Steve Rubel, over at Micro Persuasion, makes a brief mention of new podcast downloads at Fidelity Investments’ Registered Investment Advisor Group. While not in the true podcast spirit (To access the actual audio, you have to go through a registration process), the fact that Fidelity is offering this service is worth noting.
I think we’re just beginning to see this type of audio-on-demand ‘brochure-ware.’ As more and more people bring podcasts (and vodcast – videocasts) into their daily lives, the medium will serve as a powerful replacement (possibly enhancement) to mass marketing vehicles like brochures and radio advertising.
De.licio.us is a really cool social bookmarking website. So cool in fact that it’s hot! Yahoo bought de.licio.us last week. I just read an excellent post over at Slacker Manager about how to best use del.icio.us. Now that Yahoo owns del.icio.us, I hope they integrate it with the Yahoo Companion toolbar, a browser add-on that I have used, and depended on, for years.
It seems that email service innovation went into hibernation after the dot-com bubble burst. There were incremental improvements in features, like better spam filters or more space, until Google shook up the space with Gmail. Gmail’s initial attraction was the ‘unlimited’ space offer that Google used to promote the service. Google also introduced a new approach to categorizing your email, using tags instead of folders. One email now could be assigned to many ‘tags’, no folders needed. I’ve had a Gmail account for some time, and find it adequate for some needs. For many, however, Gmail is not user friendly enough to justify a switch.
While Google has taken a spartan approach to using web interfaces, the other major services have decided to move closer toward mimicking desktop applications. Marc Orchant, over at the Office Weblog, has a great initial review of where Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL are taking their services.
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Well, its been a few weeks since I brought this blog online. I’ve been trying to get something going for months now, but I had two outstanding issues that didn’t seem to have a clear solution. The first was constructing an adequate disclaimer, even though I did not have any plans to discuss detailed issues from previous clients or prospects on this blog. The second was finding a Wordpress template that was unique in its approach to presentation and format, while still maintaining all the powerful features of Wordpress on the back-end.
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It’s hard to imagine Wal-Mart as anything but a clearing-house for goods made in China, India, and other developing countries. The retailer, however, has recently partnered with Aldus Equity Partners to build a small, but interesting venture capital fund. Since Wal-Mart is only investing a paltry $25 million in the fund, the real question is why Wal-Mart would even waste time and effort to move in this direction? Well, the fund is aimed at investing in small women and minority owned businesses, and Fortune believes the idea is to placate diversity advocates who have been a drag on the Wal-Mart image of late.
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Tom Berners-Lee keeps a copy of the 1st internet web page in his archives. Here it is.
