Rumors of the Video iPod

Apple is planning another one of it’s mysterious events for October 12. This time, people seem to think it’s the long sought after video iPod. Personally, I can’t fathom why you’d want to watch Spiderman 2 on a 2 inch screen, or how I would legally get Spiderman2 on my video iPod.

I would be impressed if it had: 

• A big hard drive
• Video out capabilities
• The ability to link to iTunes to buy and sell movies and/or television shows

Let’s just hope it’s not another phone.

Links: AppleInsider MacRumors Reuters

Read More

The Google-Sun Non-Announcement

Google and Sun announced yesterday that Sun will offer the option of including the Google Search toolbar with downloads of it’s Java Runtime Environment. Many were expecting yesterday’s press event to announce the Google Office Suite. Instead, it turned out to be about as exciting as Apple and Motorola’s snoozefest announcing the iTunes phone.

Google and Sun said there will be more to come from the partnership, let’s hope so.

Read More

24 Hour Laundry Comes Clean

24 Hour Laundry, the stealthy startup that’s been keeping Netscape founder Marc Andreesen busy lately, has finally lifted the lid off its newest offering. Honestly, I’d forgotten he was up to anything. And now, after seeing Ning I don’t know whether to stand and applaud, or just scratch my head. Why all the mystery prior to launch?

Riding on the recent successes of social apps like MySpace, Flickr and del.icio.us, Ning seems to have created an online social application structure for you to take and create your own social application.

If you’re up on the social software phenomenon, think of Ning as a CMS for social apps. If you’re not, I’d suggest visiting some of these links before trying to understand what 24 Hour Laundry is doing.

I’m interested to see if Ning releases a future standalone product that allows me to host my own. If it does, sign me up! In the meantime, I’m sure I"ll waste part of my weekend playing in Ning’s new playground.

Read More

Writeboard is Released

37signals has launched its latest application called Writeboard. And just as many people guessed, it is based on the idea of a wiki. However, Writeboard is only one-page long, which doesn’t seem all that helpful at first glance. But after reading their starter list of ideas, I think there are many ways that an individual or organization could benefit from using it.

Here are a few reasons to give Writeboard a spin around the block:

• It’s free.
• You can create as many of them as you want.
• It’s accessible anywhere you can get online.
• It can be shared with as many or as few people as you want.
• It keeps a history of all changes.
• You can mark versions you think are keepers.
• A visual cue on the history list indicates how major a change was.
• It’s integrated with Backpack

If you’d like to try out Writeboard, I set one up called Sundog Writeboard Sandbox (password: password) that you can play around with. Enjoy!

Read More

O’Reilly (hearts) del.icio.us

O’Reilly has an interesting experiment underway in which they’ve taken articles that have been tagged on del.icio.us and are using those tags to create a folksonomy on their own site. The tags and resulting folksonomy created by the readers is not only meant to replace O’Reilly’s own categorization, but rather to add to it. In their own words, “There’s value in both types. One’s authoritative. The other is flexible and dynamic.” As someone who uses del.icio.us extensively and sees a great future for tagging, this is a great development. I hope del.icio.us will open up their data to any sites that wish to do the same.

This blog post goes into further detail about the O’Reilly experiment. And if you don’t know what del.icio.us is, here’s some info we’ve posted before.

Read More