But joking aside, what it is, is really human negotiation, between the buyer and seller. I asked Brian Kupetz, Director of Development for the La Canada, CA based company Zigabid to tell me a little about what makes Zigabid so unique:

Zigabid allows buyers and sellers to sell entertainment tickets without a fixed price. It’s is the first company to offer a dynamic pricing model for tickets, with many competitors introducing similar features in 2009. The concept is rather simple: tickets are a commodity and should not sell at a fixed price, they should sell like any other commodity in which pricing is market-driven.

The initial feature set we have introduced is a negotiation system which provides buyers and sellers the means to determine a mutually agreeable sale price. The ticket market space is extremely crowded and Zigabid not only differentiates itself from Ticketmaster, Live Nation, Stubhub and Tickets Now by its stock market style functionality, but it is also very transparent about its service fees.

Zigabid is restricted to the US so far, so I haven’t had the pleasure of actually using their services myself, but since I was part of the development, I know that it’s real simple to use. I asked Brian how many tickets their system is currently holding, and he said that they have an estimate of 200′000 seats listed, mostly sports and concert tickets.

On the Boxee blog I read some good news for all of you who’s waiting on the Windows version of Boxee to be released.

Some 200 people have signed up for the pre-alpha testing of boxee for Window, but I can imagine that number will grow rather quickly when word gets out more. Not sure how many testers they’re planning letting in though.

To the general we can add local media scanning, YouTube, Flickr, Picasa and CNN and Hulu. For me, local media scanning hasn’t been an issue at all, I’m just hoping that they address the network media scanning and improve that.

Right now, I’m tossed between the super fast network scanning by my Xbox 360 but inability to play all my file types, and the super slow network scanning by Boxee but ability to play all and everything I throw at it. And the fact that I don’t have an Xbox in my bedroom.

Oh hey, Boxee team! You should definitely have a look at the MtvMusic service. How cool would that be to have in Boxee? Buuuut like everything else, if you’re not in the States, you’re not allowed to watch jack. Damn it. They did however allow me to watch music videos for a while when they released the website. Then they slammed the door in my face.

Oh and people, if you like Boxee, you should nominate them for The Crunchies!

quick intro to boxee from boxee on Vimeo.

Boxee, my new favorite media center application just announced that they landed a $4 million investment from Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures at 50% each, and this brings me joy and sparkles in my eyes.

Since I last reviewed Boxee, and re-reviewed it, I have really fallen even more in love with this application. I can only assume this investment will bring more awesomeness to the application and the Boxee team. Maybe they can do the network browsing a bit faster, have settings stick (When I change “View” under say Movies, then go up or down a level and back, the View setting is reset). And I don’t know if caching is busted somehow, but thumbnail view is slow as snails. Actually, every time I enter Movies, the system has to think for way too long for me not to get testy. Another thing I’ve been wondering about is if the system respects folder names/structures, or if it uses the media file only for data.

Anyway, on with the good cash flow.

They say their goals for 2009 are:

• grow out of our comfortable closed-alpha cocoon and launch a kick-ass beta
• build even more functionality and content into boxee while making it easier to navigate
• listen to user requests, ideas and frustrations (and improve the product accordingly)
• work with team-xbmc, developers and partners to extend boxee beyond the confines of our limited resources
• finish the year with ~ 1,000,000 users

Not so many concrete goals I have to say. But yeah, we’d like to see improvements… They hit 100′000 sign-ups last week, that’s a good start. Congratulations Boxee!

quick intro to boxee from boxee on Vimeo.

The startup Spotify has really achieved something here. I’m using the Spotify application on my MacBook Pro, and it’s running so smoothly. It’s a very light application streaming music to your computer. It looks very much like iTunes in many ways, only the interface is dark grey. I am using the free account with the invite I got, which is the advertising-funded version of Spotify. So far I’ve heard one third-party ad, and some Spotify ads saying I should get Premium account if I love music as much as they do. Which I might very well do. The ads seem to run with an interval of 20 minutes, and the Spotify ad was only about 10 secs, while the third-party ad was more like 25-30 seconds long. Not bad at all. Oh, as I’m typing this, I just heard two shorter third-party ads in a row.

There is no way to browse music, not by artist, nor by album, songs or genres. It’s all search based Google style, even with spelling suggestions if you get no hits on your search. However, you can get creative with your searches, like they state in their FAQ: “you can search for genres by writing genre: followed by the genre you want to find, like genre:Trip-hop.“. That particular search results in 0 hits though.

I have read some reports from people saying that they are experiencing connection problems with the application, which is to be expected I suppose. It is after all only a few days old. I have however not had any problems at all in the two days I’ve been using it. When connection issues occur, cached music still works. The application caches as much music as you let it cache (up to 100gb) under settings to minimize network strain, which is calculated to run below 256 kbit/s, which means 3G/Turb-3G connections should handle the traffic easily.

The sound quality is nice. Not fantastic, but very good at the very least. They say in their forums, as people asked about this and some had some complaints about the audio sounding “flat”, “We are currently using Ogg Vorbis q5, i.e. up to approx. 160kb/s.“, which seems fair to me.

A bonus feature if you use Growl is a nifty message like this when the song changes, if you change it yourself etc. Beautiful indeed.

It responds to the Play/Pause, Previous and Next buttons on my Apple Wireless Keyboard, which was a surprise, and I think that’s a great feature! However, it does not respond to the Apple Remote Control, which is a real shame, that would have made the experience (for me) far greater, as I have my Mac Mini and iPod at a distance in the office, controlling them remotely. Obviously, it’s a feature outside the norms of delivering a great software application to the general public, but if we’re really lucky, and participate in the forums, we might see it happen.

Some more information about Spotify, which is a Stockholm, Sweden-based company, you can check out this article on TechCrunch and here’s an official video:

Spotify – the story from Spotify on Vimeo.