this is so cool.  it can geotagged the photos (acutally the text tags) of flickr photos and put them on a map.  so it’s like you can visit all these places without leaving your computer. I am trying to paste the codes here but somehow it does not work properly. Interested parties can visit here

Just like Napster which turns into a legit music download service, BT announced that they will also start offer movie rental and TV downloads for a fee.  Movie can be viewed within a 24-hour period while TV programs can be purchased and owned.

There are more than 5,000 titles including movies, TV shows, music and games content from partners like MGM, 20th Century Fox, MTV Networks, Paramount Pictures, and Warner Brothers Home Entertainment Group.

This is definitely good news for 24 fans like me.  No longer do I need to wait for local TV station to carry the series or wait till DVD becomes available.  I could actually pay for the latest episodes once they become available in the US.

However, when I go check out the site, the service is only available in the US.  Just like iTunes, those executives in the entertainment industry still has a very traditional mindset depsite they start to make use of the internet to sell their content.  Why don’t they open up the market and make the content available to the worldwide audience?  Afterall, the advantage of the internet is its boarderless characteristics.  They could reach out to a massive number of customers in a very cost effective way.  Payment can be easily made by credit card or Paypal so why do they have to limit the service to the US?

Of course one of the considerations is to protect the local TV station as they have paid large sums to get the rights to broadcast the programs.  But with the internet, the studios or labels could reach the end customers directly.

The site claims that they have 135 million users and believe that may be one third of them will pay for the downloads or rental.  But by blocking international users to pay for the service, they just give them an excuse to continue the practice of illegal downloads.

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

This short clip pretty much summarizes the development and implications of Web 2.0. Great work, a must see for those who are interested in internet.

Read a recent article by HK consumer council saying that a lot of broadband ISP are not delivering the promised access speed.  I always have this doubt and it turned out to be true.  This is a website www.numion.net that allows user to test the speed of the ISP.  I tried last night and it turned out that the download speed is only 1.6M.

Probably night time is the peak time and the performance may not be as good.  What make it worse is that if I keep the LAN cable that connects to my NOW TV set top box, the download speed dropped to about 800k!  That was when I did not even turn on my Now TV.

Two guys Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, who founded music sharing network Kaaza and the VOIP service Skype (which was sold to eBay Inc. for around $2.5 billion in 2005) announced another new project - the Venice Project, which is now renamed as Joost (www.joost.com).

The site is still in beta and inviting users to sign up and test the new service and report problems.  I have signed up about 10 days ago and finally got the invitation email.

Tried it last night and it was quite a different experience in terms of how one can enjoy TV shows.  The interface is quite nice although not totally intuitive.  The streaming quality of the video is also acceptable.  Right now the problem is their limited content (as expected Paris Hilton was there …).  I spent about 10 minutes and quit their application.

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