KEY POINTS:
First to the music and the promising news from Amazon.com that it will take its fledgling music store, which sells tracks for US89c each, to an international audience this year.
I tried the Amazon.com service late last year before Amazon started blocking people outside the US based on
IP addresses. I really liked it. There's a good selection, the Amazon music downloader you install to manage your downloads is efficient and the songs are encoded at 256Kbps and most important of all, are free of DRM.
Apple's iTunes store faces its most credible challenger yet in Amazon.com. No word yet on a timetable for international roll-out. Meanwhile, Qtrax, the legal ad-supported peer-to-peer music download service which has been in the works for five years wins the prize for the worst launch of an internet start-up ever after it proclaimed it had won the support of the four bug music labels only to have all four labels publicly deny they'd given any such endorsement to the service. Aardvark has more on this. As I wrote on the weekend , I've been using the We7.com service to download a handful of free songs with a short advert at the beginning of each. It's a decent service, even if the catalogue of music is slightly anaemic.
While there's little money in online music at the moment - 95 per cent of it is downloaded for free according to new reports, a few enterprising domain-name squatters are making a fortune selling off addresses they claimed a decade ago - before the first dotcom boom. Take Rick Schwartz for instance.
He just sold ireport.com to CNN for US$750,000 and has a portfolio of 6000 web addresses. Not bad work if you can get it. Actually, credit to Schwartz for taking the risk and having the foresight to choose some domain names back in the late nineties that have turned out to be hot property. Still, sitting on domain names is a bit of a seedy game, in more ways than one. Not only is Schwartz the ultimate middle-man adding nothing of value just at the biggest sales of domain names to date:
1: Sex.com - sold for US$12 million in 2006.
2: Porn.com - sold for US$9.5 million last year.
3: Diamond.com - sold for US$7.5 million in 2006.
Computerworld reports that internet provider Xtra has ditched its WAP-based mobile email service with the move over to the Yahoo platform last year. As you remember, that transformation led to a major email catastrophe with thousands of Xtra customers unable to receive email. It took a week to iron out and cost Telecom $7 million to put right.
Now it seems WAP enthusiasts are out of the loop for an indefinite period.
I doubt there are a huge number of WAP users out there, but it is incredibly annoying for those people with their own hosted domains who simply want to sync their handset to get their email. Xtra users can use PDAs to do so, but for some that will mean an investment in a new device. Telecom is working on a "new system and packages" for affected customers but no timeframe has been given for their release. Not a great way to endear you to some of your most valuable customers.
Finally, Richard MacManus has a report on Al Gore's plans to IPO his digital media venture Current TV. With the goodwill Gore has amassed in the last couple of years it is bound to be a well-supported venture. More on Current TV here.