Everybody Loves Your Money

I used to live in that house.  Pearl used to come around at the worst possible hours pounding on the door for the rent.  Geez.  I really don’t miss her:

Remember back when you were a kid and you used to open up the Sears catalog and look through the toy section?  Man, I miss those days.  I would spend hours thumbing through that catalog drooling over all the toys I wanted to buy.  (okay, maybe as an 11 year old I browsed through the lingerie section once or twice, but there was really nothing to see there).

Nowadays there are so many more ways to salivate.  We as consumers have ready access to everything that is for sale.  Instead of a paper catalog, we have millions of pages on the internet to browse through.  Not only can we salivate over things that are for sale today, we can spend hours and hours looking at all the things that are “coming soon”.  Just head over to Engadget and see what I mean.  They track all kinds of electronics and gadgets that are just being released, or aren’t due to be sold for months.  Here’s a breakdown of my modern day Sears catalog:

-Amazon.com

-Best Buy

-Sears online (no lingerie pages now.  Just tools)

-Engadget

-Ebay

-Craigslist

-Fatwallet

-Home Depot

-Dell

-Expedia  (I like to dream of where I can go)

-Road & Track (just had to add an eleventh)

We all have a different list, of course.  Where do you dream of spending your money?

I’m just recently starting to get excited about watching TV on the internet.  There are a couple companies out there that are working on this technology, but I think one stands out more than the others. JOOST is being developed by the same guys that created Kazaa and Skype.  They obviously get it.  Skype has turned in to a killer app and it really didn’t take that long.  Millions and millions of people are using it all over the world as you read this.

I think that Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis will pull off the same thing with Joost.  They are working WITH the content owners and are building relationships that should avoid all the nasty copyright issues that Youtube and others have had to deal with.  They also plan to employ similiar peer to peer type technologies to help distribute the video.  They are promising full screen, high quality video and I’m optimistic that they’ll be able to do it.  They have introduced video on Skype so I think they have some experience in this area, although Joost will be Skype video on some serious steroids.

Are you a beta tester of Joost?  I’m dying to try out the beta client but you need an invitation to get on.  If you have one, or know someone that does, maybe you could help me out?  (Wow, that sounded way too much like I was begging for drugs).