renting

More people renting DVD and Blu-ray Discs?

I just noticed a New York Times blog post about the sales trends of DVD and Blu-ray discs. While numbers for DVD and Blu-ray weren't broken out, overall sales for discs were down big in the fourth quarter of 2008.

Here's the key quote from the article:

In last year's fourth quarter, usually a big one for DVD sales...the studios' revenue from sell-through of conventional DVDs and Blu-ray discs fell 23.4 percent, to $2.6 billion from $3.4 billion. This drop of $800 million, Adams Research figures, shaved fully $500 million from the studios' … Read more

iiProperty adds tenant-side rent payments, rebrands as Rentomatic

Paperless billing is one of the greatest facets of the Internet, especially when it comes to recurring payments. For many folks, the biggest monthly expense is rent, and the process of sending off a check, or coordinating payments with roommates to keep a roof over your head is a juggling act. Rentomatic (which rolls off the tongue a lot easier than its predecessor iiProperty) is aiming to help change that for people in apartment buildings with anywhere from one to ~50 units.

While this technology remains mostly unchanged for landlords who might have previously used iiProperty to handle finances, expiring … Read more

Minisodes: For those who find 30-minute sitcoms too deep and drawn out

The average half hour sitcom runs about 22 minutes, but for some people that's simply too long. Most successful web videos average between 2 and 5 minutes, and the folks at Sony Pictures Television have found a new way to deliver classic television to this shortened-attention-span set. As highlighted in a recent story by CNN, The The Minisode Network is presented on Myspace and offers a swath of retro television episodes that have been carefully edited down to five minutes in an effort to update the old shows for the post millennium web format.

The network offers a variety of programming from Dilbert to Diff'rent Strokes, but is something lost in translation as the video editors slice and dice everything from the original that is considered not essential? Are these mostly ancient sitcoms even worth watching today in either form? While I can't be certain whether it's a result of the hack jobs or the dated material, most of the mini-episodes I watched felt incomplete and not really worth watching. The editing was clean and seamless, but the stories lacked any real development (something that's already a problem with the sitcom genre). The jokes were still there and the punchlines were also kept intact, but the timing was wrong and the humor was all but lost on me.

… Read more

TenantMarket is like dating, for landlords

Moving can be a strange experience. Even stranger are the people you meet along the way. TenantMarket is a new service that plays matchmaker for both landlords and potential tenants in an attempt to avoid potentially bad living situations. You simply give TenantMarket details like length of employment, credit status, and reasons for moving, and it will match you up accordingly.

Landlords pay to have their listings matched up, and the system provides them with a fresh set of "leads" to contact. Likewise, potential renters are e-mailed personalized offers about new places that match their criteria. It's … Read more

Keyboard as studio apartment

If you live in real-estate hell--as in New York or San Francisco--then every square inch of living space can be the difference between solvency and homelessness. That's just one practical reason for the "KB-Dock" keyboard, which Chip Chick says "tries to pack in everything but the kitchen sink."

In addition to its most obvious feature, a detachable iPod dock, the keyboard includes 14 media hotkeys and a 10-in-1 memory card reader. If it just included a Murphy bed, it could qualify as a Manhattan studio.