Digital Marketing and Technological Insight

Online giant Amazon.com finally launched its digital music store, Amazon MP3, today with a catalog of over 2 million songs…all without copy-protection technology. Amazon MP3 lets shoppers purchase and download individual songs or entire albums. The songs can then be copied to multiple computers, burned to a CD as well as copied to many portable devices, included Apple’s iPod and Microsoft’s Zune. Songs cost 89 cents to 99 cents each and albums sell for $5.99 to $9.99.

In order to streamline the purchasing of one or more songs / albums, Amazon developed the MP3 Downloader, a application that sends your purchased songs to your specified music library…it should be noted that customers do not have to download the application in order to purchase songs.

Obviously the success of any music service comes down to the music selection. Amazon has signed on major labels Universal Music Group and EMI Music Publishing, as well as thousands of independant labels. But, is it to little to late? Are to many people just “comfortable” using iTunes? Is there a big enough market for those left over? The only way we will know is if Amazon sticks with this, signs on more labels and most importantly gets that one big band (Led Zeppelin!) that will draw customers by the thousands.

iPling, based out of San Francisco, just announced today the launch of its innovative location-based social networking service optimized for the soon to be released Apple iPhone. People who sign up to be part of the iPling community can discover and communicate with other iPling’ers who have similar interests - regardless of where they are and if they know them or not. Basically, iPling is an “open social network” that does not rely on invites and connections to bring people together.

Founder and CEO of iPling Manuel Monroy has this to say, “Community-building has been hindered in the past few years by worries over security and protection. People have become anxious about opening up to new, real-life relationships and experiences. We believe a large number of us are ready for a change, so we created a set of tools that will inspire confidence and encourage folks to open up and get together. iPling is all about openness”

Monroy goes on to say, “You’d be surprised by all the amazing people that you pass by every day that could enrich your life. As the world goes mobile, we feel the time is right to introduce our services. And we couldn’t ask for a better platform than the iPhone.”

Once I get my iPhone I am going to give this service a try, the success of iPling will depend on how quickly the user base grows and takes advantage of all of the applications features. If the cards fall their way iPling has the potential to be huge…

USAToday.com just posted a Question & Answer session with Apple’s Steve Jobs and AT&T’s Randall Stephenson. A must read if you are at all interested in Apple or the soon to launch iPhone. Steve Jobs is the master of not disclosing to much information, but giving enough so we are interested.

Read the full article here. 

Just put up a flash poll so I can start seeing where my readers stand on various Web related topics. This weeks question: “How long will you wait to buy the new iPhone?” So get out there and vote!

Steve Jobs announced today at the WWDC that 3rd parties can write Web 2.0 applications for the upcoming iPhone. This has been one of the largest questions surrounding the iPhone since it was announced earlier at Macword ‘07. Mr. Jobs had said earlier that the iPhone would be a closed platform device, but I think Apple saw the light and realized  all other phone platforms allow for 3rd party app development and it hasn’t caused a nuclear melt down (yet).

Apple just announced that they are launching a version of the Safari 3 browser for Windows, oh and here comes a real surprise - the new iPhone will run Safari as well. This is just another example of how Apple is extending it’s business into other areas, this time it takes aim at the 78% share of Internet Explorer. Yes, Safari for Windows is cool and has some great features…it even seems to be faster then IE and Firefox as Steve claimed. But, ehhhh what is the big deal? I will always run IE for testing and certain sites / applications that require it. So the question is, is Safari better then my beloved Firefox? No…it isn’t worse and it isn’t better. So why would I use 3 browsers? Answer…I won’t. I will keep Safari on my PC, but it is a distant 3rd on my list and will soon fall into the "unused icon" bucket. Want to  decide for yourself? You can download the public beta of Safari 3 here.