Michael Arrington (of Techcrunch) just posted about his switch to Blockbuster’s online movie rental service called Total Access away from Netflix. Apparently Blockbuster is now offering the option to rent movies online AND bring them back into a local store to instantly get another movie rental. Basically it combines Blockbuster’s online movie rentals with traditional in-store rentals - you can do either or. This is something Netflix can’t offer.

Many years ago I tried Netflix - but at that time their systems were slow and their distribution was not as efficient as I’m sure it is now. The spread between when i mailed back a movie and received the new movie in the mail was too long - about 4-5 days. I canceled it a few months later and have not used an online video rental service since.

Now that Blockbuster Video introduced Total Access, I think I’m going to give it a try. I like the option of just driving down to the Blockbuster any given night and exchanging the video. This should also solve the “difficult to get a new release” problem that Netflix apparently has.

I’d really love to see one of these services come out with an API. I think widgetizing people’s movie queues or what they just watched (sort of like Last.fm for movies) would be a killer marketing strategy for either Netflix or Blockbuster. I also think people could come up with some cool mashups if they just let their data loose.

Actually, I think I’ll sign up for both Netflix and Blockbuster (using my own my affiliate links below) and compare the two video services in a future post.

Update: My experience with Netflix v. Blockbuster Total Access

Both services have free trial offers:

TechCrunch reported on the launch of Media Temple’s new hosting service called Grid Server this morning. It promises to be a new kind of hosting platform that’s priced more like shared hosting ($20/month), but is instantly scalable on demand (more like Amazon’s EC3 computing service).

For $20/month you get 100 GB is storage and 1TB of bandwdth. If you have overages, they charge you incrementally. You can host up to a 100 sites and there’s an option for Ruby on Rails (but only 1 app per account it seems).

I’ve decided to give the Grid Server a spin with one of our projects. Signup was fairly easy, as was setup. I started with a 1-click install of a Wordpress installation and have played around a little bit since then. The control panel is quite intuitive. The site speed seems to be much faster than Dreamhost’s, but that might just be because it’s still a new service and they haven’t been stressed.

I’ll report my experiences after a few weeks/months after we test out the Grid-Server, its capabilities, speed, etc. It’s still too early to tell if the Media Temple Grid $20/mo. service will trump my Dreamhost Shared $8/mo. service (when it comes to real-world usage), but it really does look promising.

If you’re like me, you have probably wasted hundreds of hours of your life trying to fix glitches in your CSS-based designs. Cross-browser issues, alignment issues, and various CSS bugs like the IE peekaboo bug, make standards-based design a massive headache.

Some time ago I learned about two new services that offer outsourced CSS/XHTML coding. This was a pretty interesting concept and so I took both for a test drive. They both essentially convert your design from a PSD (Photoshop), Adobe Illustrator, JPG, or any type of “flat” file into standards-based CSS and XHTML. If you’ve ever “sliced” up a design into tables (back when that was the norm) – you get an idea of what these services do. But proper CSS/XHTML is quite a bit more complicated than slicing a design into tables, so it’s imperative to know what you’re doing to get cross-browser compatible, valid, accessible code.

Basically these services take the economies of scale approach to outsourced semantic coding. Since these people are pros and do it full time, they can crank out very good code in a lot less time than it would ordinarily take you.

Here’s an overview of the two services:

XHTMLized

XHTMLized is a network of 12 coders from 7 different countries who share the workload for the service.

• Time to completion: 7 days.
• Included:
• Support for all major browsers – IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Mozilla, etc.
• SEO-friendly code
• Accessibility compliant
• Pricing: $149 for 1 page, $259 for 2 pages, $359 for 3 pages, $439 for 4 pages, $499 for 5 pages, etc.
• Payment terms: Pay via paypal or moneybookers once work is completed. If you’re not happy with the quality of the work, you don’t pay.

My experience: The process took 1.5 days or approximately 36 hours from the time I submitted the work to the time it was emailed back to me. I needed a few tweaks that I had not specified originally and they were happy to oblige. Once again the work was delivered back very quickly – within hours. Total cost was $149 for one main page and another slightly modified version of the same page. The code was everything they promised (seo, cross-browser, lightweight, etc.) and worked well in IE6, IE7, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. The CSS was well commented.

PSD2HTML

PSD2HTML is a single company (as opposed to a distributed group of coders) that offers 3 different levels of markup: basic, professional, and high-end. They offer a menu of options in addition to the three levels such as “optimize for load speed” and “implement dynamic menus”. They make it very easy to contact them via email and every type of instant messaging service available and offer expedited and weekend work options (at a premium, I’m sure).

• Time to completion: 8 hours, sometimes longer depending on workload (12-16 hours)
• Included:
• Varies depending on level. See site for details. All include IE and Firefox compatibility.
• Pricing: $117 for basic, $153 for professional, $211 for Hi-End. Each additional page is 50% off.
• Payment terms: Work is paid up front via 2Checkout.com. There is a money back guarantee if you are not satisfied.

My experience: The process took 24 hours from when they received the order, 36 hours from when I actually placed it (which was in the evening at 8PM EST). The communication was good during and after delivery. The CSS/XHTML code was lightweight and efficient and worked well in IE6, IE7, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. I opted for the professional level of markup and received everything as promised. My total cost: $243 for 2 pages.

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Overall, I was very pleased with both services – they both produced excellent code and delivered everything they promised within a very short amount of time. Personally I think PSD2HTML offers too many options and levels, but some people might like that. Also, on the business end, I think the XHTMlized business model might do better since it’s distributed and can scale a bit more as needed. I for one am very happy that these services are available – they will help me save a lot of time and avoid all the aggravation that comes with trying to create valid, cross-browser-friendly, accessible code.

One of our startups, Qeeglixtr™ is looking for VC funding – anywhere from $15M to $145M, please. We predict the market cap will be $8.75 Billion within 8 months, so this is actually a good deal, but you have to act now.

It’s a little hard to understand what Qeeglixtr™ will do but let me try to explain it: It is a beta SMS feed widget that uses a wiki-backend to collaboratively publish ajax-enabled API’s to semantically tag and integrate tagclouds in user-generated blogs, and podcasts that asynchronously posts skype messages back the user.

In short, you can use it to send a trackback to your grandma’s mobile blog anytime somebody on Facebook finds out you bought an x-rated amazon untube video. It will then let grandma send you an interactive-zwinky via skype that will then be tagged and mashed up with your last.fm tracks to appear on your half-life account as a youtube clip that you can then share with your friends.

It’s that simple. Pretty soon people will be saying, “remember the days before Qeeglixtr™ when we used to have to talk to people? That sucked. Grandma just pwned me.”

You can use Google to predict the demand ⁽¹⁾. There are 131,000 searches for “zwinky”, 600,000,000 searches for “SMS”, and 17,500,000 for Skype. Concordidly, 131,000 X 600,000,000 X 17,500,000 is something like 3.79 million billion dollars. Estimating that each user is worth $25, that equals … let’s just say a lot of money.

So any takers?

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(1) Courtesy of Ali G’s ice cream glove mathematic theory

Thanks to Alex for the logo, and EB ventures for help with drafting the business plan. Also, our competitors who got covered in TechCrunch earlier today:

Ever since I learned about .mobi coming out (Landrush 1 begins in 5 days), I’ve been wondering about its significance. I estimate it falls somewhere between “huge opportunity” and “waste of time” (which can sort of be applied to anything I suppose).

But after researching it for a little bit, I didn’t really get a sense of where in the continuum it lies. Here’s two possible scenarios, the way I see it:

1. .mobi is a sleeping monster and not enough people are realizing its potential or are aware of it. There are far more mobile devices than computers, and as soon as the providers get it together and access via phone becomes as easy and painless as access via computer, this market will REALLY open up. Landrush is coming in about a week and you’d be foolish not to pick up some choice domain names. Snagging a .mobi might be as significant and lucrative as snagging a .com was back in its heyday.
2. .mobi is nothing more than another generic TLD like a .us or a .info. Most people will still end up using .com, even on their cell phones and it won’t make that much of a difference.

One rumor I heard was that phones will be defaulting to .mobi. I haven’t been able to really find anything concrete that states this. If it was true, then I’d be leaning more towards option 1, however, I’m not so sure that’s the case. A lot of hype has been thrown around “Google and Nokia are backing this” and other Don King-esque sales pitches, but it almost seems like self-promotion by the people involved with .mobi.

I’ve asked some people about the significance and potential of .mobi, but nobody has been able to really tell me a solid opinion. Any experts out there that want to chime in?