Review: Joost

Matt was kind enough to send me an invite to Joost today, so I figured the least I could do was check it out and write about it. (please don’t ask for invites, I don’t have any to give out)

If you aren’t familiar with Joost, it’s the new project of Niklas Zennstrøm and Janus Friis. If you think those names sound familiar it’s because they do. Niklas and Janus are the same guys who made Kazaa and Skype.

So what is Joost? Joost is like Internet TV. You download the client (it’s very small, mine used less memory than my currently open Fire Fox!) and then using a bit torrent like system you can can watch TV on your computer. It’s not live TV but it does offer some cool channels.

There’s a comedy central channel, a fight channel, and a soccer channel.

Best of all, it even has Moose and Squirrel!!

If you look at the above image, you’ll get a good idea at what the Joost interface is like. While I love the service, I feel that the interface could use some more work.

In my opinion, the interface is a little clumsy. Sure it’s neat the way it overlays, but it doesn’t respond like I’d like it too. I had to click pause about 3 times before it finally paused, and once I got stuck in full screen mode and was unable to make the controls come back up.

Another annoying feature is when the playback catches up to the download – it gets choppy. The first thing I could think of was realplayer. Of course, as more people get on Joost I expect that this should resolve itself.

The channel selection is another area that could use some work. Take a look:

It took me a while to realize that the middle element is always highlighted – not the one that I’m hovering over. Ordinarily that’s not a problem, but if I click on a non-highlighted channel it loads – without any real notifcation to me that it’s doing so.

Is it annoying enough to get me to stop using it? No! I’d just prefer a more windows media player feel to the application.

It’s definitely a neat concept though, and I’m going to waste lots of time exploring it over the coming weeks.

1 comment April 3rd, 2007

How I Just Lost $40,000

Some of you who regularly play the market may remember an allegedy shady character named Mario Pino and his company Mellon Research that traded under the symbol MLON.

Well about a year ago MLON changed it’s name to Paychest, and those of us who had the MLON penny stock recieved a ton of shares of PYCT and XMET instead.

Paychest is a company vying to compete with Paypal (their whole business strategy of “be as good as our competitor” is a topic for another post), and XMET is xxstream entertainment – an adult themed club. I’m actually sort of afraid to visit their website.

Anyway, the shares were worthless. Myself, I had 6500 shares of XMET valued at $0.0001

So imagine my shock today when I opened up my AIM stock ticker to see this:

6500 shares at almost $6 is almost $40,000 !!!

As soon as my heart started again, I headed over to Ameritrade and placed a sell order with a limit of $3 (part of me was skeptical and thought this could be some sort of error.)

I’m not sure what happened, the Ameritrade quotes kept saying $5.95 but my $3 sell order wasn’t executing. 10 minutes later the price was the same, the stock’s volume had jumped from 10,000 to 10 million, and my order was still sitting there.

10 minutes after that, the price was back down to $0.0001 (ok, so I didn’t really LOSE $40,000…. but that’s not the point)

I have no idea what’s going on, but I don’t think my heart can take something like that again.

1 comment April 3rd, 2007