FUTURE SHOPPING BAZAR

This is a New York real-estate story and one of marketing excess. It’s about Amp’d Mobile, the too-hip-for-its-own-good virtual mobile carrier that filed for bankruptcy last June after burning through $360 million in capital. A lot of that money was spent on things like MTV ads to attract 175,000 young, urban customers. The problem was that nearly half of them turned out to be unable to pay their bills.

Today, a company called VoodooVox, which I wrote about last week, occupies Amp’d Mobile’s former posh offices on Union Square in Manhattan, complete with a massive terrace overlooking the city. VoodooVox CEO Scott Hamilton was able to acquire the space and it’s custom-built contents “by feeding on the corpse of Amp’d,” as he so delicately puts it. For $16,000 at bankruptcy court, he was able to to get a couple hundred thousand dollars worth (his estimate) of furniture and other surplus.

As Hamilton was cleaning out the desks and filing cabinets, he came across some of those excesses in the form of marketing schwag—like condoms stamped with the unfortunate tagline, “Try not to die.” Little did the Amp’d marketing genius who came up with that line know that the expiration dates on the condoms would outlast the company.

Hamilton also found a closet full of Amp’d fleece jackets. Maybe he should send those to all the investors who pumped money into Amp’d and themselves got fleeced in the process.

Labels: Deadpool: Amp’d, Google, Junkies, Lame Sales Front, Mobile’s, Remain, Sordid, Tales From, The, Yahoo

We’ve been keeping an eye on the mobile social networking world covering companies such as Zyb, Mocospace, Aka-aki, imity, meetmoi, mobiluck. See our roundup post here. Most of the innovation is occurring outside of the U.S., particularly in Europe. That’s why it’s no surprise to see yet another success story, Mig33, originate outside of the U.S. (the company was founded in Australia). The company has over seven million registered users, nearly all outside of the U.S. Today, however, the company is launching their service in the U.S. They’ve also moved the company here - it’s now based in San Francisco.

Migg33 is a mobile application that lets you chat (AIM, MSN, Yahoo) and send instant messages and emails, make cheaper international phone calls, share photos, connect with friends. The key selling point is that they now offer all of this functionality through the WAP browser (wap.mig33.com) currently available on most mobile phones, which has the added advantage of being accessible on your computer too. However, the WAP interface is rather spartan and chatting on a webpage is time consuming. The downloaded J2ME version makes for a richer experience.

The U.S. launch also includes a new free hosted email feature, allowing U.S. subscribers to send and receive e-mail on their mobile phones. This adds to the photo sharing, chat integration, and cheap calling rates by connecting over VOIP lines of the original application.

It will be interesting to how popular the service in the U.S. considering the differences between European and American cell phone use. Europeans have been more likely than Americans to use cellphones for the internet. Cellphones have continually been more a part of people’s lifestyles outside of the U.S.

Labels: $, FutureBazarOnline.com, Gmail, Google, Mig33 Moves, The, To, U.S.

Google has launched Sky for Google Earth, new functionality that adds imagery of the stars to Google Earth’s already extensive imagery of our planet.

According to Google, the new functionality allows users to “explore the universe from the comfort of your chair.” Users can zoom in on galaxies hundreds of millions of light years away, explore the constellations and even witness a supernova explosion.

The space imagery includes over one million photographs from various sources, including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Palomar Observatory at the California Institute of Technology and the Hubble Telescope.

It’s often said that Google Earth and Google Maps took Cartography to the masses, Sky could well do the same for Astronomy.

To access Sky, users must download the latest version of Google Earth.

Labels: $, cartridges. It has a USB Port and is compatible with Windows, Earth, for, Google, Heads, integrated handsfree speaker, Stars, The

The owners of the now infamous cut price Russian MP3 retail site AllofMP3 have posted that the site will soon recommence trading.

The announcement follows a Russian court decision August 15 that found AllofMP3’s previous CEO was not guilty of breaching Russian copyright laws, and therefore the AllofMP3 service was legal.

EMI, NBC Universal and Time Warner had led the legal case against AllofMP3, with the US Government previously threatening to escalate the dispute regarding AllofMP3 to the World Trade Organization (WTO).

According to AllofMP3, “The service will be resumed in the foreseeable future.”

Labels: All, Dead, From, Labels: child, MP3, Of, Rise, The, To