No news during my INSEAD year

I'm off doing an MBA at INSEAD in France and have discovered that keeping my blog updated is impossible while being there. I will be done studying by the end of december 2008 and will resume blogging from then on!

YBay Merger becoming more realistic?

 

eBay and Yahoo have announced they will let Yahoo Auctions Japan work with eBay in 2008. For the full post see here on AP and some new speculations on a Yahoo eBay merger here on Fool.com

 

Dealbundle for sale

 

I just received an email from socialshopping site dealbundle. Unfortunately the technology company behind dealbundle, r3interactive.com, will not continue to run the platform and is planning to sell it via eBay starting monday december 10th. I wrote about social shopping services on dekoopman.net and I think it is unfortunate that this one apparently did not really pick up.

Maybe interesting for a webenterpreneur? I will post the link to the eBay sale as soon as it is available.

Please find the content of the email below:

 

DealBundle Member,
We would like to thank you for using dealbundle. Unfortunately, at this
time, we have decided to put dealbundle up for sale. Dealbundle started as a hobby for our technology company, but with limited resources, we simply don't have the time to grow dealbundle into something that it can, and one day will be.
Starting this Monday, December 10, 2007, we will be staging dealbundle for sale, and will be removing all user accounts and deals. Within 2 weeks, dealbundle will be posted on eBay for sale, and we hope that the right person/business will grow this community and our technology!

Thank you again. We look forward to showing you our new web application coming early next year!

DealBundle Team
www.dealbundle.com

Preview - some techspottings from Asia

I'm travelling through asia for 7 weeks and while here of course do some trend and/or tech spottings. Here are some examples - more will follow later.

Skype launches beta version 3.5

Skype launched a new beta version today. This version 3.5 solves some little bugs and delivers new services around video. You can now integrate video in your mood message, you can share video in chat sessions with multiple people and you can take snapshots during a videocall to save and retrieve later. Next to that, it's now easy to share contactdata with people (I did not see that one in previous versions) and it is possible to forward calls.

It seems skype is launching new beta's now every 2 to 3 months with nice new functionalities. The last beta was at the end of march and the one before mid februari.

The question is if all these new functionalities are really used by the average "skyper". Doesn't it lead to a product that becomes complex because of the enormous amount of functionalities? For instance: I don't believe skypefind from version 3.1 is that populair and I really ask myself how many people even know of it? The beta version (watch it: "beta" so not so stable) can be downloaded from here.

Just quickly; some links

Here a couple of links I'd like to share:

• Jan Chip Chase (nokia) - mobile usage research page
  
• I was busy with creatinga list of online tools: Measuring your "buzz" on the web: Technorati and Blogpulse
• Prometeus - the media revolution - I personally don't think this one is as good as some of the others I have seen but still interesting

Yahoo buys sportssite Rivals.com

Yahoo has just bought rivals.com - a popular sportssite in the US. The site will operate as a seperate entity within the Yahoo sports division and is a strengthening of it's media division.