As Scoble talked about “here”:1 this “Kayak Buzz”:2 thing is pretty cool. Here’s what it looks like…

The Kayak buzz service lets you see on one web page both a list and, more important, visually _buzz_ fares (discount fares, I assume) for any searched on city (one with an airport anyway). The list is great, and is an important way of seeing information, but it is the visual component that shows the commercial power of the new web future — the future of API-accessible services (Google’s mapping service in this case). I guess this might even be an example of “Web 2.0″:5 or whatever.

What will the commercial relationships of the Kayaks and Googles of the future be? This could be a big business for some body… or surely bodies. The “Intel Insides”:6 of the future.

Update: 2005-11-08
Oh, just in case you thought Google was going to own the mapping service market from the get go, Yahoo!’s been getting some rave reviews for their new map APIs. For example, here’s a quote from the O’Reilly Radar blog…

bq.. …this release is a major strike by Yahoo! I didn’t think their first maps API was anything to write home about, but they haven’t just played catch-up to Google with their second maps API. They’ve overtaken Google in functionality and in elegance. A much-needed offensive in the mapping wars.

p. For the full review, check out this O’Reilly “post”:7.

[7(O'Reilly Radar on Yahoo!'s new map API)]http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/11/yahoo_announce_nextgen_maps_ap.html
[6(Wikipedia on the Intel Inside advertising campaign)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#Advertising
[5(Wikipedia on Web 2.0)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0
[4(Wikipedia on thingamajig)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thingamajig
[3(Buzz fares for LAX)]http://www.kayak.com/h/buzz/flights?code=LAX
[2(Kayak travel search buzz fares for any city)]http://www.kayak.com/h/buzz/
[1(Scoble post on Kayak buzz)]http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2005/11/06/kayak-buzz-brings-best-airfares/

An Engadget “post”:1 turned me on to the “Videora iPod converter”:2, which is a handy little program to convert videos to .MP4 format which the video iPod can understand. I haven’t tried it out with a video iPod (I don’t own one), but it seems to work ok with my Windows Quicktime player.

In a nutshell, Videora converter is GUI front end to “FFmpeg”:3. Here’s the FFmpeg project description from SourceForge:

bq.. FFmpeg is a complete solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. It includes libavcodec, the leading audio/video codec library. FFmpeg is developed under Linux, but it can compiled under most operating systems, including Windows.

The project is made of several components:

* ffmpeg is a command line tool to convert one video file format to another. It also supports grabbing and encoding in real time from a TV card.
* ffserver is an HTTP (RTSP is being developed) multimedia streaming server for live broadcasts. Time shifting of live broadcast is also supported.
* ffplay is a simple media player based on SDL and on the FFmpeg libraries.
* libavcodec is a library containing all the FFmpeg audio/video encoders and decoders. Most codecs were developed from scratch to ensure best performances and high code reusability.
* libavformat is a library containing parsers and generators for all common audio/video formats.

p. Update 2005-10-28:
Oh, “here’s”:4 another Engadget post on using “VLC”:5 to do the conversion. However, for some reason, I couldn’t get my Quicktime player to play the converted .MP4 file — probably due to operator error.

[5(The most excellent VLC media player homepage)]http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

[4(Engadget on using VLC to convert videos for the iPod)]http://features.engadget.com/entry/1234000583063891/

[3(FFmpg page on SourceForge)]http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/index.php

[2(Videora iPod converter page)]http://www.videora.com/en-us/Converter/iPod/

[1(Engadget post on Videora and iPod video conversion)]http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000723066031/

Ok, the comment spam is getting a bit more thick, so my short-term solution is to moderate comments. If you do comment, it might take a couple of days before I get around to allowing it — I don’t check the comments to be moderated everyday.

In the long term, there are lots of solutions to comment spam. One of these days I’ll get around to figuring out which one is best. In the meantime, comments will have some latency.

-The Management

Read this “post”:1 and tell me that blogging is not _already_ a big thing. Or that it hasn’t already changed the world.

[1(Robert Scoble employee of MSFT, and not in PR)]http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2005/11/01/ross-doesnt-trust-microsofts-approach-to-web/

Really, why do we even have pennies anymore? Heck, you could almost get rid of nickels while you are at it… just round up to the nearest dime, thank you. But pennies; pennies are so so useless that almost anyplace is likely to have one of those cheap plastic cups by the register — you know, “give a penny, take a penny” or whatever. Hey, sometimes you see nickels and dimes in those things too. And that’s just for making change.

Regarding pricing of things, friggin’ nothing costs a penny, or a nickel, or a dime or almost even a quarter. I can’t even remember that last thing that I bought for less than 50 cents. A quarter is about as “micro” as payments get.

Ahhh… remember back in the 90’s when all of those start-ups were trying to do “micropayments.” I can almost remember the names of some of them, but not quite. Maybe something like Letmeincinerateyourstockportfolio.com?

Anyway, in the WSJ today they ran a story talking about how credit card companies are starting to accept transactions for items under a dollar (as they already do at the “iTunes”:1 store, for example). Oh, and it gets better… Visa is looking to eliminate the need for signatures on a growing class of transactions less than $15. And then there is the push to get contactless readers installed at merchants, so you just need to wave your wallet in front of it.

The credit card companies are going to “pwn”:2 a lot of “micropayments” real soon.

[2(Frag a little, don't die a lot)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pwn

[1(Apple's iTunes frontpage)]http://www.itunes.com