Why do remote controls still ask you for the number of a TV channel?
It would seem that remote controls as interfaces are falling behind in usability with the deluge of 1000s of cable channels, VOD and DVR options….
I want:- a small wireless keyboard or touchscreen- and/or speech recognition- semantic search by actors, genre, recently [...]

[Jeff Bezos via Flickr]
Great quote from a Portfolio.com interview with Jeff Bezos discussing one of the reasons why the Kindle is so successful:
The No. 1 feature is that it disappears. When you’re in the middle of reading, you don’t notice the ink or the glue or the stitching or the paper—all of that disappears, and [...]

You know it is that Holiday time of the year when in seven days you get seven shopping catalogs in your mail…
I have started testing Catalogchoice, and it might be just what I needed: a slick, easy way to stop receiving unwanted catalogs. Setting up a free account is a breeze, and the ajax menus [...]

I guess I came across flightstats.com around the time of the infamous JetBlue Valentine’s Day debacle earlier this year.
I was looking for a place to check flight departure status and was not satisfied with JFK’s website. Through a Google search I landed at flightstats.com (no pun intended) and found three features that really got me [...]

OpenTable Restaurant Reservations
It’s Friday night and I have a problem. I want to have a nice dinner with my girlfriend but forgot to book, and she was really looking forward to going somewhere nice….
Enter opentable.com, a website that let’s you quickly see which restaurants have seats available and instantly confirm reservations.
I am a huge fan [...]

DMNews has an interesting analysis:
Searches conducted on AOL were most likely to lead to online consumer purchases in January, according to a new WebSideStory index. This may reflect a difference in the demographics of people visiting various search engines.
WebSideStory’s index compares the median conversion rates of four major search engines at business-to-consumer e-commerce sites. AOL [...]

Jason Calacanis recently wrote about how YouTube.com was building a business based on copyright infringement:
These type of companies are leeches. They know that their business is predicated on people stealing content and they hide behind this silly disclaimer that users agreed that they owned the content they submitted. Yeah, right… the dozens of Saturday [...]