First strike, although it doesn’t affect users in the U.S., international iPhone owners may be disappointed in the library of available content. Unless you’re a huge fan of Naruto, which seems to make up all of the Anime video section. Many services encounter problems when trying to pick up international distribution rights for all types of media. Pandora is one high profile example, as is Hulu for video. That doesn’t mean there won’t be more content available in future. The Xbox Live Marketplace has brought video to Canada and other markets, albeit behind their American launch.
(more…)

eBay has published a press release regarding the retail sales stats on Black Friday without going into details about the sales volumes or earnings made during this time. This absolute lack of information has been taken as a clue that sales were not up to the mark.

Nintendo Wii Console is The Most Popular Product on eBay

Nov. 29, 2008, SAN JOSE, Calif. – Black Friday saw a buzz of shopping activity, as consumers took to their computers to snap up hot holiday gifts. eBay Inc. (Nasdaq: EBAY) companies, including PayPal and Shopping.com, all saw consumers going online for great deals. The companies reported key online shopping trends, popular categories and hot gifts.

“Results from Black Friday show that shoppers continue to turn to the Web for their holiday shopping needs, especially for consumer electronics,” said Jim “Griff” Griffith, eBay Marketplace Expert. “Online shopping is convenient and allows consumers to find the best values and vast selection. Shoppers can visit eBay and Shopping.com to purchase all of their holiday items at unbeatable prices, and can pay quickly and securely with PayPal.”

Shoppers are Clicking for Deals
With money tighter than ever, shoppers are hitting the Web to find the best values for their hard-earned cash. A recent Nielsen study found that 78 percent of adult online users made a purchase on the Web in the past six months. Additionally, a recent survey conducted by Survey.com on behalf of eBay found that getting “great deals” was the most important criteria for shoppers when choosing where to shop online this holiday season.

Shoppers are taking advantage of the great deals on eBay to find must-have gifts. Black Friday online shoppers took advantage of eBay’s great deals, including the Daily Deal, $1 Holiday Doorbusters, Bid from $1 and Microsoft Live Search cashback. Consumers also turned to Shopping.com for their holiday shopping needs, searching most often for Nintendo Wii Fit and Nintendo Wii.

Was there any information in it, we all know that shoppers are turning to online shopping in increasing numbers and are hunting for bargains, what’s informative in all this ?

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eBay Companies See Black Friday Shoppers Clicking for Great Deals

Saturday, November 29th, 2008

Nintendo Wii Console is The Most Popular Product on eBay

Nov. 29, 2008, SAN JOSE, Calif. - Black Friday saw a buzz of shopping activity, as consumers took to their computers to snap up hot holiday gifts. eBay Inc. (Nasdaq: EBAY) companies, including PayPal and Shopping.com, all saw consumers going online for great deals. The companies reported key online shopping trends, popular categories and hot gifts.

'Results from Black Friday show that shoppers continue to turn to the Web for their holiday shopping needs, especially for consumer electronics,' said Jim 'Griff' Griffith, eBay Marketplace Expert. 'Online shopping is convenient and allows consumers to find the best values and vast selection. Shoppers can visit eBay and Shopping.com to purchase all of their holiday items at unbeatable prices, and can pay quickly and securely with PayPal.'

Shoppers are Clicking for Deals
With money tighter than ever, shoppers are hitting the Web to find the best values for their hard-earned cash. A recent Nielsen study found that 78 percent of adult online users made a purchase on the Web in the past six months. Additionally, a recent survey conducted by Survey.com on behalf of eBay found that getting 'great deals' was the most important criteria for shoppers when choosing where to shop online this holiday season.

Shoppers are taking advantage of the great deals on eBay to find must-have gifts. Black Friday online shoppers took advantage of eBay's great deals, including the Daily Deal, $1 Holiday Doorbusters, Bid from $1 and Microsoft Live Search cashback. Consumers also turned to Shopping.com for their holiday shopping needs, searching most often for Nintendo Wii Fit and Nintendo Wii.

Yes, this is a consumer-facing release, designed to lure shoppers with promises of great deals. But we have to believe that, if there was some good news to print about Black Friday sales, eBay would have printed it.

(PayPal sales, meanwhile, jumped an impressive 26% year-over-year, and eBay was quick to report that.)

See Also: eBay's Traffic Collapsing

While this is a cool feature for readers, it could be a very valuable tool for the visually impaired. These tools also provide benefits to readers with learning disabilities like Dyslexia.

As a demonstration of how easy it is to setup this text-to-speech technology, we’ve actually gone ahead and helped Rachel from Why Not Rachel setup Odiogo for her blog. Why Rachel? Well, she’s legally blind and truly needed something like this so she and many of her subscribers could experience her posts in an audible manner. This means less strain and fatigue for the eyes and more accessibility as the posts can now be heard from mobile devices.

Easy 10-Step Setup Guide for Text-to-Speech Conversion

1. Join Odiogo.

2. Download the player button plugin that you will need depending on the blogging platform that you’re using. Odiogo will work with several popular blogging platforms such as: WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, BlogEngine.NET and Terapad. Note: In this example, we will use a WordPress blog.

3. Upload the directory odiogo_listen_button to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory via FTP.

4. Login to your WordPress admin account.

5. Click menu Plugins and Activate the Odiogo Listen Button plugin.

6. Click menu Setting > Odiogo Listen Button.

7. Enter your Odiogo Feed ID and click Save. (You’ll receive this feed ID in email after joining)

8. Click menu Presentation > Widgets (or Sidebar Widgets depending on your WP version).

9. Drag and drop Odiogo Subscribe Button from Available Widgets to Sidebar.

10. Click Save Changes.

Within minutes, your blog posts can be heard online and on iTunes or mobile devices such as iPods and iPhones. Here’s a post from WhyNotRachel with the Odiogo Listen button clearly visible within each and every post just under the post title.

The other important thing to point out is the Odiogo subscription button which appears on the home page in the location that you place the widget. In this sample, it’s located above the Twitter Badge.

Clicking the Odiogo button will take you to the newly created Odiogo feed page for the blog. The impressive thing is that there are several different types of feeds, such as HTML, xHTML (for mobile devices) and XML/RSS feed.

As you will notice, there’s a plethora of ways for subscribers to listen to your blog now. They can select to subscribe to your new podcast from iTunes and play it on their mobile device of choice or they can subscribe with Juice. They can also elect to use their web readers such as Google Reader, Newsgator, etc. There are also options to share the feed with friends on social networks.

Also worth noting is that all of the posts can be played with the “Stream All Articles” link or played individually with the player located next to each post title. Every blog post can be downloaded individually as an mp3 file.

Other Text-to-Speech Tools

iSpeech - Another text-to-speech conversion service similar to Odiogo but not quite as feature-rich. For example, you can embed a widget to play back the entire blog or convert chunks of text but there isn’t a way to embed a player in each blog post for easy playback. However, they do offer a choice of male or female voice, which is lacking from Odiogo at this time.

Jott - Can convert blog feeds to audio and let you listen to them on your cell phone, which in essense becomes an audio Google Reader of sorts.

AT&T Labs - Provides a free TTS service that converts whatever you type to speech and lets you download it as a wav file as well.

NextUp - Offers a line of commercial products such as TextAloud, NewsAloud, and StocksAloud that can convert text to audio.

GhostReader - Does text to speech for the Mac platform.

FlameReader - Reads text or even letters as you type, which is good for those with learning disabilities.

Expressivo - Offers a commercial product as well as a free online version that lets you convert text to speech in different voices as well as share them on a blog, email or IM.

Conclusion

Providing greater accessibility to your content makes a great deal of sense for several reasons. It not only gives your readers more ways to experience your blog, but it also allows many others to enjoy your work that otherwise couldn’t do so. Text-to-speech technology continues to improve with time, so look for this feature to spread across the blogosphere, slowly but surely as people realize that the web isn’t just for viewing but for hearing too.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, bunhill

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Geezeo recently announced that it has expanded its Marketplace and now includes ratings of online brokerage firms. The online financial management service states that visitors will now be able to evaluate brokerage firms based on the initial investment required to sign up for an account, associated fees related to stocks, and the overall experience of using the service. Geezeo co-founder Peter Glyman adds:

Geezeo is all about helping our community of users save and make money.

The addition of the Brokerage Marketplace will provide another resource for our users to find the best investment products to help them reach their financial goals.

Brokers can join in on discussions with customers in a way that demonstrates their commitment to transparency and quality service.

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Geezeo, an online financial management service, announced Wednesday that it has expanded its Marketplace to include ratings of online brokerage firms.

According to the company, visitors can now evaluate brokerage firms based on the initial investment required to sign up for an account, associated fees related to stocks, and the overall experience of using the service.

"Geezeo is all about helping our community of users save and make money," Peter Glyman, Geezeo co-founder, said in a statement. "The addition of the Brokerage Marketplace will provide another resource for our users to find the best investment products to help them reach their financial goals."

Geezeo believes its new feature goes beyond providing more information for the user. According to Glyman, user reviews give brokerage firms a glimpse into what people like and dislike from the service and offer them an opportunity to improve. The company will also allow brokers to join in on the discussion.

"Brokers themselves stand to gain from their placement on, and involvement with, Geezeo," Glyman said. "Brokers can join in on discussions with customers in a way that demonstrates their commitment to transparency and quality service."

Users can start adding reviews now on Geezeo's page.

See also: Wesabe, Mint, and Buxfer.