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Untold Stories: creative consequences of the rights clearance culture for documentary filmmakers

The problems that documentary filmmakers face in getting and controlling rights for their creative work — and the consequences for cultural creativity — are the subjects of this study. It explores the effects of the current terms of rights acquisition on documentary filmmaking. It makes recommendations to lower costs and promote creativity. It focuses on the lived experiences of independent documentary filmmakers who work within broadcast (sometimes with a theatrical 'window'), in coping with the challenges created by acquiring (and granting) rights. [Untold Stories: Creative Consequences of the Rights Clearance Culture for Documentary Filmmakers] [Center for Social Media] [Buttonpusher]

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Sony proposes iTunes-for-movies

Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment group plans to digitize Sony Pictures' top 500 films and make them available for the first time in various digital environments within the next year. Distribution for films like Spider-Man 2 will go beyond just Movielink: Sony plans to sell and make films available in flash memory for mobile phones in the next year. It also will further develop its digital stores for downloading and owning films on the PC. [C|net]

Lafayette Fiber to the Home

Local businesses back project. Planners of a Lafayette community run residential fiber project - which Cox and BellSouth have fought tirelessly to shut down - have a new ally. The Lafayette Chamber of Commerce - 2,400 members strong (ironically including Cox) - is urging voters t..

WordPress Spam–Blog Herald Response

Duncan Riley (someone I’ve come into interaction with a few times over the past few months, someone who I’ve also come to respect) has decided to pull the post on WordPress spamming the search engines, and defend Matt’s (the creator of WordPress) reputation:

What is clear though that today on the Blogosphere we have experienced the crucification of the reputation of a formerly well respected blogger, Matt Mullenweg, the genius behind WordPress. I suppose that if the Blogosphere takes delight in crucifying people in the mainstream media, rightly or wrongly, then I suppose its only natural that we’ll eventually turn on one of our own.

I agree with what Duncan is saying–but I think he’s missing the point. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love WordPress. It’s done wonders for the blogging community–and is a solid, fast, easy to use blogging platform. Matt has done amazing things with this project–there’s no question about that.

The point is, what Matt was doing was un-ethical. As a web developer–he knew what he was doing was questionable. However, he continued to do it. This doesn’t change my view on Matt (as a person or as a developer). As I said in the update in the entry about it here on BlogosphereNews, I can relate to the problems facing web developers when it comes to raising money–especially for a free product. The fact is, Matt made a mistake. And that’s OK. Everyone makes mistakes.

I certainly agree with this point in Duncan’s post:

Matt has made a mistake, we all make mistakes, but is this really necessary? Is it right to destroy the reputation of one who has given so much to the Blogosphere without greed nor profit?

My point is–Matt is too smart of a guy to be involved with things like this. Yes–he needs to make money. There’s no question about that. But there are better ways to do it. I agree that Matt’s reputation shouldn’t be “crucified”–as Duncan put it–by the Blogosphere for this incident. But that’s not to say that it should be ignored.

I truly wish Matt all the best. I hope WordPress doesn’t suffer from this. It is truly a great product. As Matt said, donations were slipping while expenses were rising. If you use WordPress, and would like to donate to help out–please visit the donate section on WordPress.org. We (the Blogosphere) can turn this situation into a positive one–and help keep Matt from having to making hard decisions such as whether to spam search engines to make money.

Update: I’d also like to point out that Matt is out of the country right now–traveling in Europe. In his absense, the first employee to work at WordPress Inc. has given his view on the whole situation.

Brand X: The Wait

Jeff Pulver notes that, amid all the hoopla surrounding the Supremes hearing the Grokster case on Tuesday, the coverage of the Brand X case was rather muted. I'm with him when he says the "less visible Brand X ruling might prove to have more sweeping effects on the future of one's Internet experience."

Of course, no one has any idea of what the ruling, which will probably come in June, will be. And the media coverage of the issue doesn't help much (though there were several set-up pieces, including one from James Granelli in the Los Angeles Times, which we talked about last week, and another from the Baltimore Sun's William Patalon III, that were well done) . The issues are described as complex, the justices are described as scratching their heads over aspects of the case, and there's very little critical analysis of how the arguments went (one exception is the Progress and Freedom Foundation, which is fighting for deregulation of broadband: The group expressed some concern that the government didn't strongly assert the FCC's primacy -- as opposed to the courts' -- in setting the rules for the broadband playing field).

I'm inclined to agree with Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America: Let's hope the court comes down on the side to open access to the cable broadband pipe. Otherwise, the market will be reduced to "a crummy duopoly" (cable firms on one hand, telcos on the other).

Guide To Finding Information: Search Engines

Phil Bradley has complied an excellent list of search engines with their best of utility value identified.This is a collection of search engines and similar resources that phil says he uses on a regular basis when looking for different types of information. Excellent list indeed.

New York Times Editorial Board Blows It on Grokster

Today, the New York Times (reg. req.) editorial board's lead editorial is on MGM v. Grokster. They manage to all but regurgitate Hollywood's talking points on the issue (When David Steals Goliath's Music):The battle over online music piracy is usually...

MGM v. Grokster: A Field Guide (Donna Wentworth)

As Ed Felten suggests, there is, not surprisingly, a lot of "generic" scene-setting press coverage of MGM v. Grokster of late, with a few pleasing exceptions scattered here and there. Luckily, we also have a handy Field Guide (unpardonable pun intended) -- a tour of the current crop of articles with the more relevant/interesting bits excerpted for our perusal.

Update: Andrew Raff of IPTABlog also has a useful tour, including a podcast program he recorded that goes step-by-step through the oral arguments before the Ninth Circuit, elucidating points of law all the way along.

Update #2: Ernie Miller provides a bit of, shall we say, critical analysis of The New York Times editorial on the Grokster showdown: "Brilliant editorial New York Times, bravo. Cheap rhetorical tricks, unsubstantiated statistics, and complete lack of an actual solution. Is there any error that wasn't made?"

Python script for uploading to Flickr

"This is just a simple python script that looks in a directory, and will upload what ever is there to your flickr account. It keeps track of what it has uploaded, and that is about it for features. The code is available to do whatever you wish with it." Link (Thanks, CJM!)

Update: Antrix sez, "Michele Campeotto has written the nice FlickrClient interface for those with more ambitious visions of mating Python and Flickr."

Via Boing Boing

A Snake-Shaped Serpentine Robot

Engineers from the University of Michigan have developed a snake-like robot that conquers obstacles. It is composed of 5 segments of 8-inch diameter each and weighs 26 pounds. It is currently piloted by a human operator. And it can maneuver in extremely rugged terrain, climbing stairs and pipes. "It moves by rolling, log-style, or by lifting its head or tail, inchworm-like, and muscling itself forward."

This robot will be used for industrial inspection and surveillance in hazardous environments, and also for military and urban search and rescue operations. Read more for other details, pictures and references.

The rise of camera phone snaps

Antonio in Ion's Blog points to an impressive picture in El Mundo that demonstrates better than any discourse the growing trend to snap pictures with a camera phone instead of a traditional camera at major events. Here during a procession in Sevilla (Spain)

Audacious: Our Media

Congrats, as Dan says, to the folks behind OurMedia. A very audacious plan. From their site:

We provide free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches.

Has HP Patented Refilling Ink?

In a case that sounds somewhat reminiscent of Lexmark's (failed) attempts to use intellectual property law to block the competition, HP has decided to sue two companies that offer refilled ink cartridges for their printers. The ink business, of course, is big business -- with ink costing more than vintage champagne or high end perfume (depending on whose study you want to read). HP claims that they have nothing against customers choosing to buy refilled cartridges, but they have problems with these two refilling companies. The first one is accused of patent violations, which seems like an odd issue. The details (buried all the way at the end of the article) say the patents are about the type of ink -- which seems bizarre. Even more bizarre is that HP seems to make it very clear in the filing that if the three patents they've picked out don't stick, they have another 9,000 to choose from (which sounds eerily like IBM's patent attack on Sun years ago: "OK, maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"). The other claim makes a bit more sense, as HP says the second firm is packaging the refilled cartridges as if they were new -- which could lead to consumer confusion. Still, these lawsuits do seem like a simple attempt to scare off certain ink refillers.

Adult Entertainment on a Cell Phone Near You

"Unlike the Internet, there is virtually no free adult content available via mobile wireless devices," said Jupiter Research's Windsor Holden. As a result, anyone who acquires the materials must engage in a commercial transaction, and these transactions can be traced. [via TechNewsWorld ]

"One reason the Internet gained as much interest as it did in its early days was the convenience that it offered individuals interested in pornography. No longer did they have to visit adult bookstores in person; with a few keystrokes the materials were delivered directly to their personal computers.

[...] Companies such as Hotphone (gay phone sex), Pornforyourphone , Private and Voooyeur started out offering still images to mobile phone customers but have recently been moving to video clips and video streaming. Available content now ranges from models disrobing to hard-core pornography.

[...] Jupiter Research Inc. estimates that worldwide revenue from this market segment will jump from US$500 million in 2004 to $2.5 billion in 2009".

Anonymity and the Internet

From Slate:

Anonymice on Anonymity Wendy.Seltzer.org ("Musings of a techie lawyer") deflates the New York Times' breathless Saturday (March 19) piece about the menace posed by anonymous access to Wi-Fi networks ("Growth of Wireless Internet Opens New Path for Thieves" by Seth Schiesel). Wi-Fi pirates around the nation are using unsecured hotspots to issue anonymous death threats, download child pornography, and commit credit card fraud, Schiesel writes. Then he plays the terrorist card.

But unsecured wireless networks are nonetheless being looked at by the authorities as a potential tool for furtive activities of many sorts, including terrorism. Two federal law enforcement officials said on condition of anonymity that while they were not aware of specific cases, they believed that sophisticated terrorists might also be starting to exploit unsecured Wi-Fi connections.

Never mind the pod of qualifiers swimming through in those two sentences -- "being looked at"; "potential tool"; "not aware of specific cases"; "might" -- look at the sourcing. "Two federal law enforcement officials said on condition of anonymity. ..." Seltzer points out the deep-dish irony of the Times citing anonymous sources about the imagined threats posed by anonymous Wi-Fi networks. Anonymous sources of unsubstantiated information, good. Anonymous Wi-Fi networks, bad.

post from wendy.seltzer.org:

The New York Times runs an article in which law enforcement officials lament, somewhat breathlessly, that open wifi connections can be used, anonymously, by wrongdoers. The piece omits any mention of the benefits of these open wireless connections -- no-hassle connectivity anywhere the "default" community network is operating, and anonymous browsing and publication for those doing good, too.

Without a hint of irony, however:

Two federal law enforcement officials said on condition of anonymity that while they were not aware of specific cases, they believed that sophisticated terrorists might also be starting to exploit unsecured Wi-Fi connections.

Yes, even law enforcement needs anonymity sometimes.

tworks are a good thing. Yes, they allow bad guys to do bad things. But so do automobiles, telephones, and just about everything else you can think of. I like it when I find an open wireless network that I can use. I like it when my friends keep their home wireless network open so I can use it.

Scare stories like the New York Times one don't help any.

GAO's Report on Secure Flight

Sunday I blogged about Transportation Security Administration's Secure Flight program, and said that the Government Accountability Office will be issuing a report this week.

Here it is.

The AP says:

The government's latest computerized airline passenger screening program doesn't adequately protect travelers' privacy, according to a congressional report that could further delay a project considered a priority after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Congress last year passed a law that said the Transportation Security Administration could spend no money to implement the program, called Secure Flight, until the Government Accountability Office reported that it met 10 conditions. Those include privacy protections, accuracy of data, oversight, cost and safeguards to ensure the system won't be abused or accessed by unauthorized people.

The GAO found nine of the 10 conditions hadn't yet been met and questioned whether Secure Flight would ultimately work.

:

• TSA plans to include the capability for criminal checks within Secure Flight (p. 12).

• The timetable has slipped by four months (p. 17).

ight not be able to get personally identifiable passenger data in PNRs because of costs to the industry and lack of money (p.18).

• TSA plans to have intelligence analysts staffed within TSA to identify false positives (p.33).

HS Investment Review Board has withheld approval from the "Transportation Vetting Platform" (p.39).

• TSA doesn't know how much the program will cost (p.51).

privacy rule to be issued in April (p. 56).

u who read the report, please post other interesting tidbits as comments.

As you all probably know, I am a member of a working group to help evaluate the privacy of Secure Flight. While I believe that a program to match airline passengers against terrorist watch lists is a colossal waste of money that isn't going to make us any safer, I said "...assuming that we need to implement a program of matching airline passengers with names on terrorism watch lists, Secure Flight is a major improvement -- in almost every way -- over what is currently in place." I still believe that, but unfortunately I am prohibited by NDA from describing the improvements. I wish someone at TSA would get himself in front of reporters and do so.

Billionaire Mark Cuban underwrites Grokster in file-sharing case

Mark Cuban explains why he will underwrite the defense of file-sharing in the upcoming showdown at the U. S. Supreme Court: … It doesn't matter that the RIAA has been wrong about innovations and the perceived threat to their industry, every single time. It just matters that they can spend more then everyone else on lawyers. Thats not the way it should be. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and others came to me and asked if I would finance the legal effort against MGM. I said yes. I would provide them the money they need. This isn't the big content companies against the technology companies. This is the big content companies, against me, Mark Cuban, and my little content company. It's about our ability to use future innovations to compete, versus their ability to use the courts to shut down our ability to compete. It's that simple. [p2pnet.net]

• Supreme Showdown for P2P's Future. The entertainment industry goes head-to-head against file-sharing services at the Supreme Court this week. Some fear the Grokster case could have a devastating effect on development of new technologies. By Katie Dean. [Wired News]

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Ubuweb audio and video archives

At Ubuweb you can find audio and video archives of radio, films, sounds, visual and concrete poetry, literature and other, related subjects. One of the new features, Film, has some surrealistic silent movies from Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Luis Buñuel and the photographer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and 37 Short Fluxus Films. Many more good things: read from Eugène Ionesco works, listen to Antonin Artaud declaiming poetry, interviews with Jean-Luc Godard, Marshall McLuhan, and Alberto Giacometti. [Bibi's box]

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Phishing Your Yahoo! Account

More evidence that phishers are widening their net. Munir Kotadia of ZDNet Australia reports that Yahoo's free instant-messaging (IM) service is being targeted by phishers in an attempt to steal usernames, passwords and other personal information.

Yahoo confirmed on Thursday its service was being targeted by a phishing scam. According to the search giant, attackers are sending members a message containing a link to a fake Web site that looks like an official Yahoo site and asks the user to log in by entering their Yahoo ID and password.

The scam is convincing because the original message seems to arrive from someone on the victim's friends list. Should the recipient of the phishing message enter their details, the attackers can gain access to any personal information stored in their profile and more importantly, the victim's contact lists.

The bigger point about this is that any kind of password may be enough for the phisher. WIth Yahoo! the successful phisher may be able to get quite a lot of personal data for a future social engineering attack, and may even be able to access payment details such as addresses from within the profile. A phisher could also access the user’s Paypal account, redirect shipments, learn about the user’s investments, impersonate the user in auctions, etc etc. I’m not sure whether the phisher could access credit card details, but it’s feasible, I guess.

Net stocks now lead, but GOOEY or GERQY?

ThinkEquity's Michael Moe argues that the US economy is now dependent on the health of Internet companies rather than industrial companies like GM:

Our view is that in the knowledge economy and global marketplace, growth will be driven by intellectual capital. The general ecosystem of Silicon Valley attracts brainpower, entrepreneurism and capital – all necessary to propel the next “big thing.� ...Specifically though, the ecosystem to support the “Big 3� of Google, eBay and Yahoo! (GOO.E.Y.) will be a feeder of business opportunity for the next 20 years.

Quick comment:
Similar to Jim Cramer's argument that the new economic and stock market leaders are GERQY - Google, eBay, Research-in-Motion, Qualcomm and Yahoo. But Cramer's argument was more thought provoking: he was contrasting GERQY with Cisco, Intel, Dell, EMC and Microsoft. Note also that Cramer includes the fastest growing wireless stocks.

Telcos trailing Cable in Broadband

Telephony quotes The Convergence Consulting Group Ltd., a Canadian consultancy as saying that if Phone guys want to compete, they really need to cut prices, now.

In ‘The Battle for the North American Couch Potato: Bundling, Internet, TV, Telephone,’ TCCG examined the strategy, prices, products and technology of telcos, cable companies, satellite providers and others in both the U.S. and Canada. Its analysts believe that, in the U.S. particularly, cable companies are well positioned to stem the tide of basic cable subscriber loss and to continue dominating broadband usage through well-priced service bundles.”

The price cuts over at SBC indicate that phone operators might be getting aggressive in chalking up numbers, worried about the cable operators superiority …. for now.

Broadband Grows, Gear Doesn’t

Despite a growing demand for broadband, the equipment sales for all sorts of broadband gear will decline for near foreseeable future. Synergy Research Group forecasts that revenues of broadband gear is going to decrease 5.4 percent to $6.0 billion in 2005. By 2009, decreasing prices will cut the market to $5.2 billion annually, a CAGR of negative 3.4 percent. IMS Research forecasts nearly 400 million broadband users by end of 2009, up from 150 million at end of 2004. Asia is supposed to super charge the growth, primarily in new markets like China which are adopting DSL and its future variants quite aggressively.

Nobel laureates warn against China currency revaluation

Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Robert Mundell agree that a China currency appreciation would not be helpful to either China or the US. Here are the key points:

The United States blames foreign countries for its trade deficits:

• In the 1980s, the US blamed Japan for its massive trade deficit.
• Today, China is blamed.

America's real problem:

• The root of America's economic problem results from the imbalance between savings and investment.

Will a China currency appreciation fix the imbalance?

• According to both economists, the answer is NO.
• According to Stiglitz: "A 3% change on the foreign exchange rate does not have a significant effect" on the US trade deficit with China".
• Factories are not going to move production to the United States because of the change.
• The problems of outsourcing, manufacturing, and China's global advantage would not be affected by a moderate change in the foreign exchange rate.

What would a China currency appreciation do to the Chinese economy?

• It would have an adverse effect on Chinese farmers.
• It would also negatively effect China's bid to narrow the rural-urban income gap.
• It could undo some of the progress China has made in reducing poverty in rural areas.

According to Stiglitz, China would benefit in one way from a currency appreciation:

• "A revaluation of the Yuan would get political pressure off the back of China for a couple of months".

Paul Graham On Startups

Paul Graham, author of the book Hackers & Painters gave a talk recenetly at the Harvard Computer Society about building Startups. Excerpts with edits:

- You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.all three are doable. Hard, but doable. And since a startup that succeeds ordinarily makes its founders rich, that implies getting rich is doable too. Hard, but doable.

- You don't need a brilliant idea to start a startup around. The way a startup makes money is to offer people better technology than they have now. But what people have now is often so bad that it doesn't take brilliance to do better. Google's plan, for example, was simply to create a search site that didn't suck. They had three new ideas: index more of the Web, use links to rank search results, and have clean, simple web pages with unintrusive keyword-based ads.

- An idea for a startup, however, is only a beginning. A lot of would-be startup founders think the key to the whole process is the initial idea, and from that point all you have to do is execute. What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save bad people.

- It's no coincidence that startups start around universities, because that's where smart people meet. It's not what people learn in classes at MIT and Stanford that has made technology companies spring up around them. If you start a startup, there's a good chance it will be with people you know from college or grad school.

- If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you'll learn something important about business school. You don't even hit an MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. There are only four MBAs in the top 50. What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of people with technical backgrounds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore. The rulers of the technology business tend to come from technology, not business. So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you'd do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA. There is one reason you might want to include business people in a startup, though: because you have to have at least one person willing and able to focus on what customers want. Some believe only business people can do this- that hackers can implement software, but not design it.There's nothing about knowing how to program that prevents hackers from understanding users, or about not knowing how to program that magically enables business people to understand them.

-The difficulty faced in a startup would not be more than you'd endure in an ordinary working life. It's probably less, in fact; it just seems like a lot because it's compressed into a short period. So mainly what a startup buys you is time. That's the way to think about it if you're trying to decide whether to start one. If you're the sort of person who would like to solve the money problem once and for all instead of working for a salary for 40 years, then a startup makes sense.

- Starting a startup is not the great mystery it seems from outside. It's not something you have to know about "business" to do. Build something users love, and spend less than you make. How hard is that?

Category : Startups.

When IP kills (Alan Wexelblat)

...and I don't mean that metaphorically. I don't really have the energy for another Big Thoughts post, but this story deserves a lot more thinking than I've been able to give it. So I place it out here for your consideration.

Bare bones: as a precondition for getting into WTO, India's lower house of parliament has passed a law prohibiting copying of patented drugs. It's expected to go through the upper house and be signed into law shortly.

Unless you've been hiding in a hole for the past few years, you are aware that India is the source for generic copies of life-saving anti-AIDS drugs for literally millions of people in the non-industrialized countries. This bill will put a stop to that for new drugs. If you're up on HIV/AIDS thinking, you know that the virus is very good at developing resistance to drugs and a fairly steady flow of new treatments is needed to combat this.

Opponents such as Medecins Sans Frontieres, fear that the safeguards that are supposed to operate with the new law (potential for compulsory licensing, for example) could be tied up for years in court challenges. Meanwhile, people die.

That's not hysteria. MSF is not some radical anti-WTO group, nor a radical anti-intellectual property organization. They're a group of doctors, on the ground in dozens of countries, treating millions of HIV/AIDS patients for whom the steep drop in prices over the past few years, as Indian-made high quality generics have become widely available, has meant a new lease on living. Raise the prices even a trivial amount (by Western standards) and you put them out of reach of hundreds of thousands of people, not to mention stalling out efforts to get the drugs to millions more who need them.

Now we face the issue - is this an appropriate use of intellectual property protections? Does the right of a corporation to make a profit for its shareholders trump the right of these people to live for a few more years with their disease kept in check? I hate questions like that.

Drug companies pull out the "funding research" card. It is true that income from patented drugs funds research. It also funds a massive advertising and lobby machine. Last I looked, US drug industry spending on advertising exceeded spending on R&D by a significant fraction. On the other hand, I do not believe that public need destroys business considerations completely. I choose to invest my money in companies that behave in what I consider socially responsible fashion, but I agree there are other ways businesses can operate.

A balance is needed. I'm not comfortable with the mental image of lavish boardrooms and skyrocketing company profits (they're consistently the most profitable industry in the US) as a shining metal beacon in a sea of dark-skinned misery, death, and suffering. Conversely, I'm not comfortable with the notion of a national government appropriating the fruits of labor (corporate or individual) because it has determined that these fruits meet a real human need.

And I hate not having an inkling of how to get progress on this issue at a pace that has even a glimmer of hope of keeping up with this global pandemic.

Cable Equal Access Case Goes to Supreme Court

DCTooTall writes "The FCC has ruled that Cable High-Speed Internet is an Information Service, and therefore not subject to the same equal access regulations that govern DSL. Brand-X Networks sued the FCC for equal access to the Cable Networks and won. The FCC appealed the decision and next Tuesday the case goes to the Supreme Court. The Telco's have repeatedly used the current FCC stance on Cable Broadband in their fight to get the same monopoly on DSL. This case has the potential to not only open the Cable networks to competition, but also prevent the Telco's from further attempts on limiting DSL options."

Canada Says No To DMCA

P Starrson writes " The Canadian government has reportedly said no to the DMCA. It released its plans for copyright reform today with a limited anti-circumvention provision that would not cover the likes of DeCSS. It even avoided the U.S. "notice and takedown system" that has caused a big headache for U.S. ISPs. A good summary is available from Canadian law professor Michael Geist. "

West End Laboratories TagZapper(TM)

West End Laboratories, a division of LDC Security, has also developed a RFID tag zapper designed to disable RFID chips. By killing the radio frequency identification tag, the zapper prevents the unwanted scanning and tracking of people or goods. The...

CITIZEN MEDIA INITIATIVES LIST

So many citizen journalism initiatives are cropping up now it's hard to keep track, so CyberJournalist.net has begun keeping a list.

Here are some of the more ambitious citizen's media efforts that have launched or are in the works. Click on the links for more information and to post your comments about each one.

Signal or Noise 2k5: Creative Revolution?

Register today to attend Signal or Noise II: Creative Revolution? on April 8. While DJS and musicians spin their works and machinima creators demo film segments, conference panelists and participants will discuss how digital technologies are enabling new forms of creativity by a broader group of people.  Cultural, business, legal and ethical implications of new genres and new forms of authorship will all be covered.

Join panelists for dinner and discussion after the conference -- sign up for Food for Thought, a Berkman tradition. 

Signal or Noise 2K5 is hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, and the Harvard Committee on Sports and Entertainment Law.

Real-Time Car Tracking with EVDO

This is why EVDO cellular internet is cool: the guys from EVDOInfo.com rigged together a little application using off the shelf parts to display on a web page their car, its exact location and velocity, as well as the current view out their window. It's tricks like these that will make EVDO (and UMTS, if Cingular ever gets it deployed) a standard feature for "carputers" before long.

And to think, just a few short years ago these technologies were reserved for child molesters and enemies of the state.

EVDO GPS WebCam Mapping [EVDOInfo]

New Model For Start-ups?

: Jeff Clavier looks at Topix.net through the VC lens as "yet another Internet startup to develop a meaningful presence without any VC financing, and end up being taken out - at least partially. These exits would not make sense for 'traditional' VCs that need to deploy at least $5 to $10M per deals, and need to generate a bare minimum 3X to 5X on that capital. But it makes sense for angels and founders -- and people helping them develop the shop like yours truly, who have to accept to live for some time on "Macaroni and Cheese". Alternate model ? Hmmm."< br>This dovetails with what we've been writing about as these deals roll out.

Jupiter Research For Sale?

: Update: Meckler writes in to us: "These have been going on since Gartner announced the Meta deal. We have no deal going on -- however we are always for sale as a company -- that is the fiduciary obligation of a CEO for a public company. We also owe to stockholders to listen to any offer. Are you a buyer!" Ah, well..
Jupiter Research, part of Alan Meckler's Jupitermedia, is up for sale, according to Silicon Valley Watcher, with multiple bidders for it.
The sale of Jupiter would further consolidate the market research analyst community, which is down to a handful of companies dominated by Gartner, the largest, according to the story.
Meckler's a master at mixing and matching businesses, and has had the golden touch of getting out of business at the right time. He bought the entrails of Jupiter Research (then Jupiter Media Metrix)for a mere $250K in 2002, and has gone on to rename his company based on it.
The research firm has been doing well, at least according to Meckler himself, who wrote up a post titled "Jupiter Research Rising", a week ago on his blog: "Syndicated research clients hit 297 the other day (up from 241 at this time last year). Contract value renewals have climbed to close to 100%. JR is now profitable and we expect healthy financial growth this year."
For some performance history of JR over the last year, read the latest 2004 10-K, here...

Hartford To Build Free Citywide Network?

Hartford's mayor promised free Wi-Fi access to residents citywide in his state of the city address: The Hartford Advocate looks into this network's feasibility. The mayor proposes to not just provide a free network, but also to give computers to less-advantaged local residents. Hartford has had a problem for decades and decades with "rich flight": it may be divided across racial lines, but anyone with any money moved across city lines. The county structure in Connecticut is very weak providing no shield to a big city with big problems. (My wife grew up in West Hartford; I spent five years in New Haven. It's pretty clear that wealthy suburbs can suck a city dry in a way that's not quite the same in other parts of the country.)

Comcast played its hand pretty broadly when the Advocate reported asked for comment. Declining, the spokesperson suggested an analyst at The Heartland Institute, a group I've written about extensively on this site which doesn't disclose funding and released a report rife with direct ties to Verizon and Issue Dynamics, an incumbent telecom and cable PR and lobbying firm.

The work is still in the planning stages, but with only a third of Hartford residents hooked up to the Internet--and 83 percent of the poorest family not surprisingly having no computer--the city sees this as a critical gap they want to close.

Yahoo Ups Mail Limit to 1 GB

Starting next month, Yahoo Mail will go to one gig. Platform wars, Ho! Release in extended, I don't have a link for the news, save the mail site, which does not mention it yet. One thing to note: According to figures I've seen lately, mail is about 40% of all Yahoo page views, it's the silent driver of profits at that company. And that's why Google is pushing Gmail so hard lately - those pageviews drive profits.

Can You Patent Online Fundraising?

Plenty of people have started to realize that, instead of encouraging innovation, many are using the patent system as a sort of legalized shakedown. Software patents are bad, but business model patents are downright scary. The folks over at the EFF point to one pending patent that tries to patent the process of fund raising online: "A method for conducting a fundraising campaign by an organization or person over a wide-area network, comprising the steps of: hosting a website including a plurality of linked web pages, the website providing information about the fundraising campaign and soliciting potential donors to make a charitable contribution to the fundraising campaign; registering on the website; contacting third parties via email messages soliciting charitable donations; and providing one or more reports, on the website, including information on the status of the fundraising campaign." Where's that guy with the patent on stupid patents?

The Silliness of Secrecy

This is a great article on some of the ridiculous effects of government secrecy. (Unfortunately, you have to register to read it.)

Ever since Sept. 11, 2001, the federal government has advised airplane pilots against flying near 100 nuclear power plants around the country or they will be forced down by fighter jets. But pilots say there's a hitch in the instructions: aviation security officials refuse to disclose the precise location of the plants because they consider that "SSI" -- Sensitive Security Information.

"The message is; 'please don't fly there, but we can't tell you where there is,'" says Melissa Rudinger of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, a trade group representing 60% of American pilots.

Determined to find a way out of the Catch-22, the pilots' group sat down with a commercial mapping company, and in a matter of days plotted the exact geographical locations of the plants from data found on the Internet and in libraries. It made the information available to its 400,000 members on its Web site -- until officials from the Transportation Security Administration asked them to take the information down. "Their concern was that [terrorists] mining the Internet could use it," Ms. Rudinger says.

lockquote>For example, when a top Federal Aviation Administration official testified last year before the 9/11 commission, his remarks were broadcast live nationally. But when the administration included a transcript in a recent report on threats to commercial airliners, the testimony was heavily edited. "How do you redact something that is part of the public record?" asked Rep. Carolyn Maloney, (D., N.Y.) at a recent hearing on the problems of government overclassification. Among the specific words blacked out were the seemingly innocuous phrase: "we are hearing this, this, this, this and this."

Government officials could not explain why the words were withheld, other than to note that they were designated SSI.

School Killer's Animated Terror

Minnesota teen posted bloody Flash film late last year

Yahoo's New Confidence (& Google's Fatal Flaw)

It is fairly remarkable how the winds in search (and related) markets have shifted. While Google had the wind at its back for almost a year, it now feels like the momentum is behind Yahoo. From the Flickr acquisition, to...

DVD Blowing Away Box Office

No wonder that the intervals between screen release dates and DVD release dates are getting shorter. Although box-office revenue has remained steady at about US$9.2 billion a year in recent years, since the mid-1990s, home video sales have surpassed the domestic box office. Last year, DVD sales alone — not counting the VHS format — skyrocketed to US$15.5 billion. [Hacking NetFlix]

RSS Feed for Cinema Minima

Movie downloading is the Internet's fastest-growing sector

Grabbing movies and TV shows off the Net for free is the fastest growing activity in cyberspace. [Hollywood Liberation Army: Chronicling the Internet movie revolution]

RSS Feed for Cinema Minima

Ireland going all-digital in theaters

Avica Technology has embarked on a mission to outfit 515 screens throughout Ireland with a digital delivery and presentation system. The system uses a network to distribute the movies in digital format, with an encryption technology developed by Digital Cinema Initiatives. DCI (can we call it that?) is a joint venture of Disney, Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros. They hope the new distribution and projection technology will reduce operational costs while making Tom Cruise some extra Irish cash. They plan to have all of Ireland outfitted in about a year. [Engadget]

RSS Feed for Cinema Minima

Big Dog Robot Now in Puppy Stage

The Defense Advanced Research Project Authority (DARPA) Learning Locomotion project seeks to create algorithms that help multi-legged platforms learn to walk in varied terrain. DARPA will be handing out a series of $600,000-$800,000 research grants to teach 6.6-pound, 10-inch "Little Dogs" to walk.

Thoughts on The Future of WordPress and MovableType

There more I look at the blogging "market" these days, I see things falling into fairly well defined places--at least in my head. There is a already a well defined split between the hosted services that offer blogging capabilities (Blogger, TypePad, Y! 360, LiveJournal, etc) and the "host it yourself" model.

That second group is the ecosystem that MovableType and WordPress currently dominate and I think they'll continue to do so. If you further divide that into "corporate/enterprise" and "personal/non-profit" groups, I think both products will find their respective roles.

WordPress will come to be the de-facto choice in the world of self-hosted personal weblogs and low-end webhosting "value added" package. MovableType will be the blogware of choice in the corporate blogging world, both for internal weblogs and those that face the outside world.

Of course, there will be many exceptions to these generalizations, but these are the trends that I see. Matt's decision to create a WordPress Inc. shift things around a bit as well.

What do you think?

Start A Blog - Get Rich Quick!

There's been a lot of talk about why marketers should start blogs as some sort of fast track machine to high search rankings.

Ignore it all. It's bullshit.

Marketers should start a blog if they have a desire to communicate. To converse. To connect.

Thinking of a blog as a content producing technology is to miss the point. It's about tone, not text. It's about talking and listening. It takes a lot more time and energy than a conventional seo approach if your goal is to attain search rankings. How many blogs do you see here?

Here's a question for those marketers thinking of a starting a blog: what is more important - inbound or outbound links?

If you answered inbound, you need to think again.

Forget marketing. Think conversation. Gapingvoid puts it well, as usual:

Yahoo Offers Creative Commons Search Engine

Get your copy of Windows XP 64 Bit Edition now

360 day trial of the pre-release... Link...

Firefox and Thunderbird 1.0.2 released

Mozilla has released updates to both the Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email client. Both releases fix bugs and include security updates. Mozilla recommends Firefox and Thunderbird users all upgrade to the new version 1.0.2. Thanks Jim and tyrantmizar!...

Bells saved by DSL, Wireless

We all know that they really did not want to sell DSL to the consumers, hoping somehow to protect their ISDN and T-1 Businesses, but looks like DSL and Wireless are two technologies that are keeping the profit-engine chugging for the Baby Bells. According to Fitch, a Chicago-based bond research and ratings company, if you took out the money they made from wireless and DSL, the regional Bells would be in a lot of trouble. (Perhaps that explains SBC’s valiant attempts to woo me back as a DSL customer… that love is appreciated!) According to Fitch, Bell revenues increased 3.1% in 2004, versus a decline of 0.8% in 2003. DSL sales were up 7.4% for 2004, and nearly 8.2% of total bell users had DSL. Now if they turbocharged these pipes for an extra $10 a month, things could get interesting.

SBC & BellSouth, the parents of Cingular benefitted because they bought AT&T Wireless. Bells lost 5% of access lines in 2004, as more and more people said goodbye to their fixed lines, and decided to shout on the streets on their wireless phones. Take into account the fixed line losses and increase in wireless customers, the Bells saw a net 12.1% addition to their total base. Wireless part of the revenues were up a whopping 20.3% for 2004. Wireless now represents approximately 37% of total consolidated revenues, compared with approximately 29% in 2003.

[Press Release]

Wireless Gear: Flirting with Disaster

Business 2.0: Three years ago companies like Ericsson, Lucent Technologies, and Nortel Networks were stock market pariahs. Yet in 2004 they staged remarkable turnarounds. Cellular-phone companies were upgrading their networks to meet the demand from millions of new customers, so they needed to buy lots of wireless equipment like base stations, back-office gear, and switches. Those happy days might soon become a distant memory because of the rapid consolidation of wireless carriers. Continue reading at Business 2.0 site.

Jupitermedia (JUPM), industry research and conflicts of interest

A VC endorses JUPM, but is he right? argued that research from Jupiter suffers from severe conflicts of interest. Jupiter analyst David Schatsy responded:

I can understand why other research firms get the rap he's laying on us--because, according to numerous first-hand reports from their clients--they treat many of their clients in such a smarmy manner.

I have always been opposed to creating the impression with prospects and clients that [a] paying for a Jupiter contract is the same as paying protection money or buying PR. And I hope and believe that that attitude is shared throughout the JupiterResearch organization. Thus, it is pretty disappointing to be painted with that brush.

David's right, and I owe him and the other Jupiter analysts an apology, since my comments weren't based on any specific experience of Jupiter Research. (His full post is here.)

However, this is an important issue for the market research industry, and Jupiter is part of that industry. Market research in general is rife with undisclosed conflicts, and as a result small companies often view the cost of industry research as a marketing expense rather than a business planning expense. David's comments about his competitors seem to confirm that.

Currently, industry analysts do not have to disclose potential conflicts of interest, and there's no Chinese Wall between the business unit that accepts payment from clients and the analysts who comment on companies' products and positioning. The potential for abuse is a problem even in an organization of ethical people.

That problem could at some time bite Jupiter and its shareholders. So far there have been no major law suits from companies claiming they were misled by biased industry reports in which conflicts of interest weren't disclosed, or from companies claiming they were ignored because they didn't pay for research subscriptions. But who knows about the future?

So Jupiter should grab the opportunity to (a) prove that it operates at a higher ethical level than its competitors and (b) limit the risk of future litigation. Like the investment banks' equity research divisions, it should shield its business relationships from its analysts and disclose all paid relationships with companies mentioned in its reports. Hoping and believing "that that attitude is shared throughout the JupiterResearch organization" isn't enough. 

Although disclosures and Chinese walls may increase costs in the short term, they would be a good long-term investment for JUPM shareholders.

Evolving Blogging Platforms

China's latest need - opportunity for investors?

Bill Gates saw the opportunity in 2004. And according to today's People's Daily, the problem is worse than previously expected. How can investors profit? Thankfully, Raymond James strategist Jeffrey Saut offers some suggestions.

The problem: Lack of clean water

China's severe water shortages are worsening due to:

• Heavy pollution of lakes.
• Urban development projects consuming water for lawns and fountains.

Water statistics:

• More than 100 cities have inadequate water supplies.
• More than 300 million rural Chinese lack clean drinking water.
• More than 190 million others have to drink water with excessive hazardous substances.
• 34% of China's rural population has to drink water that does not meet state standards.
• Annual per capita water resources of Beijing residents is less than 300 cubic meters, compared with the world's average of 1,000 cubic meters.

A January survey found that:

• 53% of water in major rivers is undrinkable.
• 35% of ground water is undrinkable.

Plans to raise water prices:

• Beijing is likely to raise its water price to a record high but the timing remains unclear.

Jeffrey Saut of Raymond James had this to say - recommendations at bottom (entire piece here):

....According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, “As the world’s population has tripled during the past century, the use of water has increased sevenfold.� Emerging China has a HUGE fresh water problem since most of its rivers are polluted. Over 300 Chinese cities are water “short.�

In 1989, when I was still a practicing analyst, I wrote an industry report titled, “Water: the Ultimate Resource.� Mentioned in that report were roughly 15 public companies, many of which have been acquired by other companies. Most recently, one of our “water� recommendations was acquired by General Electric (ticker: GE), as water company Ionics was bought by “water believer� Jeffrey Immelt (CEO of General Electric). Indeed, the wars of the future will likely be fought over water, not oil.

For the past 16 years we have believed the “water story� and investing in that theme, which has produced some pretty decent returns for portfolios. While the water utilities have been an okay “bet,� given their consolidation play, the real money has been made on water treatment companies, desalinization plays, filter companies, water infrastructure companies, etc. Indeed, countries like Saudi Arabia have said they will spend billions of dollars on desalination and power plants. Ditto as many other countries have expressed the need for large investments in water treatment plants, water pipelines, etc. Even the U.S. has recognized the need to invest billions to refresh its aging water infrastructure. Consequently, many of the “low hanging fruit� water companies have already been gobbled-up by the GEs of the world. By our pencil, only a few names (save the water utilities whose rates will be “capped� by the Public Utility Commissions) are left for the investor.

We recommended Suez roughly a year ago in the high teens when it was yielding over 4%. Additionally, we recommended ITT Industries (ticker: ITT), which was recently added to Neuberger Berman’s “All Cap Core Taxable Portfolio� for the following reasons. As stated, “ITT Industries is a conglomerate with most of its revenue derived from the growing defense and water industries. The defense industry is showing strong growth and indications are very likely this strength will continue in the near future. The need for potable water and waste treatment both in the U.S. and internationally will drive the rest of the business.

The demand is particularly strong in certain emerging economies, such as India and China. We expect this to allow the company to grow at double-digit rates for the next several years. Further, we believe the valuation is supported as it trades at a discount to the sum of the company’s parts.� We think the good folks at Neuberger Berman are pretty savvy investors and obviously agree with their analysis. Other water names we have mentioned in past comments for your consideration include: Watts Water Technologies (ticker: WTS), Veolia Environment (ticker: VE), Pall Corporation (Ticker: PLL), Cuno Inc. (ticker: CUNO), and the turnaround speculation Calgon Carbon (ticker: CCC).

Quick thought: The Bill Gates Foundation invested in a Chinese water utility last year. See here.

Full Text Court Filings: Agence France Press v. Google

Last Friday, news broke of Agence France Press filing suit against Google in U.S.District Court alleging copyright infringement. Here's the SEW Blog post with links to a Reuters and AFP's own story about the lawsuit. If you're interested in reading...

Social Engineering and the IRS

Social engineering is still very effective: More than one-third of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employees and managers who were contacted by Treasury Department inspectors posing as computer technicians provided their computer login and changed their password, a government report said...

Roll Your Own Comics

: At first glance, this was just one of those nifty Boing Boing finds. Gnomz.com is that and more -- a combination comic generator-community-sim site creating a treasure trove of lasting content. Launched in French and tres Gallic in tone, Gnomz allows anyone to create his or her own comic strip; registered users get to access to a character generator among other elements. So cool that if I actually registered I might not have time to post again here for a few weeks. Granted, the content is only as good as the creators, which means it can be uneven.
This fits into the social media discussion mentioned earlier today: strips can be shared by email creating buzz, community building includes an active forum, registered users get benefits like a place to publish your comics and a sense of inclusion, content sharing via the site, and evolving content offers plenty of reasons to check in regularly.

The Gorgeous Arrogance of Large Media Companies

From a WaPo (reg req'd) piece on media conglomerates and growth:

Topping Redstone's shopping list are more cable television channels to add to the MTV/Nickelodeon empire, he said. He added that Viacom is "underinvested" in the Internet and will look for acquisitions there. "But not Yahoo or Google," he said.

How sporting that Viacom, market cap of about $57 billion and no growth story, deigns not to "buy" Yahoo, market cap of $44 billion, or Google, market cap $49 billion, both living smack in the middle of the fastest growing sector of the media business. Jesus. If only Time Warner had deigned not to "buy" AOL.

The Top Ten Spyware

According to Webroot Inc. and listed in the Inquirer, here are the top ten spyware and adware threats based on detection as well as potential impact.

1. CoolWebSearch
2. Gator
3. 180 search asst.
4. ISTbar/AUpdate
5. Transponder
6. Internet optimizer
7. BlazeFind
8. Hot as Hell
9. Advance Keylogger
10. TIBS Dialer

Read how each works at the Inquirer Website.

RIM Competition

The Economist writes about Blackberry's competitors:

At the moment, 70% of RIM's revenue comes from the sale of BlackBerry devices, and the rest from software and services. To broaden its reach, RIM has licensed the BlackBerry software to big handset-makers such as Nokia, Motorola and Samsung, while continuing to sell its own devices. It is therefore both co-operating and competing with some much larger companies, as it navigates the transition to a more software-and services-based business.

an opportunity to offer handset-makers their own BlackBerry-like software instead. “This segment is switching from proprietary innovation to standards-based mainstream growth,” says Danny Shader of Good Technology, a maker of wireless e-mail software that runs on a wide range of hand-held computers and smartphones. Without a hardware business, Good is not competing with the handset-makers (such as Nokia) that license its programs. Its software, running on Treo and PocketPC hand-helds, is already in use at nearly 5,000 companies, including seven of America's top ten firms.

Brian Bogosian of Visto, another software firm that hopes to dethrone RIM, claims that mobile operators, like handset-makers, are also ambivalent about the BlackBerry. Many operators that resell the BlackBerry co-branded with their own logos would prefer not to dilute their own brands, he says. Visto offers “white label” software that runs on almost any device, and can be offered by operators under their own brands. So far, Visto has signed up ten operators, and will announce a deal with one of the world's biggest operators next month, says Mr Bogosian. Other firms pursuing a similar strategy include Intellisync, Seven and Smartner. Patent-infringement claims abound, underlining the intensity of competition.

If all this were not enough, another threat looms on the horizon: Microsoft, the world's largest software company.

A New Kind Of Tagging?

Everyone uses Google but what about narrowing down your search, or looking for something that may not be on the open Web?

One option is FindArticles, owned and just re-launched by LookSmart.com, which last July acquired Furl, the social bookmarking service. According to a press release issued today, improvements mean that FindArticles' features include the ability to search by topic, or view only "Free Articles," making it easier for Web searchers to find what they want without having to scroll through pages and pages of search results. Once searchers find what they're after, they can save the entire page with Furl -- LookSmart's personalized, online bookmarking service.

FindArticles gives searchers the ability to sort through a comprehensive collection of reliable sources that includes more than 1,000 publications. Searchers can sort results by article date, length, relevance or publication name, and can refine the relevance of their results by inserting new search terms as needed.

Other new features include "hot new articles" and "top articles ever" for each of FindArticles' neatly organized categories: Arts & Entertainment, Automotive, Business & Finance, Computers & Technology, Health & Fitness, Home & Garden, News & Society, Reference & Education, and Sports.

The press release says FindArticles has articles from thousands of resources with archives dating back to 1984, and millions of articles not found on any other search engine. By working with the best sources, FindArticles has compiled all the essential publications covering a wide range of subjects -- and is continually adding to the collection.

Worth checking out. I’m interested by synergies between Furl and FindArticles, although of course I’m also concerned that this might be at the cost of the the broader opportunities of a more open system like del.icio.us.

IAC - "Incoherent Acquisitions Continue"?

IAC's stock (ticker: IACI) reacted poorly to the Ask Jeeves acquisition. After closing at $22.29 on Friday, the stock fell to $21.63 by the end of trading yesterday. Why? Because Barry Diller's justifications for the acquisition are unconvincing.

Diller stated on the acquisition conference call that

Through this acquisition IAC is going to be creating a traffic ecosystem, sending traffic back and forth between IAC sites from Ask to our brands and vice versa.

But Diller's separation of IAC's travel businesses from its other e-commerce businesses is an admission that it has failed to do exactly that with its current properties. TicketMaster and CitySearch, for example, are highly synergistic with Expedia, Hotwire and Hotels.com, since they offer the "destination services" that naturally interest travellers when booking trips. But Diller is now splitting them into separate companies.

Yet travel services and destination-based e-commerce are more closely related than search and e-commerce or travel. If Diller can't integrate travel and destination services, there's no reason to expect him to do a better job of search, travel and e-commerce.

That would leave as the main justification for the deal that ASKJ is cheap. But is it? Sure, it trades at a lower multiple than GOOG and YHOO, but then it should. And if it's so cheap, why is ASKJ happy to sell?

Other reactions to the deal:

The FT's Lex column:

Having watched Mr Diller's slew of deals in recent years and the direction of the share price, investors can be excused for remaining sceptical.

Peter Eavis at The Street.com:

Diller is buying an also-ran search engine to fight off the encroachments of much larger search engines -- and paying through the nose to do so. It is one more move that shows that IAC isn't ready to admit that it's getting pushed out of the game.

Sarah Lacey at Business Week:

The heart of this deal is making the sum add up to more than its parts. That could make Ask Jeeves IAC's diciest -- yet potentially most lucrative -- deal yet.

Bambi Francisco at MarketWatch:

But I also wonder whether Diller has a "gift" for buying at the cusp of shrinking margins... As one hedge-fund analyst said: "Diller's not a visionary... He is simply a business guy who has crystal-clear vision six months out [but nothing beyond that]." ...Now in search, margins may also be collapsing as competition intensifies. Wall Street is already pricing in declining margins at Google.

John Batelle's Searchblog:

To my mind, this deal augurs my long held position that search and television are going to merge. In short, the first engine to get on Comcast's interactive guide will have a huge leadership position in terms of the video advertising revolution I wrote of here, and with Diller, who can certainly navigate the cable world better than most, Ask has a shot at being that brand.

American Technology Research analyst Mark Mahaney:

We understand the rationale for gaining greater exposure to the hyper-growth online search market; but IACI management was direct on the conference call in saying it saw no cost synergies. There may be revenue synergies -- especially with IACI promoting the Ask Jeeves search box on every IACI site -- but our view is that IACI's record of generating revenue synergies has been limited to date. Further, we note that to date IACI has had difficulties in integrating its numerous acquisitions. Our sense is that this deal highlights and increases the roll-up risk to the IACI story.

Pacific Growth Equities analyst Derek Brown

...with both Companies’ management teams indicating that the transaction was not motivated by potential  operating synergies, we believe that the goal of this acquisition is to build a portal-like Internet presence to rival that of  AOL (Ticker: TWX), Google (Ticker: GOOG), Yahoo (ticker: YHOO)  and MSN (ticker: MSFT).

Quick comment: "Portal-like Internet presence"? If Diller couldn't even integrate Expedia and TicketMaster, the chance of IAC building a "portal-like Internet presence" seems slim.

IAC chart below.

Internet Usage At Home Peaking

Remember Metcalfe’s Law meets market reality? Here is new wrinkle to that argument. Folks at Nielsen/Net Ratings say that the total usage of this thing called the Internet might have peaked in the mature markets. The report says that the amount of time spent online at home in countries such as US, Germany, United Kingdom and Switzerland is showing minimal to flat growth. In US the Internet usage at home declined 2%. In other words if your business depends on online growth in usage and total number of users, well you need to tweak your business models. The tier two countries like France, Italy, Hong Kong and Japan are still growing, however at double digit rates. Clearly, there are signs that there is a limit to how much a network can be used. That argument will gain credibility as time goes by - after all time does put all axioms to test… eventually.

Symbian sleeps with the enemy

The big news this morning in the wireless world, Symbian licensing Microsoft’s ActiveSync technology which allows Symbian-based products to interact better with Microsoft Exchange servers. Russell Beattie worries about the potential problems for Symbian.

No one wins in deals with Microsoft (except Microsoft). I’m not sure what the long view is here for MS, but I’m sure they have one and I’m sure it’s devious.

Maybe Symbian and MS are trying to kill RIM. Well two things - Symbian is working with Blackberry folks as well, and doing a deal with Microsoft is a prudent strategy since it means the Symbian platform will support whatever is hot in the market. Palm made that deal as well with Microsoft for ActiveSync. Having said that, has anyone used the ActiveSync over the air? If it worked as well as RIM email, it would have been a standard by now. So far only RIM (and to some extent Good Technology) has been able to give people an intelligent, easy to use wireless email experience. I don’t expect that from Microsoft, unless of course they put their Mac people in charge. For past two weeks I have been mucking around with Microsoft mobile phones, and despite what others might say, Microsoft’s wireless efforts at present are in “spring training” stage and “play-offs” are too far off.

More from WSJ, Mobile Tracker, MocoNews

Don't say 'blogger' to US Immigration

Xeni Jardin: Via Declan McCullagh's politech list: William Knowles writes about a Canadian blogger who claims he was harassed and strip-searched by US immigration officials when he told them his profession was "blogger." Snip:

This sounds like an unbelievable story, but it happened to Canadian blogger Jeremy Wright last week. As already reported on quite a few blogs, Jeremy was detained and interrogated by US Immigration when he arrived in New York last week for a meeting with McGraw-Hill (Ed. note: an unnamed media company -- see update) to discuss a great business opportunity for Jeremy in the area of blogging.

It appears that the immigration people simply did not believe that Jeremy could make a living as a blogger. And they gave him the third degree - including an humiliating strip search - as a result for some hours. And banned him from entering the US. Incredible. Jeremy wrote detailed commentary on his blog about his experience, but he's now pulled those posts (this post explains why). While the details aren't yet clear on exactly why Jeremy had such an awful experience at the hands of the guardians of freedom and liberty (hard to get true irony here), this appears to be disgraceful behaviour on their part.

I met Jeremy in the US in January. Shel and I interviewed him for a podcast. You couldn't meet a nicer and more honourable bloke!

am's post, and link to an update posted by Jeremy Wright on The End of The Story.

IBM plans service job cuts across Western Europe

Yuck! It looks like we are going to be dealing with more layoffs again with IBM. Those that are to be hit this time will be those inWestern Europe. I feel for these folks as we have been dealing with the same sort of issues here in the States for some time now. I have no doubt that there are going to be plenty of ill feelings to go around as these sort of layoffs…

Direct and Related Links for 'IBM plans service job cuts across Western Europe'

Michigan State Police warn: blogging could mean jail time

Not content to let Michigan School Officials naysay about the dangers of blogging (as reported here on Feb 11), Michigan State police have joined in the blog bashing fun warning that blogs could result in kiddies going to jail.

Lt. Tim Lee, Michigan State Police Department warns:” [Kiddies] can say horrible things about a principal or horrible things about their parents, or horrible things about the kid next door, and they feel like no one’s going to find them..But what kids often don’t realize is that saying horrible things about a person on the internet could get them into trouble with the law.”

But not content with warning off kiddies from using name calling on blogs, Lee goes one further: “That person goes out there, reads the posting and says, yeah I’m nervous about this, or I feel uncomfortable, I’m afraid for my life. They contact law enforcement, and that’s when we get involved…If we can identify those individuals, and there’s enough information to believe that person’s threat is accurate, that person could actually carry out that threat, then that is a threat that would be prosecuted.”

What’s even more bizarre, is that WLNS.com news reports that blogging is a serious problem, but authorities “are still playing catch up… State police don’t have enough resources and even psychologists are grappling with this issue.”

Yikes! Has blogging become the new platform for evil in the 21st Century? Should Michigan State Police be creating a dedicated Blogging squad to trawl for hate blogs instead of dealing with less important crimes like murder and rape?

The answer, it seems, is yes, in Lee’s words: “It’s actually become a psychological phenomenon.”

WSJ: IAC/InterActiveCorp Close to Acquiring Ask Jeeves

I just blogged about Yahoo's acquisition of Flickr. Ready for another acquisition in the search space? According to a just published article in the Wall Street Journal, Ask Jeeves is set to be acquired by Barry Diller's IAC/Interactive Corporation for...

2,000 Talmud tapes, or one loaded iPod

The Daf Yomi is a seven-and-a-half-year cycle of Talmud learning. Participants study a page a day of this compendium of Jewish oral law, culminating in a celebration, known as the Siyum HaShas.

But how do you study a 2,711-page book when you have to commute?
With the ShasPod.

For $399, Yehuda Shmidman sends his customers a 20-gigabyte iPod loaded with Talmud lectures. That is $100 above the price of an iPod alone.

"We created this because of two glaring trends," the entrepreneur said. "One is the iPod, and the other is the Siyum HaShas, which is something so incredible that when it happens you obviously want to join the next cycle."

MP3 audio files of Daf Yomi lectures have long been available online. But many ultra-Orthodox Jews refrain from using the Web for purposes unrelated to work, so they have no way of downloading these files.

Via Antonio < The New York Times.

Yahoo Flickr Acquisition Confirmed

Hong Kongers Flock Online

The folks at Nielsen//NetRatings have released their latest Global NetView Analysis (PDF only) which shows, as they put it, that ‘the majority of usage growth has come from increased frequency of access or user session growth. Australia, France, Hong Kong and Italy saw double-digit growth in the number of monthly user sessions (see Table 2). In comparison, the U.S. experienced no growth, second to last in the rankings.’

To me, though, the most interesting part is how much time Hong Kongers spent online last month  compared to anyone else (22 hours), including Japanese (15 hours) and Americans (14 hours).

This is new: It represents significant (25%) growth over last year  and, as Nielsen//NetRatings points out, compares strikingly with the U.S., where people actually spent less time online than they did in the same month last year.

I have no idea why so many Hong Kongers spent nearly every waking moment online last month. Perhaps it was the weather. I’ll be up there later this month. I’ll ask around.

Help defend bloggers' rights to keep their sources secret

Cory Doctorow: As part of the appeal on Apple's legal action to force websites that report on its new products to reveal their sources, Boing Boing will be signing onto a bloggers' "amicus brief." Our lawyer is Stanford's Lauren Gelman, and she needs your help for the brief. She writes:

"I need links to news stories broken by bloggers-- things a court can look at and say 'this looks like what we traditionally think of as journalism.' I am particularly interested in examples of stories based on sources, but any news will do. I will use these both as facts for the brief and I want to attach printouts from the blogs as attachments to it. I'm looking for as many as 50 examples, but I need at least 10."

Email your comments with links to gelman@stanford.edu. Link

Help Defend Blogger's Rights

Boing Boing is filing an amicus brief in the Apple V. the Blogosphere case. I've refrained from comment as it's not totally search related, but honestly, this is a very bad precedent. I break news here, and intend to keep doing it, much as I did for MacWeek back in 1988. Apple didn't sue me then, because I was working for an "organization." But now, if it's just me, they can? Hogwash.

In any case, we're looking for examples of blogs breaking news stories. If you have em, send em to BB's counsel. More info on where and how is at this post.

GoogleX Disappears a Day After It's Debut

Google paid homage to Apple’s OSX operating system by starting a separate page called GoogleX which had icons like those on OSX which would expand as your mouse went over them. It also had a little rhyme at the bottom of the page that said, “Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, OSX rocks, Homage to you.” But the next day GoogleX was gone. Why? Speculation abounds. With all the hoopla around the web about this, maybe Google will come clean. Here’s a peek at it thanks to News.com.

U.S. Electronic Passports

From the Federal Register: the proposed specifications for the U.S. electronic passport.

On The Legality Of Tracking BitTorrent Files

A few months back, when the MPAA started going after BitTorrent trackers, some people wondered if those trackers were really doing anything illegal. After all, they weren't hosting any of the unauthorized content. If anything, they were more similar to a specialized search engine, that only found torrent files — not all of which had to be unauthorized. It appears that the guy who hosted one torrent tracking site is now hoping to use this defense against Hollywood, after receiving a lawsuit from the MPAA (in the UK, despite the charges being in the US). It's a tricky question. Still, it's only a matter of time until someone writes an interface for Google to just search out torrent files. Then, Google basically becomes a torrent tracking site as well. Will the entertainment industry go after Google too? [Techdirt]

RSS Feed for Cinema Minima

French led Euro Rival to Google Print Initiated

Google Print, the ambitious plan to put great libraries of literature onto the Internet just got itself a French led European rival after making enemies in trademark suits in France where it has just lost it's latest appeal.

French president Jacques Chirac told the national library to get cracking on plans to build a european rival to what the french fear will be an english language dominated project run by the Search giant in the US.

Chirac gave the go-ahead for research into the project after Jean-Noel Jeanneney, who heads the national library, expressed concern that Google's plan to put books from some of the world's great libraries online would favor the English language.

Chirac asked Jeanneney and France's culture minister to look at ways "in which the collections of the great libraries in France and Europe could be made more widely and more quickly accessible by Internet," Chirac's office said in a statement.

Chirac would seek support among other European countries in the coming weeks for a bigger, coordinated push to get Europe's literary works online.

You have to wonder about the technology side of that i guess, Google have ample experience in indexing documents. What do the French have? At any rate, this is something to likely take years and years so file this one under "one day..."

More Book Digitization Projects

Gary Price emailed me this morning with some nice links to other projects, thanks Gary!

• The Million Book Project from Internet Archive
• The Online Books Page which has about 20,000 books online and has been going for about 10yrs
• More projects listed here

and this post by Roy Tennant who Gary says is a living legend in the library world, that's fairly damning for Google. It talks about how they've been less than forthcoming with details about their digitization project.

Is Search Advertising Dangerously Overpriced?

Dow Jones' Riva Richmond thinks they may be..

But worries about ad-price softening have weighed on shares of Google and Yahoo recently, despite strong fourth-quarter performances from the two companies. Google's stock is down 17% at $179.98 from a high of $216.80 set Feb. 2, while Yahoo is down 20% at $31.91 from its 52-week high of $39.79 set Dec. 3.

The concerns arose, in part, from complaints about high prices by online retail giant eBay Inc., one of the largest buyers of keyword ads, at its annual meeting with financial analysts last month. The comments came on the heels of a disappointing earnings report for the fourth quarter, when eBay lifted its marketing spending to attract Christmas shoppers.

The genrich class and the natural human species

The artificial human chromosomes (HACs) technology adds an extra chromosome to the 46 that reside in most cells of the body.

Proponents believe HACs can be made to replicate each time cells divide, and it could be possible to turn their genes on or off at will. It might also be possible to include a self-destruct mechanism that prevents the HAC from being passed on to future generations if necessary.

Gregory Stock and John Campbell of the University of California believe it will soon be possible to consider therapies that involve inserting specially-designed HACs into human embryos. An HAC could be built containing genes that confer life-long resistance to HIV. Another idea is to introduce into male embryos an HAC containing a series of genetic switches that can, when turned on, trigger the destruction of prostate cancer cells.

If preventative treatments such as these are shown to work safely, one can envisage treatments delivered as a "gene cassette" on a single HAC. For instance, anti-ageing genes could be added to every embryo's extra chromosome.

One scenario that has been envisaged is the idea of human society being divided between the "gene enriched" and the "naturals" - some people having the resources to exploit all aspects of the technology to improve their life, with others left to live and breed naturally. Princeton University's Lee Silver believes that although such a dystopia is not imminent, it is plausible and could eventually lead to two species of humans.

"If the accumulation of genetic knowledge and advances in genetic enhancement technology continue at the present rate," Silver says, "then by the end of the third millennium, the genrich class and the natural class will become the GenRich humans and the Natural humans - entirely separate species with no ability to cross-breed and with as much romantic interest in each other as a current human would have for a chimpanzee."

Via The Independent.

Samsung to launch monitors for color blind

Samsung will launch this year an LCD monitor with color correction technology for people with dyschromatopsia or color blindness.

The color correction technology, named Magic Vision, allows users to control red, green, and blue at 10 levels so viewers with impaired color vision can adjust the intensity of colors that give them difficulty.

Via Digital Chosunibo.

Municipal Report

Verizon, SBC Chiefs play dumb. In a Senate hearing this week on the recent bout of telecom merger-mania, both Verizon and SBC's CEO's deny they're stopping communities from wiring themselves with broadband (CSpan video). "We are not in the business of stopping anybody from doi..

Think Vertical

Bubble, Bubble..

San Francisco Chronicle: Up, Up and Away. Another month, another real estate record. Median prices for existing homes in the Bay Area hit an all-time-high of $569,000 in February, rocketing 19.5 percent from $476,000 in February 2004 and up 2.3 percent from $556,000 in January.

The most revealing statistics in the story: "Bay Area home buyers in February committed to a typical monthly mortgage payment of $2,549, a record. That payment is up 21.9 percent from $2,091 a year ago."

re and more people are further and further extended financially. Most of them are on mortgages that will cause their interest rates to rise at some point.

This is going to get so ugly.

Yahoo Assures Firefox Compatibility

4 Bay Area cities submit bids for stem-cell center -- SOME LEADERS URGE COMBINING BIDS TO FEND OFF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

At least four Bay Area cities including San Jose made separate bids Wednesday seeking the headquarters for the state's new $3 billion stem-cell institute, prompting speculation the proposals...

IE7 Details Leaked

Microsoft recently announced that IE 7.0 is coming out in a few months, but information about the browser has already been leaked onto the web. Read this article for all the info... Link...

The world’s biggest phishing attack?

This London bank raid seems impressive:

The investigation was started last October after it was discovered that computer hackers had gained access to Sumitomo Mitsui bank's computer system in London.

They managed to infiltrate the system with keylogging software that would have enabled them to track every button pressed on computer keyboards.

Of course, it’s likely that there are lots more cases like this we don’t hear about. As Computerworld reports:

[Security experts] Cluley and Barnes said keylogging hacks are more common than thought, and they said the $423 million plot was probably the largest corporate case that had been made public. Both experts said it's unclear what kind of keylogging was used.

The two speculate it could have been a physical keylogger dongle, installed by a cleaner (although that would mean the dongle would probably have to be retrieved somehow since any traffic through the company’s servers would be noticed. At least, one would hope so.)

Microsoft to release web-based RSS aggregator

Microsoft's MSN division has started testing a Web-based RSS aggregator, a move it's making to stay with rivals like Google, Yahoo, and Ask Jeeves. Link...

Silicon Valley’s buzzing with Vertical Search

You can’t go two steps on Sand Hill Road, the epicenter of venture capital without some money man espousing the virtues of vertical search. So often you is it repeated that it harks back to the bubble era euphemisms like “market places,” “new paradigms” and of course my favorite, B2B exchanges. Ah… sweet memories. Still, I can understand the fascination - as broadband usage grows we will end up looking for more and more information online. Google seems to becoming quite worthless everyday given that blog entries are dominating the top results. Enter vertical search.

So what is vertical search? It is a specialized search engine that mines data for one narrow niche of the market place. Say jobs or travel. Or even high end real estate. Because the data sources are so fragmented, there seems to be an opportunity to massage the data and present it in a manner that is simple to use and easy to consume. Sort of meta search for niches. The main reason this is supposed to work is that the two older advertising models - cost per thousand (aka banner ads) and cost per click are too inefficient and fraught with fraud-related risk. Vertical search can offer a more focused audience, and thus increase the efficiency of ads on the search engine. It also presents a new kind of advertising opportunity - lets call it cost per action. If you can generate leads, or say have some sign-up for an email newsletter or a RSS feed, you suddenly have created much higher value, and thus that click is more valuable.

Fred Wilson and Danny Sullivan are among the two who have been signing the praises of vertical search for a few weeks now. Folks like Nextag, Froogle by Google, PriceGrabber are some examples of early vertical search examples, but the next generation is going to go more granular. Jupiter Research says so - so it must be true. In other words the buzz is in high gear.

Matt Marshall recently wrote about Kayak.com which is a riff on SideStep, a travel “vertical” search engine. Expect any minute to hear about a brand new company - Simplyhired.com which is making sense of all the job search data sources in the market, much like its rivals Work Zoo and Nimble Cat. (Who thinks up these names) The team behind the company includes the Godhwani brothers who sold AtWeb to Netscape back in the day for dot-com millions. No more details yet. All emails went unanswered!

Jobs is one category where vertical search makes absolute sense. The silos of information make searching for jobs tough and someone needs to step up and clean up the whole mess that is HotJobs or for that matter Monster. It, won’t work in all categories. My fear is that this whole trend is going to get out of whack - someone will start a vertical search for digital cameras or something like that. Bah! Saw it before as B2B exchanges.

I tend to mildly agree with Tom Evslin who dismisses vertical search as an oxymoron. Never mind me because you will hear more about this trend and will find more companies getting funded. Let me explain -in the late 1990s, telecom was hot and incumbents like Cisco were busy shopping. VCs funded start-ups that could be bought. Wash, rinse repeat. Now Yahoo and Google have taken over the mantle, and with MSN jumping into the fray, it is quite clear there is going to be some serious “search related shopping.” So if you are an entrepreneur who is looking to build a sustainable business, then build a vertical search tool that allows the search’s big three to search for buyout candidates.

Samsung takes on Apple’s IPod

Looks like Apple might finally have some serious competition in the MP3 player business: Samsung. The South Korean giant wants to take over the leadership in the business from Apple by 2007. If the MP3 players they plan to ship are anything like current Yepp models, well, Apple has nothing to worry. My bet is that in premium markets like Japan, US and Europe, you will see IPod do well. Price sensitive markets well, they might say Yepp, especially is they are cheap enough.

NewsFactor reports that MP3 sales are going through the roof, and by 2009 there will be 132 million devices sold, up from 36.8 million in 2004. IPod is currently the category leader even though available in a handful of markets in comparison with plain vanilla Mp3 players. In order to catch-up, folks are experimenting and cramming new features into these devices. Digital Cameras, Video Playback and even VoIP. In other words classic mistakes that made Mp3 players a disaster to use before IPod came along.

Still Samsung is a serious enough threat - they have crazy money to burn and can discount their products no end to take market share. These guys did it when pushing memory chips, televisions and will repeat the scorched earth tactics in Mp3 players. Samsung hopes to sell 5 million units this year, up from 1.7 million in 2004. 2006, it wants to ship 12 million. Given their whole position as a chip-and-cell phone giant, they might have something going for it. Still, makes me wonder when the cell-phone division which wants to put MP3 players in the handsets butt heads with the MP3 division.

I am so used to the bombastic predictions by these giants, except a few months later you see IPod doing its thing, and others have fallen flat on their face. Apparently, Rio’s Karma has fallen victim to bad Karma.

Arkansas’ Broadband Face-Off

There is a broadband face-off going on in Arkansas. And its over a bill that want to spur broadband penetration by offering income tax breaks.
Even though it is not particularly a rich state, Arkansas is offering tax breaks worth around $36.5 million over four years to spur broadband deployment in the state.

This bill, SB Bill 980, approved Thursday by the Senate’s Technology and Legislative Affairs Committee, calls “for companies that offer broadband service to Arkansas counties with 20,000 or fewer residents to receive a 15 percent state income-tax credit. Those that offer service to counties with 20,000 or more residents would see a 10 percent credit.”

SBC and Alltel are backing this one but cable companies like Cox are opposing it. Cable companies complain that there is no reason why government should subsidize the phone companies’ broadband efforts. “These guys want all the breaks. They know exactly what they’re doing,” Regan said. “It’s hardball, pure and simple. We did it with no breaks and all private money. We’re real competitors.” They want the bill to be restricted to new greenfield deployments. I don’t understand why any of these guys have to get tax breaks, considering that they all get some funds from the universal service fund and all. Still, if this will spur them into action, so be it. Arkansas sees broadband as key to its future.

“The pace at which broadband is being adopted — in an economy where doing business means getting information — is so fast that if we don’t act now, we may never catch up,” said John Ahlen, president of the Arkansas Science and Technology Authority.

Full story @ Gazette

Walmart RFID Mandate -Status Not Encouraging!!

ETECH Notes: Bezos on vertical search and A9

Cory Doctorow: Here are my notes from Jeff Bezos's talk from the 2005 O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference, called "Vertical Search and A9." A9 has added a ton of tools to let people design their own domain-expert searches.

There are lots of things you can do if you're a domain expert in vertical search. If you're a medical pro and you search on Vioxx, you'll get different results from Web search and PubMed.

The data-sets are different and the relevance ranking and the transformations on the query are all different too.

PubMed takes the user-query and does sophisticated transformations, e.g. "Heart attack" into many medical terms.

The Web-search on Vioxx is mostly about class-action lawsuits, while the vertical is about medical info.

A9.com has a visual metaphor for vertical search -- columns for web results, image results, and reference results, your bookmarks, etc...

Sifry Updates Web 2.0 Preso: Man, A Lot of Folks Are Blogging!

Dave Sifry of Technorati has updated his "State of the Blogosphere" presentation from Web 2.0 last October. The growth in blogging is really amazing. From his note announcing his new findings:

"Technorati is now tracking over 7.8 million weblogs, and 937 million links. That's just about double the number of weblogs tracked in October 2004. In fact, the blogosphere is doubling in size about once every 5 months. It has already done so at this pace four times, which means that in the last 20 months, the blogosphere has increased in size by over 16 times."

Dave will be adding more to his presentation, so keep an eye on his site.

Tracking Bot Networks

This is a fascinating piece of research on bot networks: networks of compromised computers that can be remotely controlled by an attacker. The paper details how bots and bot networks work, who uses them, how they are used, and how to track them.

From the conclusion:

In this paper we have attempted to demonstrate how honeynets can help us understand how botnets work, the threat they pose, and how attackers control them. Our research shows that some attackers are highly skilled and organized, potentially belonging to well organized crime structures. Leveraging the power of several thousand bots, it is viable to take down almost any website or network instantly. Even in unskilled hands, it should be obvious that botnets are a loaded and powerful weapon. Since botnets pose such a powerful threat, we need a variety of mechanisms to counter it.

Decentralized providers like Akamai can offer some redundancy here, but very large botnets can also pose a severe threat even against this redundancy. Taking down of Akamai would impact very large organizations and companies, a presumably high value target for certain organizations or individuals. We are currently not aware of any botnet usage to harm military or government institutions, but time will tell if this persists.

In the future, we hope to develop more advanced honeypots that help us to gather information about threats such as botnets. Examples include Client honeypots that actively participate in networks (e.g. by crawling the web, idling in IRC channels, or using P2P-networks) or modify honeypots so that they capture malware and send it to anti-virus vendors for further analysis. As threats continue to adapt and change, so must the security community.

Google gets a taste of it's own Autolink Medicine

Mark Pilgrim of DiveIntoMark.org has written a Firefox extention called Butler that dramatically alters the pages on many Google services. Features include:

• removes ads on most Google pages
• fixes fonts on most Google pages
• Google web search:
• • adds links to other search sites ("Try your search on...")
  • in news results, adds links to other news sites
  • in movie results, adds links to other movie sites
  • in weather results, adds links to other weather sites
  • in product results, adds links to other product sites
• Google image search:
• • adds links to other image/photo/art sites
• Google News:
• • adds links to other news sites
• Froogle:
• • adds links to other product sites
• Google Print:
• • Removes image copying restrictions
  • adds links to other book sites
• Google Toolbar Firefox page:
• • adds links to other Firefox-friendly toolbars

Is it Spyware?

Mark asks if it's spyware? Why no, it's not!

No, Butler is not spyware. It does not track the pages you visit, display ads, hijack Amazon affiliate links, log keystrokes, steal passwords, set cookies, "phone home," or install any bundled software on your computer. It is simply a Firefox script that modifies a few Google services in ways that I find useful. If you don't like it, you can easily uninstall it.

Will Google Love it?

Of course they will, it's for the user right? and it seems to me that if those people want to block Google Ads and rearrange the pages, and if they want to go to other engines then they were going to do that anyway right Marissa?

This is cleary an attack on Google's widely condemed Autolink feature that allows users to change links on your pages to those chosen by Google. Google still have not deigned to take part in the discussion and frankly, Marissa Mayers comments on the subject were insulting at best. You can find links to code that disables Autolink here.

thanks bb

LMFAO....

Sweating in an airport? You could be a terrorist

In November, a security scanner that sees through clothes and produces a nude image of passengers was tested at Terminal 4 of the London Heathrow airport. The scanning device can spot not just metal but other potential threats like ceramic knives or hidden drugs.

The electromagnetic technology, known as Millimeter Wave, is just one aspect of a potential revolution in security screening being pioneered at QinetiQ.

While travelling, you could one day be submitted to "hyperspectral sensing" that will check for pheromones, chemicals secreted by the human body, which may indicate agitation or stress. The stress could betray the nervousness of a potential attacker, but it could also simply indicate fear of flying.

As with MMW, the technology could function at a distance and without the need for people to wait in line.

Now as you proceed through the terminal, the next layer of surveillance could be carried out through "cognitive software" which monitors someone's movements and sounds a silent alarm if it picks up an unusual pattern.

While many of these technologies are still under development, others have already been rolled out to clients. Millimetre wave, for example, has been trialled at airports and is being used by immigration authorities and Channel Tunnel operator Eurotunnel to detect illegal immigrants trying to enter the country as stowaways in the back of trucks.

Via Wired and Prison Planet.
Related: security check for plastic bottles.

New Apple OS in April?

That's what Think Secret is reporting -- though the supposed announcement date of April 1 does raise an eyebrow. If it's true, I wonder if Apple will launch a new legal action to find out how the news got loose.

(Updated to corrected the link...)

How South Korea got its Broadband Mojo

Every so often a pundit or a journalist rediscovers South Korea and presents it as a broadband nirvana. And it is! Still, not many try and write about how South Korea became center of the broadband world. No mention of South Korean government’s generous subsidies or its not so gentle nudge that forced incumbents out of its slumber. Its a case study on why governments need to get actively involved in the broadband rollout. In comparison we have a murky situation in the US, where incumbents are playing wait and see game. The municipal broadband is still being stopped in its tracks. San Francisco Chronicle goes to Seoul and brings back a very complete picture of how broadband has changed South Korea. The rollout of broadband has made some high-speed services possible and thus has fostered new innovation and new start-ups, especially in online gaming and entertainment space in South Korea.

Even American companies are finding that if they want to innovate, their early market is going to be Korea. Microsoft has done well with its MSN Mobile, and so have others. But this doesn’t mean that Koreans are happy buying other people’s technology. They are now working hard to take control of their broadband destiny. WiBro, the fixed wireless standard is a way to keep out American tech giants, and help grow local technology business. Koreans believe that the next generation WiBro networks - three of them - will help “raise Korean gross domestic product to $20,000 per capita from $12,600 in 2003, the latest available figure. In the United States, GDP per capita was $40,000 in 2004.”

This has long term ramifications for Silicon Valley. For the longest time SV has been home to the latest and greatest technology, mostly because US was a nation that “early adopted” technology. With marginal broadband in US, most innovators still cannot comprehend and start companies based on a near ubiquitous broadband experience. Slowly, it is going to start eroding American competitiveness in one of three industries which are still big export dollar generators. (Fast Food and Hollywood being the other two!) South Koreans want to become players in global markets, and are going to leverage their domestic knowledge worldwide. (Remember we used to do that in US.) Chinese want to do precisely the same. These are new reality of post-broadband world. (As an aside, I must mention that the challenges of wiring up a country the size of US are many.)

UBS revises 2005 GDP outlook, unexpected export growth

Here are the key points:

• UBS increased its 2005 real GDP growth forecast to 9.6%, from 8.8%.
• This does not reflect a change in view on the overall pace of domestic demand. 
• UBS sees the same slowdown in investment spending, and stable consumption path as before.
• This is still a “soft landingâ€� for the Chinese economy. 

Key change in outlook:

• Net export balance.
• UBS expects a sharp increase in the current account surplus to almost 9% of GDP, in line with the unexpectedly strong current export trend and unusually weak import trend.
• These are due to a sharp turnaround in mid-stream basic materials sectors such as metals and chemicals, which have moved from being large net importers to net exports in many cases.
• Main drivers are both demand (the slowdown in domestic construction activity) as well as supply (excess capacity in most basic materials areas).
• More demand will be met by domestic producers and less by overseas sources. 
• This could weaken growth in China's neighbors, who are the major suppliers to the mainland economy.

Guidance for 2006:

• UBS also increased its 2006 growth forecast to 8.4% from 7.4%.

Implications:

• No hard landing.
• Support for commodity prices.
• Larger foreign currency reserve accumulation and US Dollar Treasury purchases.
• More pressure by the G7 to appreciate the Chinese Yuan.

Terry Ratzmann's Homepage.

Terry Ratzmann's Homepage. After reading some accounts of the Wisconsin church shooting, I noted he was into horticulture. A Google search turned up only four entries, one from his church, and three forum posts written by Terry himself about plants, which included his email address at "traven@execpc.com". I went old school, and formatted an URL in Unix style, trying his email name as a web directory and hit paydirt.

More Reactions To Sony: No Return?

: A couple of stories are taking a second look at new Sony CEO Howard Stringer, and hint that it may be too late to do anything with Sony, at least in terms of convergence.
-- NYTimes: Last week, Sony announced a bunch of new Walkmans positioned against the ultralight iPod Shuffle. They reflect the same insular hardware culture that learned the wrong lessons from the earlier success of the Walkman. The game today, however, is not necessarily about spec sheets and weight in grams.
-- Newsweek: In the most famous cases, Sony failed to spot the potential of flat-panel TVs, ceding leadership to Samsung and Sharp, and fumbled the lead in digital music players to Apple. "I can't afford to be beaten this way again," concedes Stringer, if only because the iPod defeat has become a symbol of "Sony's stodginess."

Burst Down. RealNetworks to Go

: Microsoft has settled its patent lawsuit with Burst.com...MSFT has paid a one-time fee of $60 million for a non-exclusive license to Burst's international patent portfolio.
According to Foley, Microsoft is rumored to be working to settle the last major private antitrust case against it (with RealNetworks). But there's no official word on how, when and if that might happen.

Sony's new CEO

The NYT and the Economist both comment on the appointment of Sir Howard Stringer as Sony's new CEO.

"The problems he inherits are severe. Two years after the so-called “Sony shock”, when the bottom fell out of its earnings and its shares began to plunge (see chart 1), the company appears no closer to sorting out the mess in its electronics business. In the fiscal year that ends this month, Sony expects to have an operating-profit margin—on more than ¥7 trillion ($67 billion) in global sales—of only 1.5%. That is a pitifully low figure, and is a far cry from the 10% margin that Mr Idei promised by March 2007."

s from Sony's media businesses, who are naturally delighted by this week's sudden announcement, credit Sir Howard's low-key but results-driven style for this run of success. One of his boldest moves in media was to buy MGM, a famous studio with a much-coveted film library, in partnership with three private-equity firms and Comcast, a cable-television company. Sir Howard is believed to have wanted to buy more of MGM, but could not persuade his bosses in Tokyo to put up enough cash; in the end Sony paid only $300m of the $1.6 billion of equity financing that went into buying the studio."

"The cassette-playing Walkman, even though it was outrageously successful, did not help Sony prepare for the digital player. The Walkman was nothing but hardware, and surprisingly simple. The first one was built in 1979, when a Sony executive sent a request to the company's tape recorder unit to rig up a portable cassette player that could provide stereo sound but still be light enough for him to take along on international flights. A small team pulled out the recording mechanism and speaker of the company's monaural Pressman, a cassette recorder used by journalists, installed stereo circuitry and added earphones. It was ready in four days."

"The predigital Walkman evolved over the years into more than an astounding 1,120 models. But its essential nature remained unchanged: it was dumb hardware. When Apple Computer introduced the iPod in November 2001, Steve Jobs described his new player as "the 21st-century Walkman." With 98 years remaining in the century, that was an early call. But he was correct. The iPod in 2001 was a Walkman successor, but smarter, its hard drive easily navigated with well-designed software."

No doubt Sir Howard Stringer faces a gigantic task in the middle of a foreign corporate culture. If he succeeds the reward will be big...

Via TJ's Weblog

AOL - All of your Conversations are Belong to Us!

Check out the new TOS for AIM

"In addition, by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy."

thanks susan

Terrorist reality TV boosts ratings in Iraq

Every night at 9pm thousands entertainment-starved Iraqis tune in to the state-run al-Iraqiya channel to see the "confessions" by insurgents, with recently added victimsÂ’ families who hurl abuse at the suspects and detail their crimes.

Terror in the Grip of Justice is the latest weapon in the GovernmentÂ’s propaganda war against the insurgents, exposing them as the enemies of Iraqis and cautioning those tempted to join them.
The authorities insist that the confessions are genuine, although many wonder whether the statements are made by ashamed killers or simply bad B-actors.

The show has become the most watched ever on al-Iraqiya, an unpopular channel set up and funded by the Americans. The Americans, who no longer supervise the stationÂ’s output, say they have no hand in the show which was conceived by the Interior Ministry to demonstrate the authoritiesÂ’ fight against the insurgency.

Insurgents have begun a propaganda counter-offensive, denouncing the tapes as fakes and threatening to impose "God’s justice" on the station’s employees — a threat apparently made real with the killing of Raeda Wazan, an anchor- woman, last month.

Via The Agenda < The Times.

: Psychological warfare.

Via Aeiou.

RIAA Settlement details

One tells his tale. Nick Mamatas tells his story of settling with the RIAA to the Village Voice. 8,400 suits have been filed (8,100 against anonymous IP addresses), with about 1,700 settling to the tune of between $3,000 and $7,000; none have actually reached trial. M..

AT&T Execs $31 million Payout

AT&T senior executives will get $31 million if SBC deal goes through and the new parent decides to bid adieu to Ma Bell's senior executives. In addition, FCC has started a 180 day public comment period and the merger will be consummated in early 2006 if all goes according to plan. There is a plan [...]

VoIP and the telemarketing nightmare

The growing popularity of VoIP might have a big downside - telemarketing. Many folks are focusing on the SPAM problem associated with VoIP, ignoring the fact that falling costs of dialing means telemarketers can now dial as much as they want, and skirt the pesky "traditional long-distance cost constraints and U.S. Do-Not-Call regulations to [...]

Stage Set For India Headquartered Software Companies To Grow Phenomenally

Via Sadagopan's weblog on Emerging Technologies,Thoughts, Ideas,Trends and Cyberworld

Bad week at the Plex

The denizens of the Plex have been through a really bad hair week. It has been fairly clear that Google was in for a bad time on the Nasdaq once the mainline and investor press picked up the bad PR that was seeping out across the blog world on Google. Everyone from Danny Sullivan to the Wall Street Journal, and Slashdot on Threadwatch to Business Week has been having a go at them over the past few days.

From the particular, the Toolbar fiaso, to the general, Yahoo and others may be poised to do better in the long term - they have been slated. They refuse to back down on the toolbar fiasco, and are getting bad mainstream press, the banning themselves for cloaking was just plain wierd, and the financial press are looking at their long term profitability

Follow the title link for the full post.

Add to this list Walter Mosberg in the Wall Street journal on Friday. As for us, if it ain't good for the goose (M$) it ain't good for the gander (YHOO)

Via Threadwatch.org - Less Noise - More Signal

ReBlog 1.0 has been installed and the MT plug-in to link is now also functioning as its supposed to. After updating the templates that control how stories get displayed, we will run some tests,

Apple's "Trade Secrets"

AP: Judge: Apple can press bloggers on sources. A California judge on Friday ruled that three independent online reporters may have to divulge confidential sources in a lawsuit brought by Apple Computer Inc., ruling that there are no legal protections for those who publish a company's trade secrets.

Reporting on business, if this bad ruling is upheld on appeal, will be a great deal harder in the future. Companies will simply slap "trade secret" protection on everything they do, and any reporter who gets a scoop on anything the company doesn't want the public to know about will be under a legal threat.

didn't fully buy Apple's contention that the bloggers are not journalists. He ducked the question. His ruling suggests he was half-persuaded that these folks may well be journalists after all. Thanks for small favors.

But there will be long-range damage from this. Apple's acolytes, who keep finding reasons to worship a company that deserves increasing contempt, won't care. Someday, they will, but maybe too late by then.

During the time Steve Jobs has run the company, Apple has been hostile to truly independent journalism about its products and policies. This current attack on journalism -- and that is precisely what is going on here -- reflects the side of Jobs that will someday lead the company back down from its current heights. He is a genius, no question, but he is a control freak who doesn't seem to care whatsoever that he's infuriating some natural allies.

I'm writing this on a Mac. If I were buying a replacement today, I'm not at all sure I'd make the same choice again.

Upgrading Reblog

We've gotten pretty far in upgrading the Reblog software we use to pass on to you the stories that catch our fantasy each day. Thus far, we've got the Refeed component working but haven't managed to complete the link (plug-in) to our Movable Type blogging software.

What this means is that instead of moving our selections at the flick of a click from ReFeed to MT, we're forced into an awkward cut and paste mode.

No pain, no gain, we suppose. The upgrade will give us an easier mode to insert our own comments into the stories, well aware that most are just fine without any added baggage from our part.

We're looking forward to seeing how it's going to work. In the meantime, we've passed on a couple of stories today and hope to be back in full swing tomorow.

Mice with human brains coming?

Mark Frauenfelder
2005-03-08T10:14:51-08:00

Mark Frauenfelder:
Researchers at Stanford University are planning to create mice with brains made entirely of human brain cells from aborted fetuses. The mice would be used to study Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease.

...the university's ethics committee approved the research, under certain conditions. Prof Henry Greely, the head of the committee, said: "If the mouse shows human-like behaviours, like improved memory or problem-solving, it's time to stop."

Link (Thanks, James!)

WIPO Shutting Out Public Interest Voices

Here's the scoop on what's happening at WIPO with regard to the April meetings on the Development Agenda [EFF]. It's unpretty.



Previous relevant Copyfight coverage here, here, and here.

Via Copyfight

Cable Vs. DSL

DSL surge not quite enough. "It's a horse race now, but cable has a 10-length lead," says Leichtman Research Group's Bruce Leichtman of the ongoing cable/DSL battle. Techweb reports that despite of a recent DSL surge, cable is holding on to its lead (19.9 million subscribers t..

New Homeowners Handcuffed to ISP's

Carriers striking deals with developers. The Arizona Republic reports that in the Phoenix area, both Cox and Qwest are striking deals with homebuilders to make them the "preferred" provider in their developments. The downside of this of course, is new home buyers are paying for the service..

Grokster Press Conference Now Online (Donna Wentworth)

The EFF/Public Knowledge press conference on the Grokster case is now available [MP3, 37M] for listening on the EFF site. Public Knowledge's briefing materials are here; also see Beyond Grokster, a Robert Schwartz/Mike Godwin critique of various policy proposals Congress may consider no matter what the outcome of the case.

Yet Another Form of Digital Radio: 3G Cellular

Orbitcast alerts us to the Next Next (Next) Big Thing: Radio over third-generation cellular (3G) data networks. Virgin Radio is “broadcasting” two stations for free that anyone with the right cellular phone can listen to by downloading a small application. The capable audience is nearly 15 million.

This is just the beginning, too, as hybrid cell phones that handle 3G and Wi-Fi will allow opportunistic networking in
which if you’re streaming radio—or audio or video or downloading a file—a handset will switch from cellular to a
cheaper or better or faster signal as it’s available.

3G is a worldwide phenomenon, although a little muted in the U.S. where a scarcity of spectrum has led to late
deployments and initially high pricing. In South Korea, Japan, and parts of Europe, 3G is widely available, fast, and
not terribly expensive. (In Europe, Wi-Fi is incredibly expensive, so 3G is a cost-effective alternative in many
cases.)

Blogging 2.0

Fred Wilson writes:

I see four fundamental improvements that differentiate Blogging 1.0 from Blogging 2.0.

The first is the notion of the post as the central piece of content. About.com had some of this in its DNA, but Geocities and Tripod did not. Posts drive freshness, frequency, and syndication and make Blogging 2.0 much more exciting than Bloggin 1.0 was.

The second is related to the first. Permalinks have changed the game fundamentally. Linking to content was not really possible until permalinks came along. Now each piece of content is a persistent object that has a unique identifier. This is a huge deal and this concept did not exist in Blogging 1.0.

The third is RSS. Blogging 1.0 was a web experience. Blogging 2.0 is a everywhere experience. Content was a solid in Blogging 1.0 and its a fluid in Blogging 2.0.

The fourth is CPC and contextual ad networks. In Blogging 1.0, the only way to monetize the business was with banners. And brand advertisers were not thrilled with paying high CPMs to advertise on "amateur content". With the arrival of CPC and contextual ad networks, this is no longer the case. Wherever advertisers can get clicks, they'll place their ads. The result is a huge increase in the potential revenues.

Silicon Valley Watcher: Why your podcast is probably already illegal

UK WiFi Users Get Free Skype Calls

Skype is moved into wireless telephony by announceing that a deal with UK wireless provider Broadreach, the BBC reports.

People using wireless net hotspots will soon be able to make free phone calls as well as surf the net.

Wireless provider Broadreach and net telephony firm Skype are rolling out a service at 350 hotspots around the UK this week.

Users will need a Skype account - downloadable for free - and they will then be able to make net calls via wi-fi without paying for net access.

 

Google Local Upgrade

Google today introduced upgrades to Google Local, taken together they point to some interesting trends in Google's approach to this market.

First, Google has integrated its broadly acclaimed Google Maps application, not a surprising move. Second, and more interestingly, Google has incoporated reviews. But unlike Yahoo, which allows for users to submit reviews at the point of search, Google crawls the web for reviews which are already extant, then rolls them into its results. Users cannot add their own reviews on the spot.

This is an important distinction, and yet another declaration of how Google differs from its competitors, in particular Yahoo. I've written about this here and here (and a lot of other places). Blogger aside (and there's plenty to say about the limitations of that platform), Google has always been uncomfortable with user created content, at least on its main site. While sites like Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo are full bore participants in the architecture of participation (AOP), Google prefers to lay an algorithm between user created content and its own search service. It's still AOP, but it's AOP once removed.

Why am I on about this? Well, Yahoo's approach allows merchants to join the AOP party, and start paying for listings, for example. Google's approach - at least so far - eschews this potential revenue stream. Again, Google seems to be avoiding the deeper media play.

This is not a criticism, per se, just an observation. The new Google Local also scans the web for other useful information such as prices, hours of operation, and so on. On first blush, the new service looks greatly improved. But I wonder if the approach - of filtering the web rather than engaging an AOP based platform - will really work for users. We'll see. It's great that there are such distinct approaches to the same market - it means we'll all learn more, more quickly.

Bernie Ebbers, Dumb & Dumber

Bernie Ebbers’ despite claims of no knowledge about minor details of the business called WorldCon had intimate knowledge of the goings-on at his company, according to his testimony. There are some juicy nuggests from today’s proceedings, that come to you via fine folks at Light Reading. Here is what he had to say about Jack Grubman.

Ebbers testified that Grubman had visited him on his yacht at the 1999 Super Bowl and he had played pool with him, but that they weren’t close personal friends, and when he visited the yacht he ‘didn’t stay the whole weekend. We had a professional relationship.

Bernie says he never took any advice from Grubman, but this is a complete lie, as per Grubman’s own congressional testimony. Later in the day, he addressed the Coffeegate scandal - free coffee was replaced by dispensers.

‘I approved replacing the free coffee with a dispenser… It was a good idea.’

Penny wise, pound foolish, some might say.

‘It’s important, Look after pennies, the dimes will take care of themselves.’

Other nuggets of dumbness and self incrimination.

‘You added a half percent,’ said Anders, referring to Ebbers’s statement that he had tacked on to the company’s growth numbers.

‘Yes,’ replied Ebbers. ‘…it doesn’t matter… what’s important is the range.’

‘So there was no motive to add a half percent?’ asked Anders.

‘No,’ said Ebbers. ”

RFID Security Analysis

A very impressive analysis of the Texas Instruments RFID technology used in a variety of security systems, such as vehicle immobilizers and ExxonMobil's SpeedPass system.

Mistake number 1: The cryptographic algorithm is a proprietary 40-bit cipher.

Microsoft Loses Key Engineer to Google

galdur writes "Microsoft Watch reports Marc Lucovsky, one of Microsoft's key Windows architects has defected to Google. His confidence in Microsoft's ability to ship software seems to have waned, too. Some hypothesize Google working on an OS but in the wake of Google's inroads into Ajax tech applications (GMail, Suggest, Maps), I think Google may have other plans for the chief software architect for Microsoft's .Net My Services ("Hailstorm")" CT Many users are reporting 404s on the Microsoft Watch article, but its working fine for others. Hopefully they'll fix their server soon.

Nokia Says Fuel Cells Not Ready For Prime Time Just Yet

Just months after jumping on the fuel cell bandwagon and claiming the technology was "reasonably mature," it looks like Nokia has seen some more signs of adolescence in the technology. They're holding off on plans to develop fuel cell phones, and don't believe such phones will be available for a few years. Fuel cell still seem quite overhyped. While they will provide much longer battery life, people may not like them for a very simple reason: it takes them back to buying new "fuel" for their devices all the time. Notice how almost all gadgets these days now use rechargeable batteries? People don't like having to constantly buy new batteries and replace the old ones. However, they don't seem to have as much of a problem recharging batteries. With fuel cells, the cells will come in containers that the average person will simply assume are batteries -- and you're back to having to replace batteries instead of recharge them.

Broadband Providers Are Happy About Monopolies When They're The Monopoly

In all of the arguments the various broadband providers have been making against muni-broadband, one of the more popular ones is that it's unfair competition, and the muni-provider would basically have a "monopoly" on the town or city. They usually go on to talk about the importance of competition. Well, apparently, that doesn't apply to themselves. You don't see them complaining at all when they can strike deals with new home developments that requires homeowners to use only the approved services (found via Broadband Reports). In fact, many of these developments simply include the fees to the broadband providers directly in the Home Owners Association fees -- meaning you're paying for it whether or not you use it. Apparently, those types of monopolies are just fine.

Billboard to launch Digital Music Blog

Billboard, the trusted source of music and entertainment news, charts and reviews has joined the blogosphere with the launch of Billboard PostPlay, a blog covering the latest news, trends, analysis and economics of the digital music industry.

The blog is a partnership with paidContent.org and will be directed by Rafat Ali, editor of paidContent.org

The site will aggregate links to stories across the web pertaining to digital music along with commentary and analysis by Ali and his editorial team, creating a daily must-read site for the industry. Additional site content will be user generated, as readers will be able to comment on stories and provide links to additional relevant articles. As a convenient research feature, the archives will be collected by subject, company and category, as well as by calendar date.

“With the digital music scene ever-evolving, a trusted blog was the only real way to keep up with the pace of change. And as a fan of Rafat and paid Content, working with them was the obvious choice.” said John Kilcullen, President and Publisher of Billboard. “The digital music community already looks to Billboard for news, reviews and analysis and our charts power most of the download music commerce sites. Billboard PostPlay is a dynamic extension of that relationship with the industry and provides a unique resource unlike any other on the web.”

The site goes live today with Ali posting live from the 5th annual Digital Music Forum, the annual conference hosted by Digital Media Wire and sponsored by Billboard.

Microsoft AntiSpyware is Spyware?

A couple of weeks back, we reported on a sneaky M$ patch that was reseting users homepages to MSN.com as well as fixing bugs...

Now, Preston Gralla at O'Reilly points out that Microsofts AntiSpyware software does much the same thing, every time it blocks a homepage hijack!

How does it do this? In a devilishly simple and exceedingly misleading manner. When it detects that a hijacker is trying to reset your home page, it warns you and then asks whether you want to block the hijacker. When you answer yes, Microsoft AntiSpyware promptly blocks the hijacker. But it then does a hijack of its own and resets your home page to MSN.com.

If you dig deep enough, you can defeat AntiSpyware's home page hijacking. Choose Advanced Tools-->Browser Hijack Restore, and highlight Start Page. Click "Change restore settings to a new URL," type in your normal home page, then click OK. From now on, when Microsoft blocks a home page hijacking, it will let you keep your own home page, and won't do a hijacking on its own.

Quite astonishing....

Windows XP Professional x64 Edition in April

After a long wait, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition is coming a few months earlier than expected.

64 Bit Windows in April

Should be RTM this month. Jim Allchin, Microsoft’s senior vice president of platforms, says the company will begin shipping desktop/workstation version of Windows XP Professional x64 in early April. "We are locked on 64-bit - You should start [tailoring] your applications to..

Yahoo Opens Up Search Tools

CNet: Yahoo opens up its search toolbox to developers. The network will allow software developers to create new applications (with the aid of application programming interfaces, or APIs) on top of Yahoo search, including images, video, news and local search.

This is a boost to the emerging Web services arena, and potentially a big deal for grassroots media as well. Giving people some tools to make new kinds of Web-based applications, connecting this set of data on one site with that set of data on another, is part of a phenomenon that will transform the way we think of information.

Google already has done some of this. Now Yahoo is upping the ante, it appears -- and Web users will be the winners in the end.

Help Journalists with Good Questions

NiemanWatchdog.org notes that Rupert Murdoch is speaking at an upcoming newspaper convention, and the site is soliciting questions to ask the media mogul. I may post one or two myself.

Stripe Snoop

Stripe Snoop is a suite of research tools that captures, modifies, validates, generates, analyzes, and shares data from magstripe cards. The data is captured through different hardware interfaces (or stdin), the contents decoded into the correct character set, and then...

Intuit Forces Upgrades To Quicken

What do you do if your customers are happy with older versions of your software and you want to make more money off of them? Why you force them to upgrade by taking away some of the functionality of their older versions. That’s what Intuit is doing with Quicken users. People who rely on older versions of Quicken, 2001 & 2002, to download their financial data from banks and brokerages must upgrade to Quicken 2005 or lose this time-saving feature, says the publisher of the popular personal finance package.

From the PCWorld article: Intuit spokesperson Chris Repetto says the company's decision to end .qif support was unrelated to its decision to end online services for the 2001-2002 versions of Quicken. He says the .qif format was abandoned because it was old technology that required a lot of costly customer support by both banks and Intuit, and because DirectConnect and WebConnect (which import data with one button instead of in a multistep process with a greater chance of error) provide a superior user experience….
But Repetto maintains that the people who are complaining in forums and newsgroups about either the end of support for Quicken 2001-2002 or the end of .qif import capability are a small minority. "At the end of the day, we are solving problems for millions and not a couple of people in a chat room," he says.

Isn’t it nice to have so much business that you can openly ignore part of your customer base and not have to worry about it?

New York Lawmakers Seeking $1 Billion ($100 Million/Year) for stem cells -- Despite concerns about cloning, research getting bipartisan support from lawmakers who don't want NY falling behind in biotech race

State lawmakers from both parties yesterday proposed spending at least $100 million a year for stem cell research, joining a growing number of states moving to fill the void left by President...

Aastrom, Stem Cells and CRYO-Cell Lead Stem Cell Index Up 8.81% With Double Digit Increases -- Biggest Single Gain In The Index History

Today the Index Value closed at $3.46, up 0.28 -- a gain of 8.81%.

The index value climbed to 0.9505 from 0.8736 with an associated index market cap of $1.705 Billion.

Aastrom...

Sourced fromHype & HopeReblogged by dymaxion on March 3, 2005 12:18 AM Originally posted by: Kevin O'Daniel

How Spyware Works

Spyware doesn't just install itself by magic — although it can certainly seem that way. Typically, users need to visit a spyware-infested site and take some action to cause a spyware module to be installed. Sometimes just clicking to exit an annoying popup will do it. Knowing when to click — and more important, when not to click --— takes some experience and knowledge.[desktoppipeline]

Read this article to know thy enemies.

...John

BrightCove

More on the TV over IP meme - Jeremy Allaire, who has more than a few years of entrepreneurship under his belt - is launching Bright Cove, an "exploding TV" company, as Fred Wilson puts it. It's got serious money behind it - more than $5 million at launch from Accel and General Catalyst. Om has more coverage - he calls it "a platform for the little guy." This sounds promising.

Firefox Nips IE Ankles Again

Even with the growth of the mighty Firefox still pushing forward, it is great to see that the growth has not come to a screeching halt. Still, I know from experience that people still use Internet Explorer by the truck load. Some do it because that is their choice, while vast numbers of other people do it because they don’t realize there is a choice….

Direct and Related Links for 'Firefox Nips IE Ankles Again'

The New Hows and Whys of Global Eavesdropping

The New Hows and Whys of Global Eavesdropping [book review: for access: "legion" "legion"] Remember chatter? After 9/11, it was all over the news. For months, snatches of cellphone conversations in Karachi or Tora Bora routinely made the front page. Television newscasters could chill the blood instantly by reporting on "increased levels of chatter" somewhere in the ether. But what exactly was it? Who was picking it up, and how were they making sense of it?

Patrick Radden Keefe does his best to answer these questions and demystify a very mysterious subject in "Chatter," a beginner's guide to the world of electronic espionage and the work of the National Security Agency, responsible for communications security and signals intelligence, or "sigint." In a series of semiautonomous chapters, he describes Echelon, the vast electronic intelligence-gathering system operated by the United States and its English-speaking allies; surveys the current technology of global eavesdropping; and tries to sort out the vexed issue of privacy rights versus security demands in a world at war with terrorism.

Odeo's Money, Podcasting & Pre-Launch Publicity

: Ev Williams and partner Noah Glass ceded some control over their message when they announced new venture Odeo through a news article by John Markoff, a valuable opportuntity but one that has Williams scrambling now to emphasize the points that matter most to him using the Odeo blog as his forum. He's disturbed by the focus on Odeo as a business, preferring to emphasize his goals to humanize and democratize In the process, he offers more details about their plans.
"We are starting a company, so we have answers to the questions of how we're going to make money, when prodded. But we're not even building in money-making functionality from the start. We expect the vast majority of content on Odeo to be free -- and even free from advertising. Indefinitely."

"We are not building an "eBay," except in the sense that we will make it possible for individuals who want to do business with each other to do so. I don't think there is any way someone could have a monopoly on audio content, nor are we trying to. In fact, our system will be open in a bunch of different ways."
"Our focus is on humanizing a very promising technology. Making it easier for those already doing it (listening or creating). And getting many more people involved by creating a great experience. If we do that right, maybe money will come -- to us and others. If not, someone else will do it."

Rule of thumb: When someone says it's not about the money, it's usually about the money. There are exceptions to every rule so we'll take Williams at his word when he says Odeo isn't all about the money. But it's naive to think that a lot of people aren't viewing this as a test of whether podcasting can make serious money.
(via Adam Curry)
Related: Ev Williams Launches Into Podcasting With Boost From the NY Times

Brain drain

By Alex Soojung-Kim Pang Twenty years from now, historians will say that one of the great unintended consequences of the war on terror was that it contributed to the erosion of America’s preeminence in science and technology. Not so much...

Keyword Search Prices Drop Two Percent

A new Fathom report was released today and shows that keyword prices dropped two percent last month. Despite the overall decrease, the mortgage-finance category again rose three percent from $4.93 to $5.10...The telecom-broadband sector prices also rose three percent from...

MGM v. Grokster: Here's Why P2P is Valuable

Briefs defending Grokster's right to exist were filed yesterday in MGM v. Grokster, from Intel, Creative Commons [PDF], and many others. Among them, 17 computer science professors laid out the case for P2P, beginning with principles: "First, the United States' description of the Internet's design is wrong. P2P networks are not new developments in network design, but rather the design on which the Internet itself is based." Pointedly, the EFF compares this case's arguments to those made over 20 years ago in the Betamax case, which established the public's right to use video-copying technology, because of its "substantial non-infringing uses," even though many used videotape to infringe copyright. We'll soon see whether that right will extend to peer-to-peer software: the Supreme Court takes this up on March 29th.

Appeals Court Overturns Eolas/Microsoft Patent Decision

This story just came out so the details aren't fully in yet, but it appears that the Appeals Court has overturned at least part of the Eolas patent decision against Microsoft. It appears they've ordered a new trial, where Microsoft will be able to present more evidence of prior art against the patent. This is good news, as the Eolas patent is one of the biggest examples of a patent on something that's both obvious and with prior art that's being used to hold innovation hostage.

Not Buying iPods Becomes A Patriotic Issue In South Korea

Apparently, the widespread success of the Apple iPod in South Korea is ticking off some Korean consumer electronics companies, who are taking out newspaper ads trying to encourage a patriotic boycott of the iPod in favor of South Korean-made portable media devices. Of course, the simple solution to this issue is to make a better product.

China releases Internet user predictions

Here are the key points and a quick thought:

• According to China's Ministry of Information Industry (MII), China's Internet user base is expected to grow 28% in 2005 to 120 million.
• This compares to 16% growth in 2004.

Telecom statistics (as of the end of January 2005):

• 316 million fixed-line users (an increase of 3.2 million from the end of December 2004).
• 340 million mobile users (an increase of 5 million from the end of December 2004).

More here.

Quick thought: 28% Internet user growth in 2005 is surely reassuring to Chinese Internet businesses. This prediction comes amid concerns that Chinese Internet user growth is slowing (See New China Internet users lowest since 2001).

How big a problem is click-fraud?

According to The Times of India, " A growing number of housewives, college graduates, and even working professionals across metropolitan cities are rushing to click paid Internet ads to make $100 to $200... per month". Investors in search and advertising stocks had better understand the scope of the click-fraud problem. Some thoughts:

1. Most pay-per-click (PPC) ad revenue comes from search. Over 50% of Google's revenue (numbers here) came from its own search site, and the vast majority of PPC revenue generated by Yahoo!, AskJeeves, FindWhat and LookSmart also comes from search. PPC ads on search pages are susceptible to two forms of click fraud: investors looking to boost the profits of stocks they own, and competitors trying to raise their rivals' advertising and marketing costs. Both problems are probably limited in scope, since they don't generate tangible profits for the "clicker".

2. PPC ads run by publishers are more problematic. Publishers get paid for clicks on ads on their own site, and are therefore incentivized to fraudulently pay others to click on their ads. Seth Godin thinks that click-fraud is such a serious problem that the company is "a house of cards". Like the India Times, he highlights the results of a Google-search for "earn rupees clicking ads".

3. Mechanisms are available to limit click fraud. The PPC ad companies block repeated clicks from the same IP address. (That probably isn't enough, though. StopClickFraud.com describes how fraudulent clickers limit their clicks per IP address to avoid blocking.)  Oliver Thyman argues that "mathematic formulas like Fourrier Analysis might be able to calculate the level of click fraud and see unlikely changes" in usage patterns. Crucially, Google has publicly acknowledged the severity of the click fraud problem, and has hinted that it  is working on solutions.

4. Investors need to see advertising technology trends in a wider perspective. Pay-per-click ads have been wildly successful because they are measurable and more closely tie advertising costs to advertisers' profits. Seth Goldstein convincingly argues that ads will become more and more linked to real performance: "The future of Internet advertising is sales". Note the implication here: PPC ads will converge with affiliate marketing programs, which are entirely success-based. In a world of 100% success-based advertising, there's no room for click-fraud.

The bottom line? Click fraud might raise the search engine firms' profits in the short-run. But in the long-term, it destroys advertisers' return on investment and the "performance-based" nature of PPC ads. So PPC ad-dependent companies like Google, Yahoo!, FindWhat, LookSmart, and Mama.com will be forced to combat click fraud. In that context, it's significant that FindWhat.com claimed on its Q4 conference call that it eliminated profitable revenue because it didn't deliver underlying value to advertisers.

The Diminishing Slashdot Effect

BusinessWeek are running a piece on Slashdot's diminishing "slashdot effect" - citing analysts and site owners they're saying that a link from the grandfather tech site no longer means what it once did to the sites it links to.

They blame the resurgence of tech related sites, paricularly blogs:

How can this be? The number of news sites Slashdot is linking to has skyrocketed. And that has reduced the impact Slashdot can make on each individual site's traffic. The number of tech news sites, run by traditional media companies, reaches 360 today, up 20% from 300 just one year ago, according to Hitwise. These sites have proliferated following a revival in U.S. online ad spending, which is projected to grow by more than 20% in 2005, to more than $11 billion, according to e-commerce consultancy eMarketer.

BLOG INVASION. The end result is a watering down of the Slashdot effect. Readers are still jumping from Slashdot to other sites. Indeed, Slashdot probably has more readers than ever, but they're going out into a far larger Internet news world. While their impact on the Web as a whole is still significant, the effect on individual sites or even particular stories is a lot less than it used to be.

One thing they don't note, that i think is important is the way we view, find and share information - closed groups are somewhat passe - just look at some of the larger group websites out there: The walled garden is gone - and whereas i'd love a link from Slashdot, i'd not expect the boost in traffic to come from there alone.

Slashdot appears to me to be a closed group. What's happening is this:

• Blog A picks up a story
• Blog B posts a link to Blog A, adding some more info
• Blog C picks up blog B's post and cite's blog B as the link
• Dont ya see? It's the blog as network

We can't say exactly how the trick is done, but we understand the basics: a network, a message-passing protocol, nodes that aggregate inputs and produce outputs. The blog network shares these architectural properties. Its foundation network is the Web; its protocol is RSS; its nodes are bloggers. These ingredients combine in ways that are not yet widely appreciated.

Blo.gs for Sale

Phil "i think TW members are scum" Ringnalda points to Blo.gs being up for sale. The package includes:

• the blo.gs domain name (and all subdomains)
• the weblo.gs domain name
• the database of blogs (and related databases)
• all rights to the blo.gs software*

The blo.gs DB is at about 6 million....

Allaire launches "democratic" TV

LR friend Jeremy Allaire has started a new company that promises to help anyone with video content put it up on TV and the internet. Allaire says his goal for BrightCove is to "democratize" the television and video process.

Via Lost Remote

Daily Show on the Jeff Gannon and Eason Jordan media fallout

Well, this is from almost a week ago, but I didn't have time to track it down online sooner. If you haven't seen it, you are in for a treat, if you have it's not hard to skip to the next post.

Last week the Daily Show hit a homerun, mocking all sides in the blogger vs. traditional media debate and calling it like it is. It's "hysterically accurate".

Nothing hit it home for me more than Steven Colbert's mocking of reporters who attacked bloggers for lack of credibility and accuesed them of being a lynch mob... "They have no credibility, all they have is facts." Colbet stated.

In fact some bloggers do have tremendous credibility, not me, but some do. I'm just a spineless hack hiding behind a blog. It's not like I put my name on this blog. Ok, I do, but fine, who needs credibility when you have facts. Facts I tell you.

Bloggers didn't really stand up on the highly visible primetime news and say, "Fire Eason Jordan", no that was mainstream political pundants with their credibility and credentials. But bloggers aren't innocent in this head rolling. They sat there and spun there tremendous facts all over the place. Facts like lies, except that they were facts. Facts which spread like a virus or a plague. We cannot have that, dirty slanderous facts everywhere... bloggers must be held to some standard of accountability.

Watch it: ds021605bloggersx.mov
(9.7mb video/quicktime Object)

And if that isn't enough check out the Moment of Zen: ds021605zen.mov (436k video/quicktime Object)

Via: onegoodmove: Bloggers And The Media Thanks onegoodmove!

Skype Bashing On The Rise

Skype is starting to draw comments that aren't all positive. The issues are mostly around QoS and security of late. My guess is Teleo's PR team is doing some depositioning work.

Tales of future past

David H. Szondy’s site, Tales of Future Past collects classic visions of future eras, from food pills and wrist radio to time capsules and life on the Moon.
Here's how the 60s envisioned the robot dog.

Via Future Feeder.

Will Larry and Sergey Grow Up?

I wouldn't have have thought there was anything new to say about Google, its financing, and its IPO, but there is (as written by the estimable John Heileman):About a month into the [first-round financing stand-off between Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins],...

Odeo

Evan Williams, late of Google and Blogger, is at it again, with a podcasting service called Odeo.

Here's the blog about the service, and his own post on the story behind Odeo. And here's the NYT coverage (reg required).

From that:

The primarily amateur Internet audio medium known as podcasting will take a small, hopeful step on Friday toward becoming the commercial Web's next big thing.

That step is planned by Odeo, a five-person start-up that is based in a walk-up apartment in this city's Mission District and was co-founded by a Google alumnus. The company plans to introduce a Web-based system that is aimed at making a business of podcasting - the process of creating, finding, organizing and listening to digital audio files that range from living-room ramblings to BBC newscasts.

Firefox 1.0.1 out, squashes most security bugs

So they released a new version of Firefox! Cool, but have they addressed the PDF issue that many people have voiced concerns about? Not from what I am seeing which I have to say, is quite irritating. Regardless, they did make sure that there are needed patches for various security issues, and this is always a good thing. Now, if the Mozilla crew would just do something to offer a ‘true export feature’ for Thunderbird’s…

Direct and Related Links for 'Firefox 1.0.1 out, squashes most security bugs'

Why Qwest may not get MCI

Steve Castellano. thinks that chances of Qwest winning MCI are remote because “Qwest has too much debt. Verizon will raise its bid, if it has to, and move on. MCI will never pair with a weak partner and see its shareholder value desolve.”

“Qwest has submitted a second proposal to the MCI Board of Directors and it is not likely to win the Board’s favor,” says Allan Tumolillo, COO of Probe Financial Associates, Inc. “The proposal includes a ‘Value Protection Mechanism’ to protect MCI shareholders if Qwest’s stock were to fall below $4.15/share, all the way down to $3.74/share.” He feels that the stock dropping like a stone, MCI board will have to reject the proposal. And in that case Qwest will have to find a buyer for its operations - quick.

Who could be that buyer? Steve suggests some telecom which is not from the United States.

Bubble Burst Anniversary

Folks I am planning to do a special edition to mark the bursting of the bubble, which is coming up soon. I have teamed up with Carl Haacke, the author of Frenzy (Read his interview) and we will be writing special op-eds, about 600 words on this site. The anniversary is on March 10, and we should be looking at next five years. I know there are a lot of you who have many things to say - so if you are interested in writing or will be publishing something on your site, do let me know.

PS: Can anyone design a small logo/graphic and send it across. We can use it as a common thread for all the posts on other blogs.

Jeremy Allaire To Launch Brightcove

: Jeremy Allaire, one of the key people behind ColdFusion and a co-founder of Allaire Corp (later sold to Macromedia), is lifting the veil on his mysterious new venture: an IP video startup called Brightcove formed to encourage democratization of video production and distribution. The Cambridge-based company wants a hand in all facets of IP video or Internet TV -- creation, delivery and monetization.

Brightcove already has $5.5 million of first-round venture funding from General Catalyst Partners and Accel Partners. The management team includes executives from Allaire, ATG, BSkyB, Comcast, Macromedia and News Corp. The consumer service will be launched in the second half of this year...

Allaire spoke to me at length about the premise for his company, but not about the specifics of the still-under-wraps technology or mechanism. From what I saw, tons of cool stuff with Flash and Windows Media platforms...(He guest blogged for us last year, and wrote at length on IP video). My impression: think of it as RealNetworks done right with a consumer video service, a backend service, and other allied services needed for everyone from small publishers, like bloggers, to small-to-mid sized media companies and online VOD startups, develop and distribute video easily and cost-effectively. In essence, an open-publishing model.

Allaire explains: "The online service will operate with a consumer-facing service that provides access to programming and content published in the service, and will also provide a very rich service to publishers and rights-holders interested in a direct-to-consumer distribution path for video products. The service will also provide tools to website operators generally, who are interested in economically participating in the online video revolution."

Some of the other companies and startups in the space are focusing on various pieces of the pie -- for instance, a grounds-up project like OurMedia, which focuses on indie and small publishers as "the global home for grassroots media." Then there are players like RealNetworks and Akimbo, with their bigger media focus, though there's a big difference in their approach, both philosophically and in implementation...

I haven't yet seen any of these startups straddle the whole value chain, and BrightCove might be among the first ones. My advice: pick a niche and focus. It might be difficult to develop services which cater to every constituency in this growing democracy of video online. The needs of a blog media publisher differ greatly from, say, a TV channel online, and vendors along the food chain fit into the ecosystem in their own ways. Overarching ambition to converge all of this is great, but may be too much to handle...

Of course, I haven't seen much of the service yet, so more as things unfold over the year...

More radio woes

By Mitch Ratcliffe Yesterday, it was Viacom acknowledging the flagging value of its Infinity Broadcasting radio assets. Today's reality bite comes from ClearChannel, which wrote down its radio license assets by $4.9 billion. Advertising sales at ClearChannel stations were essentially...

Copernic Releases Updated Desktop Search

Last week Copernic announced a new version of its Copernic Desktop Search. The new version is 1.5; it now fully supports Mozilla and Mozilla Thunderbird. It also supports the ability...

Google Maps Expands Support

Google Maps now supports Safari and Opera, according to the Google 'blog. Good!...

Hilton Hacking Has Been Good For T-Mobile?

Perhaps there really is no such thing as bad publicity. While some have accused Paris Hilton of releasing the contents of her own T-Mobile Sidekick on purpose to stay in the public light, it would make sense that the ease with which her information got out (following a well-publicized hacking of the T-Mobile servers) would reflect poorly on the carrier. Apparently not. Last week we were surprised at the somewhat dismissive reaction T-Mobile had to the huge security hole in their voicemail system. However, it seems that T-Mobile is perfectly happy to have their systems hacked -- especially when it's a celebrity account that got hacked. Since the Paris Hilton incident sales have been booming for the Sidekick. Apparently, it's now hip to be hacked. The article even suggests that T-Mobile make a commercial with Paris Hilton making fun of all of her personal information being spread all over the web.

XM's Forced Upgrade

We were just wondering how satellite radio was ever going to make money and it appears that the folks at XM radio are wondering the same thing. To try to help move the process forward, they've decided to force everyone to upgrade to some premium services. The article describes it as a price increase, but also notes that premium services that people could pay extra for before are now included. That sounds more like forcing people to sign up for premium services they didn't seem to value that much before, rather than just a regular price increase. That's not a knock on the premium services -- some of which sound great. However, it does raise more questions about how XM and Sirius are ever going to make money.

Alcatel Teams Up with Microsoft in IPTV

Alcatel (NYSE:ALA) announced a couple of days ago a partnership with Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) geared towards developing an integrated IPTV delivery solution.  The idea is enable MSOs to deploy IPTV faster and cheaper.  This relationship is the first significant one that unites a major triple play solution vendor and one of the top IPTV software vendors.

Interestingly enough, prior to signing this agreement, Microsoft and Alcatel were competing in the IPTV middleware segment (in fact, Telecom Italia was trialing both platforms).  Alcatel had acquired a couple of software houses to create its own IPTV offering (the Open Media Suite).  But Microsoft kept piling win after win (SBC, Verizon, a trial at Bell South, and Swisscom. among others), and Alcatel had to implement Microsoft's IPTV system in deals where it was the primary equipment supplier for DSLAMs and routers (such as SBC, for instance).

So nothing like a partnership to solve the issues.  By jointly developing an IPTV solution with Microsoft, Alcatel saves considerable system integration time (since it can integrate Microsoft's software into its hardware).  Microsoft wins a way to tap into the world's large carriers.   

Harvard Researchers Discover How HIV Escapes Immune Detection

Scientific American has an interesting note about breakthrough HIV research being conducted at Harvard Medical School, where Bing Chen and his colleagues have been able to get the first sharp pictures of the gp120 protein, which enables HIV to fool the immune system effort to destroy it, while continuing to infect host cells. 

gp120 is a highly variable protective membrane that allows HIV to evade the attack and survive in the body long term. The research undertaken at Harvard studies how the molecule changes shape once it recognizes and binds to the cell. This is yet another important milestone in understanding how HIV infects a cell and how to stop that from happening.

Skype Going Wireless

Skype has reached an agreement with Motorola that aims to embed Skype software onto a number of Motorola WiFi-, 3G-, and even WiMax-enabled mobile phones in the near future. As a result, subscribers will be able to make free national calls and low-cost international calls by using the Internet to carry calls rather than standard mobile networks. In addition, both companies plan to co-market products embedded with Bluetooth or other wireless technologies before bringing the aforementioned handsets with preinstalled software to market.

NYC Low Income Broadband Plan

Housing units get free, or $10/month broadband. The New York City Council has adopted (press release) a new resolution aimed at getting low-cost (or free) broadband service into the city's housing projects. As part of the plan, anyone building public housing for those making less than 80% of the ..

Vonage IPO This Year?

Om say Vonage IPO. I don't think they can wait. Reports are their growth is slowing, that costs are rising and that founder Jeffrey Citron has a bundle of his own cash in the venture.

Spying mannequin robot strikes a pose for customers

Japanese software company SGI has developed a mannequin robot that can strike a pose for the nearest person by sensing his or her position - and spy on who s/he are and what s/he's buying.

"It makes the product the mannequin wears look more attractive, increasing consumers' appetite to buy," explains robot designer Tatsuya Matsui, who heads Flower Robotics.

Palette uses motion-capture technology to replay the movements of supermodels.

Its maker plans to program it to judge the age and sex of shoppers and identify the bags they are carrying and pass along the information to stores for marketing purposes.

Palette has no face as "consumer attention would be diverted to the face if there were one," said Matsui, noting he wanted customers to focus on the clothes or jewellery the mannequin wears.

Palette is available in two versions - the whole-body without legs or upper torso models for jewelry displays. The designer intends to make a Palette with legs along with male and child models.

Via IOL.