falling CD sales.”

Mr Doherty warned that, if current trends continued, by 2010 the industry’s total revenues could be 30 per cent lower than they are now. He said: “We have to reinvent.”

Blogroll


Categories


Archives