Rose Cantine

Mashable has just created a Web 2.o marketplace for entrepreneurs who want to find software developers, sell or buy companies, provide development services, etc. Mashable was inspired by the recent trend of companies listing themselves for sale on eBay but apparently, they claim they got more leads from Mashable. Among the categories are websites for sale (and wanted), jobs available (and wanted) Facebook development services, software providers, etc.

Anyone who lists within 48 hours (starting August 14, 2007 — 03:15 AM PDT) gets a free listing. Mashable is thinking of charging $120 per month for listings but they’re open to other suggestions. 

Go to the Mashable Web 2.0 marketplace: http://market.mashable.com/ 

Last week, a fire broke out in two canal houses in Amsterdam. The owner of the apartment where the fire started says the only thing he can think of as the cause of the fire is his laptop. Until the investigation is complete, we won’t know for sure. However, I saw this blog post by Farhad Manjoo on Salon about laptop batteries catching fire (quote): Toshiba announced today that it’s recalling 1,400 laptop batteries because they pose a risk of overheating. The recall affects the company’s Satellite A100, Satellite A105, and Tecra A7 notebook models. This small recall comes just a month after Toshiba reissued 10,000 batteries that it said could catch fire. In all cases, the batteries were made by — who else? — Sony.

I wonder if there is any connection between the canal house fire and these types of batteries.

Om Malik posted an article today about Skype on the iPhone: “It took me less than two minutes to get up and running. Sending messages was as simple as typing SMS messages.” A German company has figured out a way to let iPhone owners use Skype via the browser on the iPhone (since you can’t install applications on the phone yet). I am sure AT&T is not too pleased about that but then again, they did not cripple the Wi-Fi functionality on the phone.

Meanwhile, Farhad Manjoo, Salon’s tech columnist, says that several UK ISPs are threatening to block access to BBC’s online videos. The problem is that the BBC uses a P2P application called iPlayer which allows people to view thousands of BBC videos online. ISPs say it’s a bandwidth hog and since they buy their bandwidth (wholesale) from BT, it’s costing them a lot of money and slowing down the network. Tiscali, a UK ISP, wants the BBC to pay them or else. The ISPs threat is making a lot of people scream for net neutrality rules in the UK where ISPs cannot block content at will if the content provider does not pay. Perhaps the ISPs simply have to charge more. Other countries are, for this reason, encouraging the deployment of fiber networks which provide much more bandwidth (at lower prices too).