The Media Economist

Big media has been somewhat slow to change, but today's CBS news shows a promising shift for the television industry. Patrick Keane, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for CBS Interactive, proposed a move to an aggregate ratings system, which would combine TV viewing with online video consumption. These combined ratings could then provide advertisers with a cross-platform option that is more detailed in terms of data, thanks to online metrics.

Keane cited internet darling "Jericho" as an example: the online viewers of one episode boosted the ratings from 4.2 to 5.1 - nearly a whole percentage point. Although Keane didn't mention the online campaign that did, in fact, save Jericho from cancellation, had these online ratings been taken into account from the beginning, desperate measures by hardcore fans would never have been needed.

Internet fans save Jericho

Another example Keane used was this year's Grammys. TV viewers accounted for 16.9 million of the viewers for the annual music awards show - down 15% from the previous year. But taking into account the web viewers, an additional 7.9 video streams could be added to that number, as well as 4.9 million page views, making the decline in viewership not as bad as previously thought

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/a_good_day_for_internet_tv.php

March Madness

2008-03-20T10:55:00.000-07:00

Free Web broadcasts of U.S. college basketball let CBS reach the sports fan at the office, and turned the Web-advertising model on its head

GRANT ROBERTSON
MEDIA REPORTER
March 20, 2008

It's one of the fastest-growing, most lucrative departments at CBS Corp. right now. But the company's president, Les Moonves, has a far more blunt way to describe how the network has turned March Madness basketball into an Internet gold mine.

"People sit at their computers and waste away their afternoons watching basketball games while their bosses are looking the other way," Mr. Moonves told analysts recently in New York.

When asked about the advertising dollars CBS expects this year from online broadcasts of the annual U.S. college tournament starting today, Mr. Moonves simply added: "We are having our best year, by far. Ever."

It started almost as a joke three years ago when CBS began offering the online games at no charge to see how many slackers at the office would tune in during the first two days of the competition.

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The massive response in 2006 nearly bogged down the network's servers, proving the at-work audience for Web TV was formidable. Revenue surged from $250,000 (U.S.) the year before, when a subscription model was used, to about $4-million from advertising alone.

Despite a jittery economy that threatens to throw a wet blanket on the advertising market this year, CBS said yesterday it expects to rake in $23-million of ad revenue over the next few weeks. Advertising space during the online broadcasts was 95 per cent sold out by late February, a number more suited to events like the Super Bowl than to college basketball.

But the secret that has turned March Madness into one of the shining examples of how TV can work on the Internet lies in a deal struck 10 years ago between CBS and the National College Athletic Association (NCAA), which governs U.S. college athletics.

With the Internet still in its infancy, the contract placed almost no restrictions on how the digital rights to the games could be exploited by the network. CBS has been allowed to experiment online like few other TV networks, using the tournament as its proving ground.

"We're very fortunate that the rights with the NCAA, back when they were done in the late nineties, were all encompassing," said Jason Kint, senior vice-president of CBSSports.com. "The people in charge appreciated where this was headed."

The move to a no-charge, ad-supported model pushed the online audience to more than a million, almost immediately. This year, the network has unshackled things further by eliminating blackouts that were in place to protect local CBS stations. The company doesn't expect TV ad sales will be cannibalized.

CBS is also pushing the games further onto the Internet this year, allowing social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace to link to the games directly. The network expects to shatter last year's record of 1.4 million unique users, which will also drive up ad rates for next year.

"Rather than trying to get a user to come to one specific [website] to find the content, we're bringing it to them, wherever they are on the Web," Mr. Kint said.

Most TV networks, particularly in Canada, are tangled up in numerous rights restrictions with studios and producers that prevent them from going online in a big way. Even CBS, which has most of its prime-time programming online in the United States, remains conservative, not allowing shows to be shared, and blocking them from being viewed in other countries.

March Madness, on the other hand, can be accessed anywhere in the world where there is a high-speed Internet connection. Mr. Moonves couldn't help but marvel at the model: The $23-million CBS expects this year is "brand new revenue for the same old content," he said.

In Canada, the broadcast rights to the tournament are held by cable network The Score, but the online rights remain with CBS.

THEN

In 1939, the only way to see the first NCAA March Madness basketball championship game was to be among the 15,025 people packed into Patten Gymnasium in Evanston, Ill. Television was still considered new media back then. The first televised baseball game was another two months away, and live basketball wouldn't arrive on TV until 1940.

NOW

In 2008, all 63 games will be streamed live over the Internet for the first time. Because the NCAA places few restrictions on the broadcast rights, CBS is free to package highlights for smart phones and video mash-ups and let social networks such as Facebook and MySpace link directly into live games.

THE VIEWERS

March Madness viewership on CBS.com last year

2.6 million hours of video streamed.

1.4-million unique visitors.

REVENUE

Revenue has more than doubled each year.

2005: $250,000

2006: $4-million

2007: $10-million

2008: $23-million

JAPAN'S FOUR INTERNET PROVERS TEAM UP TO RUB OUT ILLEGAL DOWNLOADERS

2008-03-17T14:10:00.000-07:00

JAPAN'S FOUR INTERNET PROVERS TEAM UP TO RUB OUT ILLEGAL DOWNLOADERS
Peter Olszewski
17 March 2008
Media Blab

Japan's four internet provider organisations have agreed to forcibly cut the internet connection of users found to repeatedly use Winny and other file-sharing programs to illegally copy gaming software and music.

The move aims to deal with the rise in illegal copying of music, gaming software and images that has resulted in huge infringements on the rights of copyright holders.

Cutting off the Internet connection of copyright violators has been considered before but never resorted to over fears the practice might involve violations of privacy rights and the freedom of use of telecommunications.

The Yomiuri Shimbun reported that the internet provider organisations have, however, judged it possible to disconnect specific users or cancel provider contracts with them if they are identified as particularly flagrant transgressors in cooperation with copyright-related organisations, according to sources.

The four organisations include the Telecom Service Association and the Telecommunications Carriers Association. About 1,000 major and smaller domestic providers belong to the four associations, which means the measure would become the first counter-measure against

The number of users of file-sharing software such as Winny in the country is estimated to be about 1.75 million, with most of the files exchanged using the software believed to be illegal copies.

A brief six-hour survey by a copyright organisation monitoring the internet found about 3.55 million examples of illegally copied gaming software, worth about 9.5 billion yen at regular software prices, and 610,000 examples of illegally copied music files, worth 440 million yen, that could be freely downloaded into personal computers using such software, the sources said. In other words, this survey alone, uncovered damages amounting to 10 billion yen.

Readers cash in on social network

2006-11-30T08:43:00.000-08:00

DigitalJournal.com has re-launched as a revenue-sharing social network website offering financial rewards to readers for posting news and comments.

The beta version site pays people to blog, post news, videos, comment on and rate stories, with greater frequency of community interaction leading to higher levels of remuneration from a monthly cash pot.

Readers are paid for their contribution by being given a share of advertising revenue as they create the aggregation and comment pages on which it is carried.

The new home page now carries user's news alongside more traditional editorial, similar to the recently redesigned Netscape home page.

The free subscription allows users to submit stories - a la Digg - by writing a headline, a brief explanation and a link to the host page.

"Our goal is to develop the strongest user-powered news site on the internet, and provide tools for users to exchange comments and ideas on news that matters to them," said Chris Hogg, editor-in-chief of DigitalJournal.com.

The site was founded in 1998 as an online technology/lifestyle publication. It spawned a quarterly magazine before taking its latest incarnation.

But it is not yet the retirement fund it seems - contributors have to work hard for their money.

October's cash pot was $1000 from which leading earner Wolfman2001 took home the princely sum of $349.38. If paid in Canadian dollars - it's not that clear - the amount equates to £162.

Since registering on 22 September, Wolfman2001 has blogged 645 times, added 1,437 comments and uploaded 358 images.

The developer's claim the more people sign up, the greater the revenue pot, from which they can draw, will become.

To prevent contributors going hungry in the meantime, other readers can also donate funds to them.

Social Network Timeline

2006-11-30T07:56:00.000-08:00

http://yasns.pbwiki.com/

Zune's social network

2006-11-30T07:49:00.000-08:00

Zune - Social Networking Differentiates It From iPod Microsoft has released details of its upcoming Zune product, an iPod-like device that is squarely aimed at challenging Apple's dominance of the online music market. TechCrunch, Engadget and PaidContent have all the details, so I just want to focus on a couple of interesting Internet features of Zune.

1) Zune will have a social network (iPod/iTunes doesn't)
This is clearly going to wake Apple up, because a social networking aspect is the one glaring feature missing from its otherwise excellent iPod/iTunes online music combo. Zune's social networking will be based in Zune Marketplace, the equivalent of iTunes. Songs can also be shared via wireless technology on the Zune device.

It also seems that Zune will have as good a selection of music as iTunes, although details are sketchy at this stage.

2) Zune is centered on connectivity
This is what Microsoft truly believes is its advantage over Apple - ability to connect Zune across a network of devices. Zune will no doubt over time hook into the PC, Xbox, TV, etc. While Apple announced its own inter-connection plans with iTV this week, in this case Apple is the follower and not the leader.

Of course the big advantage Apple has is its brand and design, which a lot of people think is enough to continue its success. And given the early screenshots of Zune, with its brown(!?), black and white colors and its monolith-like shape - well, let's just say that Apple designers won't be feeling the heat any time soon!

Summary: Zune Experience
Microsoft's vision for this is summed up here: "Zune is Microsoft’s music and entertainment platform that provides an end-to-end solution for Connected Entertainment."

It's a social platform, as well as a music one. This currently differentiates it from Apple, so it's a good move by Microsoft. It also promises a very connected experience across devices, which plays to Microsoft's strengths. Whether all this is enough to challenge Apple, which has already won over the hearts of the mass market with the iPod and iTunes, will be interesting to see.

Wink Social Search, now with people search

2006-11-30T07:46:00.000-08:00

Wink calls itself a social search engine. It is that and more. Wink is also a community where you register to get access to bookmarking and tagging search results and adding them to thematic collections. Last week Wink added people search. They crawl Bebo, MySpace and LinkedIn, allowing you to search for name, username, location, interests and more.

What is Wink Social Search?
Wink’s web search option searches Google and rank the search results according to their own People Rank algorithm. Registered Wink members can re-rank search results, bookmark and tag sites they like and block results they don’t like. Wink’s PeopleRank uses this information along with tags from Digg, del.icio.us and Yahoo MyWeb and other similar services to refine the ranking according to the input from the users.

Wink also lets you create collections, grouping the best links for a topic all in one place. You can subscribe to other people’s collections, you can make them public and let other people add to your collections, or you can make them private so that only you can see them. Public collections will show up in the Wink search results. When testing Wink, we made a collection of sites that we consider to be among the most important sources of search engine news.

If you come across other users who have the same opinions on results as you do, you can add them to your friends list and/or subscribe to any collections they have made.

So in addition to the PeopleRank, which may or may not be an improvement on Google’s ranking, you can benefit from seeing the collections, tags and recommendations of other Wink members.

Wink relies on lots of user interaction to make the site a useful tool and really improve the search results. It seems that in it’s first year in business, they have not quite reached critical mass. But Wink could still attract a lot of users.

Wink People Search
The new people search feature may attract a large number of potential users from Bebo, MySpace and LinkedIn.

It appears under the People tab on the homepage. Wink crawls Bebo, MySpace and LinkedIn, so when you use Wink’s people search, you search an index of more than 100 million profiles from these three social networking sites.

You can search for name, username, location, interests and more, and you can narrow your search by network, gender, age and whether they’re single or taken. You can even search specific areas of a profile page. The advanced search options can be found behind the link “More ways to search” to the right of the search button under the People tab.

In the search results, a little icon identifies in which network Wink found a person. Depending on which information a person has in her profile, Wink includes name, photo, location, interests and more

If you find someone who shares your interests or come across an old friend, you can “Wink” them to add them to your your wink page for later.

The new people search feature can prove to be useful for people who spend a lot of time on networks like MySpace. But for this tool to mature, Wink needs to add more networks and to become more visible to the people who use them.

Norwest invests $10 mln in Indian social network

2006-11-30T07:35:00.000-08:00

A top Silicon Valley venture capital firm has invested $10 million in Indian Internet community Sulekha.com on a bet the social network site can become a much bigger player in the fast-growing market.

Norwest Venture Partners, led by Indian-born managing director Promod Haque, said the $10 million in Series A financing would fund the expansion of Sulekha's focus beyond India's top eight cities and into new business segments.

"Suffice it to say that the goal is to go into smaller Indian cities," he said in an interview on Tuesday, adding the English-language site may eventually offer regional dialects.

Sulekha encourages social networking and local commerce in 25 cities in India and around the world. Beyond self-published blogs and online directories, users can buy and sell classified advertising, as on Craigslist.com, or do other transactions.

Founded in 1998 in Austin, Texas, by electrical engineer Satya Prabhakar, Sulekha first targeted non-resident Indians, before spreading to Indian cities. It had funding from Indian early-stage Internet and mobile investor Indigo Monsoon Group.

Haque, who ranks among Silicon Valley's top deal makers, is joining Sulekha's board.

Already this year, Norwest, a $2.5 billion venture capital firm based in Palo Alto, California, helped fund the formation of Indian travel services site Yatra Online.

"We are very bullish about the macro trends driving consumer Internet businesses in India," Haque said, citing explosive broadband Internet and mobile phone use and vibrant consumer spending by Indian's growing urban middle class.

Ninety-five percent of Sulekha's 10 million pages are user-generated material from hundreds of thousands of member contributors. It counts 1.5 million members, Sulekha said.

Sulekha, which has spent little on marketing, ranks behind Rediff.com (REDF.O: Quote, Profile, Research) and global names like Yahoo, Google and MSN in Web page-views, a key metric for advertisers, but outpaces any site in India in classified ads and yellow pages look-ups.

It has offline partnerships with book publisher Penguin and newspaper companies DNA and Indian Express to distribute the work of tens of thousands of bloggers, and plans to spend more on marketing with partners such as mobile carriers.

MySpace founder backs SaySwap, social network for gamers

2006-11-30T07:32:00.000-08:00

One of the founders of MySpace has backed an interactive online video gaming community allowing users to trade games, swap cheats and share tips and thoughts via blogs.

Los Angeles-based SaySwap, which claims to be the first social network for gamers, uses a virtual currency based on trading tokens to exchange games.

MySpace founder Brad Greenspan is backing the new venture through his LiveUniverse company established to nurture video, entertainment and social networking properties.

Mark Elfenbein, chief executive at SaySwap, said: "I had become frustrated with the lack of good titles at game rental stores and the steep $50+ cost of new games.

"This long-overdue service allows players to trade away their old games to acquire the games they want to play."

Elfenbein has a track record in the business. He co-founded SkillJam Technologies, a pay-for-play gaming site with over 12 million registered users, which was sold to Liberty Media in March 2006.

SaySwap registration is free, and users are allocated an initial 30 purchase points.

"Players of practically any console or device can interact with peers from around the globe to trade games for a mere fraction of the price they would pay at a traditional retailer," said Elfenbein.

SaySwap is also entering into a white label partnership with CheatCodes.com, a one million strong cheat code sharing community.

SuperSociety, announces technology that connects all online social communities under one log-in screen

2006-11-30T07:28:00.000-08:00

SuperSociety, a social networking technology firm, announced today its plans for adoption of a new service that will target existing social networks and communities, like FaceBook, Myspace, and YouTube, and link them together using a single login platform. Members of different online communities will have the option to access their online communities under a single log-in screen; SuperSociety’s platform will serve as a mega ‘Mash-up’ — a website that seamlessly integrates content from more than one source.

SuperSociety will make this integration possible by its proprietary AI Aggregator Engine and Social Networking Protocol, patent-pending architecture technologies that will alter the way websites share information. The Aggregator Engine can automatically grab (scrape) user data from any other interactive site and contextualize it to fit the needs of SuperSociety. Using artificial intelligence, the engine can learn to adjust itself to grab different sets of data even if the data arrangement is manually altered.

“The technology we are currently developing will change the way online community users access their web pages. It will become much easier to share messages, photos, and videos with members, and will be able to transcend just one network,” said Kaz Moghim, co-core technology architect and co-founder of SuperSociety. “Users of SuperSociety will now be able to search for people in multiple social networks.”

The advanced Al Aggregator Engine will scrape, or read, user data from the screen and anonymously categorize users by demographic and interest. Potential SuperSociety advertisers will then be able to accurately market themselves within the SuperSociety webpage to users with similar interests.

With the tremendous growth in the online network communities, and its increasing disintegration and diversification, SuperSociety aims to provide a service that will consolidate the growing fragmentation by providing a single service log-in. The Company understands the value of integrating services and aims to become an all-in-one social network platform with the mission to spearhead a new phase of communication and connectivity in the virtual world.

Social Business Network for Entrepreneurs

2006-11-30T07:26:00.000-08:00

I'm sure most of you have heard about Internet Marketers using social networks like MYSpace and others to tap into wallets of prospective buyers. Heck some of you may be using this technique now.

But what if I told you that there was a new Social Network that has recently been dubbed "The new MYSpace for business" A Social Network that is highly targeted only available to entrepreneurs where you can meet new friends, develop new business contacts, build relationships with them, get viral exposure to your business, and never be banned for including your business details, products/services or web link?

But what if I told you that this new social network would also pay you while you build your network and invite others! After all wouldn't it be fair that you get paid while your building the user base of the social network? You bet it is!

Rob Clark, Creator of BizFriendz had this to say- "I got tired of hearing about people trying to penetrate Myspace or other social networks to promote their products/services only to learn that they are getting banned or their profiles deleted because they violated their terms and conditions for "commercial use".

So my idea was to develop a social network where a user will never be banned because they included their business information, products/services, or website in their profiles but in a professionally controlled environment.

But I also wanted to offer more to the users. I wanted to put a "Spin" on it in a big way.

And that is why I also made my social network free to join but capable of paying the users a 50% commission when they invited others into their network who later chose to upgrade their accounts. An incentive that has been very motivating and is creating a buzz online evident by the hundreds that have signed up just within a few days.

Rob also says that you don't have to worry about getting spammed like in other social networks because each user can control how they are contacted within the network.

He also said that you can send announcements to your personal network about various events you can create within your account such as sales events, webinars, podcasts, teleseminars, viewing videos, etc. And guess what? You can actually earn money from the event ticket sales that you can create from your account! (If you choose to set event as fee and not free)

Think about the power of this for a minute?

You post your event in the BizFriendz Social network. Example: sales event of a product/service at your website that you offer for 50% off. You set the description, date and time, etc. of the sales event and post it live under "events" in the social network for everyone else in the entire BizFriendz network to see, attracting more people to your event. Then you also send out a bulletin or announcement to your BizFriendz network of people informing them of your sales events.

However if you choose to charge a small fee for the event tickets you created you then can eliminate the "tire kickers" and essentially pre-qualifying users as buyers. Increasing your conversions dramatically and making a few extra dollars in the process.

Of course there are too many scenarios of how selling tickets to your events can benefit you, but you get the picture.

Rob's social network does have many, many more features and other ways you can leverage the system to increase your exposure for your business. Features like personal urls, Word Press blogs, forums, instant messaging, personal mail center, groups that you can join-or create and moderate, events system, listings where you can sell things like- domain names,websites, computers, or post a job, etc., keyword Hyper link searching technology, JV matching system (coming soon) and much ,much, more.......

Evident by the scores of new profiles that are being listed every few minutes on the site, there's an obvious "viral frenzy" to sign up. Maybe it's because others are seeing people that they recognize and know already listed in the network, including well known marketing "gurus" (the flash audio player is pretty cool too!)

Well Rob's confirmation of a "viral frenzy" was with an astonishing number of sign-ups each day....

"The site has become extremely viral within about 2 weeks", said, Rob. "some days we have seen as many as 200 people join the network, the sign-ups have been climbing steadily each day."

Business owners are signing up in droves because there are no other social networks that have these powerful features or incentives to help you grow your business and drive your sales through the roof!

http://www.wendyshepherd.com/bizfriends.php

Boost Mobile launches loopt, GPS-enabled social network

2006-11-30T07:23:00.000-08:00

Boost loopt is a new location aware social network service from Boost Mobile and loopt. Using the phone's built-in GPS, Boost loopt automatically updates your location for a private list of friends. Users can update their status and geo-tag locations with text and photos.

Competing carrier Helio recently launched a similar feature called Buddy Beacon. It's not quite as sophisticated, but is also built into their new Drift handset with no extra fees (GPS services will be built into all future Helio handsets).

The service will officially launch for Boost Mobile subscribers on November 20th. It costs $2.99 per month with the first month available for free as a trial. As a further promotion, Boost is allowing customers to use loopt for free through the end of the year.

CityTools to launch as a 'social network for newspapers

2006-11-30T07:21:00.000-08:00

U.S. CityTools will launch next month a platform that allows newspapers to share content and even use articles written by the public. According to the developers, several U.S. newspapers are already interested by the service.
"What we are trying to do is create a system where the barriers to a relevant flow of information are really removed while everyone still has their commercial interests intact," said president of CityTools Robert Cauthorn.
An audacious aim, considering both objectives of free-flowing information and sustained profitability have been the weights dragging the newspaper industry down.

The program’s publishers hope it can compete with dominant search engines because it rids itself of the “mass aggregation,” “shotgun approach” of Google-like engines. Instead it will provide “the same kind of mass but it’s all relevant to local readership,” Cauthorn said.

“Imagine this as a combination of a file-sharing network and a social network for newspapers (…) all for the benefit of the reader, the advertiser and the publisher – everybody wins,” Cauthorn.

It still sounds a hair too idealistic, but this networking platform could become a major factor in the conglomeration of news sources and media companies. The real losers could be small publishers, discouraged by the cost of the service – $650 flat per month – and slowly effaced by efficiently networked media giants.

Source: journalism.co.uk

AOL upgrades messenger, integrates social network

2006-11-30T07:19:00.000-08:00

NEW YORK (Reuters) - AOL said on Wednesday it will launch an upgrade to its instant messenger software with new features that let users track some of the online activities of their friends.

The debut of AOL Instant Messenger, or AIM 6.0, lets users link to "Really Simple Syndication," or RSS, feeds of their friends that keeps track of friends who upload videos or posts pictures to sites such as Google Inc.'s YouTube or Yahoo Inc.'s Flickr.

The upgrade, which also provides easier-to-find links to AOL's own take on social networks, popularised by rival service MySpace, comes amid a restructuring of AOL announced this summer.

Eying the surge in online advertising sales growth, the online unit of the world's biggest media company Time Warner Inc. decided to give away most of its services for free. It continues to operate a dial-up Internet service, but no longer markets the service.

Early signs of progress came at the end of the third quarter when it reported a 46 percent growth in online ad revenue.

"This version (of AIM), and a lot of what we are doing in AIM Pages, is extending the user-generated communications platform on their terms with what people care about," AOL Vice President Marcien Jenckes said.

Other features of the upgrade include the ability to leave messages for friends even if they have logged off and a feature that lets users save text logs of their conversation.

AIM users can also add up to 1,000 friends on their buddy list.

More than 42 million messaging users are on the AOL Network. Over 30 million of these use AIM.

Nokia Slips a Little Yahoo! Inside its Phones

2006-11-30T07:08:00.000-08:00

Nokia Slips a Little Yahoo! Inside its Phones

We already know about the Verizon/YouTube match up, but now Nokia fans are getting some love too, albeit of a different kind. As of today, all of Nokia's Series 40 phones will include integrated versions of Yahoo! Mail and Messenger. The apps will be built right into the UI making it easy to get all those annoying fwds your friends send via e-mail while you're on the go. Add to that the ability to block them while logged onto Messenger and its like you never left your computer. The apps will roll out with the 6300, 5300, and 5200 phones.

BitTorrent Signs Licensing Deals With Viacom, News Corp

2006-11-30T06:55:00.000-08:00

LOS ANGELES -- BitTorrent Inc., developer of a popular online file-sharing tool, said it has reached licensing deals that will boost the number of movies and TV shows it can offer as part of a video download service launching next year.

The closely held company said it signed agreements with Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures, News Corp.'s 20th Century Fox, Lionsgate Entertainment Corp., Palm Pictures and Kadokawa Pictures USA.

The San Francisco-based BitTorrent also inked content deals with cable television networks G4 and Liberty Media Holding Corp.'s Starz Media along with several Viacom-owned networks, including MTV Networks, VH1, SpikeTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and Logo.

Financial terms of the licensing agreements were not disclosed.

Added to BitTorrent's lineup were films such as "X-Men The Last Stand," "Saw III" and "Mission: Impossible III," and TV shows "Star Trek," "Laguna Beach" and "South Park."

Earlier this year, BitTorrent announced content deals with Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, Egami Media, Hart Sharp, Koch Entertainment and The Orchard.

Unlike other video-on-demand services, which distribute movies stored on their own servers directly to computer users, BitTorrent uses a peer-to-peer technology that assembles files from separate bits of data downloaded from other computer users across the Internet. The technology makes the distribution of large files faster and less expensive.

BitTorrent plans to debut the commercial video service in February and expects to offer thousands of video titles in addition to music and software. The company has yet to disclose a pricing scheme but has said individual TV shows could be priced as low as $1, and movies will be sold for about the price of a DVD.

TV shows and most films can be purchased and burned on a backup DVD, although the copy will only play on the computer used to buy the original and not on standard DVD players. Some films will only be available for viewing a limited number of times.

Last year, BitTorrent agreed to remove links to pirated versions of movies from its Web site and eliminate online links leading to unauthorized content owned by the seven studios that are members of the Motion Picture Association of America.

YouTube Coming Soon to Cellphones

2006-11-28T11:07:00.000-08:00

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 27 — YouTube is coming to mobile phones — or, to be more precise, a small slice of YouTube is coming to some Verizon Wireless phones.

While its explosively popular Web site is free, YouTube’s phone-based version will require a $15-a-month subscription to a Verizon Wireless service called VCast. And instead of choosing what to watch from a vast library of clips, VCast users will be limited to an unspecified number of videos selected and approved by the companies.

Still, the deal, which the companies plan to announce on Tuesday, marks the mobile-phone debut of YouTube, the video-sharing service owned by Google that many say is already changing the media landscape.

“Everybody carries a phone with them, but they may not have a computer,” said Steve Chen, chief technology officer and a co-founder of YouTube. People can “take the phone out of their pocket while waiting for the bus” and watch a video, he added.

Verizon Wireless and YouTube said the service would be available early next month. The companies would not discuss the financial terms of their deal but said Verizon would have the exclusive rights to distribute YouTube videos on mobile phones “for a limited period of time.”

“This marquee partnership is the first of many,” said Kelly Liang, senior director of business development for YouTube. Ms. Liang said the company planned to introduce other such deals within the coming year.

YouTube said its editors would select short videos from its library for the Verizon Wireless service. Verizon Wireless said it would vet the videos to make sure they met the company’s editorial and taste guidelines.

“We’ll select content that has the broadest appeal and the highest entertainment value,” Ms. Liang said.

One question is whether the limited selection of videos on the service will undermine the basic appeal of YouTube, which has grown popular in part because users decide what they want to watch.

But Allen Weiner, a Web publishing analyst with the consulting firm Gartner Inc., said he believed that the short bursts of escapism provided by YouTube would translate well to the mobile phone. That said, Mr. Weiner said he did not believe the deal alone would be enough of a selling point to attract new customers to Verizon.

“It’s not going to be a driver” of new subscribers, Mr. Weiner said. “But it will give people who are considering the video service component something to think about.”

TiVo to Insert Ads At End of Programs

2006-11-28T11:03:00.000-08:00

TiVo Inc. announced a new service that will let marketers place ads at the end of recorded programs and track how many people watch them.

The company, which makes digital video recorders, said Tuesday it would insert the ads after a television show has played, when there is nothing left to fast-forward, offering a way for advertisers to reach audiences who record shows and are more likely to skip through traditional commercials.

Tivo, based in Alviso, Calif., said the new ad scheme, dubbed "Program Placement," will allow advertisers to purchase ads against specific shows, the way they do on traditional television. Companies that have already signed up for ads include Burger King Corp., General Motors Corp. and MasterCard Inc., TiVo said.

With the growth in popularity of DVRs, advertisers and television networks have become increasingly worried that most viewers skip through commercials. TiVo said it will give marketers in the new program access to its audience measurement data, so they'll be able to track how many viewers play the ads at the end of the program.

In other news, on Monday a federal judge in Texas rejected the request of EchoStar Communications Corp. for a new trial in its patent dispute with TiVo, which won an $89.6 million jury verdict earlier this year.

Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit gave EchoStar the go-ahead to continue providing its digital video recorder service while the appeal is pending. The court had said EchoStar showed it had a chance to win and would be hurt if it was forced to shut down the service during the appeal.

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge David Folsom said EchoStar failed to raise any new legal issues that would justify a new trial. In April, a jury determined that EchoStar violated a TiVo patent for technology that lets users record one TV program while watching another.

EchoStar spokeswoman Kathie Gonzalez said the ruling is another step in a lengthy legal process -- and the next step will be a federal appeals court in Washington D.C., that specializes in patent law.

TiVo taps the Internet for content

2006-11-20T15:56:00.000-08:00

TiVo taps the Internet for content

TiVo enthusiasts will soon be able to use their devices to watch Internet video content on their TV set, the company announced Tuesday.

The company's expansion as a broadband video portal, as well as a manufacturer and television interface provider, includes three new software features and several content partnership agreements.

"These are features that are really changing what the TiVo service is," said Tara Maitra, general manager of programming at TiVo. "It's a creation that will make TiVo different from generic digital video recorders and opens up the content beyond what's available on digital cable and satellite."

Owners of TiVo's DVRs will be able to share home videos with other users. Through a partnership with One True Media, an online video and photo service, TiVo users can upload home video to the Web and share a channel code with other TiVo owners.

Special report
Me TV
An in-depth look at the revolutionary new technology
reshaping the TV industry.TiVo also announced Tuesday that it has expanded its TiVoCast offerings. TiVoCast is a service that offers broadband video content from companies via the TiVo box. TiVo said it signed a deal with CBS Interactive to provide content from CBS.com, CBSNews.com, CBS SportsLine.com and Innertube (CBS' broadband channel).

TiVo also signed deals for TiVoCast content with Reuters; Forbes; dLife, a health content network; Plum TV, a lifestyle network featuring vacation hot spots; and Nano Network, an independent film and theater outlet.

In addition to the One True Media partnership and the TiVoCast offerings, the company announced a broadband video service for watching Web videos on TV. That broadband video service requires TiVo Desktop Plus 2.4, which will be free for version 2.3 owners and $24.95 for TiVo subscribers. TiVo Desktop Plus 2.4 converts videos in QuickTime, WMV and MPEG-4 formats into a TV-viewable format and enables them to be imported to the TiVo box. The software must be downloaded to a PC running Windows XP that is connected to the TiVo box either directly or via a home network.

"The real question is whether this (addition of Internet video access) is going to sell more TiVo boxes, and I think the answer to that is no," said Josh Bernoff, a Forrester Research analyst.

"There is no way for TiVo to monitor the content in this situation, because it's the TiVo consumer who is downloading the content to their PC and then offloading it to the TiVo device."
--Tara Maitra, general manager of programming, TiVo "Internet video looks pretty crappy when you put it on a big TV set, and transcoding doesn't solve that," Bernoff said. "I am a lot more encouraged that (TiVo is) making relationships with content owners."

But TiVo owners may have the opportunity to download more than just crappy movies. Besides the technical parameters of the three formats the TiVo software can convert--QuickTime, WMV or MPEG-4 files free of digital rights management (DRM) protection--TiVo users will have complete control over the Web video content they choose to upload to TiVo via the Desktop Plus 2.4 software. That means that things like copyright movies that pirates manage to upload to peer-to-peer such as BitTorrent or social networks such as YouTube could potentially be illegally downloaded to a PC and then uploaded to a TiVo box.

TiVo does not plan to police the content that millions of device owners download to their own PC, according to Maitra.

"TiVo, basically, will be a receiving device, in the sense that the content that a subscriber pulls from the Web needs to be in a format that is not DRM-protected," Maitra said. "There is no way for TiVo to monitor the content in this situation, because it's the TiVo consumer who is downloading the content to their PC and then offloading it to the TiVo device."

TiVo has been struggling to gain new subscribers. In March, the company signed a partnership with cable provider Comcast to provide software to its DVR boxes. The deal will give TiVo access to Comcast's 23.3 million cable subscribers, though the product has been slow in reaching the market.

In rolling out the new video features, TiVo plans to keep the goodies to itself. TiVoCast, as well as the Web-to-Internet broadband video service and the One True Media home video-sharing feature, at this point, are going to be "strictly available through the TiVo standalone service," Maitra said.

As companions to all the new content available, TiVo said it will be offering a new search feature in 2007 for finding and recording content across "broadcast, cable and broadband content sources." An additional deal with International Creative Management will also offer TiVo owners new TV show and film recommendations from famous Hollywood actors and directors.

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Adding new features is usually a tool used to retain existing customers, Bernoff said. While retention is a problem for cable providers afraid of losing customers to satellite television, customer retention has not been a problem for TiVo. TiVo's challenge, Bernoff said, is to acquire new customers.

"You are about to see, starting in 2007, announcements from a bunch of new Internet-connected DVRs and, of course, TiVo's competition is and continues to be from the cable and satellite boxes available for free across the United States."

DVR owners are mainly interested in three things from their DVR: "to skip commercials easily, pause live TV, and record and view all episodes of a given show," Bernoff said, referring to a Forrester Research survey.

"All the new features...may make the TiVo box a whole lot more interesting to the TiVo owner, but it's very obscure stuff to be selling to a potential customer," Bernoff said. "They're not saying, 'Well, if only I could get access to Internet video, then I'd buy a TiVo box.'"

"I know we are hearing of DVRs with Internet video, but I have not heard of any service that is going to provide an all-encompassing service, combined with what has already been tested and proven as one of the easiest-to-use interfaces," Maitra said. "Having it all available in one location is going to be one differentiating factor. And it's all going to be made available in the easy-to-use TiVo interface."

Universal Music Sues MySpace

2006-11-20T15:50:00.000-08:00

After its CEO said in September that YouTube and MySpace owe Universal Music Group “tens of millions of dollars,” the media giant has followed through with its threat and filed suit against MySpace for copyright infringement, according to the Wall St. Journal (subscription required). The most interesting part of the suit is that Universal is alleging that MySpace participated in the copyright violations by transcoding copyrighted video so that it can be replayed and sent to other users.

The Journal notes that today is also the day that MySpace is introducing a new tool that will allow copyright holders to flag unauthorized content on the site. That tool (our coverage) uses technology from Gracenote. MySpace said in a press release that the suit is “unnecessary and meritless.” That transcoding argument sounds like a serious one to me.

Weeks after threatening YouTube and MySpace both this fall, Universal signed a licensing agreement with YouTube the day before the Google acquisition was announced. It also sued Sony’s Grouper and Bolt for copyright infringement.

Is a fresh round of heavyweight copyright wars breaking out? Is there any possibility of an out of court settlement between the two companies? This week’s Craigslist court decision immediately comes to mind. The online directory was ruled on Wednesday to not be responsible for discriminatory housing postings on its site. The court found that Craigslist is a conduit and not a publisher. That ruling was complicated and fell under the Federal Communications Deceny Act. Universal’s lawsuits, against Grouper, Bolt and now MySpace appear headed for a direct test of the DMCA Safe Harbor provision, which is believed to protect parties to copyright infringement so long as they remove copyrighted content upon request. The argument about transcoding video may be the killer in this case.

Music Companies Lose Suit Against Baidu.com in Beijing

2006-11-20T15:32:00.000-08:00

Music Companies Lose Suit
Against Baidu.com in Beijing
By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER in Hong Kong and ANDREW BATSON in Beijing
November 18, 2006; Page A7

Leading Chinese Internet-search company Baidu.com Inc. won a lawsuit filed against it by a group of music companies over its MP3 search engine, the latest in the media industry's effort to win intellectual-property protection in China's courts.

The ruling, which was announced by the industry group and can still be appealed, wasn't available, so the judgment's exact basis wasn't clear. At issue was Baidu's practice of so-called deep linking to unlicensed songs stored on other Web sites. The music industry said that making music tracks available in this way, without the consent of owners, is a breach of copyright.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry filed the suit last year in Beijing on behalf of seven companies over the public-transmission rights of 195 recordings, which Baidu had made accessible to the public. A number of news reports have said the lawsuit sought damages of 1.67 million yuan, or about $212,000.

Both foreign and domestic copyright holders are increasingly turning to the Chinese court system for recourse against alleged infringements, including litigants who have gone after the landlords of DVD store owners. And while the physical piracy of goods like CDs and DVDs has long been the main concern of U.S. and European Union trade officials, online piracy is gaining increasing attention.

The IFPI said it plans to appeal the ruling. "I am amazed by this inexplicable judgment that is totally out of step with Chinese law and with court decisions made against similar services around the world," the IFPI's chairman and chief executive, John Kennedy, said.

The music industry has won similar cases against deep linking in the Netherlands, Norway and Australia.

A Baidu spokeswoman said the company won the case but declined to provide a copy of the ruling and had no further comment. The IFPI also didn't provide a copy of the judgment.

An attorney for Baidu, Li Decheng, said the company had won this round of the legal battle. "I agree with this first-instance judgment. But it's not the final judgment," he said. "If IFPI appeals, Baidu surely will respond."

Universal Music Sues MySpace Claiming Copyright Infringement

2006-11-20T15:15:00.000-08:00

Universal Music Sues MySpace
Claiming Copyright Infringement
By ETHAN SMITH and JULIA ANGWIN
November 18, 2006; Page A3

Universal Music Group, the world's largest recorded-music company, sued News Corp.'s MySpace for copyright infringement, alleging that the social-networking giant traffics in "user-stolen" content, including music, videos and other material.

At issue is the widespread presence of copyright music and video content on MySpace. In the suit, filed in U.S. District Court for California's Central District, Vivendi SA's Universal dismisses the frequently used label "user-generated content" -- alleging that much of the material on MySpace is stolen from copyright holders.

The move signals that content companies remain sensitive to how their intellectual property is deployed on the Internet. Universal Music particularly has been among the most-aggressive content creators in sabre-rattling against potential copyright violators.

MySpace and Universal have been negotiating toward a deal in which News Corp. would pay a licensing fee for Universal content. However, News Corp. balked at Universal's demand that News Corp. pay restitution for content that had previously appeared on MySpace, according to a person close to the situation.

The suit also comes less than three weeks after MySpace, owned by News Corp., announced it was testing a system from Gracenote Inc. of Emeryville, Calif., to filter Universal Music content from its site. People familiar with talks between the two companies characterized that test as the final step before a putative licensing deal.

A Universal spokeswoman declined to comment on the filtering system. But the music company's court filing cited recent widespread leaks on MySpace of superstar rapper Jay-Z's forthcoming "Kingdom Come" album as a factor.

Universal executives have been outraged by the leak. In a recent interview, Antonio Reid, chairman of Universal's Island Def Jam Music Group, said next week's debut of the Jay-Z album would likely be "devastated" by the leaks. "I'm sure it's cut into our sales, and not by a small amount," Mr. Reid said. "Even if it [sells] a million units it's not what it should have been."

So-called user-generated content sites have been an increasingly hot issue for music companies and other copyright holders. Universal and two other big music companies recently reached blanket licensing deals with YouTube Inc., shortly before it was acquired by Google Inc. Universal sued two smaller sites, Sony Corp.'s Grouper Networks Inc. and Bolt Inc., over copyright infringement.

In September, Universal Chairman Doug Morris made public statements that were widely interpreted as threats to sue MySpace and YouTube. Since then MySpace has been taking steps to take copyright material off its Web site. In addition to last month's test of the Gracenote software, on Friday, hours before the lawsuit was filed, MySpace announced it had set up a system to make it easier for copyright holders to report infringements.

Universal said in a statement that its content has "created hundreds of millions of dollars of value for the owners of MySpace," and added that it was seeking to "ensure that our rights and those of our artists are recognized."

A statement released by MySpace said in part that it had "no doubt we will prevail in court."

New TiVo Feature Lets Families Share Videos On TV Via the Web

2006-11-18T10:19:00.000-08:00

New TiVo Feature Lets
Families Share Videos
On TV Via the Web
By NICK WINGFIELD
November 14, 2006; Page D1

Watching television and watching Web video have been separate activities, usually occurring in different rooms of the house on different devices. Now the two are starting to blur together in ways that may ultimately make it hard to distinguish between them.

The latest push is by TiVo Inc., the company that pioneered the digital video recorder, or DVR, a device that made it easy to record "The Sopranos" and other programs from cable and other traditional sources of television. The Alviso, Calif., company today unveiled several new features designed to enhance the array of content available to TiVo users to download from the Internet for playback on television sets. The new options include a home movie service, through which users can create an Internet "channel" that automatically broadcasts clips of kids' birthday parties and other movies over the Internet to family and friends with TiVo recorder boxes.

The new TiVo capabilities are another step in the direction of the long ballyhooed convergence between television and the Internet. Cable giant Comcast Corp. recently launched a Web site called Ziddio where it solicits homemade videos, with the intention of putting the most popular on its cable video-on-demand service for television subscribers. Apple Computer Inc. in the first quarter of next year plans to begin selling a product tentatively called iTV that plays movies, TV shows and other content downloaded from the Internet on television sets in living rooms.

TiVo CEO Tom Rogers comments on the new features allowing users to download content from the Web for TV playback.TiVo is seeking to make its product more Internet-savvy as its faces stiff competition from cable and satellite companies in the market for DVRs. TiVo has been steadily losing share in that market to its much larger rivals, but it believes it can stay relevant if it keeps a technological edge on competitors. Helping users tap the huge growth in Internet video is one way it hopes to do that.

TiVo executives say its users over time won't be able to tell whether video recorded on the device has come from conventional TV or off the Internet. "My kids don't know the difference between broadcast and cable channels," says Tom Rogers, chief executive of TiVo.

For now at least, the content available to TiVo users is much thinner than what they can get on the airwaves and cable. TiVo today plans to announce a new batch of partners including CBS Corp., Reuters Group PLC, Forbes magazine and others, which will make news and entertainment programs available for downloading onto TiVos. The partners join New York Times Co., National Basketball Association and a handful of others that joined the company's Internet video downloading service, dubbed TiVoCast, earlier this year. The service doesn't cost users a fee beyond the $12.95 a month that TiVo already charges most customers to get updated television listings and other features.

TiVo has developed software that will let users download video from sites like Google Video for playback on TiVo recorders, though they will first have to download it to their PCs for translation into a video format that is compatible with the devices. The company also has cut a deal with the talent and literary agency International Creative Management through which the agency's roster of actors and directors will recommend films, television shows and Internet videos that users can then easily record onto their devices. TiVo said it wasn't ready yet to announce the names of celebrities that will create "guru guides" for TiVo.

In addition, TiVo is opening up its devices to amateur videos through a relationship with One True Media Inc., an Internet start-up that operates a Web service designed to help users easily edit their raw footage into slick home movies. Starting early next year, users of One True Media, which charges customers $3.99 a month to share their videos with others over the Internet, will be able to create their own online channels to which TiVo members can subscribe.

Anytime the creator of the channel on One True Media adds another video, the clip will be sent over the Internet to all of the subscribers. Mark Moore, chief executive of One True Media, says most of the video shot by its subscribers is high-enough quality to look good on televisions. Televisions, Mr. Moore says, are getting "closer and closer to the Internet."

Still, some analysts doubt Internet video will end up being compelling enough to draw significant numbers of users away from conventional television in the near term. Brian Wieser, director of industry analysis at Magna Global, says conventional television viewing still dwarfs the amount of time people spend watching Web video, and is likely to continue doing so for years even with the growth in content online.

Apple, Airlines Agree To Offer iPod Connection

2006-11-14T07:56:00.000-08:00

Apple, Airlines Agree
To Offer iPod Connection
A WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE NEWS ROUNDUP
November 14, 2006 9:51 a.m.

Apple Computer Inc. struck deals with six airlines to integrate its iPod portable music and video players into in-flight entertainment systems.

Apple said Tuesday the airlines, which include Air France-KLM, Continental Airlines Inc., Delta Air Lines Inc., Emirates Airlines, and United Airlines, a unit of UAL Corp., will begin offering passengers seat connections that will power and charge iPods while allowing video content contained on the devices to be played on seat-back monitors. The connections will be available on planes by mid-2007, Apple said.

Apple's iPod has so far dominated the market for portable music and video players , but the popular device could face stiff competition in coming months from Microsoft Corp.'s Zune and other music players.

Strategic partnerships like Tuesday's airlines deal could help the Cupertino, Calif., company secure a place for the iPod with consumers. Apple also struck deals with auto makers over the summer, teaming up with Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp. and Japanese Ford-affiliate Mazda Motors Corp. to offer iPod connectors in new models.

Microsoft Entertainment Domination Plan

2006-11-09T09:20:00.000-08:00

Forget the fact that Microsoft is being overshadowed by Google and that Google is looking like the 800lb gorilla beating down Microsoft. Microsoft has other plans they’ve been working on — plans that have been really coming together the past few weeks and that quite frankly, I’m sitting here in amazement.

Earlier this week, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 division announced partnerships with CBS, MTV Networks, Paramount Pictures, Turner Broadcasting, UFC and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment to “Digitally Deliver TV Shows and Movies to Gamers.” This is Microsoft’s first move into digital movie and TV show sales — and is also another move towards turning their Xbox gaming system into a full-fledged digital entertainment system (note: they want to become the center of your living room). These digital movie and TV show partnerships for their Xbox 360 unit, will likely turn into sales through their future digital media sales service Zune.com and playback on their upcoming handheld Zune device. Xbox 360 up until this announcement has only let users download select music videos and movie trailers. Last week, Microsoft sent a major update to Xbox 360 consoles that now allows users to now stream video from a PC or portable device (note: their handheld Zune device has wireless capabilities built-in) — previously, only users with Windows XP Media Center Edition installed could stream video to the Xbox 360.

Last week, Microsoft launched the website for their handheld digital music/video player Zune, which comes out next week (November 14) — Microsoft is taking on Apple’s iPod with their Zune device. And less than 2 weeks ago, Microsoft launched the latest version of their Windows Media Player (WMP), version 11, which takes over for Windows Media Connect and allows users to manage connections for sharing media (between PC, Xbox 360, Zune) within the new WMP player. One shocker is that Zune is not using Microsoft’s own “PlaysForSure” framework that other digital music etailers and manufacturers embraced (Napster, Musicmatch, Wal-Mart, URGE, MSN, FYE, etc) since Apple has not let etailers sell to iPod owners (due to Apple’s proprietary DRM, which DVD Jon recently cracked) and Apple has not let other manufacturers make devices that can work with iTunes-purchased media. Zune will be proprietary as well (like the iPod) and won’t be allowing etailers to get their media on it — Zune will not support PlaysForSure.

Since September, Apple has been selling movies online via iTunes, which iTunes at the time had 40-60 million copies of their software installed on user machines. Less than a week after launch, Apple announced $1mm in digital movie sales (125k purchases).

What does all of this mean? Microsoft has a serious strategy to dominate digital entertainment. Microsoft already has a very successful gaming console (Xbox 360) that allows users to play games, watch movies, buy movies, buy TV shows, stream video from their computer, stream music from their computer, and I’m sure buying music from URGE is in the gameplan — not to mention the social networking features that allow Xbox 360 users (and maybe Zune users, considering the wi-fi built-in?) to chat with each other in games, send messages to each other, add users to their friends list, etc.

The other device that has entered millions of homes over the years is the DVR. Microsoft has already been using DVR-related technology in their Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 operating system (OS). In fact, if you own this OS, you can login to Microsoft’s online TV listing guide and setup their MSN Remote Record service, which then allows you to browse TV listings from any computer and click a button that will set a TV program to record to your home PC. I’d guess that in the future, there will be an accessory for my Xbox 360 that plugs into one of the Xbox 360 USB ports, hooking my cable TV into my Xbox 360, and allowing me to easily record TV shows to my Xbox 360 (note to self: short TIVO).

Apple may have millions of users using iTunes and millions of owners of iPods, but they lack a gaming console (which PriceWaterhouseCoopers predicts the gaming market will be $54.6 billion by 2009), they lack a DVR unit, and they won’t let manufacturers and etailers sell to their users. Currently, Apple’s strategy for getting into your living room is the anticipated iTV, which is rumored to be a set-top box for your TV and will allow you to stream movies, TV shows, and music from your iTunes software. Apple is also planning to sell basic games through iTunes, which iPod owners will be able to play. Could there be a gaming console (Nintendo WII? Sony Playstation 3?) purchase or partnership in the future for Apple? Could there be an Apple purchase of TiVo? (note to self: long TIVO)

This strategy by Microsoft is impressive and we’ll begin seeing how it all plays out over the next couple months of the holiday season — as buyers put up their money for an Apple iPod or a Microsoft Zune and/or Xbox 360.

Verizon, YouTube Deal

2006-11-09T08:56:00.000-08:00

Verizon, YouTube Aim
To Bring Web Videos
To Cellphones, TV
By AMOL SHARMA and KEVIN J. DELANEY
November 7, 2006; Page A1

Verizon Communications Inc. is in advanced talks with YouTube Inc. to bring the popular Web site's videos to cellphones and television sets, in what would be a landmark link-up between telecom and Internet video.

An agreement would allow Verizon's customers to view some of the most avidly watched entertainment on the Internet. That could advance the long-expected convergence of video and cellphones. It could also, at least temporarily, give Verizon a marketing edge over its rivals in the wireless and cable industries, furthering the company's efforts to expand into Internet and entertainment services.

Under the terms being discussed, customers of Verizon Wireless -- Verizon's joint venture with Vodafone Group PLC -- would be able to view some YouTube videos on their cellphones through the carrier's premium V Cast service, people familiar with the matter said. Verizon Wireless, like other cellular providers, has been adding video and data services to offset declining revenue from its calling plans.

Verizon also would offer YouTube videos as an on-demand feature of a TV service it is launching throughout the nation. The company paved the way for the launch with a massive upgrade of its network that is expected to cost $18 billion through 2010.

A deal with YouTube, which could be finalized within weeks, would give Verizon the chance to showcase its new network, which runs on fiber-optic lines all the way to subscribers' homes and has more capacity than the networks of competing cable operators. It could also give Verizon the exclusive right to carry YouTube videos for a limited period of time, one person with knowledge of the discussions said. The talks, however, could still fall through.

Though many cellphones provide Internet access, it is difficult for cellphone users to watch video on the Web, in part because it typically isn't formatted for cellphone screens. But cellular operators such as Verizon Wireless have the technology to bring video, music and other entertainment options to those screens. And their millions of subscribers make them attractive to digital-entertainment companies like YouTube, which are looking to extend their reach beyond personal computers.

YouTube, which has agreed to be acquired by Internet giant Google Inc. for $1.65 billion, is expected to seek similar deals with other big cellular operators -- such as Sprint Nextel Corp. and Cingular Wireless, a joint venture of AT&T Inc. and BellSouth Corp. -- to get the widest possible distribution for its content.

A spokeswoman for YouTube declined to comment on whether the company is in discussions with telecommunications carriers.

YouTube rose to Internet stardom by offering a wide variety of videos submitted by its users. They range from home videos to clips recorded from TV, such as music videos and soccer highlights. Users watch videos more than 100 million times daily on the site.

It remains to be seen whether YouTube's online success can translate to TV sets and cellphones. For one thing, the quality of the many homemade videos it carries is generally lower than what viewers expect on their TV sets. And consumers have yet to take to video on cellphones in large numbers.

Chad Hurley, YouTube's chief executive and co-founder, told an advertising conference last week that he sees a huge market in mobile services. The company has already launched a service that allows cellphone users to upload videos from some handsets to the YouTube site, but the clips can be watched only on a PC. The proposed Verizon deal would give cellphone customers an easy way to access YouTube videos while on the move.

The talks between Verizon and YouTube come at a time when a wide range of media and advertising companies are racing to figure out how to cash in on the skyrocketing popularity of Internet entertainment. Comcast Corp., the nation's largest cable operator, also has had talks with YouTube but has opted instead to create its own video-sharing site that will have ties to its video-on-demand service on TV.

Verizon Wireless, like other cellular carriers, is marketing new data services such as ringtones, songs, games and videos as its revenues from voice services decline. YouTube videos could give Verizon's business a boost by encouraging more subscribers to sign up for its V Cast service, which costs an additional $15 a month.

Verizon already offers video clips from major media companies and networks such as MTV, ESPN, and ABC News, but a YouTube deal would be its first with a company whose videos appear only on the Internet. Among the many clips Verizon was offering yesterday was a short CBS News piece on President Bush's last-minute campaigning before today's midterm elections. Rivals Sprint and Cingular have even broader offerings, including live TV.

Under the terms being discussed, Verizon Wireless cellphone users would be able to access about 50 to 100 of the most popular videos on the YouTube Web site at any given time, people familiar with the matter said. Initially, Verizon cellphone users wouldn't be able to post material of their own to the V Cast service but, by the end of the year, they would probably be able to upload video shot with a Verizon camera phone, a person with knowledge of the plan says.

As part of the proposed deal, Verizon, starting next year, would allow users to view YouTube videos on demand through its new TV service. Users would likely be able to buy access to the top YouTube videos of the day for a small fee, with the revenue shared between the two companies.

Verizon is offering TV as part of its effort to compete with cable companies in selling consumers bundles of home phone, Internet and television services. At the end of the third quarter, Verizon said it had 522,000 customers for its fiber-based Internet service and 118,000 TV customers.

Up until now, Verizon's TV service hasn't varied significantly from digital cable service, offering roughly the same slate of the most popular channels as well as movies and video on demand. A deal with YouTube would give the phone giant an opportunity to distinguish itself from cable, especially with viewers in their teens and twenties who are YouTube's biggest fans.

Verizon rival Comcast has decided to go it alone with its own video Web site, ziddio.com, which became accessible to the public in a trial phase yesterday. Ziddio solicits videos from users which, if they are deemed good enough, will show up on Comcast's video-on-demand service or traditional cable networks. Today, for example, the site is promoting contests for videos about Jedi warriors and messy houses. The best videos will be available on demand when Ziddio is officially launched, probably before the end of the year. Comcast also hasn't ruled out the possibility of doing a deal with an Internet company like YouTube or Revver Inc.

The Verizon discussions with YouTube suggest there are some areas where it makes sense for the large telecom carriers and Internet companies to work together. Until now, the giant cellular providers sometimes have been reluctant to cooperate with companies like Google and Yahoo Inc. Providers such as Verizon, Cingular, and T-Mobile USA generally have opted to work with small start-ups like Medio Systems Inc. and JumpTap Inc. when integrating search features into their handsets, rather than work with the Internet powerhouses, who have demanded a larger share of revenue from mobile search-based advertising.

Landline phone companies, meanwhile, have chafed at the fact that they get no slice of the massive profits that Google and other Internet companies generate on the Internet, despite the fact that their lines provide the Internet connections customers need to use those services. Telecom industry observers have mused for several months about the possibility that AT&T and Verizon might begin charging Internet companies and online video providers a special fee to guarantee priority treatment of their traffic on the Internet, an arrangement opponents say would violate principles of "net neutrality."

The dynamic of the Verizon deal would be very different, however: The carrier would be harnessing YouTube's Internet brand to promote its own FiOS TV services, treating the Web site as a partner rather than a competitor. If any money changes hands in the deal, it is likely Verizon will be paying YouTube, a person familiar with the matter said.

Verizon was hesitant about doing a deal because of legal concerns surrounding YouTube's content. In some cases, users of the video-sharing site have uploaded copyrighted material without the permission of the music labels and media companies that own the rights. The company already faces a copyright-infringement suit filed in July in U.S. District Court by Los Angeles News Service owner Robert Tur over several videos he alleges appeared on the site without his permission. YouTube has said Mr. Tur's suit is "without merit."

YouTube says it removes copyrighted videos when requested by their owners, which it says protects it from liability. At least partly to help insulate itself from lawsuits, the Web site has signed content licensing agreements with some media and entertainment companies, including Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group Corp., Sony BMG and CBS Corp.

Microsoft, Universal Music Strike Licensing Deal for Zune Service

2006-11-09T08:42:00.000-08:00

Microsoft, Universal Music Strike
Licensing Deal for Zune Service
Associated Press
November 9, 2006 10:35 a.m.

LOS ANGELES -- Microsoft Corp. and Universal Music Group say they have struck a licensing deal for the software company's new Zune portable music player and digital music store that calls for the recording company to get paid a cut of the sales of the device.

Executives at both companies declined to disclose the financial terms of the deal, which is expected to be officially announced early Thursday.

Redmond-based Microsoft is pursuing similar agreements with other major record labels, Chris Stephenson, general manager of global marketing for Microsoft Entertainment, said late Wednesday.

MOSSBERG REVIEWS THE ZUNE

Walt Mossberg says Zune, the upcoming MP3 player from Microsoft, has some attractive features but overall doesn't outshine Apple's iPod.
• Microsoft's Zune Challenges iPod

Zune, which is scheduled to be released Nov. 14, is Microsoft's attempt to compete with Apple Computer Inc.'s market-leading iPod player and iTunes music service. The device, which will sell for $249.99, lets people share songs, playlists or pictures over a wireless connection with nearby Zune users.

By paying record labels a portion of Zune player sales, Microsoft hopes to have more freedom to allow song-sharing or other promotions, Mr. Stephenson said. "There's certain marketing elements that we're looking at going forward, all based around the sharing and wireless scenarios," he said. He declined to provide specifics.

But in an interview late Wednesday, Universal Music Group Chairman and CEO Doug Morris said that the wireless song-sharing feature of the Zune player wasn't a major factor behind the company seeking a revenue sharing deal on the player.

"The only factor was that we feel that there's a great deal of music that's [stored] on these devices that was never legitimately obtained, and we wanted to get some sort of compensation for what we thought we're losing," Mr. Morris said. "I want our artists to be paid for the music that makes these devices popular."

While sales of digital tracks have increased in recent years amid lagging sales of CDs, record labels lament that much of the music that winds up on iPods and other digital players comes from either CDs fans already own or tracks culled from online file-sharing services. Apple does not give a cut of sales of iPods to music companies. It only pays labels for songs sold on its iTunes download store.

Earlier this year, Universal and other major recording companies settled a dispute with Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. over its Sirius S50 portable music player by reaching a deal that called for Sirius to pay the record companies a fee for every S50 it sells.

Universal sought a similar approach when Microsoft came calling the recording company to hash out a licensing deal for its Zune online music store. Absent a deal with Universal, Microsoft faced the prospect of unveiling Zune without content from the world's biggest recording company, home to artists such as U2, Eminem and Shania Twain.

Mr. Morris said the agreement with Microsoft marks a turning point in how the company will approach similar deals in the future. "I don't want any business built on our music without getting paid a part of the business," he said.

Mr. Morris declined to say what percentage of each Zune sold will be paid to Universal Music, but said "it's good." Under the terms of the deal, Universal will split the money it gets from Zune player sales with its artists. Mr. Morris declined to say how much artists will be paid.

A Message From Chad and Steve

2006-10-11T20:45:00.000-07:00

Yahoo! and Terry Semel's long pause

2006-09-29T21:57:00.000-07:00

While Google and small internet firms race ahead, Yahoo! seems to be standing still

“NOW let's just pause for a second.” It is the fourth pause for thought that Terry Semel, chairman and chief executive of Yahoo!, has requested in about ten minutes. He is trying to marshal various arguments to prove that his firm, the world's largest internet company by visitors to its website, has a coherent and winning strategy compared with Google, a phenomenally successful search engine. With only slightly bigger revenues, Google has three and a half times the market value of Yahoo!. Twice in three months Wall Street has dumped the shares of Yahoo! and widened the gap (see chart).

The first sell-off, in July, came after Mr Semel announced that Panama, an ambitious project to improve Yahoo!'s technology so that it can make more money on each of its users' searches, would be delayed until the end of this year. Yes, agrees Mr Semel, it was supposed to be released a quarter earlier, but this sort of market reaction was silly. Unlike Google, which has a habit of releasing sloppy brainstorms in test versions called “beta”, he says, Yahoo! wants to launch a fully functional product, and therefore had to be cautious—and since the financial benefits will come next year, why should the stockmarket get into such a tizzy?

The second sell-off happened last week, when Mr Semel warned investors at a conference hosted by Goldman Sachs that growth in online advertising was not quite what he had hoped. Quarterly earnings would be on the low side of his previous estimates. In particular, Mr Semel noted slower growth in demand from carmakers and banks—Yahoo!'s biggest customers—for graphical advertisements, the category in which it outsells all its rivals. “Let's pause for a second,” he says again. “We still expect to outgrow the segment in 2006. This is not about a tragedy or disaster; it's just pointing out something that we had seen.”

Part of the problem for Yahoo!, however, is that nobody else appears to be seeing a slowdown. This week the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, a consultancy, jointly released the latest industry numbers, which show that online advertising in America grew by 37% to $7.9 billion, a new record, in the first half of the year. Another firm that tracks online advertising, eMarketer, cut its forecasts, but that was in response to Mr Semel's statement. Jim Lanzone, the boss of Ask.com, the fourth-largest search engine after Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft's MSN, says that his firm is not seeing any similar easing of demand.

The deeper problem, says Henry Blodget, founder of Cherry Hill Research, a consultancy, is that Yahoo! is still suffering from a “colossal error” it made in the late 1990s. At that time, it already wanted to become a portal, or a gateway to content on the web, but thought that search would be at most a feature, not a business in its own right. This allowed Google to dominate the category. “By the time Yahoo! realised its mistake about three years ago it was too late,” says Mr Blodget. Google's share of search queries has been growing, and the enormous profits from this product allow Google to invest more than Yahoo! does.

Mr Semel counters that Google's gains in search have not come at the expense of Yahoo!, which has been a steady number two. MSN has been the primary loser. Panama will help. And there are differences between Yahoo! and Google which favour his company. For advertisers, the difference is supposed to be that Yahoo! is more of an all-round online media company, selling the full gamut of advertising, from pay-per-click text snippets on search pages to interactive banners, whereas Google sells almost exclusively pay-per-click advertisements. As such, Yahoo! benefits from its huge leads in web-mail and finance and general news, where Google is a tiny, niche competitor.

For consumers, the difference is supposed to be that Yahoo! is about human beings, whereas Google is about soulless machines and algorithms. So Yahoo! has bought several young firms such as Flickr, a photo-sharing site, and Del.icio.us, a bookmark-sharing site, which both allow users to “tag” the pictures and web pages they encounter, and pass them on to each other. There is Yahoo! Answers, where users can ask real questions and other users respond. Yahoo! started the service nine months ago, and it now has more than 50m users in 20 countries. Yahoo! has fared less well with its social-networking site, Yahoo! 360, and is now negotiating to buy Facebook, a networking site used by many American college students.

But none of these is a solid answer to Yahoo!'s woes. The “tagging” that Flickr and Del.icio.us offer is still far from the mainstream, and are mostly used by hard-core technology geeks. Yahoo! Answers is growing, but arguably full of rubbish. “What is the sexiest food?” is a typical recent question. Answers range from “bacon, mmmmm” to “a pickle” and “anything with a beautiful woman sitting across from it.”

And Yahoo!'s efforts to buy Facebook may illustrate the older firm's shortcomings as much as its market power. Yahoo! was originally interested in MySpace, the biggest social network, but lost it to News Corporation, a media conglomerate. It also wanted to buy AOL, a web portal owned by Time Warner, another media company, but Google swooped in. Yahoo! again lost to Google when the latter won a deal to supply the advertising on MySpace, and then to Microsoft when it struck a deal to deliver advertising on Facebook. Now Yahoo! looks rather desperate, and will have to pay an enormous price for Facebook, a fast-growing company which many big firms have considered buying.

“Days go by and deals go away,” says an outside adviser to Yahoo! who has sat in on executive meetings. The firm has a “relatively constipated process of reviewing anything,” he says. It is slow and cumbersome and “not an entrepreneurial culture” because Mr Semel is a “low-risk, non-confrontational guy”, says this adviser. He recalls a meeting at which an engineer asked: how long do we take from idea to execution? Several people scrawled on the whiteboard and agreed on an answer of eight months.

None of this means that Yahoo! is in dire trouble. If it turns out to be true that online advertising is growing more slowly as a whole, Google and all other internet firms will feel it sooner or later. Christopher Sherman, executive editor of SearchEngineWatch, an online newsletter, says he doesn't think that Yahoo! has lost its way. But “we're past the days of radical innovation where somebody is really going to blow past a competitor.” Yahoo! will have to content itself with a position as the internet's number two, at best.

Living a Second Life

2006-09-29T21:55:00.000-07:00

Living a Second Life

A Californian firm has built a virtual online world like no other. Its population is growing and its economy is thriving. Now politicians and advertisers are visiting

PETER YELLOWLEES, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Davis, has been teaching about schizophrenia for 20 years, but says that he was never really able to explain to his students just how their patients suffer. So he went online, downloaded some free software and entered Second Life. This is a “metaverse” (ie, metaphysical universe), a three-dimensional world whose users, or “residents”, can create and be anything they want. Mr Yellowlees created hallucinations. A resident might walk through a virtual hospital ward, and a picture on the wall would suddenly flash the word “shitface”. The floor might fall away, leaving the person to walk on stepping stones above the clouds. An in-world television set would change from showing an actual speech by Bob Hawke, Australia's former prime minister, into Mr Hawke shouting, “Go and kill yourself, you wretch!” A reflection in a mirror might have bleeding eyes and die.

When Mr Yellowlees invited, as part of a trial, Second Life's public into the ward, 73% of the visitors said afterwards that it “improved [their] understanding of schizophrenia.” Mr Yellowlees then went further. For about $300 a month, he leases an island in Second Life, where he has built a clinic that looks exactly like the real one in Sacramento where many of his students practise. He gives his students “avatars”, or online personas, so they can attend his lectures inside Second Life and then experience hallucinations. “It's so powerful that some get quite upset,” says Mr Yellowlees.

Second Life, as Mr Yellowlees illustrates, is not a game. Admittedly, some residents—there were 747,263 as of late September, and the number is growing by about 20% every month—are there just for fun. They fly over islands, meander through castles and gawk at dragons. But increasing numbers use Second Life for things that are quite serious. They form support groups for cancer survivors. They rehearse responses to earthquakes and terrorist attacks. They build Buddhist retreats and meditate.

Many use it as an enhanced communications medium. Mark Warner, a former governor of Virginia who is considered a possible Democratic candidate for president in 2008, recently became the first politician to give an interview in Second Life. His avatar (also named Mark Warner) flew into a virtual town hall and sat down with Hamlet Au, a full-time reporter in Second Life. “This is my first virtual appearance,” Mr Warner joked, “I'm feeling a little disembodied.” They then proceeded to discuss Iraq and other issues as they would in real life, with 62 other avatars attending (some of them levitating), until Mr Warner disappeared in a cloud of pixels.

By emphasising creativity and communication, Second Life is different from other synthetic online worlds. Most “massively multi-player online role-playing games”, or MMORPGs (pronounced “morpegs”), offer players pre-fabricated or themed fantasy worlds. The biggest by far is “World of Warcraft”, by Blizzard Entertainment, a firm in California, which has more than 7m subscribers. These worlds are the modern, interactive, equivalents of Nordic myths and Tolkien fantasies, says Edward Castronova, a professor at Indiana University and the author of “Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games”. They allow players to escape into their imaginations, and to take part by, say, joining with others to slay a monster.

Making, not slaying
Second Life, by contrast, was designed from inception for a much deeper level of participation. “Since I was a kid, I was into using computers to simulate reality,” says Philip Rosedale, the founder of Linden Lab, the San Francisco firm that launched Second Life commercially three years ago. So he set out to construct something that would allow people to “extend reality” by building a virtual version of it, a “second life” not unlike that envisioned by Neal Stephenson in “Snow Crash”, a science-fiction novel published in 1992.

Unlike other virtual worlds, which may allow players to combine artefacts found within them, Second Life provides its residents with the equivalent of atoms—small elements of virtual matter called “primitives”—so that they can build things from scratch. Cory Ondrejka, Linden Lab's product-development boss, gives the example of a piano. Using atomistic construction, a resident of Second Life might build one out of primitives, with all the colours and textures that he would like. He might add sound to the primitives representing the keys, so the piano could actually be played in Second Life. “Of course, since these are primitives, the piano could also fly or follow the resident around like a pet,” says Mr Ondrejka.

Because everything about Second Life is intended to make it an engine of creativity, Linden Lab early on decided that residents should own the intellectual property inherent in their creations. Second Life now allows creators to determine whether the stuff they conceive may be copied, modified or transferred. Thanks to these property rights, residents actively trade their creations. Of about 10m objects created, about 230,000 are bought and sold every month in the in-world currency, Linden dollars, which is exchangeable for hard currency. Linden Lab estimates that the total value (in “real” dollars) this year will be about $60m. Second Life already has about 7,000 profitable “businesses”, where avatars supplement or make their living from their in-world creativity. The top ten in-world entrepreneurs are making average profits of just over $200,000 a year.

By emphasising creativity and communication, Second Life is different from other synthetic online worldsSecond Life's total devotion to what is fashionably called “user-generated content” now places it, unlike other MMORPGs, at the centre of a trend called Web 2.0. This term usually refers to free online services delivered through a web browser—for example, social networks in which users blog and share photos. Second Life is not delivered through a web browser but through its own software, which users need to install on their computers. In other respects, however, it is now often held up as the best example of Web 2.0. “It celebrates individuality,” says Jaron Lanier, who pioneered the concept of “virtual reality” in the 1980s and is now “science adviser” at Linden Lab. And it connects people, he says, because “the act of creation is the act of being social.”

The Web 2.0 crowd also extols Second Life for its highly original business model. Most Web 2.0 firms try to build audiences around user-generated content in order to sell advertising to them. This assumes the availability of unlimited advertising dollars, a notion that is increasingly ridiculed.

Linden Lab does not sell advertising; instead it is a virtual property company. It makes money when residents lease property—an island, say—by charging an average of $20 per virtual “acre” per month. Only about 25,000 residents, or about 3% or the population, lease property, but that already amounts to 53,800 acres, which, in real life, would be bigger than Boston. This works out to monthly revenues of $1m, not counting the commissions that it takes on currency exchanges between Linden dollars and hard cash. As a private company, Linden Lab does not disclose its exact revenues, although Mr Rosedale says the firm is “close to profitability”.

A common reaction to such numbers is astonishment that anybody should pay anything at all for something that exists only in a metaphysical sense. But “there's actually no economic puzzle in this; all kinds of things derive their economic value only from the realm of the virtual,” says Indiana University's Mr Castronova. The American dollar, for instance, is virtual (aside from the value of the paper used for the bills) in that it requires consumers to have faith in its worth. In the context of online games, virtual economies much bigger than Second Life's have existed for years. Many people in poor countries, called “gold farmers”, play games such as “World of Warcraft” professionally to score weapons, points or lives to sell to lazier players in rich countries. But Second Life is unique in that residents conceive what they sell. As such, says Mr Lanier, it is “probably the only example of a self-sustained economy” on the internet.

For all these reasons—its ability to change the real lives of its residents, its innovations in technology and in its business model—Second Life has become a darling of Silicon Valley. It promises to be “disruptive”, says Mitch Kapor, the inventor of the Lotus spreadsheet that played a big role in the personal-computer revolution of the 1980s and 1990s. He is now chairman of Linden Lab. To him, Second Life is comparable to both the PC and the internet itself, which started as something “quirky” for geeks, and then entered and transformed mainstream society. “Spending part of your day in a virtual world will become commonplace” and “profoundly normal,” says Mr Kapor. Ultimately, he thinks, Second Life will “displace both desktop computing” and other two-dimensional “user interfaces”. As “a hothouse of innovation and experiment,” he says, Second Life may even “accelerate the social evolution of humanity.”

Back to this reality
It is bold and early to make such predictions. After all, Second Life is still a relatively small virtual world—only about 9,000 residents are usually logged in at any one time, for example. About two-thirds create content from scratch, but mostly they customise things that they find or browse passively. And a lot of the wares on offer are banal. Whereas a few residents choose very innovative bodies for their avatars, most have shapes, male and female, that hew to the default templates and look, predictably, like cosmetically enhanced porn stars. Among the artefacts, there is some genuine art but quite a bit of junk.

Endless possibilities: Donna Meyer, a grandmother from New York, and her avatarIs Second Life a nirvana where unknown talent can prove its creative mettle and make it in the real world? “You can create your own island and people come to it,” said Bill Joy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and now a prominent venture capitalist. But “I don't see any correlation between that and what it's going to take to be a designer and have a skill set to succeed in the world.”

Mr Castronova also cautions against overestimating the depth and breadth of Second Life's economy. Yes, people do create clothes and games and spacecraft in Second Life and then sell them. But most of the big money comes from the virtual equivalent of land speculation, as people lease islands, erect pretty buildings and then rent them to others at a premium. Tongue in cheek, Mr Castronova compares Second Life's in-world boom to America's house-price bubble. In artistic terms, there is not always much difference between building an in-world house and designing a personal web page.

There are also stirrings of discontent among some of the “older” (if one can use that term in a three-year-old metaverse) and more purist residents of Second Life about what they see as a menacing trend toward commercialism. One avatar, for example, has created “MetaAdverse”, a network of advertising billboards inside Second Life to which property developers can feed images of their creations. More controversially, Second Life is also attracting the attention of corporations and advertisers from the real world hoping to attract the metaverse's residents. Publishers now organise book launches and readings in Second Life. The BBC has rented an island, where it holds music festivals and parties. Sun Microsystems is preparing to hold in-world press conferences, featuring avatars of its top executives. Wells Fargo, an American bank, has built a branded “Stagecoach” island, where avatars can pull Linden dollars out of a virtual cash machine and learn about personal finance. Starwood, a hotel and resort chain, is unveiling one of its new hotels in the virtual world.

Toyota is the first carmaker to enter Second Life. It has been giving away free virtual vehicles of its Scion brand and, in October, will start selling all three Scion models. The price will be modest, says Adrian Si, the marketing manager at Toyota behind the project. Toyota really hopes that an “aftermarket” develops as avatars customise their cars and sell them on, thus spreading the brand “virally”. Toyota will be able to observe how avatars use the cars and might, conceivably, even get ideas for engineering modifications in the real world, he says.

Those Scion cars have “great driving performance for in-world physics,” says Reuben Steiger, the boss of Millions of Us, a company he founded this year to bring companies like Toyota into Second Life for marketing and brand-building. “How it corners and makes sounds when it changes gears is great.” So Toyota, which is a client of his, along with Sun Microsystems and even Mr Warner, shows that Second Life is “perfect for creating experiences around a brand,” says Mr Steiger. “We don't think that conventional advertising will be very prevalent,” he says, because it would “be badly received culturally”. Advertising in Second Life is not about “trapping people” but about captivating and stimulating them. A good campaign in Second Life costs about $200,000 dollars, he reckons, of which only a tiny part is property leases and most goes to paying the talented designers to create great virtual stuff.

Virtual strip mall?
Inevitably, this sort of thing turns some residents off. Will Second Life, that realm of individualism and pure creativity and spontaneity, get plastered over by the same mega-brands and mass culture that have, arguably, made the physical world such a homogenous place? In real life, many avatars argue, big business tends to push out small artisans. If the same happens in Second Life, the metaverse will lose its raison d'être.

Mr Rosedale, Linden Lab's founder, empathises with the concern, but thinks it is misplaced. “That is a fear which comes from the real world that is not likely to be borne out in Second Life,” he says. His arguments are all economic. In the physical world land is scarce, so big brands can buy up much of it; in Second Life, Linden Lab simply allocates more computer-processing power and makes even more islands available. The world is infinitely expandable, in other words. If one patch did become homogenous and drab, avatars would simply fly off to the next.

Another economic difference, says Mr Rosedale, is the lack of economies of scale in Second Life. In real life, a shoemaker, say, can reduce the average cost of making a pair by producing huge amounts, and the average cost of marketing by buying advertising in bulk. In Second Life, however, scale means nothing. There is no manufacturing cost to minimise. Gimmicks, such as giving away free shoes, are useless because nobody actually needs shoes at all. Nike, say, has no inherent competitive advantage over a hobbyist who likes to design shoes (or feet, paws, wings or claws) for fun. Thus, says Mr Rosedale, whereas the physical world has relatively few things that are sold in huge numbers, Second Life has huge numbers of things that are sold in relatively small quantities. In the statistical jargon, Second Life's economy trades in “the long tail” of things.

This is why, for the time being, Mr Rosedale prefers to rule Second Life with Adam Smith's “invisible hand” only. To him that means treating every resident the same, whether it happens to be Toyota or “an 80-year-old woman from India.” Both will pay the same price for their acres; what they do with it is up to them. If it ever became necessary, he adds, Linden Lab could “become a regulator and break up monopolies”, but this does not seem likely to come about.

How, then, is one to make sense of Second Life? For those new to it, it appears to be too mind-boggling to have much relevance to real life. For those who spend time inside, however, Second Life ironically tends to resemble the real world even as its obvious differences become clear. Mr Kapor, Linden Lab's chairman, is the first to agree. “People bring all their karma” into the world, he says. Alongside benevolence, there is harassment. If Second Life were ever to become truly mainstream, there is no guarantee that residents would not pollute it with racism and hatred. Perhaps crime too: residents had to reset their passwords after a recent hacking attempt.

These things may be a criticism of human nature, but it cannot be blamed on Second Life. Henry Jenkins, a professor of media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks that Second Life deserves credit as “a world of hypotheticals and thought experiments.” From new approaches to corporate branding to education, Second Life is a petri dish for innovations that may help people in real life. Already, therapists are using Second Life to help autistic children, because it is a safe environment to practice giving signals to others and interpreting the ones coming back. Other organisations are using Second Life for long-distance learning. Overall, says Jaron Lanier, the veteran of virtual-reality experiments, Second Life “unquestionably has the potential to improve life outside.”

Video goes viral

2006-06-29T10:24:00.000-07:00

Video on the net is nothing new. But with the arrival of YouTube and other video sharing sites, it's suddenly become a phenomenon. Video is finally easy to upload, easy to find, easy to share. So far it's free, and anyone can view it - regardless of operating system or web browsers. And it comes in quick-loading, bite-sized chunks.
Thursday, June 29 - 2006So what are these videos? Uploaded by users, the variety is infinite: from music videos, travel, sports, comedy, film clips, cult TV titles, science experiments and cute animals to random people sitting in front of a webcam giving their opinion on random topics. Adult content is usually banned, to keep sites off web-nanny blacklists. The brilliance of YouTube and its associates - Revver, MetaCafe, Yahoo Video and Google Video to name just a few - is that they allow people to embed their videos on other sites. A blogger, for example, can cut and paste a couple of lines of code and display their favourite music videos from YouTube on their blog. It greatly maximises the exposure for the videos and of course the video sharing sites. Popular videos go viral, with tens or hundreds of thousands of users viewing them, commenting on them, and re-linking to them.
Stunning figuresThe figures are spectacular. YouTube currently has a 63% market share, with 12.5 million visitors a month watching more than seventy million videos a day. There are around forty million different videos on YouTube, with sixty thousand new videos uploaded every day. It has become one of the Top 50 most visited websites. USA Today described it as the "beginning of the age of personal media". What inspired YouTube's founders was the difficulty of putting digital video on the web. With the explosion in camcorders and video-enabled digital cameras, people have millions of hours of footage but no easy to way to share it. It's too big to email. It's too difficult (and often too expensive) to put it on a personal website. Video sharing sites do all the work and bear all the cost.
The money modelBut this bandwidth is expensive. It's estimated that bandwidth costs YouTube US$1 million per month. But the investment - YouTube has raised US$11 million in venture capital - is money more than well-spent. YouTube estimates that it could already earn US$10 million a month by putting ads at the start of every video. So far, it hasn't, because it doesn't want to alienate viewers. Instead it's looking for new and creative ways to get advertisers on board. One of these is US TV network NBC, which has just signed a cross-promotional agreement with YouTube. This is despite a rockier early relationship, when NBC ordered YouTube to remove unlicensed copyright clips of Saturday Night Live. But NBC realised that the illegal video had actually created unprecedented hype for SNL. So it's now agreed to run TV and online ads for YouTube, in return for YouTube running legal promotional clips of NBC's autumn line-up.
A niche opportunityFor advertisers, the beauty of video sharing sites is being able to target highly niche audiences. All videos are tagged with different keywords, from the general "music" "sport" "comedy" to specifics such as "Britney" "golf" "kittens". Nearly a third of YouTube's visitors are aged 18-24, a key youth market that is getting harder for marketers to reach. YouTube's founders claim they don't want to replace TV or Hollywood, but act as a complementary service. But the boundaries are blurred. Videos on YouTube have a 10-minute length limit, but many users have split up entire TV programmes and feature films into numbered segments. Thousands of music videos are recorded off the TV and put up on YouTube, making it like a personalised MTV jukebox. It's also a showcase for users to promote themselves. Out-of-work actors and wannabes are known to have used YouTube to plug their talents. Some have picked up work. Other YouTube users have become cult names and been signed professionally. TUNG, a tongue-cleaning product manufacturer, are sponsoring one rising YouTube star because of his "huge obsession with licking things".
Lessons to be learntThere's a lot to learn from YouTube. The first lesson is that internet users are desperate for compelling, quirky and entertaining multimedia content. And they are happy to get it in small bites. They may not want to pay for it, but they'll probably put up with a short TVC or banner ad for the privilege of watching. The second is universality. Anyone, anywhere, on any system - even mobile devices - can watch YouTube's videos. There are no proprietary formats, no plug-ins to download, you don't need a particular browser or the latest version of Windows. This is going to be a harsh lesson for video sites that try to force users to specific (usually Windows-only) formats. Accessibility is the only way. The third - as NBC has learnt, but the RIAA still shuts its eyes to - is not to fear and resist the New Media Revolution, but to embrace it. The internet is here to stay and here to grow. It's impossible to try and control the machinations of millions of hungry bright minds. If people want to see a video, they'll find a way to rip it, copy it, encode it. Forget proprietary formats, forget copyright protection - the hackers and crackers will always be ten steps ahead.

NBC on YouTube

2006-06-27T10:50:00.000-07:00

NBC adverts on video-sharing site US broadcaster NBC has agreed a deal to promote its autumn schedule on video-sharing website Youtube.
NBC said the move, in which promos will air on a dedicated NBC channel on Youtube, would help reach people who might watch little TV in the summer.
The broadcaster has previously had to ask Youtube to remove unauthorised footage of its shows posted by users.
Meanwhile Warner Bros has begun selling films and TV on Guba.com. It already has a similar deal with Bittorrent.
Youtube allows professionals and amateurs to share video footage.
The NBC deal could see clips from new and old shows, behind-the-scenes footage, and other items exclusive to the internet airing on Youtube.
"The distinction between television and video is becoming murkier and murkier," said John Miller, chief marketing officer of NBC Universal Television Group.
"Rather than putting our heads in the sand and saying this doesn't exist, we're trying to jump in and embrace it."
Warner Bros' deal with Guba allows users to buy or rent films and TV shows, with new movies being made available on the same day that DVDs are released in stores.
New films will sell for $19.99 (£11), older ones for $9.99 (£5.50), while rental starting at $1.99 (£1.10) will allow unlimited viewing within a 24-hour period.
The studio is also planning to sell about 200 of its films and programmes on Bittorrent.com.

Guba.com: For the first time, an online video site not affiliated with Hollywood can sell movies, TV shows

2006-06-27T10:49:00.000-07:00

Guba.com: For the first time, an online video site not affiliated with Hollywood can sell movies, TV shows
By John BoudreauMercury News
Continuing Hollywood's dance with Bay Area tech companies, Warner Bros. announced Monday a partnership with online video site Guba.com to distribute new and vintage movies and TV shows.
The deal is the result of a yearlong courtship started by Guba's co-founder, 33-year-old Tom McInerney, who expects other studio agreements in coming months. People will be able to rent or buy video downloads on Guba, marking the first time a Web site not affiliated with a Hollywood company can offer both movies and TV shows, from new film releases such as ``Syriana'' and ``Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,'' to TV shows, such as ``Babylon 5'' and ``The Flintstones.''
The San Francisco company hopes to grow its catalog of titles every month. Television episodes will be sold starting at $1.79 per episode. Movie rental prices start at $1.99 and films released on the same date they are on DVD will sell for $19.99. Older films will be sold for $9.99.
After initially hesitating, Hollywood has rushed into the digital era and is gaining momentum. Analysts speculate Steve Jobs is working to line up a deal to add movies to Apple Computer's successful and trend-setting online iTunes music and video store.
Meanwhile, Movielink, an online service co-owned by five Hollywood studios, began offering download sales of some first-run and older movies in April. Sony and Lions Gate also sell films on CinemaNow, jointly owned by Microsoft, Lions Gate, Cisco Systems and Blockbuster. In May, Warner Bros. announced it had agreed to use file-sharing company BitTorrent in San Francisco to legally distribute films and shows online, though the rollout isn't expected until late summer, a BitTorrent spokeswoman said. And NBC will announce today it will use the video-sharing site YouTube to promote its fall television lineup.
A few giants
Ultimately, giants like Apple, Yahoo and Google, which have enormous audiences, will dominate online video, said Phil Leigh, president of research firm Inside Digital Media. They could use their size to drive for better deals, such as maybe a price of just $10 a movie, he added.
Warner Bros. began to take Guba seriously after it agreed to scrub its site of pirated Hollywood videos, said Jim Wuthrich, senior vice president of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment.
``They worked on cleaning up the illegitimate product in the network,'' he said. ``So it made sense for us to go forward with the deal.''
Said Tim Bajarin, president of research company Creative Strategies: ``If you do not have the ability to prove to Hollywood that you can handle their content securely and guarantee it cannot be pirated, you don't even get in the door.
Entertainment online, though, is very much in its nascent stage.
``I don't know how big this business will be on an industry basis, or for Guba specifically,'' Wuthrich said. ``We are in the experimental state. We are trying different models and different partners. I really don't know where we will be six months from now.''
Studios generally insist video rentals expire 24 hours after they are first viewed. They also will be reluctant to offer movies online before the traditional four-month theater run because that would disrupt longstanding relationships with cinema owners, Bajarin said.
Restricted DVDs
Under the Guba-Warner Bros. agreement, people will be able to make a copy of a video onto a DVD, but, because of industry licensing agreements, it can only be played on the computer from which it was burned. Wuthrich said he hopes consumers will be able to watch the copied DVDs with a DVD player within a year or so.
For McInerney, the Warner Bros. deal is a big payoff, professionally and personally.
About a year ago, McInerney decided the only way his relatively unknown, 8-year-old company could garner the business of studios was to immerse himself in Hollywood's culture. He rented a Beverly Hills penthouse and bought a Porsche 911 to cruise Hollywood Boulevard. To do business in Hollywood, it helps to hit the clubs and social scene. And so he did.
McInerney, an engineer who once worked for Apple and Sony, hopes the deal will increase the visibility of Guba, which had 900,000 visitors in May, according to Nielsen Media Research. (YouTube, the popular video-sharing site, had more than 20 million visitors last month.)
With a license agreement to distribute Hollywood videos, he said, Guba has a stronger business model than its competitors.
``Nobody is going to pay to see a kid falling off his skateboard or a dog riding a bicycle,'' McInerney said.

Warner Bros To Offer Content Online via Guba

2006-06-26T18:16:00.000-07:00

Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. has made a deal to distribute movies and TV shows online via Guba LLC's search engine and video-sharing community, Guba.com, in one of the first moves by a major studio to embrace user-generated content.
Until yesterday, Guba displayed videos submitted mostly by amateurs, along with some professionally created material such as music videos posted illegally on the site. Now, the site will sell movies such as "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" along with TV shows such as "Babylon 5."
Studios and record labels have been struggling with how to embrace Internet distribution while fighting online piracy. While the technology lures studios with the promise of an expanded market -- people who would pay to watch more movies if they were easy to download -- it also allows easy online pilfering of movies, TV shows and other copyrighted content.
"The mistake of the [movie] industry has been to worry too much about piracy and not enough about providing easy, simple ways to find content legally online," says Thomas McInerney, chief executive officer and founder of Guba. He believes putting the titles in front of the 503,000 unique monthly visitors to Guba should drive sales and rentals of the titles. The number of visitors is far behind sites like MSN Video, with more than 16 million unique visitors, or YouTube.com, with more than 13 million, according to research firm comScore Networks Inc. Mr. McInerney believes even those who have illegally downloaded movies and shows in the past would be willing to pay for them on Guba.
New movies will cost $19.99 on Guba, and older titles will cost $9.99. The titles can be moved onto portable devices or streamed around the home. New titles can be rented for $2.99. Movies will be available to buy the same day they come out on DVD, while rentals will be available a few weeks later.
Alongside the legal Warner titles, Guba users can find unapproved material, such as videos from Beyoncé and Madonna, and TV content like Oprah Winfrey's spoof on "Desperate Housewives," which aired last year. Guba says it has a technology called "Johnny" that searches for videos and other copyrighted material and removes those clips from the site, but it is a work in progress. The filter system is being constantly updated to catch more copyrighted content.
Warner has been working to ensure its creations are available in as many corners of the Web as possible. Last month, it cut a deal with BitTorrent Inc. to sell and rent movies using that company's peer-to-peer technology.
At the start of the year, Warner Bros., Bertelsmann AG and its subsidiary Arvato announced a service for the German market that relies on peer-to-peer technology called In2Movies. In the U.S., Warner launched In2TV, an advertising-supported service that allows viewers to watch classic TV shows free online.

Google Begins Streaming Free Videos

2006-06-26T18:15:00.000-07:00

Google Inc. Thursday began streaming commercial videos, including movies and TV shows, for free on the Web as part of a trial of advertising support for its video offerings.
Google's move is a key test of how online ads can finance consumer access to premium video content on the Web, the way TV commercials have supported broadcast television for decades. It could impact the efforts of companies such as Apple Computer Inc. to charge users fees to access popular videos from the Internet. If successful, the video advertising could eventually develop into a significant new extension of Google's ad system that generated over $6 billion in revenue last year.
Owners of the videos included in the Google trial usually charged for the thousands of videos now available for free on the Google Video site (video.google.com). Google shared in the fees they previously collected.
Videos now accessible for free include movies such as Charlie Chaplin classics that previously cost 99 cents, episodes of the Mr. Magoo cartoon series that had cost $1.99 and wrestling matches that were $4.95.
Small graphical ads for advertisers including Burger King and Netflix appear above the videos, with short video commercials for them at the end of featured video content. Google said that fewer than 10 advertisers were currently involved in the test.
Google executives had previously said they were looking into ways to provide ad-supported commercial video. Many of the premium videos available through Google Video still carry fees.

PEEKABOO TV

2006-06-21T10:46:00.000-07:00

PEEKABOO TV
http://www.peekabootv.com/index.aspx?cid=-1&home=true&

Business Model : Uploading content is completely free, other than the standard network operator charge. Any web and mobile phone users can download content using their mobile or the internet. The operators make money from the data traffic, as users access and download content. As a reward for generating the content in the first place, the user is paid each time their clips are downloaded.
PeekaBooTV also acts as a storage place for user's photos and other content. To stop phones getting full users can just upload the content to their PeekaBooTV channel and store them, either privately or allowing people to see them.
The PeekaBooTV architecture has been designed to allow Mobile Network Operators to easily and efficiently add the functionality to their on-portal services, allowing users to be rewarded directly through their phone bills or by a separate payment. PeekaBooTV is actively seeking MNO partnerships. PeekaBooTVis a Limited company in the United Kingdom. PeekaBooTV technology is powered by the DA Group in Scotland.
PeekaBooTV can be thought of as a personal TV show, accessible from mobile phones (and PCs), where users upload the videos they've made; saucy, funny, gross or just plain entertaining, and whenever anyone else downloads it, they make cash. The service works on almost all handsets and any mobile network. Although it's predominately a mobile video solution, it is not a 3G reliant service, greatly increasing the potential user community.
Media companies or web communities, such as magazine publishers for example, can have their own branded versions of the PeekaBooTV web and wap portals, complete with the magazines branding. This allows their readers to interact with other members of their own community and also the wider database of PeekaBooTV content. It gives publishers a new dimension in reaching their target audience and in the case on monthly publications makes sure there is branded interaction with their target audience between issues.
Users can monitor how their clips are doing and how much cash or credits they have earned instantly from a range of pie charts that illustrate their earnings. The amount of cash users can earn is unlimited and uploads can be done over the web. PeekaBooTV Content is grouped by category, such as funny, wacky, sexy, gross etc. All content is moderated before being published, so users need to take care to stick to the terms and conditions when uploading videos or they won't be published.
PeekabooTV is a quick safe way to publish work while also reaping the rewards." "PeekaBooTV takes this to the next level, making everyone a publisher of their own work. Whether they are in front of the camera or behind it the user has the power to publish their own thoughts, views, music or reports. "People do business with other people. We've already seen an explosion in personal commerce with businesses dealing direct with the consumer through the web and on more personal level sites like eBay making everyone a shopkeeper. User Generated, and User Rewarded, PBTV points the way to the future of user generated content."

MTV bets big on digital strategies

2006-06-21T09:35:00.000-07:00

MTV, once the frontrunner in music television, is now playing catch-up with the iPod generation. As its target demographic increasingly looks to mobile, broadband and video-on-demand services for its content, MTV is being forced to step up its digital activities.
At its annual sales presentation in New York earlier this month, the Viacom-owned broadcaster outlined plans to increase revenue generated by new platforms from its current $150 million to $500 million by 2008.
"With each platform we are trying to expand our reach and increase our income," Angel Gambino, the vice-president for commercial strategy and digital media at MTV Networks UK, says. "It's about extending our channels and our brands to new and other platforms, and into newer areas, such as MTV Overdrive into broadband."
In addition to mobile TV channels for the MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount Comedy and Game One brands across Europe, MTV's broadband suite includes Nicke-lodeon's Turbo-Nick, VH1's V Spot, Comedy Central's Motherload, MTV U's Uber, CMT's Loaded and its newest addition, MTV Overdrive.
Launched in the UK last month, MTV Overdrive is an online free-to-view, on-demand service, offering viewers clips from MTV shows such as Pimp My Ride, as well as news, movie trailers and music videos.
Along with repackaged popular programmes from its linear channels, MTV's broadband and mobile services offer extras from original series and bespoke digital content.
"While shooting shows for our broadcast channels, our production crews are now also briefed to shoot extra footage so that it can be delivered to mobile or PC," Dan Whiley, the commercial vice-president of digital media at MTV Networks International, says.
"We release two to three original made-for-digital series per year and make one hour of made-for-mobile content and one hour of made-for-broadband content every week. We also create eight to ten mobile games and up to 300 mobile downloads, such as ringtones and graphics, every year."
Gambino believes that these media platforms could also provide MTV Networks, which attracts 1.3 billion viewers worldwide, with a useful testing ground for new programming.
"When we are unsure how something might work, it allows us to use these platforms as an incubation area to build up some critical mass and then find it the right place in the TV schedule," she says, pointing to the upcoming transition of the street-culture show Barrio 19 from mobile to network.
MTV is also fine-tuning its digital strategy to accommodate the increasing popularity of social networks and user-generated content sites such as MySpace and YouTube. Viacom has been busy creating the online music service MTV Urge for launch in the US this month. It has also acquired the online film distributor IFILM, the virtual pet community Neopets and the gaming properties Gametrailers and Xfire.
Meanwhile, MTV has been putting the finishing touches to a new crossplatform channel aimed at its web-savvy audience. "It's completely community- and user-controlled TV," Gambino says of the as-yet-unnamed service, which is due to launch later this year.
"You create your own playlist and are able to get your content up on screen. It ties together social networking, video-on-demand and user-generated content." She also maintains that the new crossplatform channel will offer advertisers a more efficient showcase. "A lot of advertisers spend a lot on TV advertising," she says. "This will give them the opportunity to take an integrated approach."
While MySpace, Google and YouTube have undoubtedly made an impact online, Whiley believes MTV has a clear advantage in this new space. "We've been entertaining youth and adult audiences for a long time," he says. "This puts us in a great position with our audiences, and we really don't view these sites as direct competitors."
It is precisely this longevity that may ultimately attract advertisers to MTV's digital offshoots. "The demographics aren't radically different from people watching the TV channels, but, if the advertising is done properly, advertisers gain premium content to associate themselves with and the benefit of targeting," Dan Cryan, an analyst at the media market research publication Screen Digest, says.
Mat Mildenhall, the chief operating officer at Proximity, agrees. "MTV will not have the scale of Yahoo!, but it will be a much narrower audience," he says. "If you are a trusted brand, you need to be careful how you operate in that space in terms of spam and intrusion, but most people will be gleeful to get MTV content."
So far, MTV has seen almost all its big sponsors, such as Adidas and Sony, advertise with it online and others are likely to follow suit. "MTV has a strong brand which will attract a decent-sized, youth, fashion-orientated audience," Julian Smith, an online advertising analyst at JupiterResearch, says.
As well as being a significant revenue source for MTV, online advertising could also help to build a social network around its digital content.
"MTV has a well-established community which is happy to contribute and participate online," Smith says. "Interactivity is a great way to generate revenue and maintain audience loyalty." MTV is also hoping that this drive into digital media will help take the brand into new territories.
With Europe already a stronghold - the region's digital activities yield the fastest growth rates for MTV's international business - Gambino is looking to push further afield. "We'll start to see a lot more digital growth in countries where our TV business is less mature," she says. "We'll use that as our lead."
(c) 2006 The Times of India Group. All rights reserved.

The Next Net 25

2006-06-20T17:56:00.000-07:00

A new Web revolution is picking up steam, and the next Google or Microsoft could emerge from the companies that are in the vanguard.

SAN FRANCISCO (Business 2.0 Magazine) - Things are really crackling in Silicon Valley these days. There's the frenzied startup action, the rising rivers of VC cash, even the occasional bubble-icious long-term stock prediction (Google $2,000, anyone?).

There's so much happening that the buzzword recently employed to try to encapsulate the era -- "Web 2.0" -- now seems hopelessly inadequate, defined and redefined into near meaninglessness by squadrons of aspiring entrepreneurs, marketers, and other fortune hunters.
So it seems a particularly useful moment to wave away the smoke and home in on what's really core. Don't be distracted by the Valley's hype-o-meter pushing toward the red: There's something very real -- and very powerful -- afoot.
Driven by ubiquitous broadband, cheap hardware, and open-source software, the Web is mutating into a radically different beast than it has been. And that is leading to the creation of entirely new kinds of companies, new business models, and oceans of new opportunity.
We are in the early stages of what might be better thought of as the Next Net. The Next Net will encompass all digital devices, from PC to cell phone to television. Its defining characteristics include the ability to interact instantaneously with any of the more than 1 billion Web users across the globe -- not by, say, instant messaging, but by evolving instant-voice-messaging and instant-video-messaging apps that will make today's e-mail and IM seem crude.
The Next Net is deeply collaborative: People from across the planet can work together on the same task, and products or tools can be rapidly tweaked and improved by the collective wisdom of the entire online world.
The new era is also creating a realm of endless mix and match: Anyone with a browser can access vast stores of information, mash it up, and serve it in new ways, to a few people or a few hundred million.
Most striking, the Next Net creates endless possibilities for entrepreneurs and established players alike to take advantage of the Web's new power. They are building on the success of early standard-bearers -- Flickr, MySpace, Wikipedia -- but also moving beyond those pioneers in creative and fascinating ways.
In the pages that follow, we identify 25 companies, in five Next Net categories, whose approaches help illuminate where the Web is headed and where the opportunities lie. Most are startups, a lot of them with less than 10 full-time employees. Few are currently making money, and it's a given that many will fail. But it's equally likely that somewhere within this group lurks the next Google or Microsoft or Yahoo -- or at least something that those giants will soon pay a pretty penny to have.

SOCIAL MEDIAThe new culture on the Web is all about consumer creation; it's composed of things like the nearly 30 million blogs out there and the 70 million photos available on Flickr. With a click of the mouse, anyone can be a journalist, a photographer, or a DJ. The audience -- that 1 billion-plus throng linked by the Web--itself is creating a new type of social media. That's leading to the creation of hundreds of promising Next Net businesses like the ones that follow.

SOCIAL MEDIACompany: Digg (San Francisco)What it is: News aggregatorNext Net bona fides: The site's links are picked by the readership, which has been doubling every three months; news items with the most votes make the homepage.

SOCIAL MEDIACompany: Last.fm (London)What it is: Social radioNext Net bona fides: Its software creates a personalized streaming radio station based on the digital music you already listen to, shares your playlist on the Web, and suggests music from other closely related playlists

SOCIAL MEDIACompany: Newsvine (Seattle)What it is: Collaborative publisherNext Net bona fides: Readers vote and comment on stories but can also organize their own pages and write their own stories, for which they collect 90 percent of associated ad revenues.

SOCIAL MEDIACompany: Tagworld (Santa Monica)What it is: Social networkingNext Net bona fides: With cutting-edge Web software enabling blogs, photo and music sharing, online dating, and more, members confront a rich smorgasbord of ways to interact, and everything can be tagged for easy searching.

SOCIAL MEDIACompany: YouTube (San Mateo, CA)What it is: Video sharingNext Net bona fides: This site lets people upload, watch, and share millions of video clips. All videos are converted to Flash (a Web-tailored format for graphics and video), making them easy to import into blogs or webpages.

Incumbent To Watch: Yahoo!Hoping to dominate social media, it's gobbling up promising startups (Del.icio.us, Flickr, Webjay) and experimenting with social search (My Web 2.0) that ranks results based on shared bookmarks and tags.

MASHUPS AND FILTERSAs we move toward the Next Net, some of the most useful sites will be those that either help "mash up" -- meaning mix and match -- content from other parts of the Web or act as a filter for the overwhelming mountains of information now at people's fingertips. The companies that follow use content already on the Web as a starting point and then improve on it by organizing it in a new way.

MASHUPS AND FILTERSCompany: Bloglines (Los Gatos, CA)What it is: Online feed readerNext Net bona fides: The site collects blogs and news from all over the Web and presents it in one consistent, updated, multifeed mashup

MASHUPS AND FILTERSCompany: Eurekster (San Francisco)What it is: Search mashupNext Net bona fides: This do-it-yourself search engine, or swicki, allows you to define sites you want to search, post the results on your blog or website, and get a cut of any search ads your audience clicks on

MASHUPS AND FILTERSCompany: Simply Hired (Mountain View, CA)What it is: Job search engineNext Net bona fides: It searches nearly 4.5 million listings on other job and corporate sites; subscribers receive an RSS feed or e-mail alert when a job that meets their parameters pops up.

MASHUPS AND FILTERSCompany: Technorati (San Francisco)What it is: Blog search engineNext Net bona fides: The site filters the almost 30 million existing blogs, shows how many other blogs link to a particular post, and can rank blogs by topic.

MASHUPS AND FILTERSCompany: Trulia (San Francisco)What it is: Real estate mashupNext Net bona fides: Combining home listings from agents' websites with Google Maps, the site is becoming a hit in California and is expanding into other regions.

MASHUPS AND FILTERSCompany: Wink (Mountain View, CA)What it is: Tag search engineNext Net bona fides: By searching user-generated tags on Next Net sites like Del.icio.us and Digg, Wink filters the Web so users can sort links into different collections and add their own tags and bookmarks.

MASHUPS AND FILTERSIncumbent To Watch: GoogleAlready the ultimate Web filter through general search as well as blog, news, shopping, and now video search, it's encouraging mashups of Google Maps and search results, and offers a free RSS reader.

THE NEW PHONEFor nearly a century, the phone, and voice as we know it, has existed largely in the confines of a thin copper wire. But now service providers can convert voice calls into tiny Internet packets and let them loose on fast connections, thus mimicking the traditional voice experience without spending hundreds of millions on infrastructure. All you need are powerful--but cheap--computers running specialized software. The Next Net will be the new phone, creating fertile ground for new businesses.

THE NEW PHONECompany: SIPphone (San Diego)What it is: Internet phone softwareNext Net bona fides: Its Gizmo Project application allows free PC-to-PC calls, cheap PC-to-phone calls, and sound effects.

THE NEW PHONEIncumbent To Watch: eBay (Skype)The pioneer in the field and still the front-runner, Skype brings together free calling, IM, and video calling over the Web; eBay will use it to create deeper connections between buyers and sellers.

THE WEBTOPIt's been a long time -- all the way back to the dawn of desktop computing in the early 1980s -- since software coders have had as much fun as they're having right now. But today, browser-based applications are where the action is. A killer app no longer requires hundreds of drones slaving away on millions of lines of code. Three or four engineers and a steady supply of Red Bull is all it takes to rapidly turn a midnight brainstorm into a website so hot it melts the servers. What has changed is the way today's Web-based apps can run almost as seamlessly as programs used on the desktop, with embedded audio, video, and drag-and-drop ease of use.

THE WEBTOPCompany: JotSpot (Palo Alto)What it is: Wikis and online spreadsheetsNext Net bona fides: A pioneer of Web collaboration apps, a.k.a. wikis, it has unveiled its new Tracker application, which provides a powerful, highly collaborative

THE WEBTOPCompany: 30Boxes (San Francisco)What it is: Online calendarNext Net bona fides: This Web-based software allows families and groups to create private social networks, organize events, track schedules, and share photos; it may soon allow you to save phone numbers as hyperlinks and make calls by simply clicking on a link.

THE WEBTOP
Company: 37Signals (Chicago)What it is: Online project managementNext Net bona fides: Its Basecamp app, elegant and inexpensive, enables the creation, sharing, and tracking of to-do lists, files, performance milestones, and other key project metrics; related app Backpack, recently released, is a powerful online organizer for individuals.

THE WEBTOPCompany: Writely (Portola Valley, CA)What it is: Online word processingNext Net bona fides: It enables online creation of documents, opens them to collaboration by anyone anywhere, and simplifies publishing the end result on a website as a blog entry

THE WEBTOPCompany: Zimbra (San Mateo, CA)What it is: Online e-mailNext Net bona fides: Taking aim at Microsoft Outlook, its Ajax-based application can, among other things, bring up your calendar for any date your mouse encounters, launch Skype for any phone number, or retrieve a Google map for any address.

THE WEBTOPIncumbent To Watch: MicrosoftBy rolling out Windows Live, Office Live, and other Next Net-centric software, it hopes to grab a dominant -- if not monopolistic -- share of the webtop, which Bill Gates regards as a crucial strategic priority.

UNDER THE HOOD A growing number of companies are either offering themselves as Web-based platforms on which other software and businesses can be built or developing basic tools that make some of the defining hallmarks of the Next Net possible.

UNDER THE HOODCompany: Brightcove (Cambridge, MA)What it is: Internet TV distributorNext Net bona fides: It's creating a video-distribution platform over the Web for producers large and small

UNDER THE HOODCompany: Jigsaw (San Mateo, CA)What it is: Business contact databaseNext Net bona fides: In exchange for their own contact lists, salespeople use this site to access a virtual Rolodex of managers at nearly 150,000 companies

UNDER THE HOODCompany: SimpleFeed (Palo Alto)What it is: Opt-in RSS marketingNext Net bona fides: By allowing RSS feeds to be customized to the desires of each recipient and tracked individually, the site makes such feeds a powerful marketing tool.

UNDER THE HOODCompany: Salesforce.com (San Francisco)What it is: Platform for online enterprise softwareNext Net bona fides: It pioneered Web-based software and is trying to become a marketplace and host for other online apps through its AppExchange.

UNDER THE HOODCompany: Six Apart (San Francisco)What it is: Blogging toolsNext Net bona fides: The company helped kick off and sustain the Next Net with its Moveable Type blogging software and TypePad blogging service.

UNDER THE HOODIncumbent To Watch: AmazonIt's becoming a major Web platform by opening up its software protocols and encouraging anyone to use its catalog and other data; its Alexa Web crawler, which indexes the Net, can be used as the basis for other search engines, and its Mechanical Turk site solicits humans across cyberspace to do things that computers still can't do well, such as identify images or transcribe podcasts.

Trend -Next On The Net Mashups And Filters

2006-06-20T17:54:00.000-07:00

Some of the most powerful sites in the new wave of internet development will be mashups and filters, sites which mix and match content from other parts of the net, or act as a filter for the massive amounts of data now available to everyone.
Google Maps is a good example of a mashup. Anyone can download a Google map, add their own data and display a map mashup on their own website which plots new information. < www.trulia.com > for example is a real estate mashup. It combines maps from Google with real estate listings. It overlays listings in a particular area on Google maps.
Mashup companies are good at cobbling together what people want from disparate sources on the web. One of the reasons is real simple syndication, or RSS which enables readers to view what they want without having to visit thousands of sites. This intense personal control over what information is consumed is a feature of the next net.
Filter sites often come in the form of a search engine < www.technorati.com > is the site to go to when you want to find out what blogs are available on the net. Another site < www.wink.com> filters tags and saved bookmarks on other similar sites. < www.simplyhired.com > trawls through job vacancies posted on other sites. These companies all share an ability to take information already on the web and simply organise it in a different way.
Other top sites include < www.bloglines.com > which creates a multi-feed news mashup based on blogs. < www.eurekster.com > is a do it yourself search engine or swicki which allows you to define the sites you want to search, post the results on your blog and get a cut of revenue from any ads your audience clicks.These sites are further examples of the new web business model in which the site itself isn't the earner, it's the peripheral ad content it relies on for income.

Tools to mine the Live Web

2006-06-20T17:41:00.000-07:00

THIS EDITION of NetSpeak examines the features of `Live Web' and introduces some tools created for extracting information from this most vibrant part of the Web.
Numerous tools by which netizens can generate/access real-time content with ease are available on the Net.
Tens of hundreds of blogs spanning diverse subjects and the wide array of social bookmark services are some of the web sources where one can find latest information on any subject.
The distinguishing feature of such a Web source is its real-time/dynamic content. This part of the Web, with fast changing information packed on it, is generally called `Live Web.'
The incessant flow of content from `Live Web' sources presents formidable challenge to netizens, who want to keep up with this ever-changing information landscape. Here, we will examine a set of tools created for helping us tame the live web.
Several on-line services for regularly monitoring live web sources and collecting/presenting information in a searchable/browsable fashion are in place. The popular news aggregator Google News ( http://news.google.com ), which periodically scans more than 4,500 news sources automatically, is a good example.
Blogosphere, where thousands of bloggers discuss/disseminate latest news on almost every conceivable subject round the clock, is a prominent constituent of the live web.
Tools developed for scanning the thousands of blogs and filtering out trends/relevant content will help you mine live web more efficiently.
Memorandum, the blog aggregation service that shot into prominence recently, is one such tool.
The service regularly analyses content on blogs related to a specific area and displays the latest important content.
Currently memorandum delivers information from two types of blogs-technology ( http://tech.memeorandum.com/ ) and politics ( http://www.memeorandum.com/ ).
As the readers of this column may already know, blogs and other live content sources host news feeds for helping us monitor the latest information available on them.
Generally, netizens subscribe to these news feeds or RSS feeds with a desktop/web-based newsreader.
Services for displaying web feeds on other channels are emerging. For instance, the free service Immedi.at ( http://immedi.at/ ) offers an awesome solution for reading your favourite feeds in your IM client. The service sends you instant messages as and when the content of your feed changes. It supports popular IM services such as MSN messenger and AOL.
The significance of `Immedi.at' lies in its mixing of two real-time tools — RSS and IM. Normally, to track information, each time you have to visit the news aggregation site or switch over to the aggregator program running in your desktop. But with `immedia.it,' you just have to keep your IM client on.
A summary of updates on your favourite subjects/sites will fall on the IM client automatically as and when it happens. More mix-up tools of this kind may surface in the future.
Besides blogs and news sources, another set of products powering the live web is the wide variety of social bookmarking services.
These services thrive on user-generated content and closely monitoring the quickly changing content on them will help you keep up with the information race.
Many netizens view the front page of the famous social bookmarking service Del.icio.us to get information on the latest sites being bookmarked by its users. In fact, this is an excellent means to locate the latest on-line products being churned out by web developers. Del.icio.us ( http://del.icio.us/ ) is so popular that numerous postings appear almost every second.
To tap this live information flow and display the postings in real-time to del.icio.us viewers, an innovative service called Livemarks has been set up. LiveMarks ( http://sandbox.sourcelabs.com/livemarks/ ) scrolls del.icio.us bookmarks as soon as the users post them on to del.icio.us. It is really exciting and addictive to experience this service, where every second a new site appears.
A feature of on-line bookmarking services and some blogging systems is the facility to attach tags or labels to the content being posted.
Services for tracking tags and aggregating tagged content from different on-line sources are in place. The tag aggregation service, Technorati ( http://www . technorati.com/tags/), featured in the past, is a valuable product in this genre.
The newly released search service Wink ( http://www . wink.com/), which indexes data from the Net's tagged content sources like Furl, is the latest entrant in this segment.
Along with the tag-based search output, Wink provides normal Google web search results also. Along with its excellent search service, Google offers several other products/services that include Google Base, Google Alerts ( http://google.com/alerts ), Google Book Search ( http://books.google.com/ ), Google Desktop ( http://desktop.google.com/ ), Google Earth ( http://earth.google.com/ ), Google Reader ( http://www . google.com/reader/), Gmail and so on. Perhaps you may wonder how to keep up with this constantly growing service base or remember each of them.
Google Services Guide
This is no more a hurdle. Just visit the site Google Services Guide ( http://googleservicesguide.blogspot.com/ ), which hosts an exclusive, alphabetically organised list of almost all products and services released by Google so far. Currently more than hundred services are listed here.

The Next Big Thing In Searching --- Yahoo and Others Embrace `Tagging' as a Better Way To Find and Store Information

2006-06-20T17:36:00.000-07:00

AMERICANS conduct nearly 200 million Internet searches every day. Now, several companies want to make that process better by transforming the way people look for and store information they find online.
The new method, dubbed "tagging," addresses a common complaint of many Internet users -- that searching is often clumsy and inefficient. Web surfers often must sift through multiple pages of search results to find what they are looking for. And retrieving the best sites a second time often means redoing the search or trolling through an unorganized list of sites that you have haphazardly saved in a "favorites" folder.
Tagging, however, can cut through the online clutter to deliver more relevant bits of information. That is because many versions allow users to search only sites that other people have already deemed useful. It also makes it easier to find desired information again. Users says tagging services can simplify online endeavors like shopping for a new road bike or acoustic guitar because they allow a prospective buyer to quickly access saved information.
While tech-heads have been using the method for the past year or so, tagging is now moving into the mainstream. Silicon Valley heavyweights -- along with a number of new upstarts -- are now putting major resources into developing tagging services. Last month, Yahoo Inc. bought the popular tagging site Del.icio.us (pronounced "delicious"). Now, the Sunnyvale, Calif., company says it plans to allow Del.icio.us users to access their tagged links through My Web 2.0, Yahoo's own tagging site.
One new site, Shadows.com, allows individuals to save their favorite Web sites under keywords that others can also search. The site, launched last October by the co-founders of Pluck Corp., based in Austin, Texas, attracts more than 275,000 unique monthly visitors, according to comScore Networks. Last week, iLor LLC of Lexington, Ky., launched PreFound.com. Like other bookmarking sites, it allows its users to upload pages they want to save into their own profiles or share them with the public.
Yahoo's Flickr.com, which allows anyone to upload photos from their camera phone or computer to the Web and then store them in a digital album that others can search by the keyword tags, is another early tagging success.
While tagging is still new and the method does have limitations, analysts are predicting further growth in "the tagosphere" as new companies crop up to grab a share of the nearly $15 billion online-advertising market. Tagging sites are free to use, but some run advertisements which display small snippets of ad text targeted to the terms a user is searching for or other words on the page.
Tagging sites are increasingly transitioning beyond places individuals go to for retrieving their favorite Web pages to sites they visit first when they want to search the Internet. That means they are beginning to compete directly with search behemoths such as Google and Yahoo. A Google Inc. spokesman says the company doesn't comment on its competition. "These systems are really coming into the mass market," says Caterina Fake, director of Yahoo Search technology.
Demand for the new sites reflect many Web surfers frustration with current search technology. The major search engines are all built around different algorithms that attempt to determine the most relevant sites for a particular search. But only 17% of Internet users say they always find what they are looking for when they use a search engine, according to a 2005 report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. In November, Americans conducted more than five billion online searches, up 9% from the previous year, according to comScore Networks.
Tagging services have multiple uses. First, they allow Web surfers to save hundreds (or even thousands) of favorite Web pages under key words. The technology is named after the keyword "tags" users associate with each page they want to save. (For example, a Web page featuring ski goggles could be saved under the tag, skiing.) For individual users, tagging makes their own favorite pages easy to search and retrieve. Unlike storing addresses in a "favorites" folder on your computer, tagged pages are stored on the Web and accessible from any computer. A tagging site also lets you search among all your stored pages by key word, eliminating the need to scroll through dozens of sites and remember the order in which your links are saved.
There are two main ways to tag a Web site. Del.icio.us, for instance, will ask you to enter the Web address of the site you want to save into a field on its page and to click "save." The site, along with many others, also allows you download a toolbar to your desktop. While Web surfing, you can add pages to your account simply by clicking on the toolbar.
Companies say the greatest benefit of tagging -- and the reason why big Internet companies are adopting it -- is that tagging sites often allow users to make their list of tags and sites available to and searchable by either a closed community of friends and family or all other Web surfers. So, instead of searching the entire Web, users can limit their forays to an edited universe of pages others have already tagged as interesting or helpful. Also, many tagging services include the kind of social-networking features that have made sites such as MySpace.com and Friendster so popular: Users can post comments or vote on the usefulness of sites that others have tagged.
While most tagging sites allow you to tag pages on any topic, some sites are built around a theme. Kaboodle.com is a tagging site for the online shopper that allows users to save Web pages displaying items they are considering purchasing. Through buttons they add to their Internet toolbar, users can turn any product Web page, from a book on Amazon.com to clothing on eBay, into an entry on their personal Kaboodle page where others can rate and comment on the item.
There are some downsides to the new sites. Unlike a typical search engine, the effectiveness of tagging services depends on the quality and quantity of the people who save pages to them. Also, generally users have to use the same tags in order for a search to capture all the relevant pages. (For example, if you search for sites under the tag "winter boots," you could miss out on applicable pages that were tagged under "shoes.")
Some users complain that not enough people are tagging for it to be worth their while. Indeed, even the most popular sites generate less than 1% of Google's monthly traffic. But they're growing fast: Some, such as Shadows.com, are doubling their number of sign-ups every month.
When Mark Johnson of San Jose, Calif., wants to learn more about a company that he hears about in the news, he has largely stopped going to Yahoo, where he says it may take him up to ten different searches to find what he needs. Instead, the 27-year-old, who works for Internet start-up Kosmix.com, goes to Wink.com, a site that lets users search pages others have already tagged. While he still visits Yahoo, often by default, he says he uses Wink.com for restaurant recommendations and for other searches where human recommendations play an important role.

43 Things I (or you) might want to do this year

2006-06-20T17:28:00.000-07:00

43 Things is a cool site. It's ideal for tracking and working on your personal progress to learn new things. I like to think of it as tracking play. Remember your goals for the day as a child? Build a fort. Make an ashtray out of the batch of clay you found by the creek? Climb the cliff in the park. Every time you did something on your mental daily goals list you learned something and felt a sense of accomplishment. You grew.
The basic concept of 43 Things is that "people have known for years that making a list of goals is the best way to achieve them. Why is that? First, getting your goals in writing can help you clarify what you really want to do. You might find you have some important and some frivolous goals. That is OK."
This Web site gives you space for 43 entries on your list. Not every item needs to be earth shattering. Learning is incremental and you can grow a little bit at a time and suddenly realize you're competent in something new. With this site you can discover from others registered on the site the many options of what you can choose to do as well as find others who share your interest. It's a way of engaging in life itself. The goal of the site is to let you make your list, edit it, get inspired and share your progress. As you achieve a goal you've listed you can click on the "I've done this" button and share a story about how you did it.
This site appears to be ready-made for those of us learners who like to engage in self-discovery and tracking our progress. I think that we're a profession of inveterate list makers and love to tick off our accomplishments. So here's my suggestion this month. Beware: this could be a yearlong or lifelong project! I want you to go to 43 Things (See the URL in the sidebar), register and list what you want to accomplish this year. You can make it private or share it with others. Just try it! Can't think of 43 things to do? Here are a few suggestions of simple things to try:
1. Take a digital picture with a camera and/or phone and download it to your PC.
2. Register at Blogger and start a blog. Post every once in a while and add a photo.
3. Register at Bloglines and aggregate your blog and RSS subscriptions into one reader. Check out what other blogs align with your interests.
4. Look at Facebook and see the next generation of social networking.
5. Set up a Flickr account and post a few of digital photos online. Tag and annotate them.
6. Look at LibraryElf and see the potential for personal library tools.
7. Check out LibraryThing and catalogue a few books from your personal collection.
8. Register at MSN Photo Album and build an album to share with friends, family, or colleagues.
9. Check out Myspace and see how this service has become so huge globally.
10. Have some fun with the links on the Generator Blog.
11. Download Firefox and compare it to Explorer and Opera.
12. Research bookmarklets and try a few.
13. Revisit Yahoo! and remind yourself why it is visited more than Google.
14. Learn about iFILM and viral video.
15. Get a PubSub account and start searching the future.
16. Make a map of all the countries or states you've been to at Visited Countries.
17. Experiment with some sound and picture search engines like Podscope.
18. Try some new Web search engines like Exalead, Wink, Gravee, Clusty, Mooter, Kartoo, etc., or others you can find at Search Engine Watch's list.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
19. Learn more about visual display tools like Grokker.
20. Check out Google Base and see what the fuss is all about.
21. Register with NetFlix and rent a movie. Learn how to deal with streaming media.
22. Get a Del.icio.us account and play with social bookmarking and tags.
23. Play with Blinkx and learn about searching TV shows, video and podcasts.
24. Try MovieFlix too. There are plenty of free movies here to learn to do this.
25. Set up a Google Picasa account. Post a picture and then edit it.
26. Download an MP3 file to your PC, laptop or phone. Try iTunes, LimeWire, Kazaa, or eDonkey. Look for something that's not music too.
27. Listen to a podcast. There are quite a few about library issues, too.
28. Find your home and your office on Google Maps.
29. Check out your local public library's website. You'll likely find some cool stuff like talking books for that long commute, or classical music collections, or eBooks.
30. Change your ring tone so you don't jump when everyone else's default ring goes off.
31. Visit the Google Labs site regularly.
32. Set up a personalized Google or My Yahoo! page
33. Play with JibJab.
34. Play with Wikipedia. Edit an entry, feel the network.
35. Play with Copernic and extend your searching.
36. Play an online multiplayer game.
37. Take an e-learning course from Click University.
38. Choose any of the above and add your own goals. Include some fun things, too.
I could go on about this forever! Many of you will have already tried a number of the above. They're easy and mostly free. By trying some you may find a serious business use for it too. Many of these sites represent some pretty basic Web and technology skills that will be necessary to survive the next few years. Even if they don't help you at work, they're great party talk, too. This past holiday season I asked every teen and college-age friend and relative I met about the way they used the Web, and many of the links above were tools and services that they considered essential to their lives. It's your entry into the new world of next-generation coworkers.
See! It's easy to try new things. Have fun.
43 Things: What do you want to do with your life?
http://www.43things.com
Blinkx
http://www2.blinkx.com/overview.php
Blogger
http://www.blogger.com/start
Bloglines
http://www.bloglines.com
Click University
http://sla.learn.com/learncenter.asp?id=178409&page=1
Clusty
http://clusty.com
Copernic
http://www.copernic.com/en/products/agent/index.html
Del.icio.us
http://del.icio.us
eDonkey
http://www.edonkey2000.com
Exalead
http://www.exalead.com/search
Facebook
http://www.facebook.com
Firefox
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox
Flickr
http://www.flickr.com
Generator Blog
http://generatorblog.blogspot.com
Google Labs
http://labs.google.com
Google Maps
http://maps.google.com
Google Personal
http://www.google.com/ig
Gravee
http://www.gravee.com
Grokker
http://www.grokker.com
iFILM
http://www.ifilm.com
iTunes
http://www.apple.com/itunes
JibJab
http://www.jibjab.com/Home.aspx
Kazaa
http://www.kazaa.com/us/index.htm
Kartoo
http://www.kartoo.com
LibraryElf
http://www.libraryelf.com
LibraryThing
http://www.librarything.com
LimeWire
http://www.limewire.com
Mooter
http://www.mooter.com
MovieFlix
http://www.movieflix.com
MSN Photo Album
http://communities.msn.com/content/features/photoalbum.asp
Myspace
http://www.myspace.com
My Yahoo!
http://ca.my.yahoo.com
NetFlix
http://www.netflix.com/Default
Picasa
http://picasa.google.com/index.html
Podscope
http://www.podscope.com
PubSub
http://www.pubsub.com
Search Engine Watch list of search engines
http://searchenginewatch.com/links
Stephen's Lighthouse Blog
http://stephenslighthouse.sirsi.com
Visited Countries
http://douweosinga.com/projects/visitedcountries
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Wink
http://www.wink.com
Yahoo!

New improved Web: ready for the next online revolution? Powerful tools help you work, search, communicate, and share data your way--usually for free

2006-06-20T17:23:00.000-07:00

LIKE A CHILD PROGRESSING INTO ADOLESCENCE, the Web has entered a new era of sophistication. We used to spend most of our time just surfing the Internet--reading and downloading whatever we could find. Nowadays we're more likely to create waves ourselves by sharing our opinions, photos, and home videos; collaborating by text, voice, and video; or adding our own data to maps that span the globe.
Applications that run in a browser are now almost as speedy as those installed on PCs, thanks to new programming tools that combine recent Web technologies, like Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and Ruby on Rails, with Java and other standbys. These technologies allow more processing to occur on users' local PCs, meaning fewer trips back and forth to Web servers. And browser-based programs can now interact more closely with Web sites. Google, Amazon, and other big sites let anyone create services that incorporate their data. These public application programming interfaces permit the data of Google Maps and similar mapping services, for example, to become content for "mashups"--sites like Trulia.com, which joins data on houses in an area.
The shift from consumption to participation is a critical change in the Web's evolution. It's now easier than ever to post photos, documents, and other files to a blog, or to publish content as a news feed. Many sites permit us to add keywords, or "tags," to our photos, videos, links, and other shared resources. For example, you might add the tags "Barcelona" and "water balloons" to a photo of a soggy day in Spain. Tagged files can meld with similar content from other contributors. Tags also allow audiences--either public or private--to search, group, and otherwise slice and dice our contributions. Naturally, we can use the same tags to discover interesting, funny, or beautiful content we might not have unearthed using a standard search engine.
Here's a sampling of the most useful and interesting sites and services of what some call Web 2.0. All promise to deliver the best Internet experience yet. (Many of these are run by fledgling companies or by individuals, so surfer beware.)
Apps in a Browser
IF YOU'RE USED TO the click-wait-click-wait browser routine, you'll be surprised by the speed of today's Web-based applications. Ajax and other technologies give browser apps the features and responsiveness of their desktop counterparts.
NEXT-GENERATION WEB MAIL
Outlook goes Live, almost: Wherever you go, there's your Outlook data. Microsoft's flagship program for e-mail, contacts, and calendars has never traveled well ... until now. For $45 a year, you can bring all of Outlook's features with you anywhere, via your MSN or Hotmail account. Like the deskbound version, Outlook Live lets you view and manage multiple e-mail accounts, calendars, contacts, and tasks. Unlike its desktop counterpart, it limits you to 2GB of mail storage, and outgoing messages can be no larger than 20MB each. outlooklive.msn.com
Windows visits the Web: Microsoft has hopped on the New Web train in the nick of time with the beta of its free Windows Live service. You can connect to your Hotmail account, get news feeds, and store IE and Firefox bookmarks online. Features that weren't available when we looked at the beta include a Gmail-style mail service, a Web-hosted Messenger IM client, and various Windows security and performance utilities. www.live.com
Gmail sets the pace: Web e-mail had been around for years when Google debuted its free Gmail service in 2004. What made Gmail different, and also ushered in a new Web age, was its slick, quick interface, as well as its spam filter and abundant storage, currently creeping toward 3GB per account. Need to back up some key files? Just send them to your Gmail account, where you can organize and search messages using tag-like labels. Both Hotmail and Yahoo are working on Gmail-like versions of their offerings. (See last month's story at find. pc.world.com/50478 for more on these new Web mail services.) www.gmail.com
WEB WORE SITES
Brainstorm on JotSpot: Wilds make it easy for groups to add text, images, and even files to a single Web page. JotSpot is a wiki that lets workers in far-flung locations get on the same page, as it were. People can create, edit, and read a wild page, all without having to know HTML. The page can be a blog, company intranet, database, group task manager, or anything else team members would need to organize online. The service is free for up to five users and 20 Web pages (registration required), and from $9 to $49 per month for more users and pages. A related service, JotSpot Live, permits groups to enter meeting notes in real time on the same Web page. www.jot.com
ThinkFree puts office apps online: With this Java-based, ad-supported service's browser knockoffs of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, you can do almost anything you would want to do in the originals. The browser equivalents read and write .doc, .xls, .ppt, and other native Office file formats. The free service (registration required) lets you save up to 30MB of documents, either online or to your local PC. You can post files to a blog with a single click. Best of all, ThinkFree Office Online can save files in Adobe's Portable Document Format--something Office applications can't do yet. (Note: The initial applet download can take several minutes on a broadband link, so on a dial-up line it might seem interminable. The applets open faster subsequently.) online.thinkfree.com
Share your musings with Writeboard: Behold the power of text. This free service from 37signals lets you create and store any number of text documents online. You can even invite collaborators to view and edit the files. Just give the document a name, enter your e-mail address, add a password, and you're ready to create your first shared file. The clean interface highlights your edits, and e-mailing invitations to collaborators is quick and simple. The service also retains previous versions, so you can roll back unwanted changes. (Read about 37signals' Backpack personal organizer in the following section.) writeboard.com
Blog in an instant with Writely: Like Writeboard, Writely is a free Web-based word processor that supports collaboration, tracks revisions, and stores and displays your documents online. Files are limited to 500KB in size, but Writely distinguishes itself from other such services by allowing you to publish to a blog, and to upload existing documents by e-mail. www.writely.com
ONLINE ORGANIZERS
Stuff your data in your Backpack: Before, whenever you wanted to travel with a lap top, you would have to load all the files you'd need onto the machine in advance. Now you can put your to-do lists, notes, and other essential files and photos onto one clean, clear Web page. 37signals' Backpack, a Web-based personal organizer, will even send e-mail and mobile phone reminders when tasks are due. Backpack isn't just a personal organizer--you can share pages, and group items by using tags. The service lets you save up to five pages and send as many as ten reminders for free, but adding files and images to the pages costs from $5 to $19 a month. Paying customers receive from 25 to 1000 pages, 80MB to 500MB of storage, and 100 to 300 reminders. If Backpack is more organization than you need, its lightweight cousin, Ta-Da Lists (tadalist. com) is an alternative, backpackit.com
Gather your team at Basecamp: Basecamp, also by 37signals, is Backpack's heavy-hitting big sibling--a full-blown Web-based project manager that permits you to track team members' responsibilities, the time they spend on various tasks, and the group's messages related to the project. The service is free for one project, with some limitations. Fee-based plans are priced from $12 per month for up to three projects to $99 a month for an unlimited number of projects. www.basecamphq.com
HipCal puts your days in order: If you think online calendars are too slow and have too few of the features you need, this free calendar service may change your mind. HipCal will hook you with its snappy interface, address book, group calendaring, and content tagging. The service can even send a text message to your cell phone when an appointment draws near. Now even squares can get hip. hipcal.com
Planzo keeps you up-to-date: Rising Concepts' Planzo: The Online Planning Community has a cutesy name, but it also has some nifty features that HipCal and other online calendars lack, such as the ability to e-mail alerts for an impending appointment. The service's interface is easy to customize, and you can sync your calendars with those of friends who have also signed up for the free service. Two other nice features let you attach files and photos to your notes, as well as create sharable to-do lists. www.planzo.com
Note to self-Remember the Milk: More than just a to-do list manager, Remember the Milk acts like a full-blown calendar, but without the row-and-column display. Separating your life into Personal, Study, and Work tasks (categories you can change), you enter task reminders as you would in any other calendar; you can even create shared calendars for your group projects. Remember the Milk stands apart from other free online calendar/ scheduling services in its support for the iCalendar format for importing and exporting calendars, as well as in its ability to publish your various tasks as a news feed. Www.remeberthemilk.com
Collaboration & Community
WHETHER IT'S TO FUEL your passion for Hungarian cinema or to find new pomegranate recipes, the Web is a great place to meet kindred spirits. (Note that all of these sites require registration.)
THINKING IN GROUPS
Yahoo 360 offers the Web from A to Z: Yahoo's free personal Web site gives you unlimited online space to publish a blog and share photos, and lets you subscribe to and share RSS feeds. You can access your Yahoo Mail, Messenger, Groups, and other services as well. After uploading your content, just invite friends to view your handiwork, even if they don't have a Yahoo account. 360.yahoo.com
Form a chorus in the Opera Community: Much like Yahoo 360, this free community offers up to 300MB of online storage for photos, blog posts, and feed subscriptions, or for creating your own topic-based community. You don't even have to use the Opera browser, my.opera.com
Put your best Faeebook forward: According to TechCrunch.com, 85 percent of college students in the United States have accounts with this online student directory, and 70 percent of them log in to the site daily. Facebook lets you post photos and send messages to other members, but most of its popularity is due to a single feature: You can browse mug shots of the people in, say, your 2 p.m. Social Psychology lecture, find out all about them, and maybe even ask one out on a date (or at least ask for last week's lecture notes). College alumni can join to reminisce about the good old days (you need a university e-mail address). Students at some high schools are also eligible for Facebook accounts. www.facebook.com
Get all chummy at Friendster: Like Facebook (see above) but without the student-only limitation, this free online social directory allows you to put your personal profile, blog, and photo album on the Web, and then see if anyone out there wants to be your buddy. Friendster lets you chat with one person or a whole group. The service recently added peer-to-peer file sharing. www.friendster.com
PICTURE PLACES
Flickr makes sharing fun: Use this free Yahoo-owned service to share your digital photos with everyone else in the world, or just the people to whom you grant access. After you upload your shots to the site, you can tag shows, and post pictures to external blogs. Moving your images to the site is easier if you download and use Flickr's handy batch-upload utility, which also adds a 'Send to Flickr' command to IE's context menu. Uploading as much as 20MB of photos per month is free; a Pro Account ($25 per year) increases the limit to 2GB per month, flickr.com
Picaboo polishes your photos: This is a photo-sharing site with a twist. Instead of uploading individual pictures to Picaboo's server, you download the free Picaboo photo-album software, make slick-looking digital albums on your PC, and then upload a copy of each album to Picaboo's server for sharing with the people you specify. You can use one of the free service's many album wizards, or use a layout of your own devising. Picaboo makes money by selling prints of the albums (though the software allows you to print your own using standard photo sleeves and album covers), as well as individual prints and slide-show DVDs. Photo-album prints cost $25 for up to 20 pages, and photo DVDs cost $10. picaboo.com
BOOKMARKS TO SHARE
Del.icio.us takes the Web's pulse: Want to find out what people are interested in these days? Just look at their bookmarks. While you're at it, let them look at yours. The name of this free site just bought by Yahoo may be awkward, but using it is simple: Register, log in, add two buttons to your browser's Links (IE) or Bookmarks (Firefox) toolbar (the site shows you how), and click a button to bookmark the current page (you can't upload all your browser's current bookmarks in a batch). For the full New Web effect, tag your bookmarks and share them with the universe, or with a small group of friends. family, or coworkers. One of the site's new main features: You can now access your Del.icio.us bookmarks from any Web-connected computer, del.icio.us
Digg deeper for tech news: The free Digg technology news site is similar to the popular Slashdot, with one giant difference: Rather than having editors decide which stories are most important, subscribers rate articles by "digging" them, a process much like tagging. As a result, breaking news tends to appear on Digg a tad sooner than it does on Slashdot. Simply read the postings on Digg as you would on any news site (or subscribe to the service's news feed), or delve deeper into the community by registering and creating your own news Diggs. Alternatively, you could simply bask in Digg's reflected brilliance by posting its stories to your own blog with a single click, www.digg.com
Flock makes browsing a group experience: This new free browser (based on the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox) has a decidedly social twist. It uses Del.icio.us's shared bookmarks by default, and it allows you to tag Web pages, grab news feeds, and link to major blogging services. The browser even displays photo thumbnails in its Flickr toolbar (just in case you find yourself getting too much work done). Though not yet in beta testing when we looked at it, Flock may be ready for regular duty by the time you read this. www.flock.com
For book lovers, it's a LibraryThing: This site is similar to Del.icio.us, but for the tweed set. If you love books, and love people who love books, LibraryThing is for you. Start by using the service to catalog your book collection: Tag your books by topic, share your catalog with others, and then endlessly browse the titles that they have on their shelves. The utterly book obsessed can add the LibraryThing widget to a blog to show visitors what they have been reading lately. Listing up to 200 books is free; listing any number of books beyond that costs either $10 per year or a one-time $25 fee. www.librarything.com
Sharing is a snap with My Web 2.0: This free personal bookmarking and tagging site from Yahoo (in beta when we looked at it) bears the familiar plain-jane look, but don't let that fool you. Unlike Del.icio.us, My Web 2.0 uploads all your browser bookmarks smoothly, and it lets you share your bookmarks via a news feed. The service also allows you to share your tags with a group of friends or associates. myweb2.search.yahoo.com
VIDEO SHARING
Check your radar for Blip.tv: The Swiss army knife of online video, Blip.tv offers free video blogging, podcasting, searching, and sharing. Create your video blog on the site, or simply post links to clips from your own blog. Most of the site's videos are tagged, and Blip.tv generates a news feed of the latest video uploads for your convenience. Better yet, Blip.tv automatically posts videos to the Internet Archive or to your blog. It also sends tagged video links to the Del.icio.us bookmark directory (see the previous section), and thumbnail images to Flickr. blip.tv
ClipShack converts videos in a Flash: It may not offer all the bells and whistles of other video sites, but this free service makes posting your videos quick and easy. Unlike other sites, ClipShack converts your uploads to Flash animations, ensuring that most people will be able to see them without having to download a plug-in. Linking to a clip requires copying and pasting some HTML code into your blog. Inveterate voyeurs can subscribe to an RSS feed of new clips. Uploads are limited to 50MB (the site plans to offer paid services with higher storage limits in the future). www.clipshack.com
Google gets the video bug: Most video-sharing sites want to be the "Flickr of video," making it easy for you to see other people's creations and for them to see yours. Not Google Video. While you can upload your own video clips to the site, don't expect them to appear online just like that--the company must decide if they meet Google Video standards first. Nevertheless, this free service knows a few neat tricks. For example, you can use keywords to search for videos, as well as sample random clips that Google deigns to serve up (usually interesting, sometimes long), video.google.com
Ourmedia.org is your media repository: Billing itself as a global home for grassroots media, Ourmedia.org is a free video, audio, photo, and text upload site that acts as an interface to the Internet Archive (archive.org)--you have to register on both sites before you can upload. You can receive the media contributions of others via RSS, or just browse around patiently (the site is a little slow), ourmedia.org
Vimeo makes Web video easy: Vimeo looks lightweight at first, but the more you use it, the more features crop up. You can upload as much as 20MB of video per week for free in any format you like. You can also tag clips for easier searching, and post tagged links to Del.icio.us to attract viewers. Vimeo lets you post thumbnails of your clips to your Flickr account, and transmit the clips via an RSS feed. (Note that some of the site's content isn't suitable for children.) www.vimeo.com
Everybody's a star at YouTube: YouTube doesn't have the video sharing and sorting tools that Blip.tv and Vimeo do, but posting your clips to the free service is a breeze. Videos are limited to 100MB each, and you have to give each clip at least three tags before YouTube will accept it. Linking to clips from your blog requires copying and pasting HTML code. YouTube offers only one news feed of the site's most recently uploaded videos; and like Vimeo, some of the videos on the site are R-rated. www.youtube.com
Search & Maps
WHETHER YOU swear by Google or use an army of Web search tools and services, there's always more to discover online, and more ways to discover it. Some of the most innovative new Web services combine search results with maps to provide a fresh perspective on places a continent away, or just around the corner.
NEW-LOON SEARCH
Odeo hooks you up with podcasts: This free service could do for podcasts what Blip.tv and other sites are doing for video. Though the site's podcast-upload capabilities were still under construction as we went to press, it nevertheless provides a great way to search for audio files on the Web without having to install itunes on your system. Casual visitors can browse podcasts by the tags assigned to them. Registering lets you do some tagging of your own (a feature itunes doesn't support); it also allows you to subscribe to topic-oriented channels and to download audio to your iPod. www.odco.com
You make the rules at Rollyo: The name is short for "roll your own search engine," which means you can create a custom collection of search engines and topics and then share the resulting "roll" with others. The free site provides logged-in users some starter search rolls of its own, as well as lists of topic-targeted rolls created by celebrities and other "high rollers." You can add your Rollyo search rolls to Firefox's search engine toolbar with a click, and post your roll to your own blog or Web site just by copying and pasting some HTML code. www.rollyo.com
Technorati keeps its ear to the Web: Google Blog Search (blogsearch.googh. com) does a good job of exploring blogs, but Technorati's free blog portal takes tracking blog buzz to the next level. You don't have to register to search blogs, browse its cloud of tags or Top 100 list, or use the site's Blog Finder to locate blogs on a particular subject. But signing in lets you promote your own blog and set up watch lists of topics you want Technorati to track for you. www.technorati.com
Search the smart way with Wink: Search engines are only as good as their underlying algorithm. Finding the nuggets of gold among the results typically requires a human (you) to read through and discard the many links that are only tangentially related to whatever you're looking for. The free Wink search engine incorporates the human element, crawling tagged sites such as De.licio.us, Digg, and Flickr (see previous sections) and drawing on Wink users' tagged searches to separate wheat from chaff. Set up Rollyo-like search sets based on tags, and sync with Del.icio.us and Yahoo's My Web 2.0. www.wink.com
MAPS AND MASHUPS
Freesound Project lets you hear the world: Close your eyes, and you're sitting at a sidewalk cafe in Oagadougou in the West African nation of Burkina Faso, or relaxing to the sound of waves lapping on Spanish Banks Beach in Vancouver, British Columbia. These and other audio field recordings (mostly of animal and environmental sounds) are linked to Google Maps on this very cool free site. fiun.pcworld.com/50554
Leave your mark on the planet with Google Earth: More than just a Web site, the free Google Earth is an application that runs on your PC, allowing you to "fly" over a virtual globe constructed of satellite imagery. Search for businesses and people, view 3 D images of cities, and
get driving directions and distances. More important, the app's public programming interface has spawned a new generation of mashup sites (several of which are described in this section) that piggyback search specifics, databases, or other "geocode" onto Google's virtual planet. Have a GPS unit? Get Google Earth Plus ($20) to import your own map coordinates. earth.google.com
Rise above it all with Windows Live Local: This free site (formerly MSN Virtual Earth) combines Microsoft's MapPoint mapping service with its TerraServer satellite images (see below). Where as Google Earth relies on a downloadable component, Windows Live Local lets you soar over terrain in your browser. Zooming beyond the U.S. border reveals one of the site's limitations, however: Outside of this country, most images are high-altitude satellite views that aren't much clearer than their counterparts in a standard atlas. As with Google Maps, the service's published APIs allow anyone to create their own apps, including maps of eBay seller locations and MSN Messenger chat partners. local.live.com
Google Maps Web Cam Locator looks ahead: Get a pretravel peek at the weather at your destination, or do virtual sightseeing at this site that plots Webcams on a Google Map. Click a pushpin on the map to see that camera's view in a pop-up window. Click again to see the view in a larger window, plus weather and other info. You can even add your own Webcam to the map. find.pcworld.com/50546
Put a place with that face via GeoBloggers: Ever wonder where the beautiful tropical-vacation shots you found on the Web were located? Want to show friends where you spent your summer? The free GeoBloggers site uses the geotagging of your images on Flickr (see page 85) to plot them on a Google Map. Visitors can fly to your photo's map point and conduct searches in the area using Google Earth. They can also jump to your Flickr page or--very cool--download a GPX waypoint file (which encodes the site's map coordinates) for upload to their own GPS device. geobloggers.com
Maplandia.com brings the world into view: This free service puts a regional interface on Google Maps, organizing the site's maps and satellite images by continent and by country. Want to see a map of Colombia? Just two clicks, and you're there. Maplandia creates HTML links you can paste into your blog so that your visitors can view the same map with just one click. www.maplandia.com
Trulia is a house hunter's best friend: Location, location, location. What could make a better mashup than maps and real-estate listings? This free site started small, mapping homes for sale in a few cities in the San Francisco Bay Area, but its goal is to show listings nationwide. Type a city or zip code into Trulia's search field to see listings pinpointed on a map. Using Google Maps' Hybrid setting, you can see at a glance which homes are close enough to the beach, and far enough from the freeway, www.trulia.com
Get a choice of views at TerraServer: Not only can you search this industrial-strength satellite-image database by city, state, and country, but you also get your choice of images from various providers, and you can purchase prints of the maps at prices ranging from $7 to $150. The service sells prints of satellite images from hundreds of famous locations, such as the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and other hallowed shrines. APIs let you write applications that grab images from TerraServer (a la Google Maps). www.terraserver.com
Yahoo Maps joins the mashup: Brand new and still in beta as we went to press, Yahoo's free mapping service is a response to Google Maps and Windows Live Local, although it differs in one giant way--no satellite imagery. Nevertheless, Yahoo's public APIs let you create your own mashups (view a gallery at find. pcworld.com/50550), and its smart navigational widget makes jumping around a map easy. maps.yahoo.com/beta
TOP PICKS
THE NEW WEB STARTS HERE
IT'S EASY TO BECOME overwhelmed by the variety of features these fabulous sites offer. To cut to the chase, here are our favorites in each category.
* Web mail: How does Gmail do it? Volume-nearly 3GB worth. Labels let you quickly find your old messages, which you may never have to delete.
* Web work sites: ThinkFree Office Online puts a full-featured Microsoft Office double and 30MB of storage at your disposal wherever you roam.
* Photo sharing: Not only does Flickr make uploading, viewing, and sharing your digital snaps simple, but it also connects easily with blogging, mapping, and other services.
* Bookmark sharing: What's the buzz this morning? By sharing and tagging the highlights of your browsing at Del.icio.us, you contribute to the zeitgeist, and you make your list of favorite sites available both to yourself and to other Web denizens from any PC.
* Video sharing: Blip.tv does online video right, giving you tags, news-clip feeds, and storage of your clips for posterity (and for free) at the Internet Archive (archive.org).
WEB TOOLS
WIDGETS BREAK OUT OF THE BROWSER
THE TECHNOLOGIES that power the New Web are being applied outside your browser, too. Widgets are lightweight applications that sometimes run inside a browser and other times operate as separate programs. They can monitor the weather, measure battery life, reformat Web pages and search results, or do just about anything else that someone figures out how to accomplish in a scripting language. Here are three of our favorite widgets:
* Yahoo Widgets: Yahoo's free program, formerly Konfabulator, for Windows XP and Mac OS X runs JavaScript apps outside your browser. Its widgets float around your desktop (looking a lot like the widgets in OS X) and include a clock, weather display, to-do list, slide show of your Flickr photos, and battery and Wi-Fi signal strength monitors. The Web site offers over a thousand more, plus instructions on how to write your own. widgets.yahoo.com
* Greasemonkey: This free extension for Firefox runs JavaScript code (which it calls "user scripts") to change the way Web pages appear or behave. After you install the program, browse to Userscripts.org to view a collection of tags (called a "cloud") of user-script topics. One of my favorites is a Greasemonkey widget that adds Google Blog-search to the Google search page. greasemonkey.mozdev.org
* Klipfolio: Looking much like an instant messaging client, this free widget aggregates RSS feeds and other complex information (such as the local weather). Unlike standard RSS readers, however, Klipfolio lets you search feeds and sends you alerts when your search terms appear, www.serence.com
MESSAGING
IM VIA THE WEB
IT DIDN'T TAKE LONG for instant messaging to become indispensable for many users. But how will you connect when you're away from the IM client software on your home or work PC? The four big-name IM services now offer Web-hosted versions of their software that let you send and receive text messages from any PC with an Internet connection (see the list below). However, remembering addresses, names, and passwords for multiple IM services is a problem that cries out for a Web solution, Meebo (in alpha) answers the call with its free universal IM service that supports AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and ICQ, pulls the Jabber service (which Google's Gtalk uses).
* AIM Express www.aim.com (page offers link)
* ICQ2GO: www.icq.com/icq2go/
* Meebo: www.meebo.com
* MSN Web Messenger: webmessenger.msn.com
* Yahoo Web Messenger: find.pcworld.com/50556
JOB SITES
THE NEW WEB AT WORK
WHILE BUSINESSPEOPLE are sure to find many practical uses for the new generation of Web sites and services, two of the best newcomers are designed specifically to get you into a business. Indeed ( www.indeed.com ) and Simply Hired ( www.simplyhired.com ) each collect listings from a variety of job sites (including Careermole, Craigslist, Dice, and Monster). They allow you to filter out unwanted job categories and save the resulting search as an RSS feed or e-mail alert that keeps new postings coming to you daily. Simply Hired lets you add prospective jobs to a Google Map so you can compare commute times among your various employment prospects, for example. Indeed's Jobroll feature lets you turn a job search into an ever-updating box you can copy and paste into your blog or Web page as a service to your readers.
HOW-TO
ROLL YOUR OWN SERVICE
YOU SAY YOU DON'T like the way that Craigslist, Flickr, or Google Maps functions? Just change how each presents its data, or combine the information on one site with that on another. ProgrammableWeb ( www.programmableweb . com) lists over 200 mashups, including a Google Map of Hindu temples, a Flickr screen saver, and a matchmaking tool for the HotOrNot.com dating service that turns you into a virtual yenta.
Creating a mashup requires a solid understanding of JavaScript (Wikipedia offers a good starting point at find. pcworld.com/50558). While it's no replacement for actual programming skills, Ning ( www.ning.com ; still in beta as we went to press) lets you set up your own classified listing, photo sharing, review, or social-networking site without writing a line of code.
You can modify one of the thousands of existing applications on the site and have a slick program of your own devising running in minutes. Ning even hosts the site, posting ads alongside your application in exchange, if you're feeling geeky, the service lets you alter the application's underlying PHP code.

Trend -Next On The Net Mashups And Filters

2006-06-20T17:14:00.000-07:00

Some of the most powerful sites in the new wave of internet development will be mashups and filters, sites which mix and match content from other parts of the net, or act as a filter for the massive amounts of data now available to everyone.
Google Maps is a good example of a mashup. Anyone can download a Google map, add their own data and display a map mashup on their own website which plots new information. <> for example is a real estate mashup. It combines maps from Google with real estate listings. It overlays listings in a particular area on Google maps.
Mashup companies are good at cobbling together what people want from disparate sources on the web. One of the reasons is real simple syndication, or RSS which enables readers to view what they want without having to visit thousands of sites. This intense personal control over what information is consumed is a feature of the next net.
Filter sites often come in the form of a search engine <> is the site to go to when you want to find out what blogs are available on the net. Another site <> filters tags and saved bookmarks on other similar sites. <> trawls through job vacancies posted on other sites. These companies all share an ability to take information already on the web and simply organise it in a different way.
Other top sites include <> which creates a multi-feed news mashup based on blogs. <> is a do it yourself search engine or swicki which allows you to define the sites you want to search, post the results on your blog and get a cut of revenue from any ads your audience clicks.These sites are further examples of the new web business model in which the site itself isn't the earner, it's the peripheral ad content it relies on for income.

Robert Iger on...Entertainment

2006-06-20T17:02:00.000-07:00

ROBERT IGER took over last year as president and chief executive of Walt Disney Co., and moved quickly to embrace the newest in digital entertainment. He signed deals to put Disney-owned television shows on the Internet and Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod, and purchased the Pixar digital-animation studio. He talked with Kara Swisher about the deals, offering Disney content over the Internet and greenlighting "America's Funniest Home Videos."
KARA SWISHER: One of your first two moves was [to make your content available on digital devices]. So talk a little bit about, first, the iPod deal.
ROBERT IGER: It seemed rather obvious to us that the killer application is great creativity . . . married with a fair amount of intelligence about both technology and the consumer. We're investing significantly in creativity, and . . . confining it to just traditional platforms when the consumer is now consuming media on many nontraditional platforms seems silly to us. . . . Since you brought up [the] iPod, I was extremely impressed with the device. The iTunes software is fantastic in terms of creating a very simple, user-friendly experience, and then, of course, the beauty of the device itself, which is very well made, very well designed. . . .
It seemed obvious when we heard that [Apple] was developing a video player that we should move our video content onto the platform.
MS. SWISHER: How has that been?
MR. IGER: The downloading has been quite successful. It's still relatively small in the scheme of things. We've had about six to seven million downloads of Disney ABC shows since we launched in October.
MS. SWISHER: What's been the greatest one?
MR. IGER: "Lost" is first. "Desperate Housewives" is second. But we've had some interesting experiences. We put a movie on [iTunes] called "High School Musical," which was on the Disney Channel . . . and charge $9.99 for it, and it went to the top of the video charts on [iTunes].
We're multiplying the number of platforms that Disney, ABC, ESPN content will exist on. Because people are accessing media on so many more platforms, then why not occupy that space?
The consumer today has much more power over how and when they access media than ever before, and technology is the great empowering tool, and we have to pay attention to that.
MS. SWISHER: [About the same time you made shows available for purchase,] you made a move to stream "Desperate Housewives," and a bunch of shows, very popular shows, the biggest hits on ABC at this point, [free of charge but] with unskippable commercials. Your advertisers, who were paying a lot of money on your network, agreed to go along with it. Tell us about that experience.
MR. IGER: ABC decided to put four shows on ABC.com streamed. Two of them very popular shows, "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives." Two others [that are] not as popular, and in 29 days, they had 11 million streams. They sold advertising in all of them, one advertiser per show with a few 30-second spots within the body of the program that could not be skipped. The result has been pretty dramatic. Over 85% of the people who streamed remember the advertiser that was advertising [on] the program they streamed, which was incredible.
MS. SWISHER: Plus, they can't skip the ads.
MR. IGER: They can't skip them, but it's interesting. They're only 30 seconds long, so when you're watching streaming video on your computer, and you know that it's only a 30-second break instead of a break that's substantially longer, you're not as compelled to skip anyway. . . .
The other thing we discovered is that most of the people that are watching are watching because they missed the show. So we're enfranchising more people. We're giving them more opportunity to watch something instead of keeping it on one platform.
MS. SWISHER: So let's talk about the list of people that your move made mad: the affiliates, companies like Wal-Mart that are selling DVDs, cable companies who pay you a lot of money [for Disney's channels], writers, actors . . .
MR IGER: Well, I think there are a lot of people who are troubled by any traditional content company moving their content under new platforms.
MS. SWISHER: Let's start with affiliates.
MR. IGER: Well, affiliates actually may end up with an opportunity that they've never had before. We gave . . . about 10 ABC affiliates the opportunity to put an ABC button on each of their Web sites. So if you go to the ABC affiliate in Milwaukee, Wis., their home page has a button that says, "Watch ABC shows." You click it, and the player that plays the streaming video comes up, [but] the environment [on the affiliate's Web site] is still, in this case, WISN. We let them sell a commercial around [the streaming video]. . . .
There will be some entities that are alienated, but in the end, we may create opportunities. We're in conversations with Comcast, who would like very much to have the same show streamed on Comcast.net or in a [video on demand] environment.
MS. SWISHER: Do you see ESPN streaming all its content?
MR. IGER: I don't see ESPN streaming its entire service [because the] satellite and cable platforms pay us a huge amount of money [for the right to carry ESPN], but ESPN is already reaching its customers directly in many other forms on either ESPN.com or through other services. . . . I don't think you're going to see one media model in the future. It'll be many.
MS. SWISHER: Actors, writers, directors must be insane at this point about what they're going to get.
MR. IGER: Insane is, I think, too strong a word. There are a lot of mouths to feed, as has been the case in this business for a long time, and I think it will all get figured out, because . . . when you have an increase in media consumption, that's a good thing. We just have to figure out ways to track the consumption and ultimately to compensate all the entities that deserve compensation, and I believe we'll do that.
MS. SWISHER: What else do you see going up on Disney.com?
MR. IGER: Disney.com is going to become a network of the future. You can watch shows. You'll be able to listen to music, play games, buy things. We'll have a fairly robust online store. We have our own photo service called PhotoPass [for] countless millions of people who visit our theme parks [and want to upload photos from their trip].
MS. SWISHER: Do you see having a close relationship with the Yahoos and Googles of the world to get this content out there?
MR. IGER: We're willing to make our product available to anyone who's willing to pay the right amount of money for it or to create an environment that is, generally speaking from our perspective, positive. If you look at the Google video offering . . . you can find CBS shows. You can find NBA highlights. But you can also find a lot of user-generated content, and some of that content is not really an environment that we want to put ourselves [into]. If they offer us an environment that is a little bit more consistent with the environment that we . . . believe is fitting for the content that we create, there's no reason why we wouldn't do business with them. Again, if it's priced right and positioned well.
MS. SWISHER: Is there a difference between user-generated content and the fancy Disney stuff?
MR. IGER: I get a kick out of the fact that there's a lot of talk about user-generated content. In 1989, I was pitched a show . . . and in it there was a feature of people who sent their home videos in, and the host typically made fun of the videos that were sent in, and that became "America's Funniest Home Videos" . . . which is still on the air and . . . won its time period this year, which is pretty ridiculous or pretty amazing.
People are fascinated with user-generated content. I don't think it holds a candle to what I'll call professionally generated content. I don't think people will make a decision to watch somebody's birthday video instead of going to see "Pirates of the Caribbean" or "Cars," but they're obviously spending a fair amount of time on it. There's nothing wrong with it at all. We're actually empowering or facilitating some user-generated content, people who shoot videos when they go to our parks, for instance. [It's] not our primary business.
MS. SWISHER: Let's talk about the network. Last night, Bill Gates essentially said the networks are dead.
MR. IGER: In the history of media, there have been a lot of declarations made about genres or platforms or parts of the media business being dead. Consumption of media is going up, not down, and if you play a content game . . . then you have opportunities today unlike you've ever had before. If you keep that content on one platform only, a traditional platform, then in the end you're not going to get enough consumption to really support the continued creation of great content. So the goal . . . is to use multiple platforms, and the television network today is a great platform to generate a lot of consumption. . . .
I think you're going to see continued fragmentation. You'll see people consuming media in more places, more often, [on] more devices than ever before, not just on a television set.
MS. SWISHER: Do you see [Disney movies] being distributed immediately on DVD, cable and satellite, not just in the theaters?
MR. IGER: Not right away, no. . . . I think the movie experience, the big-screen, multiple-person experience is actually a pretty good experience. I think the whole industry should get behind improving that experience. . . . We create a lot of value with the initial big-screen release. So I like the notion of keeping that where it is. How long that lasts in some exclusive window, I don't know. It seems pretty obvious that the windows are going to compress.

Video sites grapple with specter of smut; Critics say smut and brutal images can be easy for children to access at top upload sites

2006-06-20T16:59:00.000-07:00

Video sites grapple with specter of smut; Critics say smut and brutal images can be easy for children to access at top upload sites.

The text accompanying the video says a man has stolen a pair of women's underwear.
The clip, first posted on video-sharing site YouTube on May 31 and viewed more than 1,500 times over six days, shows a man standing in what appears to be a dimly lit public bathroom wearing what indeed appears to be panties. As the video plays, the man, shown from the stomach down and thus faceless, begins to fondle himself.
YouTube is not the only well-known video site where such graphic content appears. Many of the companies that let users display homemade videos on the Web are having difficulty keeping their pages smut free. A weeklong review of some of the top user-generated video sites by CNET News.com unearthed scenes of beheadings, masturbation, bloody car accidents, bondage and sadomasochism. It's important to note that no child pornography was discovered.
Right now, online sharing sites such as YouTube, Yahoo Video and Google Video are competing in one of the fastest-growing entertainment segments on the Web. They may also be victims of their own popularity. The vast majority of videos available on these sites depict budding musicians, comedians, filmmakers or just people vying for attention in innocuous, if sometimes oddball, ways.
But industry insiders say that as the sites collect greater amounts of video, tracking and purging sexually explicit and graphically violent content will become increasingly difficult. Industry insiders say that while prescreening millions of homemade videos is likely to be costly and problematic, failing to police the sites could scare off advertisers and lead to clashes with family advocates and lawmakers.
Materials inappropriate for children are too easy for kids to get their hands on at Google Video, according to the New York State Consumer Protection Board, which issued a warning to parents on June 12. The board has a broad mandate to inform and educate consumers but has no regulatory powers. Nontheless, it will continue to publicize the issue in an effort to force Google Video and other video-sharing sites to do more to protect children, said Jon Sorensen, the board's spokesman.
"Very few of the other (video-sharing) sites feature this kind of content on their front page," Sorensen said Thursday. "It's disappointing because we contacted (Google Video) two weeks ago, and they said they were trying to make changes. Still, this stuff continues" to show up.
In an e-mail to CNET News.com, Google said it removes such content when made aware of it.
Unlike New York's consumer protection board, the federal government does have the power to force change. A bill proposed this month in the U.S. Senate would require any Web site that offers sexually explicit content to post warning labels on each offending page or face imprisonment.
The authors of the bill, called the Stop Adults' Facilitation of the Exploitation of Youth Act, or the SAFETY Act, want to decrease the chances that children can inadvertently be exposed to pornography by Web sites that mislabel their materials either deliberately or through negligence.
And video-sharing sites are likely to face enormous pressure to clean up their sites from big advertisers. Some companies are eager to partner with the sector's powerhouses but will steer clear if it means that one of their ads sits next to unsuitable content, said Greg Sterling, who operates Web research company Sterling Market Intelligence.
"There's absolutely a big opportunity for these sites to sell advertising, provided that they guarantee (what kind of) content...goes next to the ads," Sterling said. "Advertisers are going to want control of where their brands are placed."
That's not going to be easy for some sites. Take, for example, YouTube, the largest video-sharing site with nearly 13 million users per month. Guaranteeing the quality of content on the site would mean hiring employees to eyeball each frame of the more than 50,000 videos that get posted daily. YouTube allows videos to last up to 10 minutes, but most are much shorter. If the average video is three minutes, then YouTube would be monitoring 2,500 hours worth of video a day.
"It's going to be hard to guarantee absolute protection," said Mike McGuire, a research analyst with Gartner. "You have to wonder if (these sites) foresaw the kind of expense and effort that they are going to have to put into monitoring their sites."
Yahoo Video has installed a screening system that, when applied, prevents visitors from accessing adult content that may wind up on the site. Google, which has a similar screening system for its photo site, hasn't installed one for Google Video. In its e-mail to News.com, the company said it has added new screening methods, but declined to provide details.
YouTube doesn't prescreen any videos, said company spokeswoman Julie Supan. People are technically able to post anything they want, immediately. The company's user agreement, however--like those at most rival sites--prohibits material that could be considered pornographic, obscene or unlawful, and YouTube leaves it to the community to report violations.
"As the largest community for video on the Web, we could not review all the content that goes up on the site," said Supan. "Community policing on the Internet has proven very effective over the last 10 years."
YouTube users can flag content they think violates the agreement. If a video collects enough flags (the company declines to publish the number), YouTube will review the clip and pull it if executives agree the material is objectionable, Supan said.
But not all flagged material gets pulled. If executives think a clip doesn't violate the user agreement, it remains on the site but is accessible only to registered users 18 and older. YouTube encourages visitors to register, a process that requires a birth date. People who say they're younger than 13 are barred from registering.
The process, however, can be circumvented. In one instance, News.com encountered a clip that had been flagged and restricted, but an identical, unrestricted clip was available under a slightly different title.
And there's no guarantee that a potentially objectionable clip will come to light. An unrestricted clip of a female television host in Europe, who spoke to a live audience while wearing only a bikini bottom, was available on the site for at least three days.
Over at Google Video, which also said it relies on user feedback to monitor content, material uploaded in recent weeks includes a parody of a car commercial that features an announcer using numerous expletives during a mock sales pitch.
"Self-policing flat out doesn't work," said Peter Pham, director of business development for Photobucket, a fast-growing photo-sharing site that's recently jumped into video. "The problem is that most of the people finding this material are the people who are looking for this material. And they aren't going to complain."
By eyeballing each frame of every clip submitted, companies such as Photobucket and San Diego-based start-up vMix want to avoid angering advertisers or family advocates. All videos at Photobucket.com get reviewed, Pham said. Photobucket has developed software that creates a frame-by-frame "map" of a video, allowing workers to evaluate content at a glance, Pham said, adding that Photobucket recently hired 50 people to monitor in-coming video and photos.
A family friendly site doesn't come cheap. The projected cost of all of this is $2 million per year, Pham said. vMix is doing something similar but on a smaller scale.
"What you are trying to do is discourage people from posting this kind of material on your site," Jeff Davids, vMix's chief financial officer, said at the Digital Media Summit in Los Angeles earlier this month. "If they see that their material isn't going up on the site, they're going to go someplace else."
Prescreening may work for small companies that own a miniscule market share. According to traffic tracking site, Hitwise, more than 42 percent of all visits to video-sharing sites occurred at YouTube. The privately held company would conceivably need hundreds if not thousands of personnel reviewing video.
And that won't guarantee a clean site, said Supan. "There are always going to be people who try to take advantage of the system, whatever it is," she said.

MTV puts full weight behind digital strategies

2006-06-20T16:57:00.000-07:00

Yahoo could be a winner at internet tag

2006-06-20T12:08:00.000-07:00

Yahoo could be a winner at internet tag
By JAMES ALTUCHER
876 words
20 June 2006
Financial Times
USA Ed1
Page 10
English
(c) 2006 The Financial Times Limited. All rights reserved

You read it here first. The next killer application in the field of internet search engines is tagged searching across multiple social networking sites.
If you haven't already done so, I recommend checking out the sites Del.icio.us, Flickr.com, or YouTube.com. Del.icio.us allows users to upload all their internet bookmarks and label each one with a descriptive word or phrase (the "tag").
You can then search by keyword, "chess", for instance, and see all the sites that people have uploaded to Del.icio.us (implying it was an important enough siteabout chess to be a bookmark for someone) and then labelled with the word "chess".
On Flickr.com there is the same mechanism, except it is possible to upload photos instead of bookmarks. This creates a much more impressive search engine for photo content than the Google images search.
A computer cannot and will never be as good as a human in terms of automatically cataloguing visual content. Someone once told me: "Computers will not be artificially intelligent until they can taste an apple and tellme whether it was goodor not." There are some things computers just cannot do.
YouTube.com is the same idea only with videos. It gets more than 50,000 videos uploaded every day. I have to admit, I watch YouTube.com now more than I watch television.
I go on to YouTube and I will search for "Matisyahu" or "comedy" or even "chess" and I can watch the videos that pop up for the next several hours. If you are looking for new ways to waste time, try searching on YouTube.com.
Tagged searches produce results that are an order of magnitude more relevant than Google searches. And user-generated content, such as the above sites and others (check out Digg for user-labelled news) is all the rage now, and with good reason.
All of this is to say: Yahoo is the stock to buy right now in the tagged search arena. Don't get me wrong, I love Google, the company. But the stock is a gamble and Yahoo is cheap, once Wall Street analysts wake up to the reality of tagged search.
Why Yahoo? Well, of the sites I mentioned above, Yahoo has quietly acquired Del.icio.us and Flickr.com. Terms were not disclosed.
How come? Because they were so cheap they aren't material to Yahoo. Yahoo gets content and user experience.
Lloyd Braun, the head of content (and former head of entertainment at television channel ABC - think Lost and Desperate Housewives - both of which he developed) has been spearheading these efforts to get into tagged search.
And Terry Semel, former head of Warner Brothers and now chief executiveof Yahoo, is no strangerto content either. Yahoo will dominate the tagged search arena and advertisers will stand up and take notice.
But this is not the only reason Yahoo is a buy now. Here are some more:
Yahoo is relaunching its search engine in stages during the third and fourth quarters of this year. The new engine will increase revenue per search although Yahoo has guided that this increase is a multi-year process.
Specifically, the company is adding a "quality-based ranking model" to its advertisements so that advertisers can bid for an ad not only based onhow often it comes up on search results but also on its click-through results. The ad platform will also add geographic, demographic, and behavioural targeting.
This makes the Yahoo advertising platform very similar to the Google platform. When Google went public everyone considered Yahoo to be old school and too focused on content. But Yahoo has more users and more categories for demographic slicing, and will now offer the same resources for ad targeting that Google offers. Game over.
I mentioned that Yahoo has been buying social search sites but they have also been generating their own user-generated content. Yahoo Answers has been a huge success. In addition to being a fun experience, Yahoo Answers is developing enormous user-driven content as more than 20m answers generated by 7.2m users have been stored there since its launch.
Yahoo also has a strong presence in China with its Dollars 1bn investment in Alibaba. Two weeks ago they also bought a 10 per cent stake in Gmarket, South Korea's second largest online retailer.
Finally, Yahoo guidance calls for 24-31 per cent growth in revenue and8-19 per cent growth in free cash flow for 2006.
No one knows whatwill happen with the world economy but we do know that the "emerging economy" of the internetis still growing and that when every other category has troubles, the internet might be the last man standing.
Right now, internet advertising is barely out of the experimental phase, attracting only 8 per cent of ad budgets. When advertisers really begin to focus on finer segmentation, targeting, and performance tracking, I think Yahoo stands to benefit even more than Google.
I am a believer in the company, whose share price stands at about Dollars 30, and I think we can see Dollars 40 again over the next year.

Verizon will unveil TV deal with PBS on Friday

2006-06-16T09:11:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Verizon Communications will announce Friday an agreement to carry public television programming on its new subscription video service, the company said Thursday.
Verizon, the No. 2 U.S. telephone company, "will carry the full range of public television programming, including next-generation multicast offerings," according to a company statement.
As broadcasters switch to digital, new technology enables them to use the airwaves for additional channels, known as multicasting.
Executives from Verizon, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and the Association of Public Television Stations (APTS) are expected to attend the news conference Friday.
APTS reached an agreement last year for cable operators to carry up to four digital channels of non-commercial programming offered by each public television station in a market.
Verizon, which offers a suite of communications, Internet and wireless services, is expanding into subscription television to better compete with cable companies that have launched their own telephone and high-speed broadband Internet services.
The Federal Communications Commission is scheduled Wednesday to decide whether to require cable companies like Comcast to carry multicast channels that broadcasters are planning to offer.
Already some stations are airing news and weather multicast channels and there have been private commercial agreements by cable operators to carry some of the new channels.

What will the Internet look like a decade from now

2006-06-07T09:26:00.000-07:00

Pundits Discuss the Internet's FutureMay 5, 2006
In the past 10 years the Internet has emerged as a global network that enables instant communications and borderless commerce. The popularity of blogs and the roll out of high-speed wireless connections have already begun to reshape the Web, but what will the Internet look like a decade from now?
The Wall Street Journal Online invited Web pioneer Vint Cerf and tech pundit Esther Dyson to discuss what they expect in the next 10 years. Mr. Cerf envisions an interplanetary network, while Ms. Dyson ponders a loss of privacy and an information glut. Their conversation, carried out by email, is below.
Mr. Cerf begins: Mobility has entered the world, big time, during the past ten years and the Internet is adapting to it. Geo-indexed information has increased in value as users query "where is the nearest..." and get answers because the system knows where you are when you ask, thanks to the Global Positioning System. Combining media in processing information is increasingly common. Voice a question but get the answer back on your laptop's display, the car's navigational display or your mobile's small but high-resolution screen. Take a photo with the phone and send it automatically to your blog which you just dictated.
THE PARTICIPANTS

Vinton G. Cerf is the chief Internet "evangelist" for Google Inc. where he is responsible for identifying new technologies. From 1994 to 2005, Mr. Cerf was a senior vice president at MCI. Mr. Cerf co-designed the TCP/IP protocols and basic architecture of the Internet. In 2005, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work on the Web. He has been chairman of the Internet's regulatory body, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, since 2000.
Esther Dyson is editor at large at CNET Networks Inc., where she is responsible for its quarterly newsletter, Release 1.0, and its PC Forum executive conference. Before selling her business to CNET in 2004, Ms. Dyson had co-owned EDventure Holdings and edited Release 1.01 since 1983. She is a technology investor focused on emerging markets and serves on the board of several start-ups. She was chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation from 1995 to early 1998 and founding chairman of ICANN from 1998 to 2000.
Broadband is finally coming, and is highly penetrant already in some communities such as Hong Kong, Seoul and Tokyo. Our experiences with entertainment video will almost certainly change as we tend to download and watch later rather than watching only what is currently being transmitted. Channel surfing will be replaced by menu selection. And advertising will change in very interesting ways as a result -- but that's for another installment.
By the end of the decade, we will have a two planet Internet in operation as the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is prepared to serve as a store-and-forward relay to ground-based rovers, a mobile science laboratory and other future missions to Mars. The Interplanetary Internet, serving robotic and manned missions, will grow from this simple configuration to a more complex backbone of interplanetary links as each new mission is launched to the planets and satellites of our solar system. Virtual visits to our near-space neighborhood will be as common as a trip to the local supermarket as we amass enormous amounts of information about the region of space in which we live. Kids will have virtual field trips to visit the Spirit and Opportunity sites on Mars and other places from which we have gathered so much information already and will gather in the next decade.
Ms. Dyson writes: The Internet will have become more ubiquitous but less visible. It will still exist as PCs and monitors, but it will also be all around us in other devices: everything from buses and luggage transmitting their locations so they can be tracked, to friends and children signaling their presence anytime you might want to reach them. Rather than being a separate virtual world, the Internet will encompass the physical world as well; most things will have Internet identities available remotely as well as a physical presence available only if you are nearby.
SHARE YOUR VIEW
2
What will the Internet look like a decade from now? Join a discussion3.
For most people and applications, the biggest issue will be not search but filtering: So much will be knowable, but what do you want to know. People will initially be overwhelmed with choices, but vendors -- competing vendors, I hope, rather than monopolies or governments -- will make default choices for individuals. My hope is that those defaults will be socially valuable, but visible and easy for any user to change for himself; "Paradox of Choice" author [Barry Schwartz] has called this "libertarian paternalism."
Mr. Cerf: Esther is spot-on about the Internet of devices: they will be manageable through the network and various services will help us to do that. Entertainment equipment and other consumer electronics will likely be the first to undergo this transformation. Household equipment will be next and then office equipment and the things in our cars and festooned on our bodies.
As to the information glut, we'll use all the tools we've used in the past to cope with too much information. We don't read every book, newspaper and magazine published. We don't see every movie. We don't listen to every radio broadcast. We look for clues from friends, trusted sources, personal experience, interest to refine and select. We'll use all those tools and our automated search engines to help out here.
Ms. Dyson: I think you'll see a fundamental shift in the balance of power towards individuals. Individuals will declare what kinds of vendors they want sponsoring their content, and then those vendors will have the privilege of appearing, discreetly, around the user's content. There will be much less "advertising" and much more communication to interested customers. Advertisers will have to learn to listen, not just to track and segment customers.
So the message to marketers is: If you can't sell your product (assuming it's already in the market), fix the product! Don't try to change the situation by advertising.
Consumers will publish wish lists for marketers to scan. Also, their choices will be influenced by their friends' comments much more than by marketers' messages.
On the other hand, it will be much harder for consumers to get free content anonymously, because advertisers will want to know more about the people they are paying to reach. In many cases, whether email or ads, users may even get a share of the marketer's payments. (See AttentionTrust.org4 or my op-ed on Goodmail5 or my post on Release 1.06.)
This makes sense from advertisers' point of view, but it has a social downside: People who buy Porsches can earn more from marketers than people who buy used cars. People without money will find it harder and harder to get free content -- which means a role for nonprofits in funding access to content for all.
Mr. Cerf: Advertising is going to be different on the network as broadband kicks in. "IPTV" is a sort of misnomer that misleads into thoughts of streaming audio and video when in fact it is an opportunity to download and play later. In addition, it offers an opportunity to download ancillary material that expands on the video, perhaps adds some interactive software that might be relevant to it, or even download advertising material associated with products placed into the video program. One could even imagine freezing the screen (pausing the video) and mousing around to click on objects in view. Some of these might have had advertising material downloaded. And since it might be known roughly where you are and at what time you are watching, the advertising might contain live/Web components that are tailored to these factors.
Ms. Dyson: I'm going to take this in a slightly different direction…
There's a lot of, er, attention being paid right now to the so-called "attention economy." Indeed, O'Reilly [Media Inc.] subtitled its recent (March) Web 2.0 conference "The attention economy." It even featured author Michael Goldhaber, who wrote about the concept some 14 years ago for my newsletter Release 1.0.
But people are generally missing the point; Mr. Goldhaber has trouble getting attention for the mirror he is holding up. Most commentators see the attention economy as the intention economy, where attention = intention (to buy). That version of the attention economy is all about sales leads and monetization of attention, and radical ideas include the notion of users getting paid for their attention, as I mentioned earlier, whether in the form of surfing behavior (www.root.net7) or a willingness to read email.
LOOK BOTH WAYS
8
WSJ.com marks its 10th anniversary with a package of articles that looks back at news and trends from the past decade -- and ahead at what the future may hold. Full coverage is at WSJ.com/10Years9.
But Mr. Goldhaber's thesis is far more radical, and people aren't really paying ... attention yet. It's that attention has its own intrinsic value, independent of money. People go on the Web in search of attention; they don't want to give it as much as get it. People judge their own worth by their number of friends (Friendster) or fans (MySpace) or business contacts (LinkedIn). They may tell you that they're seeking business success, but oftentimes they seem to value contact lists in the thousands for their own sake.
While adults worry about privacy, kids seek attention. They post poetry, photos, exaggerated tales of personal exploits, music in order to create an online presence that garners attention.
Doesn't this all come down to money in the end? you might ask. Don't kids buy things in order to get attention? Sure. And in the same way, the new financial-industrial economy all came down to food and shelter as we made the transition from an agrarian, feudal economy. But there are new dynamics worth noting. Most users are not trying to turn attention into anything else. They are seeking it for itself.
For sure, the attention economy will not replace the financial economy. But it is more than just a subset of the financial economy we know and love.
Mr. Cerf: This is an interesting observation and frankly I'd not thought about it in quite the same terms that Esther uses. I must admit that the behavior patterns do look as if some of these users (many of them young) feel "paid" when they have lots of "friends" or lots of hits on their Web sites. I wonder how much of this is youthful "I am ME! Look at ME!" Is any of this a kind of search for identity? Is it exploration of different personas (as in the role-playing games)? Some of this might be attributed to a natural desire to feel part of a group (gangs, cliques, teams, etc.).
To some extent, the infrastructure needed to support this potentially self-centered behavior is being paid for through advertising revenues, making it appear to be free to many or most users.
Ms. Dyson: Yes indeed, it is youthful behavior etc. - just as it once was youthful behavior to be obsessed with money and to want more money than you could use, which horrified the sages who cared more about old-fashioned values. The shift is not absolute; it's where society focuses (or where some societies are starting to focus). Indeed, Mr. Goldhaber has been writing about this for many years. In some ways it's an outgrowth of TV as much as of the Net. TV makes people want attention; the Net enables them to get it.
And yes, advertising supports most of it. It's just that the advertisers are not the center of attention the way they would like to be!
Mr. Cerf concludes: The Internet reaches only about a billion users so there are another 5.5 billion to go. It is beginning to include a good deal of information in many languages, but the domain name system needs to be outfitted with a similar capability. Access speeds are increasing but in a very non-uniform fashion. Business models for supporting various parts of the Internet are also in flux with new models being tested almost daily. Mobility is a component of the Internet that is plainly of increasing importance and will drive a variety of new applications. Entertainment media will be augmented with Internet counterparts with results that may not be entirely predictable but which will almost certainly have an interactive component missing from the traditional media. A plethora of "things" will become Internet connected and managed. There will be inventions for the use of the Internet that will come from academic and user settings to surprise us all when they appear, as they have in the past, in unexpected ways -- propagating through viral advertising. There's an Internet in your future, resistance is futile.
Ms. Dyson closes: Let me add just a couple of points:
The Internet so far has existed mostly in cyberspace, linking computers fed data by humans and by other computers. The Internet of the future will be much more tightly linked to physical space. First of all, many of its future users will connect via cellphones, and the net will know more about their physical locations and their identities than it does about those who reach it by computer. Beyond that, as Vint writes, the Internet will link things in space (on Earth as well as in off-Earth "space").
The Net of the future will know much more about the physical world and all the things in it ... and of course that information will be available to human users. The big challenges in the future will be limiting distribution of that information (security, privacy, confidentiality, etc.) on the one hand and filtering it out on the other (not search, but data-mining, exception-reporting, spam filtering, friend recommendations, behavioral targeting and the like). The big questions are who controls the filtering: individuals, organizations or governments? Will it be done transparently?

2006-06-07T09:22:00.000-07:00

The New Reality
Jeff Gaspin's job: figure out how to make online entertainment pay
By BROOKS BARNESMay 15, 2006; Page R3
When people ask Jeff Gaspin to describe how important new media has become to the old-line television networks, he brings up an embarrassing story.
While conducting meetings a few years ago at the Bravo cable channel, Mr. Gaspin, now president of cable entertainment and digital content at NBC Universal Television Group, says he could never remember the name of the executive who oversaw the online unit. "For an entire year, I just couldn't remember it," he says. "I was truly embarrassed, but it just didn't seem important enough that I remember his name."
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See the complete Technology report.
The 46-year-old Mr. Gaspin believes that these days he isn't likely to suffer the same fate. "Now, the online guy is the most important guy in the room," he says.
The New Frontier
As the television networks race to figure out their strategies for delivering shows to viewers in new ways, Mr. Gaspin is the person NBC Universal has charged with coming up with programming that runs on the Web, cellphones and on other digital platforms that haven't yet been invented. He has to figure out what kind of content will work in this new realm, how to generate revenue and prod Hollywood writers, producers and agents for ideas. It's a totally new job in an industry that, when it comes to programming, hasn't changed much in the past few decades.
In many ways, General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal is staking its future on Mr. Gaspin's job. The network, which is trying to pull itself out of the prime-time ratings hole it fell into with the departure of the hit sitcom "Friends" two years ago, has been particularly aggressive when it comes to developing unique TV content for the Web. This summer, for instance, the network will run 10 mini-episodes of the popular sitcom "The Office" exclusively on the Web -- the first of the Big Four networks to attempt such a project.
So far, NBC and others aren't generating much revenue from their online projects, especially compared with the money they make through television advertising. But everyone is trying to devise a formula.
"We are going to figure out a way to make it pay," says Jeff Zucker, chief executive of NBC Universal. "The only way to do that is to bring something new to the party. It's about having the content."
JEFF GASPIN NBC's digital guru
Mr. Zucker has dubbed his initiative to deliver new content in new ways "TV 360." And he says he asked Mr. Gaspin to oversee the effort in part because of his track record in the reality-TV genre. "Jeff is great at taking an emerging business and figuring out how to make it a mainstream one that makes a lot of money," Mr. Zucker says.
Mr. Gaspin is regarded as one of the founding fathers of reality TV, the genre that exploded in the late 1990s and gushes profits for networks because of the low production costs. Among other projects, he created the juggernaut series "Behind the Music" for Viacom Inc.'s VH1 music cable channel and developed Bravo's hit makeover show "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy."
Mr. Gaspin's journey into the digital realm started in a routine strategy meeting held last summer in New York with GE Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt. At the time, Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. were getting lots of attention for their stock prices, and Mr. Gaspin says that Mr. Immelt wanted to know what NBC's broad strategy was for the Internet and mobile devices. Mr. Gaspin says he was given eight weeks to put together an extensive presentation.
A Huge Shift
Mr. Gaspin, who is based at NBC's studio in Burbank, Calif., says he set up meetings with everyone from Google to his own online people. "It was a 180-degree shift," he says. "We went from not paying enough attention to this being our complete focus."
Among his first projects: A reality show called "StarTomorrow," which NBC will launch on the Web in July. The "American Idol"-style show, produced with Tommy Mottola, the former chief executive of Sony Music Entertainment, represents the first time a major broadcast network has developed a series exclusively for the Internet.
MEET THE NEW BOSS Scenes from an online episode of "The Office"
But Mr. Gaspin's big test will come this fall, when NBC will start running its first full batch of shows that have offshoot components for the Web, cellphones or Apple Computer Co.'s iTunes online music and video service. Viewers will be able to go to NBC.com and watch such programs, known as Webisodes, free of charge. Programming for mobile phones, called mobisodes, will be available free to people who have a video-ready cellphone and subscribe to a video package from their wireless carrier. All of the content will likely feature a combination of banner ads and video ads, although NBC says it hasn't decided yet how they will be incorporated.
One extensive project involves "The Black Donnellys," a new drama series about four brothers involved in organized crime, which will debut in September on NBC. The show also will feature exclusive content for both the Web and mobile phones. There will be Webisodes with the show's narrator divulging the history of the Donnelly family. There's also a blog from the executive producers focused on putting the show together.
Today, NBC is scheduled to unveil its fall lineup to advertisers in a major presentation at New York's Radio City Music Hall.
In on the Action
NBC isn't alone in its quest to serve up programming everywhere and in every way. Virtually all broadcast and cable networks are frantically building out a digital division.
News Corp.'s 20th Century Fox studio is developing TV content for the company's various Web sites and other platforms, and the company just created a unit called Fox Interactive Media to coordinate the effort. Already, Fox is a leader in developing original content for video-ready cellphones. It recently announced a spinoff of its "Prison Break" series to be viewed exclusively on cellphones. And original mobisodes of Fox's hit counterterrorism series "24" ran on cellphones late last year.
NBC and the other networks also face competition from Internet companies themselves. Yahoo is working on creating its own content, including reality shows to be distributed on the Web. But the online company also is partnering with television networks to stream content.
For instance, Yahoo will be streaming episodes of CBS's news program "60 Minutes" starting in September. Immediately after the broadcast, one segment will be posted on Yahoo with expanded footage and interviews, along with a totally new segment based on the week's news.
Meantime, upstarts like New York-based Rocketboom LLC are getting in on the action with their own original programming. Rocketboom runs a popular video blog where a few friends post a daily satirical news report with Internet-related content.
Greater Workload
Within NBC itself, the network faces the tough task of wringing more content out of existing employees. Like other networks, NBC isn't yet keen to spend much money on digital initiatives.
So, for instance, "The Office" Webisodes for this summer were written by some of the writers of the original series -- for no extra money. NBC and other networks have relied on corporate muscle to demand such extras.
An NBC spokesman says: "We don't separate out compensation for these services; it falls under overall compensation."
This is a festering problem for Hollywood's writers and other unions, which are starting to talk of a strike -- and one that Mr. Gaspin will be called on to help resolve.
"We need more resources if we're going to go full bore with this," says Ben Silverman, executive producer of "The Office" and several reality shows for NBC and other networks. "The good news is that I think the networks realize this."
Writers are used to developing half-hour or hour-long shows -- not Web clips and mobisodes. And they are used to big payoffs if networks buy a project. "The big turn-off at times is when people realize that there's not the upfront revenue they would like there to be," says Bob Levinson, head of world-wide television for Los Angeles-based talent agency International Creative Management.
When it comes to creating digital tentacles for their shows, Mr. Gaspin says some producers have the attitude of, "I don't need it, I don't want it, leave me alone."
So how does he handle those situations? Mr. Gaspin says he talks about the attention such efforts can bring to a show, and tries to give a tutorial on the digital universe without tripping over any egos. "Very few shows are so well run that the producers have extra time to do anything," Mr. Gaspin says. "We understand there are constraints. But the world has changed."
If nothing else, producers are starting to realize the promotional power of the Web. NBC credits its decision to make episodes of "The Office" available on iTunes with helping the show notch a sharp ratings increase. And creating online dieting clubs around the reality show "The Biggest Loser" -- where people compete to lose the most weight and win $250,000 -- helped the series blossom into a modest hit last fall. The clubs, which charge members $20 a month, offer message boards and diet and exercise tips from the cast members of the series itself. The six-month-old venture has 40,000 members to date, according to Mr. Gaspin.
"When you have little successes like that," he says, "it helps take the barriers down."
Online Incubation
In scouting for potential projects, Mr. Gaspin has started relying on a handful of talent agents, including Mr. Levinson.
At a recent pitch meeting, Mr. Levinson tried selling Mr. Gaspin on an animated project set in the future. The project would start as a Web series and then, if successful, be spun into a video game and then a TV series or even a film. By starting on the Web, the project could be incubated without incurring high costs, says Mr. Levinson. "With luck, a hit on the Web would then move elsewhere."
It's Mr. Gaspin's job to figure out what pitches are worth taking a chance on, and he says it was immediately clear that Mr. Levinson's project was worth a serious look.
"It worked out exactly as we were hoping," Mr. Levinson says. "Instead of us having to go to various divisions and sell something over and over to people who may or may not be talking to each other, we were able to go to one person. By the end of the day, Jeff had talked to all of those people for us."

Airtel & Disney join hands in India to deliver mobile entertainment experience

2006-04-26T17:02:00.000-07:00

Airtel, India’s leading mobile service, today joined hands with the world’s largest family entertainment brand–Disney, to launch India’s first "Disney Mobile Theatre". With this launch, Airtel will provide Disney branded mobile entertainment content on such a large scale in India for the first time. Disney Mobile Theatre was launched today by cricket superstar Sachin Tendulkar who downloaded the first clip amidst a group of excited kids.

Airtel’s Disney Mobile Theatre adds an exciting new dimension to mobile entertainment. Airtel customers can now have access to six Disney animated series in the form of 30-second shorts exclusively made for mobile devices featuring Disney characters. In addition, Airtel customers will have access to Disney characters in the form they want - images, animations, videos, ring-tones & games. This content can be downloaded from Airtel’s multi-access entertainment portal, Airtel Live! and music and sounds as ring back tones can also be downloaded from Airtel’s Hello Tunes. Through Airtel, Indian customers will be among the first few to enjoy the antics of Mickey, Minne, Donald, Pluto and Goofy on the Disney Mobile Theatre.

Mr. Hemant Sachdev, Director-Marketing & Communications, Bharti Airtel, said, “We have always admired the Disney brand for the difference it makes to lives across the globe – bringing millions of people fun, laughter and wholesome entertainment. We are now pleased to partner with Disney to deliver outstanding creative content and entertainment. With Disney Mobile Theatre, Airtel customers can enjoy the Disney experience on the mobile for the first time in India from wherever they are”.

Mr. Mark Handler, Executive Vice President and Managing Director, International, Walt Disney Internet Group, said, “The launch of Disney branded mobile content on Airtel, including Disney Mobile Theatre and personalization, content and games, combines Disney's rich story telling legacy and unparalleled brand equity with Airtel’s leadership in wireless voice and data services to create an engaging and unique mobile experience for Indian customers.”

Mr. Rajat Jain, Managing Director, The Walt Disney Company, India said, “India is a priority for the entire Company, and we are delivering on our strategy to expand our presence here. We have a huge competitive advantage, thanks to the strength of the Disney brand, which is aspirational and first-in-class around the world. We embrace new technology innovations in developing quality Disney entertainment and as leading content creators are best positioned to capture new ways of delivering it when and where the consumer demands.”

The Walt Disney Internet Group (WDIG) provides centralized strategic leadership, back-end business support and a global, proven technology platform for all broadband and wireless properties stemming from The Walt Disney Company. The launch of Disney mobile content on Airtel marks WDIG’s first mobile carrier distribution deal in India. WDIG has mobile content distribution in 12 other markets in the Asia Pacific region, including: Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, China, Thailand, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Macau. In this region, more than 695 million mobile consumers, (nearly 100 percent) have access to Disney Mobile content.

“An outstanding story has the ability to transcend space and time. All of Disney’s businesses utilize technology to create and distribute compelling entertainment throughout Asia. Using technology to advance our content and its distribution will play a fundamental role in securing our future,” added Mr. Jain.

Disney to test new interactive ads on abc.com

2006-04-26T16:59:00.000-07:00

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Walt Disney Co. (DIS.N: Quote, Profile, Research) will try a new type of advertising when it begins showing prime-time ABC television shows on the Web, using a single, interactive ad during each break rather than the flurry of short spots that are the norm on network TV.
Ten major advertisers have delivered new interactive online commercials as part of Disney's two-month test of whether consumers will watch ads if they can download hit TV shows on abc.com for free.
The test, which starts May 1, offers streaming video of "Desperate Housewives," "Alias," "Commander in Chief" and "Lost" about 12 hours after each episode airs on the East Coast.
The company charged advertisers only for the cost of setting up the online player and may actually lose money if the site becomes wildly popular, Alan Ives, vice president of interactive sales for ABC, said on Tuesday.
Disney asked major ad agencies to recommend advertisers who "are willing to push the envelope" for the test, Ives said.
The company had no problem finding advertisers once news of the trial hit the press, he said. The companies, including AT&T Inc (T.N: Quote, Profile, Research), Cingular, Toyota Motor Corp.(7203.T: Quote, Profile, Research), Ford Motor Co. (F.N: Quote, Profile, Research), Procter & Gamble Co. (PG.N: Quote, Profile, Research), Unilever Plc (ULVR.L: Quote, Profile, Research), General Electric Co's (GE.N: Quote, Profile, Research) Universal Pictures and Walt Disney Pictures, turned in their ads about two weeks ago.
"It's a new and different ad model," Ives said. "We got some pretty creative stuff. If you had unlimited time and interactivity to get your message across, what would you do?"
Each online episode will kick off with a 10-second sponsorship message from a single advertiser and will feature one commercial from that sponsor per commercial break, Ives said.
Commercials from each advertiser will cycle through an episode every time it is viewed online, meaning that different commercials could appear each time the show was watched online.
Only three of the five commercial breaks built into episodes for broadcast television will be used in the online model, Ives said.
Viewers will have to watch or click through ads to get to the next segment of the program. The commercials were designed to last at least 30 seconds, but some feature interactive games, coupon offers or product information that may engage viewers longer.
There is the option of clicking out of the advertisements and returning to the program after 30 seconds, he said.
By the time ABC presents its new fall schedule on May 16 in New York, Disney will have two weeks' worth of data showing how consumers are responding to the online ads.
Disney plans to review partial results of the trial at that presentation, a company official said.
Disney-ABC Television Group President Anne Sweeney said this week that the network plans to launch an enhanced version of its the program later this year.
Sweeney said the company would work with network affiliates, who were angered by the company's decision to offer premium content online, to build an online business model.
Disney officials said they do not expect abc.com to replace TV advertising or even to provide a meaningful revenue stream in the near future.
Sweeney said the online program will offer the network information about online technology and how consumers use it.
ABC already sells digital downloads of its highest-rated shows for the popular iPod music and video player.

http://today.reuters.com/business/newsArticle.aspx?type=ousiv&storyID=2006-04-26T173238Z_01_N26128524_RTRIDST_0_BUSINESSPRO-MEDIA-DISNEY-WEBADS-DC.XML

JibJab Launches JokeBox Social Network

2006-04-26T16:54:00.000-07:00

The creators of JibJab have launched a comedy social network - JokeBox, which has been in private beta for three months, writes MediaPost (via MarketingVOX). Some 40,000 members have already registered and posted more than 25,000 written jokes, photos, audio and video files - and provided personal information and content preferences. Bud Light is sponsoring the site with streaming banners, and JibJab-created shorts on JokeBox feature pre-roll advertising from Benadryl and the Suburban Auto Group Ford/Chevy car dealership, among others.
With a web presence since 1999 and established credentials in satirical animated shorts such as "This Land" - as well as 645,000 names in its opt-in email list - JibJab is poised to make its mark in the content-sharing realm occupied by YouTube and its ilk.
To keep out troublemakers, the Spiridellis brothers have rallied a volunteer squad - "The A-Hole Patrol" - to screen jokes submitted to JokeBox, including those flagged as "offensive" by other members.

Microsoft spins off social-network startup

2006-04-26T16:45:00.000-07:00

Wallop project has been touted for years, but never released to public

SEATTLE - More than two years after Microsoft Corp. began promoting Wallop, its technology for social networking, the software company is spinning off the project to a new startup company.
Redmond-based Microsoft touted Wallop at a high-profile corporate event in late 2003. But the company has been secretive about the project since then, even as startups like Friendster and MySpace have gained major traction among users. (MSNBC.com is a Microsoft - NBC joint venture.)
On Wednesday, Microsoft said it is spinning off the technology to a separate startup, Wallop Inc., to be based in the Silicon Valley. A product, however, won't launch until later this year.
Microsoft remains mum on details, only promising that it will give people more sophisticated ways for helping people find one another and will let people interact more like they would in the real world. Current social networking services tend to link people online based on things like a similar taste in music or common acquaintances.
The technology was developed by Microsoft's research and development arm. The software maker plans to license and sell the Wallop technology in exchange for an equity stake in the Wallop company. It would not disclose more financial details of the transaction.

http://research.microsoft.com/scg/

Yahoo Releases DVR Software for PC

2006-04-26T16:36:00.000-07:00

Just a week after acquiring the technology assets of television software company Meedio, Yahoo has rolled out a new DVR solution called "Go for TV." The software turns a Windows XP PC with TV tuner card into a digital video recorder, and connects the viewer with Yahoo services such as photos and music.

Yahoo! Go for TV is the latest component of Yahoo's Go platform, which is intended to bring the company's content from the PC to other devices such as mobile phones and televisions. Google and Microsoft have undertaken similar efforts as the PC continues its transition to a full-fledged entertainment device.

With the software, Flickr photos could be viewed on TVs, and users could even play games or listen to music via Yahoo's entertainment sites while sitting on the couch. DVD playback is supported, along with TV show recording capabilities much like those offered by SnapStream and Windows Media Center.

Jupiter Research vice president Michael Gartenberg questioned Yahoo's recent initiative, however, noting that Microsoft is much father along and offers a better out of box experience.
"What I don't understand is why Yahoo is spending the time and effort to do this," Gartenberg commented. "There's no reason that Yahoo can't offer the unique services it brings to the table, like Yahoo Photos or Music via the MCE interface. This is one of those things where it just doesn't make sense to re-invent the wheel."

Yahoo! Go for TV is currently in beta and only available to users in the United States.

http://go.connect.yahoo.com/go/tv/index
http://www.betanews.com/article/Yahoo_Releases_DVR_Software_for_PC/1146088585

Nokia N73, N93:3 Megapixel Cameras Phones Announced

2006-04-26T16:25:00.000-07:00

BERLIN (Reuters) - The world's largest handset maker Nokia unveiled a new video camera phone with optical zoom on Tuesday and also launched two other new multimedia phone models.
The N93 video camera model and the new N73 camera phone, which has a 3 megapixel Carl Zeiss lens, are both expected to hit the shelves in July, while the new N72 music phone is expected to be available in June.
Nokia also said it has agreed on cooperation with Yahoo's popular photo-sharing site Flickr.

http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=internetNews&storyID=2006-04-25T084016Z_01_WLA9462_RTRIDST_0_OUKIN-UK-NOKIA-PHONES.XML

Skype to Sell $1.50 Ringtones

2006-04-26T16:18:00.000-07:00

Skype joined the burgeoning ringtone business Tuesday, announcing a deals with record labels EMI, Sony and Warner Music to sell song clips to customers for $1.50 each. The Internet telephone company owned by eBay will begin offering Madonna ringtones on Wednesday, with more artists slated to follow.
The ringtone business continues to flourish, raking in over $4.4 billion in 2005 alone. Skype hopes it can capitalize on the market by selling the clips to its more than 100 million users. However, unlike on their cell phones, Skype users can already import audio clips directly from their hard drives.

http://www.betanews.com/article/Skype_to_Sell_150_Ringtones/1146070709