What are the benefits?

• The player loads right away — no more spinning butterfly thingy
• You can jump anywhere in the video, without having to wait for it to buffer
• Smoother, less jumpy playback (hopefully)

Some drawbacks:

• It’s a beta test — it might be buggy!
• It only works for about 25% of you: you must be running the latest versions of Safari, Chrome, or IE with Chrome Frame installed.
• It cannot go full screen. Unfortunately this is a limitation of the browsers right now. We are working on adding at least full-window support in the next day or so.
• It only works on Vimeo.com right now, embed code will still be Flash.
• “Only” 90% of videos uploaded in the last year will work in the new player. All told, about 35% of all videos will still require the standard Flash player. In this case, Vimeo will automatically switch for you. It should just always work.

Here is one for a video that works, just look for the ‘Switch to HTML5 player’ link below the video

Read more about it

Verizon customers will now be able to bypass the outlandish international calling rates on their mobile phones and make free Skype-to-Skype calls or use their much cheaper Skype Out minutes instead.

Surprised there is so much resistance from the carriers end. The more that people use data intense programs like these, the more customers will upgrade their data plans. Win-win, right?

Also, just because its interesting..

Skype accounted for 12 percent of all international calling minutes last year, and that number will just keep going up.

Verizon Swallows Hard And Embraces Skype.

Mint was a key leader of the next generation of game changers. And now it’s property of Intuit — the poster-child for the last generation. What a loss. Is that the best the next generation can do? Become part of the old generation? How about kicking the shit out of the old guys? What ever happened to that?

Its difficult for innovation to come from within a company that is set in its ways, so I can see this as positive move for Intuit. But from Mint’s perspective I do question the move as it feels that they are at risk of losing what made them special in the first place.

The full rant – The next generation bends over – 37signals.

Relevant tweets, blog posts, comments in a traditional news website, or trend reports can be pulled directly into a team community with designated places for specific topics and focus areas from the brand monitoring tool (such as competitors, industries, or product lines).

The team community is now the central place where virtual, topic-specific “war rooms” engage the broader team and facilitate collaborative decision-making.

Sounds like a pretty cool tool, love to see it in action sometime.

Note that your mockups are not protected in any way other than by a non-obvious URL, so don’t use this service for “secret” mockups. Only create mockups you would show in public.Note that your mockups are not protected in any way other than by a non-obvious URL, so don’t use this service for “secret” mockups. Only create mockups you would show in public.

See it for yourself : http://iphonemockup.lkmc.ch

With the addition of email client reports for all our customers, we took a step back and analyzed 6 months of data covering more than 250 million opens. The result – a birds eye view of email client popularity and usage trends over time.

Campaign Monitor has put together a comprehensive of email client numbers, and trends. If part of your business revolves around sending rich emails out to subscribers then this information is vitial. Oh and they are going to update it monthly to stay relevant.

See the full analysis : http://www.campaignmonitor.com/stats/email-clients/

Boxee is being marketed as a  ‘Social Media Center’, enabling users to view, rate, recommend their own media in addition to a variety of internet sources. From Flickr to Twitter to your DVD collection Boxee can handle it all.

From Mark Cuban

The concept of “users always want choice” really really sounds nice. It makes for a great panel argument. But the reality is that its not true. Ultimate choice requires work. Consumers like to think they have choice, but their consumption habits say they prefer easy.

From Avner Ronen

Innovation in the living room will not come from the set-top makers or the networks. if you would like to see the wild creativity of the Internet come to the TV screen, well you need to let the Internet come to the TV screen.

An enlightening read.
For anyone who is curious to see where TV is going, and what some of the hurdles that lay ahead I highly recommend reading the full conversation.

Read the debate : http://blog.boxee.tv/2009/03/21/a-lively-debate-with-mark-cuban/

Review of what Boxee is : http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/theres-something-about-boxee/

Thus creating a user-name that is also concise is of value. It can be easier for people to remember. It takes up less space when people are ‘retweeting’ things that you have said. It takes up less characters when someone is going to send you a message.

If only there was a way to see what small Twitter names were still available. Enter Little-Twit.

Little-Twit.com keeps a list of all the available one, two, three and four letter user-names. All of the one letter names are gone and most of the 2 letter names are gone as well, just 21 left. Plenty of three and four letter ones left though!

Give a check before they are all gone.
See for yourself : http://www.little-twit.com/

Where Google is a system for FINDING things that we as a civilization collectively publish, Wolfram Alpha is for ANSWERING questions about what we as a civilization collectively know.

…Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions — like questions that have factual answers such as “What country is Timbuktu in?” or “How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?” or “What is the average rainfall in Seattle?”

Wow. There are many sites competing for our search clicks and queries;  Live, Google, Ask, Mahalo and many others to name a few. And each has tried to put a unique spin or twist on it to provide extra value and win us over.  Wolfram Alpha approach of actually determining the correct answer, as opposed to pointing me to a document that might have the answer is a game changer.  It is being called a Computational Knowledge Engine for the web and the service is scheduled to go live in May, and I could not be more excited.

Read the full article : http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/08/wolfram-alpha-computes-answers-to-factual-questions-this-is-going-to-be-big/

Like many of you I love the gmail, so I was pretty excited when I logged into the service today and found that Google had enabled themes for Gmail. There are over 30 different styles to choose from and they range from simple color adjustments up to full complex graphical overhauls. There are a handful that after selecting them ask you for your location, and will visually change as day continues.

One of my favorites, albeit impractical, is the Terminal one.

To see if you have access to the new themes just go into your settings tab, then check for a subtab called themes.

*update* If you do not see the Themes tab in your Setting section, dont fret. Google tends to roll new features out rather then flipping a master switch. So keep checking!

Here are some examples.