Forget the fury of repeatedly hitting redial when those Stones tickets go on sale in your city. Ticketmaster is joining the growing number of companies that are replacing customer service agents with automated agents.

Voxify provides retailers with a voice-activated response system that can fill orders, take applications, and track orders at one-fifth of the cost of hiring real people. The company's software eliminates the need for hitting the phone's keypad and plays back recorded human voices, according to Voxify directory of marketing Hollis Chin.

Retailer Hammacher Schlemmer used Voxify's technology to help customers track their holiday orders, 40 percent of which were placed online, Chin says. This saves companies from hiring seasonal phone reps and provides better customer service, she says.

By the end of the year Voxify will take over for all of Ticketmaster's agents, enabling the ticket agency to respond to an almost unlimited number of simultaneous calls, according to Chin. So concerts will probably sell out even faster as customers won't have to deal with jammed phone lines.

Voxify's technology could also help small online retailers who don't want to setup ecommerce platforms while also addressing consumers who are hesitant to type in their credit card numbers.

We all know that most netizens have an iPod, Google has more impact on a wider audience than AOL, and Rolling Stone is the most read magazine for online music lovers.

Except that those assumptions are wrong, wrong, and wrong, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. (The truth -- just one out of seven online folks visited iTunes, AOL has a bigger audience of users who spends almost five times as long on their site as Google users, and Wired is the favorite magazine of iTunes enthusiasts).

You can't go a day without reading at least one headline mentioning Google and Apple, yet according to Nielsen/Netratings, users actually spend more time with Yahoo and Microsoft. The media (and I'll include bloggers) decide that some companies are the most interesting to follow, reinforcing the passions of the people who either love or loathe the companies.

That's why I think the iTunes phenomenon was probably the most over-hyped story of 2005, followed only by "Google continues path to world domination." Yes, the companies are significant, but by dedicating too much time to these two, we are missing out on other conpanies that are even more likely to impact our business.

This year will be the year that broadcast and print media fully commit to expanding their online audience and ecommerce, so paying attention to the companies (such as interactive agencies and streaming platforms) that will help The New York Times, Fox, and CBS to make serious money will be a smart use of time.

Jon Maroney is President of FreeRange Communications, a Portland, OR software company that develops RSS reader software for mobile phones. The company recently signed a deal with RSS feed synchronization service Attensa to make it easier to manage and view subscriptions feeds from any location. In the following Q&A, Jon discusses the challenges and benefits of reading RSS feeds from mobile phones.

Q: What are the options for delivering feeds to mobile browsers, and why would you chose WAP or a dedicated application?

A: First, RSS is simply the best way to get any kind of internet information- news, sports, blogs, weather, whatever you want - to your mobile phone, simply because it's concise and to the point. The phone companies have been limiting access to information by controlling what you can see on the phones' WAP home page. With RSS, the entire web is your oyster! WAP viewers are available from several web-based RSS vendors, including Bloglines and Newsgator. The advantage is they work on any WAP phone - the disadvantage is that WAP is really slow, only gives you limited information and you can only read your information when you are connected. As an alternative, dedicated applications are built for specific phones and have the advantage of being faster at getting the information you want onto your phone. Products like FreeNews download and store all the RSS feeds on your phone, so you can quickly scroll through them wherever you happen to be - they don't require a constant connection to the internet and are ideal for commuters. Dedicated applications also make it much easier to send an interesting article via email to someone else or follow links for further information.

Q: What should publishers be doing to make feeds more mobile-friendly?
A: Nothing! From a publishers standpoint, the beauty of RSS is that it works well anywhere. However, one thing that publishers should think about overall is how much information they put into the RSS feed in general. There's quite a debate about this going on right now. I think it really comes down to what you are publishing. If you want all your subscribers to consume as much of your content as possible, make it easy by putting as much as you can into the RSS feed. If you have other motives for your RSS feeds, then think about what works best to achieve those goals.

Q: What are the application and hardware challenges in delivering RSS to mobile devices?
A: The biggest challenge when you try to extend any internet or computer experience to a mobile device is the user's expectations. People expect browsing the internet on a phone to be relatively similar to how they do it on a computer. The reality is that most mobile devices still have slow processors, slow network speeds and small screens, leading people that do try to use the internet services to be very frustrated by the experience. Ask anyone if they've tried getting to the internet from their mobile devices, and 99% of them respond the same - it's either "No," or "Yes, ages ago and it was so frustrating that I never tried again." The challenges in developing an application for mobiles is to make a useful tool for people, that responds the way they expect it to respond and yet still makes sense within the confines of a mobile phone. We decided right away that what people want most is to have their information right there with them instead of having to navigate a WAP page to find the right location. We wanted someone to launch our product and immediately see all of their news and blogs.

Q: E-mail applications such as Outlook and Google's web-based Gmail are absorbing RSS reader functions. Why would people want to use stand alone readers in the future?
A: A lot of people like the idea of dividing the work that they do into segments. If you want to get caught up on what's happening in the world, you launch your RSS reader and when you want to interact you launch email. I think there is a place for desktop readers due to people's preferences. There are also a lot of people that don't want Google to know what they are reading or displaying advertising to them. for these people desktop reader is the way to go.
In terms of mobile devices, it's a non--issue. The size of mobile screens means you have to focus what you are doing to a single task. The screen just isn't big enough to usefully combine multiple functions into a single application.

Q:Can RSS be a replacement for email in certain business data streams?
A: Yes, it is already starting to in many organizations and showing great gains in efficiency. Email is great for interactive, 2 way communication. But a lot of the communication that goes on today in most organizations is informational - here's what you need to know to better do your job, get your health benefits, or talk about a product correctly, etc. These types of emails are about topics that you need to read and file to have for future reference - but you don't necessarily need to act on them or to reply to them. This kind of informational communication is ideal for RSS because it's always available and always current. You never need to worry about whether this is the current email or not - the latest information is always available (and spam-free) from internal RSS feeds.

Publishers looking to earn commissions by putting retailers' catalogs on their websites can do so with a single line of code, according to GoldenCan.com.

The company has written Javascript code that simplifies putting a product database onto affiliates websites. For an example, see All Mountain Sports Network. Affiliates get their own referring ID when products are sold. Instead of charging setup fees, Golden Can inserts its user ID on 25 percent of the traffic so that it gets credit for some of affiliate sales.

Overstock.com and Payless Shoes are also GoldenCan customers. This model makes sense for smaller publishers looking to garner some dough from their enthusiasm for a topic.

Craig Newmark wants to help not hinder old media, according to Information Week.

Newmark said he is working on a project that would use citizen journalists to select and monitor the best media stories so that good journalism is prominently displayed while those whose reporting is shoddy (rhymes with True-myth Filler) will be vilified by the public.

"I could say there's a lot of blood on the hands of people who don't do their jobs," Newmark said.

Interestingly Newmark, whose free Craigslist service has put a hurting on newspaper classified revenues, said that the content would be paid for through subscriptions or micropayments per article. I can understand his reluctance to embrace advertising (which could endanger the purity of the journalism), but a service that wants free exchange of ideas needs be available to the largest audience, which probably means being ad supported in some capacity.

The service would be a cross between Slashdot, the Daily Kos, and Digg, which could be a successful niche. And anything that increases the quality of reporting is good for everyone.

Microsoft is putting a new face on Hotmail as the free email service becomes "Windows Live Mail." Tinkering with the beta left me with the same empty feeling you get when trying to eat an entire meal of cheesie puffs.

The highlights are that the Windows Live home page integrates a preview pane on the right hand side of the screen enabling you to get to the urgent email du jour with one click. This opens up the Windows Live Mail page, which features drag and drop moving of emails to folders or trash.

But that's about it for the good news. Embedded links within email messages aren't live, and the checkbox that allows you to dump many emails at a time is gone, so you are forced to drag and drop the spam one go at a time. Also, the skyscraper banner down the right side eats into the real estate too much.

I also looked at Windows Live Mail under Firefox, and Microsoft has yet to add many features, such as access to your contacts, autocomplete of email addresses, or a preview window. However, I actually prefer the "old school" Inbox that is displayed under Firefox.

If the current beta email client is indicative of the "new" Windows Live services from Microsoft, they won't be getting many new customers. It's early, but you know what they say about first impressions...

Microsoft has been tinkering with adCenter overseas in preparation for its full U.S. rollout. The company's offshore adLab (Beijing) 50 researchers working on AdCenter technologies, with considerable focus on behavioral marketing.

Microsoft is data mining search data to find the difference between genders to offer advertisers audiences that are more likely to click.

The company is pursuing technology for consumers to click on items during a live video stream to find more information, such as where to buy clothes featured by celebs. This idea has been around for at least a decade (back when the "i-commerce" companies were reaping in the VC cash), so good luck. Product placement is becoming more obvious in TV and movies, but I can't see this technology ever becoming more than a small niche.

AdCenter will also provide an option so that advertisers can select a window of the day that there ads will be seen. So it will be Starbucks from 6-10, Taco Bell from 10-2, Rolaids from 2-6, Moviefone from 6-10, Budweiser from 10-2, and Doritos from 2-6.