iPod Hi-Fi – no thanks

I’m going to pass on the Apple Hi-Fi and stick with my Sonos system. And $99 for a leather iPod case? Yeah, I think I’ll pass on that too. Here’s a sample reaction from the comments section of the Engadget livecast.

how can jobs say he’s an audiophile when iTunes sells crap lo-fi music and he drops a turd like the “ipod hifi” on the market?!??!? boo apple…was hoping it would be something like the soundbridge or something and maybe lossless music on itunes….. 😦

The new Intel-based Mac Mini, on the other hand, looks promising. How much longer until HD content is available on iTunes?

Skype Registered Users Graph

For those of you saw my iTunes Sales Graph, make sure to check out a similar graph that I did a couple of months ago showing the growth of Skype registered users. I’ll be updating that graph in a month or so when eBay reports Q1 2006 earnings.

Introducing the iPod Macro

The iPod Macro, spotted in the window at Papenhausen Hardware in the West Portal neighborhood of San Francisco. It’s hard to tell in the photo but the screen is a small TV set.

iTunes Song Purchases plotted on a graph

Apple recently announced 1 billion songs purchased on iTunes. I dug around the Apple press releases and tracked down some of the major iTunes milestones over the last few years. It’s amazing that there have been 500 million songs purchased since July 2005. That’s 500 million songs purchased in 7 months for an average of 71 million songs purchased per month!

2/26/06 Update:

Additional data point: 850 million on Jan 10, 2006 (announced at Macworld)

Date	Songs Purchased (millions)	Source
05/15/2003	1	Apple
06/23/2003	5	Apple
09/8/2003	10	Apple
12/15/2003	25	Apple
03/15/2004	50	Apple
07/12/2004	100	CNN
12/16/2004	200	Apple
07/17/2005	500	Apple
02/24/2006	1000	Apple

graph created using NCES Create a Graph

Filed under: Apple, iTunes

Diggnation at Beach Chalet

Diggnation did a live show at Beach Chalet last night. More photos here.

Trying out the new Google Page Creator

I tested out the new Google Page Creator and, I have to say, I’m pretty impressed with the WYSIWYG tool, but I’m not really sure where they are going with this. I was able to build this page in about 20 minutes. I just worry that this is going to be Google’s version of Geocities. This one-line review pretty much sums it up: “No RSS? What is this for, cat photos?”.

Filed under: Google, Google Page Creator

Historical San Francisco Map Update

Recently added to the Historical San Francisco Map:

• Seals Stadium
• Battery Spencer
• Embarcadero Freeway
• Sutro Pleasure Grounds / Firth Wheel

 

Craig Newmark / Edgeio

Craig Newmark from craigslist brings up some good points about the soon-to-be-launched Edgeio service in the comments section of this post on BuzzMachine. It will be interesting to see how Edgeio deals with these issues.

Mr. Newmark’s comments:

“…I act as full time customer service rep, there’s a few of us, only a few, because with flagging, our community removes most questionable ads.

Using the tagging approach, how are bogus ads removed? Considering that spam blogs are already a huge problem, and how easy it’ll be to falsely tag viagra ads, the volume of bad ads will be tremendous.

That will also be true of blogs that do things like tagging photos that you’d prefer not to see, but they’d be in search results anyway. (You really don’t want to know.)

Also, how will ads be removed (by the poster) or expired?

When there’re other problems, like defamation, how are they handled?

I’m guessing that many customer service reps will be needed, good jobs, but then,
you risk being a “publisher” which means that you have to monitor ads.”

Tour of California Cycling

I went down to Coit Tower this morning to check out the Tour of California bike race. This is an eight-day, 600 mile, multi-stage race. Today was the individual time trial. More photos here. SFist has a good re-cap of the race and make sure to check out the photos by flickr users bigempty and whileseated.

Filed under: Tour of California, Cycling, Bike Race, San Francisco

Snow in the Bay Area

There was a rare snowfall in the Bay Area above 2,000 ft. More photos here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Photo by flickr user zkhowes