Monthly Archives: January 2006

My Yahoo gets AJAXy

It’s good to see Yahoo making some improvements to MyYahoo. They recently added the ability to drag & drop content. This is a standard feature on most of the new AJAX homepages. I’m not so sure where these new home pages (Netvibes, Zoozio, etc.) will be a year from now. I suspect that most of them will either be bought out by Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, etc. or will shut down due to a flimsy business model. I haven’t tried all of them but I’ve been very impressed with Protopage. All in all, the proliferation of these Ajax homepages is a good thing because they are pushing the bigger players to add more features, which ultimately benefits the users.

1906 San Francisco Earthquake Photo Exhibits

Yesterday, there was an article on SFGate about two new photographic exhibits commemorating the centennial of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake: 1906 Earthquake: A Disaster in Pictures (SF MOMA) and After the Ruins, 1906 and 2006: Rephotographing the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire (Legion of Honor).

Related to this, the Bancroft Library has created an online exhibit that includes an interactive map and a panoramic view of the earthquake destruction. And there is an upcoming exhibit at the California Historical Society featuring photos of the 1906 quake taken by Jack London.

eBay reports Skype revenue

In their earnings announcement yesterday, eBay provided some very interesting revenue figures for their recently acquired Skype division. eBay acquired Skype on October 14, 2005 and since that time, the Skype unit has had $24.9 million in revenues. At the end of Q4 2005, they reported 74.7 million registered Skype users. This really is tremendous growth. I did some digging around and came up with these data points for registered Skype users:

DateRegistered Users (millions)

Source

8/29/2003 0 Wikipedia
(History section)
3/11/200529Wikipedia
(History section)
8/14/200550Skype
Journal
9/12/200554Skype
10/25/200561Skype
12/31/200575eBay
(1/18/06 earnings report)

Since August 2005 (5 months), that averages out to 178,000 new Skype users per
day
! Below is a chart showing the growth since the first public beta
in August 2003:

Check out Om Malik’s blog for some interesting analysis on the Skype numbers.