Two Great Technologies

The beautiful thing about technology is that it has a constant and incessant need to continuously improve itself. I am happy to say that two new recently announced technologies are awesome, and give us a glimpse of how technology will further influence our lives.

My Yahoo Beta. I have been a user of of My Yahoo for close to 10 years now. Well after 10 years, it is certainly worth the wait. I use My Yahoo at least 2-3 times a day. It is my prefered way of getting news, sports scores, weather reports, stock quotes, financial news, and currency rates.

The new My Yahoo beta adopts many of the latest Web technologies particularly Ajax and Javascript. This gives the application a much newer look and feel. In addition, Yahoo as added many new themes making the application far better looking than its predecessor.

If I had one complaint about My Yahoo was that there was a lot of wasted space. Since I use the application so frequently, I want all the information easily accessible and well organized. The new My Yahoo beta does all that and more. I chose a 3 column layout, that displays a ton more information than my prior layout. In addition, each section is actually a widget, that you can drag and drop anywhere on the page. This makes it a snap to rearrange the page so you can put the most important information where you want it most.

Yahoo also added better email integration. I don’t check my secondary email account (chengrob@yahoo.com) because I get so much spam, but now the email is integrated directly into the application so I only have to open the email client when I actually have an email!

But I saved the best for last. This version also supports RSS feeds. I am now able to track the news of all of my favorite bloggers from my home page. Each new blog entry shows up with all of my other news as it is written. One little thing that shows how technology keeps me more productive and informed.

I am also excited about Amazon’s new MP3 download site which, to my knowledge, is the only one of its kind. I have never used iTunes and now I never will. The reason is iTunes is only good for playing music on your PC and on your iPod. Anything else is difficult if not impossible. I want to play music on my stereo in the US and also in Brazil. Plus in my BMW and my Astra. So instead of iTunes, I went to the local Best Buy every month and bought several CDs and then ripped them as soon as I got home.

Amazon’s new service is AWESOME. You can download all of the music in MP3 format and without any restrictions. This saves me a bunch of time, allowing me more time to listen to music rather than ripping it. But it does not end there. Amazon has done a great job organizing the music to make the shopping process more pleasurable. When you search an artist, they have detailed biographies about the bands and artists. They are all very well written and give an inside look on the lives of the musicians.

The cost of each CD is somewhere between $7-$8 for a whole CD or $.89 for a particular track. That’s right, it costs close to 1/2 what you pay in Best Buy, and $.10 less than what you pay at iTunes.

In addition, Amazon makes it really easy to purchase and download. They integrated their One Click technology into the MP3 download site. So literally, if you see a disk that you like, you click and 5 minutes later it is in your PC ready for listening.

You can also preview any of the songs directly from your PC without a download. Plus just like all things Amazon, the site is very well organized and one can view recommendations based on previous purchases, the most popular artists, albums and downloads.

I have literally spent hours on the Amazon site downloading MP3’s because the process is so enjoyable. I find myself listening to more music and certainly spending a lot more money. Great job, Amazon.