via SCOTUS Blog:
In a 6-3 ruling, the Court decided that cable operators offering high-speed Internet access have no legal duty to open their service to customers of all Internet service providers.
, the Court upheld the decision of the Federal Communications Commission that broadband cable moden companires arfe exempt from mandatory common-carfrier regulation. That, Thomas wrote, is a lawful interpretation of the Communications Act, and thus is due deference.Will update when the decision is available.
Public Knowledge is first out of the gate with a statement from their president, Gigi Sohn:
The Court's decision today raises the question of whether Congress, in tackling its next revision of the Telecommunications Act, should act to ensure that communications, content, and applications are allowed to pass freely over the Internet's broadband pipes. We believe Congress should do so, because "net neutrality" is a worthy goal that not only will promote free speech and creativity on the Internet, but also will benefit those who provide broadband connectivity by making that connectivity more valuable.
Cardozo law professor Susan Crawford, in a post entitled, "A Balanced View":
Today's Grokster opinion is a victory for content AND for technology. I was afraid that Sony would be undermined -- and it wasn't. The content guys were afraid that they wouldn't be able to go after bad guys -- and they've been given ammunition. What we've got is an opinion that is balanced and middle-of-the-road. It leaves Sony's "substantial noninfringing use" standard alone (yes, the concurring Justices snipe back and forth about what that standard means, but that doesn't matter), it doesn't adopt any formless Aimster balancing test, and it says strongly that you can't impute intent to technology. A good day for innovation. And a good day for Congressional staff, who won't have to deal with some request for Induce legislation -- we're done.
Professor Crawford argues that Grokster was a "balanced" opinion. In the sense that Grokster pretty much leaves Sony alone, I agree. In the sense that technology itself can continue to advanceit's just business plans that misuse technology that are suspectI agree.
ough, that the end result is "balanced," or that Aimster establishes a "formless balancing text." I think what the Court did here was largely to evade the Sony test's theoretical foundation with two limiting devices.
Seth Finkelstein, in the comments below: "It's not so much 'balanced' so much as 'buffeted by conflicting forces' -- not at all the same thing! :-) "
In the wake of Grokster, NPR's Morning Edition carried a good piece this AM on the ongoing slump in box office sales. Titled "Movie Industry Refocuses Amid Box-Office Slump" the piece examined the current decline in US box office ticket sales.
The current movie year is not being good to Hollywood. Last week was the 18th straight week in which year-over-year ticket sales were down (that is, comparing 2005 to 2004). Since spring and summar are traditional big movie-going times for Americans this is somewhat surprising. What's also surprising was that Kim Masters' story didn't just point the finger at P2P and shout "piracy."
Indeed, there are two fairly direct explanations for the decline in revenue, which amounts to about USD300 million. One is that there are fewer movies coming out. Six fewer than last year. On average, a big Hollywood movie will make $50 million in ticket sales. The math adds up. Two is that last year at this time a big box-office seller was Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. I've seen ticket figures for this movie ranging from $330 million to $390 million. In addition, this movie appealed to an audience that doesn't traditionally go to Hollywood movies. Losing that revenue this year also explains the change.
So, what to do about it? Masters reports on a number of experiments in altering traditional distribution methods, including shorter times to release DVDs (where movies make most of their money), simultaneous release, or even releasing big budget films direct to DVD.
All of these are responding to the changing demographics and finances of the box office business. In particular, a large segment of the audience just don't go out to movies as much because they're older, have kids, and have a harder time getting out. Couple this with the change in financing, where DVD prices are going down (now often below $20 even for first releases) and ticket prices are going up. Two tickets alone are $20; add in costs for babysitting, parking, and snacks and you've created an equation that doesn't favor the box office.
Of course, all of these changes and proposals are causing heartburn for theater owners, who see Hollywood as using the piracy claim as a smokescreen for shifting money away from the box office. The owners want to see more movies, better movies, and better promotion.
S Ct. reverses 9th Cir. 9 - 0, articulating an 'affiramtive steps to foster infringement' standard. Text of Grokster decision.
Important language:
. . . one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties. We are of course mindful of the need to keep from trenching on regular commerce or discouraging the development of technolgoies with lawful or unalwful potential. Accordingly, just as Sony did not find intentional inducement despite the knowledge of the VCR manufacturer that its device could be used to infringe . . . mere knowledge of infringing pontential or of actual infringing uses would not be enough here to subject a distributor to liability. Nor would ordinary acts incident to product distribution, such as offerring customers technical support or product updates, support liability in themselves. The inducement rule, instead, premises liability on purposeful, culpable epxression and conduct, and thus does nothing to compromise legitimate commerce or discourage innovation having a lawful promise.
Dell, Intel, Texas Instruments, and others want more broadband to sell more gear to consumers: They've increasingly gotten involved in the ongoing debate over whether incumbent monopolies and duopolies deserve right of first refusal for broadband deployment in their service areas over municipalities because of incumbents' investments, municipalities' tax-free and bond-raising abilities, and the role of government in competing with private enterprise.
The Wall Street Journal walks through the issue, starting with a small town in Texas that's building broadband because SBC can't or won't. The Texas legislature was considering a telecom "reform" bill--a bill which removed many public service and oversight controls on telcos--that would also have banned municipalities from participating in broadband. The original bill was so broad it would have banned virtually all private-public partnerships that the FCC and the Bush Administration have stressed for extending broadband into the furthest reaches of the country.
The backlash is now coming since Texas's bill hit defeat for a variety of reasons, partly including Dell's founder picking up the phone and calling legislators. You see, computer makers would enjoy selling more equipment and one way to do that is broadband. (Homes with broadband connections tend to buy newer equipment and more computers, among other reasons.)
Pete Sessions (R-Texas) has introduced a bill at the national level to pre-empt local legislation (there's that anti-federalism again) governing municipal operation of broadband. Sessions is the representative from SBC: a former employee with huge stock and stock options held directly (not in trust) with a spouse who currently works there. His chief of staff told the Wall Street Journal that "the congressman's ties to SBC do not present a conflict of interest." Except in that he has millions of dollars at stake over SBC's continued performance in the market.
Read The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood by Edward Jay Epstein. Epstein writes The Hollywood Economist column for Slate.com. He wrote the articles Paranoia for fun and profit: How Disney and Michael Moore cleaned up on Fahrenheit 9/11, and Dumb money: the madness of movie advertising. Here’s what The Washington Post says about the book —
The blockbusters do well enough in American theaters, but ticket sales are a drop in the bucket: of total earnings, the biggest chunk comes from worldwide DVD sales. Epstein persistently argues that theatrical release now exists not to make money, but to open the way for “intellectual property” income to be earned over the long term from other sources. As the “Midas formula” makes plain, these movies are strictly product; they may win the occasional award, since Hollywood reveres success, but they have little, if anything, to do with cinematic art.Buy The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood, by Edward Jay Epstein, from Amazon.com — you’ll save money, and your purchase through this link supports Cinema Minima.Such art as does still emerge from Hollywood can be found in the comparatively modest productions from specialty film units such as Miramax, Sony Classics, Fox Searchlight, Paramount Classics, and Warner Independent Pictures, which are a return not so much to the studio system as to the art-house system, which had at one time coexisted alongside the Hollywood studios. These movies are modest only by Hollywood standards: Their average cost was an astounding US$61.6 million in 2003, nearly two-thirds that of studio movies, and since many of the more adult films produced by the independent subsidiaries did not appeal to the youth-oriented toy, game, and other ancillary markets, they often resulted in huge losses for the studios. [Read the rest of the review at Amazon.com]
Internet stocks are looking weak. That's the conclusion of an analysis of a chart analysis of Internet HOLDRs (ticker: HHH), an exchange-traded fund that tracks a a basket of Internet stocks, on ETF Investor. The full piece is below; but before you read it, bear in mind that HHH does not include Google (ticker: GOOG). Since Google is the Internet stock with the largest market cap, HHH would look signficantly stronger if Google was included. And HHH's weakness may also reflect concerns that Google is attacking the core businesses of firms like Yahoo and eBay. With that caveat, here's the full article:
I was just going through my list of Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), which is ranked by their year-to-day returns, writes Nick Perry, who covers ETFs for Schaeffer's Investment Research. At the bottom of the list is the Internet HOLDRS (HHH) with a loss of a little more than 20-percent.
This compares to a loss of just over one percent for the S&P 500 (SPX). A check of the HHH chart shows an interesting development.
Created with SuperCharts by Omega Research
I have been tracking this chart for some time (we last looked it earlier this month) as the HHH has been struggling since breaking that two and a half year uptrend highlighted by the red channel. The green line is the 10-month moving average which has capped the shares this month. Major support sits near 50, which was low for this year and was the closing low for 2004.
This is worth noting because there has been a good deal of buzz around internet stocks. With more than 70 percent of the analysts tracked by Zacks rating Yahoo (YHOO) as a "buy" and eBay (EBAY) gracing a couple of magazine covers recently, it appears that expectations are fairly high. While that doesn't dictate that a fall has to happen, it does raise the odds that a disappointment may be lurking...
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It was a close call, but an amendment that would have tacked the
Broadcast Flag onto
an appropriations bill failed to make it out of a
Congressional subcommittee yesterday. Apparently H.R.2862 was referred to the Committee on Appropriations
without the amendment in question attached, which means that, for the time being at least, we’re in the clear.
Hard to imagine this being the end of the line though, since the
MPAA is damned determined to get this thing enshrined into
law, but public awareness about the Broadcast Flag and why it needs to be stopped seems to be growing, which will
hopefully make it more difficult for some bought-and-paid-for Senator or Representative to sneak this through.
[Thanks, Mark]
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The personal information of over 40 million people has been hacked. The hack occurred at CardSystems Solutions, a company that processes credit card transactions. The details are still unclear. The New York Times reports that "data from roughly 200,000 accounts from MasterCard, Visa and other card issuers are known to have been stolen in the breach," although 40 million were vulnerable. The theft was an intentional malicious computer hacking activity: the first in all these recent personal-information breaches, I think. The rest were accidental -- backup tapes gone walkabout, for example -- or social engineering hacks. Someone was after this data, which implies that's more likely to result in fraud than those peripatetic backup tapes.
CardSystems says that they found the problem, while MasterCard maintains that they did; the New York Times agrees with MasterCard. Microsoft software may be to blame. And in a weird twist, CardSystems admitted they weren't supposed to keep the data in the first place.
The official, John M. Perry, chief executive of CardSystems Solutions...said the data was in a file being stored for "research purposes" to determine why certain transactions had registered as unauthorized or uncompleted.
Yeah, right. Research = marketing, I'll bet.
This is exactly the sort of thing that Visa and MasterCard are trying very hard to prevent. They have imposed their own security requirements on companies -- merchants, processors, whoever -- that deal with credit card data. Visa has instituted a Cardholder Information Security Program (CISP). MasterCard calls its program Site Data Protection (SDP). These have been combined into a single joint security standard, PCI, which also includes Discover, American Express, JCB, and Diners Club. (More on Visa's PCI program.)
PCI requirements encompass network security, password management, stored-data encryption, access control, monitoring, testing, policies, etc. And the credit-card companies are backing these requirements up with stiff penalties: cash fines of up to $100,000, increased transaction fees, orand termination of the account. For a retailer that does most of its business via credit cards, this is an enormous incentive to comply.
These aren't laws, they're contractual business requirements. They're not imposed by government; the credit card companies are mandating them to protect their brand.
Every credit card company is terrified that people will reduce their credit card usage. They're worried that all of this press about stolen personal data, as well as actual identity theft and other types of credit card fraud, will scare shoppers off the Internet. They're worried about how their brands are perceived by the public. And they don't want some idiot company ruining their reputations by exposing 40 million cardholders to the risk of fraud. (Or, at least, by giving reporters the opportunity to write headlines like "CardSystems Solutions hands over 40M credit cards to hackers.")
So independent of any laws or government regulations, the credit card companies are forcing companies that process credit card data to increase their security. Companies have to comply with PCI or face serious consequences.
Was CardSystems in compliance? They should have been in compliance with Visa's CISP by 30 September 2004, and certainly they were in the highest service level. (PCI compliance isn't required until 30 June 2005 -- about a week from now.) The reality is more murky.
After the disclosure of the security breach at CardSystems, varying accounts were offered about the company's compliance with card association standards.demonstrates some limitations of any certification system. One, companies can take advantage of interpersonal and intercompany politics to get themselves special treatment with respect to the policies. And two, all audits rely to a great extent on self-assessment and self-disclosure. If a company is willing to lie to an auditor, it's unlikely that it will get caught.Jessica Antle, a MasterCard spokeswoman, said that CardSystems had never demonstrated compliance with MasterCard's standards. "They were in violation of our rules," she said.
It is not clear whether or when MasterCard intervened with the company in the past to insure compliance, but MasterCard said Friday that it had now given CardSystems "a limited amount of time" to do so.
Asked about compliance with Visa's standards, a Visa spokeswoman, Rosetta Jones, said, "This particular processor was not following Visa's security requirements when we found out there was a potential data compromise."
Earlier, Mr. Perry of CardSystems said his company had been audited in December 2003 by an unspecified independent assessor and had received a seal of approval from the Visa payment associations in June 2004.
Unless they get really caught, like this incident.
Self-reporting only works if the punishment exceeds the crime. The reason people accurately declare what they bring into the country on their customs forms, for example, is because the penalties for lying are far more expensive than paying any duty owed.
If the credit card industry wants their PCI requirements taken seriously, they need to make an example out of CardSystems. They need to revoke whatever credit card processing license CardSystems has, to the maximum extent possible by whatever contracts they have in place. Only by making CardSystems a demonstration of what happens to someone who doesn't comply will everyone else realize that they had better comply.
(CardSystems should also face criminal prosecution, but that's unlikely in today's business-friendly political environment.)
I have great hopes for PCI. I like security solutions that involve contracts between companies more than I like government intervention. Often the latter is required, but the former is more effective. Here's PCI's chance to demonstrate their effectiveness.
Safa Rashtchy released a note today (PDF only, no link) saying his sources are confirming the Journal's story, and reminding us that he earlier noted that Google may launch a listings service as well.
• We had noted earlier this year that we believe Google is likely to introduce both a listings product (similar to "Craigslist" but much more powerful) and a C2C/B2C transaction and payment platform. If Google Wallet indeed launches this year, it will be initially aimed as an additional service to over 200,000 Google merchants, many of whom also use eBay.
Google will of course be facing significant hurdles to compete with the well-established PayPal, which has more than 72M users. However, we note that when Google entered the paid listing business, it also had to catch up with a much more established Overture, which it eventually replaced as the number one provider of paid search listings.
How can a group of people say that they are seeing good response to RSS Ad's and another say that they are seeing terrible performance. The comments I have seen come from two separate parties both with high traffic websites. I will be curious to see how this all falls out. [Blog Consulting]
I felt the need to put this on the site in full context from BoingBoing this is a direct and complete quote off their website.
We've heard rumors that the Broadcast Flag that Cory, the EFF, and a coalition of pressure groups have fought so hard against (and beat in the courts) will be sneaked back via an amendment to the giant Senate Appropriations Bill in a sub-committee at 2PM EST on Tuesday 21st. This week is Hollywood's last chance to ram the flag past Congress, and they're working hard to get it under the radar.
There's no time to write letters or start a media campaign: but folk in the states below have just enough time to warn their senators, who are all on the sub-committee. People of Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Texas, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin - it's up to you!
There's a sample script after the phone list. Remember: be cool, collected and polite. Most of these senators won't know a thing about the flag, until one of them makes it a throwaway amendment tomorrow. Make sure their ears twitch when they hear "broadcast flag" today.
ALABAMA Senator Richard Shelby (202) 224-5744
ALASKA Senator Ted Stevens (202) 224-3004
HAWAII Senator Daniel Inouye (202) 224-3934
IOWA Senator Tom Harkin (202) 224-3254
KANSAS Senator Sam Brownback (202) 224-6521
KENTUCKY Senator Mitch McConnell (202) 224-2541
MARYLAND Senator Barbara Mikulski (202) 224-4654
MISSOURI Senator Christopher Bond (202) 224-5721
NEW HAMPSHIRE Senator Judd Gregg (202) 224-3324
NEW MEXICO Senator Pete Domenici (202) 224-6621
NORTH DAKOTA Senator Byron Dorgan (202) 224-2551
TEXAS Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (202) 224-5922
VERMONT Senator Patrick Leahy (202) 224-4242
WASHINGTON Senator Patty Murray (202) 224-2621
WISCONSIN Senator Herb Kohl (202) 224-5653
"Hello, Senator _________'s office"
"Hi, I'm a constituent. [Remember: Only say 'I'm a constituent' if you really are -- if you're calling the Senator from _your own state_] I'm registering my opposition to the broadcast flag amendment being introduced in the Senate Commerce Justice and Science Appropriations subcommittee mark-up on Tuesday, and in full committee on Thursday."
(*** You can give your own reasons for opposing the flag here. Here's a sample: ***)
"The Broadcast Flag cripples any device capable of receiving over-the-air digital broadcasts."
"It give Hollywood movie studios a permanent veto over how members of the American public use our televisions."
"It forces American innovators to beg the FCC for permission before adding new features to TV."
"It will prevent fair use of copyrighted works: critical review, and use of material in distance learning"
"This is an important issue which will affect all Americans, and should not be inserted in a large bill, at the last moment, with no debate."
"Please oppose the broadcast flag amendment. My name and address are ___________________."
"Thank you for your time."
This is a very popular security-related field, and one that every driver is at least somewhat interested in.
This site is run by an ex-policeman, and feels authoritative. He places a lot of emphasis on education; installing a fancy radar detector isn't doing to do much for you unless you know how to use it correctly.
Here's a product that seems to counter the threat of aerial license-plate scanners.
This spray claims to make your license plate invisible to cameras. I have no idea if it works.
One final note: the ex-cop is offering a $5,000 reward for the first person who can point him to a passive laser jammer that works.
Johanne Torres has some real Insight on what's happening with the Asian long distance traffic market ever since VoIP started gaining ground.
But when it comes to money, one has to ask where's it coming from with Skype chewing up so much of the VoIP bandwidth?
But Skype is a razor thin margin business right now as DG Lewis in a laser like way explains in this very insightful post about the money Skype is paying (or isn't) Global IP Sound.
Scientists have taken the first step towards creating human eggs and sperm in the laboratory using stem cells, making it possible of one day growing sperm and eggs artificially for IVF treatment, therapeutic cloning and medical research.
Although much work needs to be done before human sperm and eggs can be grown in a laboratory, the research could be an "extraordinary breakthrough" for couples, by allowing them to produce a child with a mix of their genetic material even if both are infertile. The treatment of developing eggs and sperm from stem cells, which can be taken from anywhere on the body, would also be less invasive than current methods.
Anna Smajdor, from Imperial College London, said the work opened a potential Pandora's Box. "The technique can be used to generate eggs from a man's somatic cells, [so] gay couples could have children genetically related to both," she said. "Single men could even produce a child using their own sperm and an engineered egg, opening the way to a new form of cloning. Women's fertility would no longer need to be curtailed at the menopause.
"These possibilities raise new questions about how we define parenthood and about how we decide who has access to these new technologies."
Via Scotsman and New Scientist.
In what I'm sure will become a heavily linked to article, Tristan Louis offers up his recent analysis. I haven't had time to digest it fully, but his conclusions are:
Of course, that's the sort of stuff I like to read!
What has your experience been in using Yahoo! Search to find blog content?
Trying to make sense of the massive theft of credit card numbers at CardSystems, ‘a leading provider of end-to-end payment processing solutions focused exclusively on meeting the needs of small to mid-sized merchants’, in which information on more than 40 million credit cards may have been stolen.
CardSystems itself has issued only a brief statement on its website (no permalink available) saying it had identified
a potential security incident on Sunday, May 22nd. On Monday, May 23rd, CardSystems contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Subsequently, the VISA and MasterCard Card Associations were notified to alert them of a possible security incident. CardSystems immediately began a remediation process to ensure all systems were secure. Additionally, CardSystems immediately engaged an independent 3rd party to validate systems security.
Notice the careful language: It talks only of ensuring all ‘systems were secure’ — in the security industry this is like checking all the locks work while watching all the horses bolting off down the street. (And don’t the FBI work on Sundays? Why wait a day to let them know?)
Then there’s the question: Why wait almost a month to let us know? A separate story by AP quotes CardSystems as saying that
it was told by the FBI not to release any information to the public. The company says it's surprised by MasterCard's decision to go public.
Actually, not so, say the FBI: Another AP story quotes an FBI spokeswoman, Deb McCarley, as denying
that the agency told CardSystems not to disclose the existence of the intrusion. McCarley says the FBI told CardSystems to follow its corporate policies without disclosing details that might compromise the ongoing investigation.
In fact, a MasterCard statement suggests that it was they, not CardSystems, who first identified the breach:
MasterCard International's team of security experts identified that the breach occurred at Tuscon-based CardSystems Solutions, Inc., a third-party processor of payment card data. Third party processors process transactions on behalf of financial institutions and merchants.
Through the use of MasterCard fraud-fighting tools that proactively monitor for fraud, MasterCard was able to identify the processor that was breached. Working with all parties, including issuing banks, acquiring banks, the processor and law enforcement, MasterCard immediately launched an investigation into the breach, and worked with CardSystems to remediate the security vulnerabilities in the processor's systems.
In the meantime CardSystems was pretending it was business as usual, including an announcement on June 14 of a move into check processing, and posting job-ads for a ‘Software Quality Assurance Analyst’ to cover, among other things, ‘troubleshooting from operations, production, and outside vendors’ who can work ‘in a very fast-paced, high-visibility organization where priorities often change’. Indeed.
Anyway, the scale of the thing is pretty awesome: Softpedia quotes experts as saying
that this is the worst case of data theft in IT history. "In sheer numbers, this is probably one of the largest data security breaches," said James Van Dyke, principal analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research in Pleasanton, Calif.
And just how did the theft happen? Details are sketchy, probably because no one yet knows (the MasterCard software which identified the fraud did so by monitoring transactions, not the actual breach. In other words, they observed the stolen goods being peddled, not the actual break-in). According to another AP story, MasterCard has identified CardSystems as being ‘hit by a viruslike computer script that captured customer data for the purpose of fraud’, but hasn’t given any more details. CardSystems itself is not talking:
="ltr">CardSystems' chief financial officer, Michael A. Brady, refused to answer questions and referred calls to the company's chief executive, John M. Perry, and its senior vice president of marketing, Bill N. Reeves. A message left for Perry and Reeves at the company's Atlanta offices was not returned.
Both Perry and Brady have been with CardSystems a little over a year.
It started with low-awareness deals like 3Com’s partnership with Huawei. Then came the big whopper of a deal - Lenovo Group snapping up IBM’s PC business for $ 1.75 billion. Today comes news that Chinese appliance maker Haier is looking to make a bid for Maytag for $1.28 billion. Another whopper of a deal is in the making: CNOOC Ltd., China’s largest offshore oil and gas producer, may bid about $20 billion in cash for Unocal Corporation., the eighth-biggest U.S. oil company, an offer that could beat out Chevron.
And this just might be the beginning, according to my colleague, Paul Kahila, whose Business 2.0 story, Why China Wants to Scoop Up Your Company? in the June 2005 is the proving to be quite prescient. He predicted the Maytag-Haier tie-up in his story. “Often, it’s name recognition that Chinese companies crave, since a history of communism has left them relatively clueless about building brands. The prime targets? American brands and manufacturers, as well as distributors that peddle Chinese goods,” writes Kahila. Driving the trend: Chinese desire to lighten up on US bonds and loading up on corporate assets. Of course they are eyeing the fat margins the brand names earn in the US, and have decided that they no longer want to be “world’s factory.”
Nearly two-thirds of all new wireless users will be Asia. China and India being big part of the overall action!
There are two exchange-traded-funds (ETFs) that offer the opportunity to invest in China -- iShares FTSE/Xinhua China 25 Index Fund (ticker: FXI), and Golden Dragon Halter USX China Portfolio Index Fund (ticker: PGJ). For a discussion of the portfolios of the two ETFs see here. Below is a performance update:
FXI, PGJ year-to-date chart.
(FXI in green, PGJ in brown)
Since the beginning of Q2 (As of April 1, 2005):
Google recently filed a US patent which reveals a great deal of how they rank your web site. Key surprises include:
- The age of the registered domain is considered.
-The days of Spamming Google are drawing to a close. With this patent they reveal just how hard they're coming down on Spam sites.
- Google relies heavily on inbound relevant links to rank a site.. As well as the number, quality and anchor text factors of a link. Google seems to also consider historical factors. Apparently the Google 'sandbox' or aging delay begins count down the minute links to a new site are discovered. Google records the discovery of a link, link changes over time, the speed at which a site gains links and the link life span.
- The anchor text link should vary but remain consistent within the site content. No more using your main keywords on every link exchange you gain. That's 'anchor Spam'. Instead vary them around your top five to ten keywords.
-Unethical link exchange can result in a ban - host and IP may also be recorded.
- Click through rates may now be monitored through cache, temporary files, bookmarks and favorites via the Google toolbar or desktop tools. CTR is monitored to see if fresh or stale content is preferred for a search result. CTR is also analyzed for increases or decreases relating to trends or seasons.
- Web page rankings are recorded and monitored for changes. The traffic to a web page is recorded and monitored over time.
- Sites can be ranked seasonally. A ski site may rank higher in the winter than in the summer. Google can monitor and rank pages by recording CTR changes by season. • Bookmarks and favorites could be monitored for changes, deletions or additions. • User behavior in general could be monitored.
- The frequency and amount of page updates is monitored and recorded as is the number of pages. A stale page that receives good traffic may hold it's own and not require an update. So don't update for the sake of it.
- Changes in keyword density is monitored and recorded as are changes to anchor text.
- The domain name owner’s address is considered, most likely to help in a local search result.
- The technical and admin contact details are checked for consistency. These are often falsified for Spam domains.Read the complete article here
The 57,500-tonne drill ship Chikyu (Japanese for Earth) will soon be penetrating the Earth’s crust to the mantle. The mission, administered by the Centre for Deep Earth Exploration in Yokohama, hopes to retrieve samples from the mantle to study earthquakes, the history of Earth’s climate, as well as the possibility of deep-Earth life.
The letter announcing this, sent to the Promed mailing list for the International Society of Infectious Diseases is here. Jamais Cascio's WorldChanging commentary on this is here. Link
Robert X. Cringely explores with fascinating logic the serious possibility that Apple may be joining Intel in an all out battle against Microsoft. This is one true hot topic for anyone interested in the future of personal computing and one that could drastically change the way that the personal computer industry will evolve in the next few years. Apple’s Decision to Use Intel Processors Is Nothing Less Than an Attempt to Dethrone Microsoft. Read on……
Direct and Related Links for 'Apple’s Move: With Intel Against Microsoft'
South Korea is going to require video distributed via the internet to be rated before it can be distributed, according to a report in the Korea Times (Online Video Clips to Receive Ratings). The purpose of the law is to reduce violence, which includes organized criminal activity, privacy violations and libel (something a bit lost in the translation, I think). In any case it will likely have a bigger effect in squelching free speech and amateur video. A couple of other aspects that seem a little strange:
To tackle online privacy infringement, the government is also considering making Internet users disclose their real names....The government will also urge people privately publishing gossip to register the reports as regular publications.via Michael Geist's Internet Law News
Wired is reporting that an update to the DirecTV D10 receiver is causing problems for TiVo and ReplayTV owners. Apparently it's not always accepting commands sent over the serial port, causing some missed shows. The solution listed is to use the IR blaster, which can have the same problem as the one reported.
The conspiratorially minded think that this update is just an effort on DirecTV's part to get them to buy receivers with PVRs built in. A DirecTV representative responds "I can absolutely say this is not a tactic to get people to switch over to another receiver," which is just the sort of thing you'd expect them to say if there were a conspiracy.
According to a new global survey, today's teenagers would be lost without their mobile phones, but they would rather text than talk. Natalie Hanman reports on the lost art of conversation for The Guardian.
"While UK teens spend $304m on mobile music a year, and own a collective 4m cameraphones, texting is the favoured form of youth communication, according to the Wireless World Forum mobileYouth 2005 report, the result of a five-year study into how young people all over the world use their mobile phones.
Despite all the technologies that have launched in the last five years, SMS is still the leader," says Graham Brown, chief executive of W2F, teenagers are keeping things simple - and cheap.
In the US, for example, young viewers of the latest series of television talent show American Idol registered more votes by text message than over the telephone, and in the UK, teenagers are sending more text messages every year, reaching a projected total this year of about 22bn.
"It's not just cost," says Brown. "Texting is something immediate and within their control." It is also something that teenagers' parents often don't understand, because most (70%) use "txtspk" instead of fully worded predictive text. It's quicker and, it seems, easier to disguise from those prying parental eyes".
Next time you get some really great colors out of your inkjet, you may want to check the cartridges. According to anti-drug people aka The Man, drug people who do and sell drugs are now shipping their drugs in refurbished printer cartridges aka drug holders. Now HP and Lexmark are going to have to add anti-horse and -doobie DRM to their already proprietary ink delivery systems. Thanks for ruining it for the rest of us, you hippies!
When Hong Kong police opened the packages, they found that the cartridges had the carbon strips removed and replaced with ketamine, also known as "Special K".
Printer cartridges filled with drugs 'exported' [Straights Times via
Sourced from
The folks at Victrola Cafe & Art were already sick of talking about Wi-Fi--I dare not guess how they feel now: A colleague tipped me to Victrola turning off Wi-Fi on weekends, and I published a short interview with one of the owners on my site. That built through links from other sites, and I've wound up writing about it for the New York Times in a story that appears in Monday's Business section (June 13).
Meanwhile, National Public Radio's All Things Considered picked it up for today's broadcast (Sunday).
The owners and staff are incredibly nice people, and just seeing them interact with their regulars the other morning when I stopped by to interview them in person and when the photo was taken it was clear that they had a loyal group. One regular with a laptop was only half-jokingly concerned that if he made it into the photograph in print it would be captioned that he was a villain. (I assured him it would not.)
The media attention focused on Victrola is certainly partly my fault, but it's also testament to the power of a simple idea expressed in cultural terms. It's very likely that Victrola's move will spark a mini-trend in which cafes point to Victrola as their motivation for trying out limiting Wi-Fi service when it doesn't work for them.
The folks at Victrola had a slightly hilarious idea: a house roast they would call Wi-Fi. If someone called and asked if they had Wi-Fi, they could say yes. When customers tried to find out about Wi-Fi, they could serve them coffee. They were only half-kidding. I imagine a Wi-Fi blend would be a great mail-order gift item.
It's starting to look like the sex in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was in fact real. A group of modders have released a hack that will unlock the sex in the PC version of the game. Having not actually installed it yet I don't know if this is a unlock hack or more of a sex mod. Someone out there check it out and let me know. A big ol tip of the hat goes to Digital D at GTASanAndreas.Net who beat my fault logic down like a prostitute in GTA. You can also go to their site to see full video of the sex in action, which is quite obviously not safe for work.
Uncesosred Dating with Girlfriends [GTA Garage]
Brad Feld offers very good advice on how to compensate board members:
what a director/VP (not SVP/COO) level employee would get. This is
typically 0.5% - 1% depending on the stage of the company (so 0.125% to
0.25% per year).
this is the ONLY time I'll give single trigger (except in certain
founder cases).
extend this to a year, but I like this to be the same that employees
get.
Very good guideline!
Try it GoToMeeting for free. Wired writes: "Now come the first stirrings of what may be the most telling sign of this shift from hardcore to hybrid: people who are both middle of the road and off the grid. Across the US some 185,000 households have switched from the local power company to their own homegrown, renewable energy. The fastest-growing segment of this population - their ranks are doubling each year - isn't doing a full Kaczynski. Sure, these folks are slapping solar panels on the roof and erecting the occasional wind turbine, but they're staying connected to the grid, just to be safe. And in many cases, they're operating as mini-utilities, selling excess electricity back to the power company. Just as their cars aren't kludgy and their food isn't flavorless, their homes aren't drafty or dimly lit. Call them hygridders. And look for them soon in a neighborhood near you. Because - trendmeisters, take note - hygrid is the new Prius."
Me and my brother give MSN a go. You might think we’re unreasonably Skype-mad here, but it’s not like we don’t try the alternatives…
We couldn't even make this up. Outside of basic IM, MSN is miserable. I guess we'll try again after the next patchset is out ...
R.
I think this is little bit unfair for MSN and others.
I am using on a regular basis MSN with my family and for a few years now.
In the past, we used to use MSN both for voice and video.
Nowaday, we use Skype for voice and MSN for video ... and it works (usually) quite well... we prefer skype for voice just because skype has better sound quality (specially when you're not using handset). However, I am also still using MSN for both Vo&Vi with some realtive which are less confortable on a PC to play with two apps, and it is also working quite well.
So although I can agree that MSN interface is not always easy and intuitive (motly beause it has so many -more- features that inherently add complexity to the GUI logic), I found that is not really fair to present it the way you do ;-)
PS1: Although I am not a microsoft supporter at all and trying to avoid using microsoft as much as possible, it sometime provide the most easy tools and the less unstable (although ...) in comparinson with the rest.
PS2: Skype is recent and they've been numerous of IM tools including Voice capabilities since many years. I (and I guess we) still don't know exactly why skype is picking up today much faster as any others, whereas what they are offering already exist since many years... but I do not think Skype sucess is due to others tools unability to offer the same! Otherwise I do you explain that Skype community is growing much faster than SIP community and this without need to peer with anyone else whereas SIP providers have peerign between eachothers which should be an advantage....
just my 0.2 cts which you were probably expecting ;-)
Martin Geddes @ June 13, 2005 10:03 AM:It's perfectly fair to MSN! We both download the latest version onto fully-patched Windows XP boxes, fired it up, and it didn't work. Can't blame it on connectivity problems -- we'd just been using Skype.
Willem de Boer @ June 13, 2005 02:28 PM:That's not quite fair. If my kids (13 and 11) can set up a video conference, you ought to be able to do so too? This reminds me of guys walking around with "Windoze" on their t-shirts.
What about e.g. MSN's implementation of the network based buddylist? It's a hell of a lot better that Skype's implementation, which is saving locally!
Don't get me wrong, I like both :-) MSn and Skype.
Cheers,
Willem de Boer - The Netherlands
Stephen Smith @ June 13, 2005 04:26 PM:This is hilarious. I futzed with MS Messenger for year, and occasionally got it to work. I bet you didn't read the fine print and use a uPNP enabled router, now did you ... oh, don't have one of those, better go get it. oh, using a usb broadband connection, umm, too bad. Stuff like this is exactly why we are all using Skype.
Andrew @ June 13, 2005 10:05 PM:Video invitations work, but I had the same problem with audio only. MSN should use a motto like Skype, instead: 'It just (kinda sorta) works! (sometimes)'
For Whiteboarding/app sharing they force you to have XP SP2, otherwise a 'You don't have the latest version of MSN' message pops up
Robin Geddes @ June 13, 2005 10:35 PM:Given time, could we make it work? Sure we could. In fact, we've used MSN for video conferencing in the past, as we have with Yahoo and a whole bunch of other apps out there. We'd be pretty crappy consultants if we didn't look around, and indeed shop around.
But that's not the point.
The point is that it didn't work out the of box, which is fine for the technically literate like yourself, your teenage kids and (I'd like to think) myself. But we are the minority. The majority are more fairly represented by, say, my mother, or the taxi drivers that shuttle me to and airports every week. They do not want to know what a uPNP router is, not perhaps, should they have to know in order to faciliate a duplex audio stream, which they've been doing for years with a device far less powerful than a PC.
As I said above, lets wait for the next patchset, and then see if they can make it work out of the box. Until then, I only want apps that don't require me to be first line support to my parents (sorry Mum, if you are still reading this).
R.
P.S. My router that for that evening was uPNP enabled, and I certainly don't have a puny USB broadband connection. Static IP address at Martin's end, and although technically I have a dynamic IP address, it hasn't changed for at least the last 18 months. NAT at my end, but suprised that would stop initiation of a session both ways.
Vincent Oberle @ June 14, 2005 02:56 PM:Willem:
Skype is having a network based buddylist since a few months now (since version 1.2).
A agree 100% with Robin, this kind of apps just has to work. Not only for our moms, even for us geeks who use laptops and many different connections through the day. We don't want to have to go through the setup program every time.
Me and my brother give MSN a go. You might think we’re unreasonably Skype-mad here, but it’s not like we don’t try the alternatives…
We couldn't even make this up. Outside of basic IM, MSN is miserable. I guess we'll try again after the next patchset is out ...
R.
I think this is little bit unfair for MSN and others.
I am using on a regular basis MSN with my family and for a few years now.
In the past, we used to use MSN both for voice and video.
Nowaday, we use Skype for voice and MSN for video ... and it works (usually) quite well... we prefer skype for voice just because skype has better sound quality (specially when you're not using handset). However, I am also still using MSN for both Vo&Vi with some realtive which are less confortable on a PC to play with two apps, and it is also working quite well.
So although I can agree that MSN interface is not always easy and intuitive (motly beause it has so many -more- features that inherently add complexity to the GUI logic), I found that is not really fair to present it the way you do ;-)
PS1: Although I am not a microsoft supporter at all and trying to avoid using microsoft as much as possible, it sometime provide the most easy tools and the less unstable (although ...) in comparinson with the rest.
PS2: Skype is recent and they've been numerous of IM tools including Voice capabilities since many years. I (and I guess we) still don't know exactly why skype is picking up today much faster as any others, whereas what they are offering already exist since many years... but I do not think Skype sucess is due to others tools unability to offer the same! Otherwise I do you explain that Skype community is growing much faster than SIP community and this without need to peer with anyone else whereas SIP providers have peerign between eachothers which should be an advantage....
just my 0.2 cts which you were probably expecting ;-)
Martin Geddes @ June 13, 2005 10:03 AM:It's perfectly fair to MSN! We both download the latest version onto fully-patched Windows XP boxes, fired it up, and it didn't work. Can't blame it on connectivity problems -- we'd just been using Skype.
Willem de Boer @ June 13, 2005 02:28 PM:That's not quite fair. If my kids (13 and 11) can set up a video conference, you ought to be able to do so too? This reminds me of guys walking around with "Windoze" on their t-shirts.
What about e.g. MSN's implementation of the network based buddylist? It's a hell of a lot better that Skype's implementation, which is saving locally!
Don't get me wrong, I like both :-) MSn and Skype.
Cheers,
Willem de Boer - The Netherlands
Stephen Smith @ June 13, 2005 04:26 PM:This is hilarious. I futzed with MS Messenger for year, and occasionally got it to work. I bet you didn't read the fine print and use a uPNP enabled router, now did you ... oh, don't have one of those, better go get it. oh, using a usb broadband connection, umm, too bad. Stuff like this is exactly why we are all using Skype.
Andrew @ June 13, 2005 10:05 PM:Video invitations work, but I had the same problem with audio only. MSN should use a motto like Skype, instead: 'It just (kinda sorta) works! (sometimes)'
For Whiteboarding/app sharing they force you to have XP SP2, otherwise a 'You don't have the latest version of MSN' message pops up
Robin Geddes @ June 13, 2005 10:35 PM:Given time, could we make it work? Sure we could. In fact, we've used MSN for video conferencing in the past, as we have with Yahoo and a whole bunch of other apps out there. We'd be pretty crappy consultants if we didn't look around, and indeed shop around.
But that's not the point.
The point is that it didn't work out the of box, which is fine for the technically literate like yourself, your teenage kids and (I'd like to think) myself. But we are the minority. The majority are more fairly represented by, say, my mother, or the taxi drivers that shuttle me to and airports every week. They do not want to know what a uPNP router is, not perhaps, should they have to know in order to faciliate a duplex audio stream, which they've been doing for years with a device far less powerful than a PC.
As I said above, lets wait for the next patchset, and then see if they can make it work out of the box. Until then, I only want apps that don't require me to be first line support to my parents (sorry Mum, if you are still reading this).
R.
P.S. My router that for that evening was uPNP enabled, and I certainly don't have a puny USB broadband connection. Static IP address at Martin's end, and although technically I have a dynamic IP address, it hasn't changed for at least the last 18 months. NAT at my end, but suprised that would stop initiation of a session both ways.
Vincent Oberle @ June 14, 2005 02:56 PM:Willem:
Skype is having a network based buddylist since a few months now (since version 1.2).
A agree 100% with Robin, this kind of apps just has to work. Not only for our moms, even for us geeks who use laptops and many different connections through the day. We don't want to have to go through the setup program every time.
Skype just signed an agreement with Brightpoint, to sell and promote Skype products via the retail channel. Incase you did not know, Brightpoint is a cellular wholesaler. This is a major move, which pits Skype against Vonage. (We said so!) Secondly, I believe this is clear indication that the viral marketing campaign is running out of gas, and the company realizes that it needs to step-up the marketing if it needs to trump other VoIP rivals. It should and must be worried about cellular companies’ voip plans. SIP is also trying hard to get a peer-to-peer makeover, and become a more potent competitor. More on this later. Meanwhile, Skype has also added voicemail services.
Update: Craig Walker just called and confirmed the deal. The two companies have not disclosed terms of the deal as yet. Full analysis to follow!
Did Yahoo just buy VoIP operator, DialPad? I guess the next last thing to Skype? More coming. Take this with a grain of salt, but the PR folks at Dialpad were in a meeting and were thrown in a tizzy when I rudely interrupted their deliberations. We cannot comment on this, please call our CEO, is what I was told. Everyone seems to be in a meeting, and I called Craig Walker, the CEO and was told he was in a meeting. I am told, Yahoo is busy gathering Dialpad employees with new employment offers.
...Those who favored the creationist exhibit, including Mayor Bill LaFortune, argued that the zoo already displayed religious items, including the statue of the Hindu god, Ganesh, outside the elephant exhibit and a marble globe inscribed with an American Indian saying: "The earth is our mother. The sky is our father."Link to CNN article, Link to Scientific American's "15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense"
"I see this as a big victory," said Dan Hicks, the Tulsa resident who approached the zoo with the idea. "It's a matter of fairness. To not include the creationist view would be discrimination."
Hundreds of people signed a petition supporting the exhibit...
Zoo officials had argued that the zoo does not advocate religion and that displays like the elephant statue are meant to show the animal's image among cultures. The same exhibit includes the Republican Party's elephant symbol.
(The following is rank speculation, referred to by a friend of mine as speaking ex recto. I have no secret sources nor access to any insider info.)
Apple's switch in hardware platforms is about the transformation of Apple into a media company. It will probably still make hardware, and it will probably still dominate certain niche market, but those markets will be ones that matter in Hollywood, like digital editing.
There are lots of reasons for this, and you should expect to see Apple beating the snot out of MS in the media business in the short and medium terms. I'm not so sure about the long term; people who make long-term bets against MS tend to come up empty. Part of the key advantage that Apple has is Steve Jobs. He runs Pixar. He can call up the head of any major studio and get in to see the right execs. They like him - he's one of them. They hate Bill, who they see as trying to muscle in on their business. If you have any doubts about this, look at the number of Hollywood films and TV shows in which characters are seen to use Macs vs those in which they use identifiable PCs. In Hollywood an enormous amount of business is done on handshake deals; Jobs knows which hands to shake and how to speak the language of the people whose hands he needs to shake. He has a track record with the music industry, too, though that relationship is a bit rockier.
The second part of this battle is for the home entertainment center. MS actually has a jump here with its PC customized for that marketplace and Apple needs a major move to catch up. Apple's wedge strategy will be the Mac Mini and Airport, but they're both too damned expensive. Would an Intel-based Mini be significantly cheaper? I dunno. What I do know is that iTunes is also beating the snot out of all comers and is a significant driver for hardware sales. If Apple doesn't have a digital movies deal in place and isn't providing movie/TV content to homes by Xmas this year I'll be stunned. The content for this service will be provided by those execs that Jobs has had lunch with.
I also fear that Apple is signing up for the Intel hardware lockdown. Hollywood, like the rest of the Cartel, is insanely paranoid about its content being "stolen." Intel is offering to wave a magic wand and pretend to make that problem go away. Apple couldn't afford to leave that card solely in MS's hands; by signing up for this, they've neutralized a major advantage Redmond used to have.
It's also true that, to some extent, they're Osborning their hardware sales. But by showing that OS X runs *now* on Intel hardware, Jobs is sending a strong "Don't Panic" message to software developers. Relax, he says, you won't notice any difference. We've got the OS running there now. The low-level guys like device drivers will have to do some scrambling, but Apple will help them.
Along the way, Apple is taking a nontrivial shot at Microsoft's PC-based gaming business. That home entertainment center needs to play games, too. Right now, very few games run on Macs. A few big names, but nowhere near the title span that PCs have. But if Macs are on Intel hardware then game companies have to do much less work to get their games over. And as additional incentive, if Apple has the "in" with Hollywood then it's one step away from the game companies' wet dream of having a major motion picture deal, with all the revenue and licensing dollars that implies. Games' core home computer market won't move off the PC, but game studios now have much more incentive and much lower barrier to entry for getting their games onto Apple boxes.
You can't look at this announcement as a bullet. It's a full broadside, and the impacts are going to be felt over a large range (see Donna's entry below for more big thoughts). It's also going to hit targets other than Microsoft; one likely impact will be on Sony, which also plays in the home-entertainment spaces and which can be seen as a partner and competitor for both Apple and Microsoft. As far as I know they haven't had anything official to say on this topic yet.
Sony Revolution is the name of the video clip this video you have to watch, watch it closely and then come back and tell me what you think this is and what it's all about. I have watched this 4 times and I am still scratching my head. [Gprime.net]
First of all if you trust putting your eggs in one basket, and pushing your readers to pick up your RSS feeds over at FeedBurner, then you are asking for trouble. No one is going to track my readers, and we don't track or analyze our RSS feed subscribers.
Those of you using FeedBurner, I suggest you look at your RSS feed every time you post something new, and see how long it takes before FeedBurner updates your feed. Test we have done here show it can take sometimes up to 24 hours for new post to show up, at least I know hosting my own that as soon as I hit enter it is updated.
Apparently the CEO of FeedBurner says that people are not un-subscribing from feeds that have Google Adsense ads in them. I am sure they are TRACKING your subscribers very strong>. I talked to several people who have put RSS Ads in their feeds, and guess what, they lost subscribers no specific numbers. More importantly I have been told by at least 6 website owners that are running ads on their RSS feeds that subscribers are not clicking on the Ads! click through is as low as one or two on a 100,000 views.
of RSS feeds, and I can tell you the way ads are placed now every other article is pissing me off to no end. If they would limit the Ad to one a day it would not be so bad, but reading the feed is distracting, and I have begun to skip a lot of sites that are doing this.
Case in point Engadget, this site has great content but their RSS ads in their feeds is beyond distracting I look at maybe the first 5 articles and move on at least Gizmodo is not jamming this stuff down my throat. I am finding myself at their website a lot more. [MarketingStudies]
I recently wrote about a Minnesota Appeals Court ruling that the presence of encryption software on a computer may be viewed as evidence of criminal intent. Jennifer Granick of the Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society has some intelligent comments on the ruling.
FireANT is the first software application that comes complete with RSS subscription, Video Search, built-in BitTorrent, and the ability to sync media onto the iPod and Sony PSP … and it’s free. [unmediated: Tracking the tools that decentralize the media]
Edward Jay Epstein says that Hollywood’s marketing tactics — which focus on the bringing teens into theaters on opening weekend — are obsolete, now that there are two movie audiences, one theater-going youngsters, the other, adults who watch movies on DVD exclusively. [The Hollywood Economist: The numbers behind the industry]
Before I came out to California to work at Yahoo, I watched the business and culture of Silicon Valley from a distance. I read lots of the trade rags, tech web sites, and books about early Internet companies (the Netscape era).
One of the things that amazed me about Internet companies (usually the portals) was how quickly they built things and were able to react to each others moves with frightening speed. Company X would do something amazing and new only to be leapfrogged by Company Y just a few weeks later.
They were putting on one hell of a show and it was all amplified by the crazy bubble of the late 90s. I loved it.
The tech and business press would say things like "in response to Company X, Company Y has just..." or "in an effort to defend their business from Company Y, Company X today launched a new..."
I saw headlines like that all the time and still see them today.
Today there's one important difference: I'm on the inside now. For the last five and a half years, I have had a front row seat to the inner workings of what I used to imagine (with the help of a small army of journalists and reports).
Now I see it first hand and hear about it from coworkers and friends at other companies. And you know what? It's even more insane than it looked from the outside.
So I'm going to let you in on a little secret about how products are developed at large companies--even large Internet companies that some people think are fast on their feet.
Larger companies rarely can respond that quickly to each other. It almost never happens. Sure, they may talk a good game, but it's just talk. Building things on the scale that Microsoft, Google, AOL, or Yahoo do is a complex process. It takes time.
Journalists like to paint this as a rapidly moving chess game in which we're all waiting for the next move so that we can quickly respond. But the truth is that most product development goes on in parallel. Usually there are people at several companies who all have the same idea, or at least very similar ones. The real race is to see who can build it faster and better than the others.
Think about this the next time a news story makes it sound like Yahoo is trying to one-up Google. Or MSN is "responding" to last week's launch of a new AOL service.
It's easy to get caught up in the drama of it all. But reality is often quite different than what you read.
As a side note, I'm sure this is even more true in the world of hardware and consumer electronics. But I have no direct experience with that world.
Scientists at the University of California, San Diego have developed a technique for mixing images and video feeds from mobile cameras in the field to provide remote viewers with a virtual window into a physical environment. Reality Flythrough dynamically stitches together still images and live video feeds to create a 3D environment.
The application fills in the gaps in coverage with the most recent still images captured during camera pans. The software then blends the imagery with transitions that simulate the sensation of a human performing a walking camera pan - even when one of the images is a still frame. If older images are not desirable, the fill-in images can be omitted, or shown in sepia, or include an icon displaying how old the photo is.
"Reality Flythrough creates the illusion of complete live camera coverage in a physical space. It's a new form of situational awareness, and we designed a system that can work in unforgiving environments with intermittent network connectivity," said UCSD professor Bill Griswold.
"With virtual tourism, for instance, you could walk down the streets of Bangkok to see what it will be like before getting there," added Neil McCurdy. "Another really cool application is pre-drive driving instructions. Imagine going to your favorite mapping website, where currently you get a set of instructions to turn left here or right there, and instead, you can 'fly' through the drive before doing it."
Video.
Via Eurekalert.
Bloglines announced in a press release today that they have over half a billion blog posts stored in their database:
Between January and June of this year, the size of the Bloglines index doubled. And each day Bloglines adds 2 million to 2.7 million new blog and news feed articles to the database, drawn from a diverse range of sources in many languages — from blogs about knitting to major online newspaper feeds.
Congratulations to everyone over at Bloglines–this is certainly a big accomplishment.
Interoute, a European data network operator has just launched a new metro ethernet network that runs at 10 gigabits per second, and connects Europe’s 61 major commercial centers. Interoute’s multipoint Ethernet service is supposed to cut costs for enterprise customers, perhaps by as much as 35%. Interoute’s multipoint Ethernet service adds to the company’s existing Metro and long-haul Ethernet portfolio.
Google-aires Larry Page & Sergey Brin are so yesterday. Its time to meet the newest billionaires - Anurag Dikshit and his college pal Vikrant Bhargava and their business partner, porn princess, Ruth Parasol. They are the trio behind PartyGaming, an online poker/gambling company based in Gibraltar that is all set to go public in London with a valuation estimated at around $10 billion. Given the growing popularity of online poker and online gambling, PartyGaming which operates popular site, PartyPoker is going to be one of the hottest initial public offerings of the year.
Here is the back story. In 1998, Parasol, a lawyer by training, decided that she had had enough on online porn, sold her businesses and decided to expand into more respectable business of online gambling. Through friends she got in touch with IIT computer engineering student, Anurag Dikshit (who will soon be changing his name to BigShit) and he helped hack together the back end for the site. Dikshit, brought in his college pal, Bhargava as a marketing honcho. If the offering goes according to plan, Anurag, who is now 33, and owns 42% of the site, will be worth roughly $4 billion. Ruth & her husband will be worth closer to that around as well, since they each own 20% of the company. Bhargava, poor guy owns only 15% of the company. The company will sell roughly 23% of its holdings, and about 5.6% of its holdings will be sold and the proceeds expected to be around $560 million will go into an employee trust. It has 1100 employees, with 925 in India.
Mr Bhargava, who has a stake of almost 15%, hints at the way in which the ride has left them breathless. “When we left university in 1994 - and you have to remember that the Indian Institute of Technology was one of the best schools in all of India - quite a lot of people went off to the US and got involved with dotcoms,” he says. “So many people wanted to do something big, but I don’t think we ever thought it would be this big. But the motivation was not money. We have done well at something we enjoy doing.”
And just when you think the story could not get any better: the company has a call center in Hyderabad in India, has operations in London, is headquartered in Gibraltar and is totally wired up, of course by broadband. “By then, this borderless company plans to be conquering new territories. A wired-up China, home of the world’s most enthusiastic gamblers, is the view on the horizon,” adds The Guardian. “Billionaire status has rarely been achieved so young or so quickly,” writes The Guardian. Now in the most recent quarter the company was bringing in $1.4 million in pre-tax profits, or about $910 a minute.
This time it's atoms, not bits, but it's the same story. Reuters reports that Sony is trying to stop distribution in the UK of its PSP (PlayStation Portable). Sony chose to omit European consumers in first shipments due to supply shortages. However, retailers (both online and offline) have responded to consumer demand and established so-called "parallel import sales."
Sony is attempting to use trademark infringement claims to halt the practice. Frankly, it's a crock. This is the same crock as region-encoded DVDs; it's the same crock as nation-limited online archives. The message is "we want to control you." Intellectual property law is just a tool used to exercise that control. I think this is one reason that the fight between the Cartel and its opponents is so nasty. Although it's cloaked by both sides in rhetoric about artistic compensation and business models, it's really a fight about control, and even people who don't openly acknowledge that sense it and get edgy.
Our buddy Hearsay Man pointed out this interesting partnership. Here's the gist: XM will offer XM/Audible branded players/receivers, Audible will offer XM content on their site, and XM will carry an Audible audiobooks channel.
I do enjoy a tasty bit of spoken word and audiobook content, so this partnership makes me shed a tear of joy.
In 2006 Audible and XM will introduce the first portable, handheld satellite radio devices that are capable of playing both the XM service as well as Audible's spoken-word content, which can be downloaded from the Web into the devices' memory.
Audible and XM Satellite Radio Sign Exclusive Technology, Marketing and Content Agreement [Yahoo]
At least, that's what Wall St. is saying, according to the Hollywood Reporter (summary only). It's now more valuable than Time Warner.
Wall Street has determined that Google Inc. is the most valuable media company on the planet. Shares of the company that went public in August at $75 rose $10.68 on Monday to close at $290.94, giving the new-media youngster a market capitalization of $80.8 billion, according to Yahoo! Finance. Meanwhile, shares of Time Warner, which until Monday was considered the world's biggest media company, dropped 23 cents to $17.02, giving the company a $79.8 billion market cap.
Today the stock is up to more than 297 and it's only mid morning in NYC. Sigh, how does that make the TW folks feel, I wonder, given that the scars from the AOL deal seem never to fully heal?
Wait, I know! It's time for a TW/Google merger!
Now, there's a few things to think about with this run up. First, Google's DNA is not as a media company, so this might seem an odd comparison for some folks within the 'plex. But Wall St. compares apples (media revenues) to apples (media revenue), and by that standard, the comparison sticks.
Second, from the looks of early trading, it seems Google will break 300 today. I have this theory about the company - it's our Web 2.0 rorschach - we see in it what we wish and dream for. We're far to smart to wish for another NASDAQ run up like we had in 1999-2000 (remember how the index kept piling on 10% increases every single week?) - but we can at least have it all in one company.
And lastly, I would not wish these expectations on anyone. Honestly, it feels like the market is getting way ahead of the company. Can or will the triumvirate manage to them? Despite protestations otherwise, how can they not?
PrivacyActivism has released a study of ChoicePoint and Acxiom, two of the U.S.'s largest data brokers. The study looks at accuracy of information and responsiveness to requests for reports.
It doesn't look good.
From the press release:
100% of the eleven participants in the study discovered errors in background check reports provided by ChoicePoint. The majority of participants found errors in even the most basic biographical information: name, social security number, address and phone number (in 67% of Acxiom reports, 73% of ChoicePoint reports). Moreover, over 40% of participants did not receive their reports from Acxiom -- and the ones who did had to wait an average of three months from the time they requested their information until they received it.
I spoke with Deborah Pierce, the Executive Director of PrivacyActivism. She made a couple of interesting points.
First, it was very difficult for them to find a legal way to do this study. There are no mechanisms for any kind of oversight of the industry. They had to find companies who were doing background checks on employees anyway, and who felt that participating in this study with PrivacyActivism was important. Then those companies asked their employees if they wanted to anonymously participate in the study.
Second, they were surprised at just how bad the data is. The most shocking error was that two people out of eleven were listed as corporate directors of companies that they had never heard of. This can't possibly be statistically meaningful, but it is certainly scary.
John Carrol writes:
The primary barrier to Linux growth is the cost of moving from a Windows ecosystem to a Linux ecosystem. Developing nations, however, have less existing IT infrastructure. Much as African nations are bypassing wired telecommunications and moving straight to wireless, why cant developing nations bypass the Windows standard and grow a Linux ecosystem?
erestimate the installed IT base present in developing nations. Nations such as Brazil arent Zaire. Per capita GDP in Brazil is six times that of China, and over half of the Czech Republic. The IT base in most nations isnt exactly a tabula rasa, and any large organization will have already built up credible amounts of IT infrastructure.
Second, consider why English is the de facto language of business. Given the need to communicate in business situations, people naturally gravitate towards one language, and for historical reasons, that language is English. It doesnt matter whether an economy newly integrated into the global marketplace has less of a track record of using English. They will use English in business situations, because thats what the wider business world is using.
The same principle applies in computer technology. Asians outnumber Westerners by a factor of 4 to 1. Still, the West will remain a critical market for the forseeable future, and having systems that integrate seamlessly with, and can consume products created by, Western corporations will continue to be important. That means Asian IT infrastructure is likely to mirror Western IT infrastructure.
The open source community cant look to the developing world as the tugboat that drags the developed world into the Linux port. They will need to figure out a way to convince the developed world to adopt Linux. In my entirely fallible opinion, the only way to do that is to lower the cost of shifting to Linux, and thats going to depend on making it easy for Windows developers to move into open source. If the open source community doesnt want to do that, then Windows developers arent going to move, and that means the people who use their products will stay put, too.
Someone told me recently the problem with Skype is why it's successful. The software was developed by programmers, not by people who understand telephony. That may go to explain the issues with both SkypeIn and Out as far as call quality.
Now I read that Skype has redefined themselves as a company when it comes to messaging.
Well now I know why the Skype folks I normally see online were offline for a few days. They had to figure out what they were and weren't. But I've said regularly that Skype in my mind is not a phone service replacement and now they seem to be realizing that they're not one either.
The big question is what do the VC's who invested in the company think about Skype now....
Via Mediateletipos.
Randall Stross' article (free registration required) in the Sunday NY Times about eBay (ticker: EBAY) and Craigslist is worth reading. This paragraph alone makes it worthwhile:
Data collected by Nielsen/NetRatings show that eBay's page views in April 2005 grew by less than half a percentage point, compared with the previous April. At Craigslist, page views grew 130 percent in the same period. According to the company's data, its traffic is now about a fifth of eBay's. And the operational efficiencies are astounding: Craigslist has 18 employees; eBay has 8,800.
Adware/Spyware expert Ben Edelman thinks that could happen. First, he outlines Google's (ticker: GOOG) role in providing ads that are used by toolbars:
Through syndication relationships, Google provides ads to multiple web toolbar operators, including to toolbars installed on users' PCs without notice or consent. Google pays these toolbar companies for the ads they show -- thereby supporting and funding their operations.
Next, he shows that Ask Jeeves (ticker: ASKJ, being acquired by IACI) illigitimately disseminates toolbars, summarizing:
So even if a user has an AJ toolbar, the user may not want it, may not know how it arrived, and may not have granted meaningful consent (if any consent at all).
And then he argues that the appearance of AdSense ads on these toolbars violates Google's own policies:
These various behaviors seem to constitute multiple violations of Google's Software Principles -- among others, installation without any consent at all, as well as failure to provide appropriate "upfront disclosure."
Notwithstanding the tricky installation methods used by these Ask Jeeves toolbars, AJ's revenues ultimately largely come from Google: Enter a search term into an AJ toolbar, and most of the resulting ads are Google AdWords ads.
Would this problem lead Google to terminate its relationship with Ask Jeeves? Ben thinks "yes". He says:
I wouldn't be totally shocked if Google ultimately elects to drop its relationship with AJ. I don't have any specific reason to think they will, but I know that's what I'd be thinking of if I were them -- especially if the contract made me sure I could do so without risk of litigation.
Quick comments:
It's also interesting to see how InfoSpace gets involved here -- as an intermediary between Google (source of ads and money) and IBIS WebSearch (sleazy toolbar with very poor installation practices, per my prior articles). An odd business for a $1.1B company!
The Telecommunications Act of 1996, however crappy it was, it worked well for the Bells. It allowed them to sell long distance services, a hardball business that was only IXCs to lose. Still doing their thing, the bells slowly saw off the competition from CLECs (many of them deserved to die for they were based on greed and dumb money.) The as the bust accelerated, the UNE-P rules were seen off, and then the Bells got the right to build brand new networks and did not have to share with them. In other words, with carefully spent lobbying dollars, and masterful business/political strategy, Bells got whatever they wanted.
Till recently, when they met their match in local governments. The locals quickly dispatched the Bells state-wide video franchise plans, and Bells know this is a battle they cannot win easily. So what do they do? Wave Stars and Stripes, plead nationalism and cry… big bad broadband policy makers are pushing us down the broadband ladder. So lets change the national policies! Boohoo!
Why do I bring this up? Verizon Executive Vice President Thomas J. Tauke was today out saying we need a new national broadband policy (which locals cannot control) and reform of the video franchise process is important for consumers and the future of broadband.
“There remains a real disconnect between the broadband market and broadband policy,” Tauke said. “We need action in Congress and at the FCC.”Do we need a broadband policy? Not really. We need competition, but we are not going to get that… will we!
Video competition “will result in an explosion of new services for consumers,” Tauke said. “But we need to change the policy on franchising.” Tauke said, “we need a fully functioning FCC,” adding that “it is hard to make bold policy when you have one vacancy and two lame ducks.” He called for the White House to be “active and attentive” on the matter.(Given that Bells have been big supporters of Republicans, it knows that Congress and White House might be more receptive to its demands than those pesky locals.) (Some data about top contributors in the 2004 elections and top recipients!)
I think there is already an explosion of services. How about giving consumers 100 megabits per second and letting them figure out what they want to do with it. Downloadable video, not IPTV makes more and more sense over the new fiber networks Verizon is building. Why build the same-old television, when you can build a new TV. Not a passive TV, but something better. A sort of hosted TiVo where consumers go to the web and build their own TV channel which comes down the fiber. Thinking different is hard, but in the end that is what is going to make Bells broadband standout, not complaining from the roof tops.
According to Barron's (subscription required) eBay's (ticker: EBAY) position in China's online auction market
is the biggest wild card in trying to forecast its long-term growth. Here is a short extract from Barron's:
....The problem is, while China could be huge for eBay, it also could be a zero. Investors haven't forgotten that eBay had its biggest failure in Asia, when it tried but failed to make a dent in Japan, where the online auction market is controlled by Yahoo! Japan. EBay exited Japan in 2002. And as it did in Japan, eBay now faces a serious competitor in China, this time from a site called Taobao.com, owned by the business-to-business e-commerce company Alibaba.com.
Other key points
Comment: More on eBay in China: eBay #1 in China? No. But CEO Whitman says "yes".
Companies like Popular Power, which tried to make a business of offering SetiAtHome-style computing grids, may have been ahead of their time, but whether through an enterprise grid like Sun's, populist projects like SetiAtHome, or hacker botnets, grid computing is definitely one wave that's coming at us.
online application that uses Google image search to generate a large graphical montage based on keywords provided by users. some users even have printed the resulting visual search maps as beautiful posters. a reverse process is chosen for guess-the-google, in which users have to guess the keyword according to randomly chosen Google images. [robinson.name]
Federalism rears its ugly head with Rep. Sessions's bill: The bill would ban municipal networks where any competitive service existed in the municipal area of governance. A grandfather clause allows existing services to proceed.
The language of the "Preserving Innovation in Telecom Act of 2005" is so hilariously broad and ill-defined that it could kill all kinds of projects that the incumbent carriers this is meant to protect would support or are involved in deploying. It has such a broad grandfather clause that it could allow massive projects to continue if even a tiny portion of the service was in use.
I doubt it will go anywhere because in its current form, it's a shotgun full of buckshot, not a surgical weapon. A broad consortium of businesses and public policy groups will certainly try to get it killed. I doubt it will get many supporters because of its broad sweep.
For instance, this bill would kill all future airport Wi-Fi that's not already built out because government entities would be unable to "provide" services if Wi-Fi were operating anywhere else in the airport authority's municipality's domain. It's pretty easy to read that interpretation.
Earlier this week I spent some time on the phone with Bob Wyman, CTO and founder of PubSub. Over the past year Bob has been hassling me for focusing on "retrospective search - Google and Yahoo, et al, and not paying attention to his offering of" prospective search," or searching what he calls the "GrayWeb" - that part of the web which is available and open, but is rarely seen because our view of the web is so dependent on traditional approaches to search. Wyman focuses on that portion of the GrayWeb that changes rapidly - the "ChangingWeb" where the future hits the present, where the unique element of the dataset is the fact of its newness. That window - when the information is knowable, but before it becomes forever eternalized in The Index - is where PubSub lives.
In short, PubSub crawls (mostly) blogs and offers a service that allows you to stay abreast of topics you choose as new information breaks. (PubSub just announced a political cut of this kind of data, for example). To me, PubSub felt a lot like Google or Yahoo news alerts on steroids, a Feedster clone. But after talking to Bob, I came away convinced that there's more to PubSub than meets the eye.
PubSub is named for "publish/subscribe" - a well traveled piece of IT theory that has, at its core, the assumption of structured data. Back in the earlier days of the computer biz, Apple, DEC, and others realized the need for users to be alerted with things change - in a database publishing model, for example, a new rev of a document would create an alert. These companies invented publish-subscribe models that, for the most part, really never took off. Why? I think the code was overspecified, and the user interface cumbersome. Wyman worked on pubsub apps at DEC - in fact, he built the pubsub piece of AllInOne, a Notes-like application that had a brief moment in the sun in the late 80s, if memory serves.
A few years ago Wyman found himself wondering if it were possible to apply the publish and subscribe model to the entire world wide web. That's a pretty audacious idea, but focusing on blogs was a good way to start , because blogs have a wealth of feed-based structured data around each post (timestamp, author, title, often a category). Wyman claims to have figured out algorithms which allow PubSub to process the ChangingWeb rapidly and "at internet scale."
I'm not in position to judge those claims, but I like the theory behind Bob's intentions. He plans to create tools that allows bloggers to easily tag their posts with category like information - "this is a book review" or "this is an event announcement." He's already built plug ins for Word Press and is looking to continue his work with other platforms like MT, which have similar widgets that so far are not aligned around a particular standard.
In theory anyway, Bob is onto something here. It's yet another attempt to build the semantic web from the bottom up, and it suffers from all the foibles of such an effort, but the intent is good - let the individual publishers build data structures which, in aggregate, create a fuzzy kind of value that developers can tap into. Were enough of these kind of structured and tagged data sets to become available ("This is a job posting," "this is something for sale,") we might well see services evolve which are built on the premise of freely available data - in other words, a new kind of publishing model, one where value comes from what you do with the data, as opposed to who owns access to the data. That may not seem like a big change, but in fact it would be - eBay, Monster, Yahoo, et al are all based on the idea of owning the environment in which structured data lives. More on this shortly, but for now, check out PubSub and let me know what you think.
Some genius (we're not being sarcastic, we think this is a clear case of genius) decided to make the San Francisco 49ers in-house training film watchable this year, so they jumped it up with racial jokes, lesbian porn, a spoof of gay marriage, and public relations director Kirk Reynolds as the meat in a topless babe sandwich.
It's all just so horrible and objectionable to god and man that SF Gate has has wisely put it up on the interweb, diced up into quick loading segments. Go enjoy.
·San Fransisco Cronicle page with the video goods.
·Quick San Fransisco Cronicle article on the video:
"49ers' personal foul Team's in-house training video includes lesbian porn, racial slurs, barbs at Newsom."
From the Financial Times:
The US military is developing miniature electronic sensors disguised as rocks that can be dropped from an aircraft and used to help detect the sound of approaching enemy combatants.thing has been discussed for a while. One of the best discussions is still Martin Libicki's paper from the mid-1990s, "The Mesh and the Net: Speculations on Armed Conflict in a Time of Free Silicon." (It's available as a book, and online.)The devices, which would be no larger than a golf ball, could be ready for use in about 18 months. They use tiny silicon chips and radio frequency identification (RFID) technology that is so sensitive that it can detect the sound of a human footfall at 20ft to 30ft. The project is being carried out by scientists at North Dakota State University, which has licensed nano-technology processes from Alien Technology, a California-based commercial manufacturer of RFID tags for supermarkets.
There's a new cryptographic result against Bluetooth. Yaniv Shaked and Avishai Wool of Tel Aviv University in Israel have figured out how to recover the PIN by eavesdropping on the pairing process.
Pairing is an important part of Bluetooth. It's how two devices -- a phone and a headset, for example -- associate themselves with one another. They generate a shared secret that they use for all future communication. Pairing is why, when on a crowded subway, your Bluetooth devices don't link up with all the other Bluetooth devices carried by everyone else.
According to the Bluetooth specification, PINs can be 8-128 bits long. Unfortunately, most manufacturers have standardized on a four decimal-digit PIN. This attack can crack that 4-digit PIN in less than 0.3 sec on an old Pentium III 450MHz computer, and in 0.06 sec on a Pentium IV 3Ghz HT computer.
At first glance, this attack isn't a big deal. It only works if you can eavesdrop on the pairing process. Pairing is something that occurs rarely, and generally in the safety of your home or office. But the authors have figured out how to force a pair of Bluetooth devices to repeat the pairing process, allowing them to eavesdrop on it. They pretend to be one of the two devices, and send a message to the other claiming to have forgotten the link key. This prompts the other device to discard the key, and the two then begin a new pairing session.
Taken together, this is an impressive result. I can't be sure, but I believe it would allow an attacker to take control of someone's Bluetooth devices. Certainly it allows an attacker to eavesdrop on someone's Bluetooth network.
News story here.
I have it on good authority that Nokia is taking a real hard look at podcasting. Being they are the world leader in mobile phones this is a smart move. As far as I can tell, non of them are running Microsoft software in them. I think this is another development that should cause Microsoft to catch up to the train because it is already out of the yard!
Lets see Apple with Podcasting Support in iTunes, Nokia with possible native podcast support built in and storage to boot. Very interesting indeed.
David Berlind thinks it is unstoppable: "First, its announcement with Philips and second, the launch of the next version of its mobile operating platform (code-named Magneto, but officially Windows Mobile 5.0). Not to mention that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates served notice to Apple and the Podderati (Dan Gillmor agrees that the iPods runaway success is unsustainable). After you add it all up how deeply entrenched into the global infrastructure (computers, other devices, telecommunications networks, content providers, etc.) Windows Media already is, what will happen as a result of the Philips announcement, and the Magneto news is there any doubt that Microsoft is not only poised to repeat its successful Windows formula, but that that success will, over the long run, actually dwarf the companys success with Windows?"
Two words - Absolutely nothing! At least on the face of it! The company became a victim of the telecom downturn, and basically treaded water, and since then has survived the bust. It has slowly weaved its way into the hearts and minds of incumbets. All those who were going to obliterate the company, well have themselves have been obliterated. A month ago it got a major boost when it was selected as one of the suppliers for the much vaunted British Telecom 21CN Network as a long haul provider. Yesterday it reported better than expected earnings, improved margins and a decent forecast. The stock still got pounded in the market, and the company cannot seem to shake off the negativity that surrounds it. Why? Because it is still guzzling cash - about $37 million a quarter.
Inventing Money blames this ho-hum reaction to the company’s recent good performance on Ciena’s seemingly haphazard acquisition strategy, which despite best efforts has delivered flat results. Catena for instance is still running at $25 million a quarter, flat from where it was a year ago when Ciena bought the company. The ONI Systems acquisition hasn’t really panned out as planned, and neither did WaveSmith purchase. The company still gets over 60% of its revenues from the much maligned optical equipment sales, which can’t bring the the 40% margins the management so believes.
Still, having known Gary Smith for a while, I am less negative than most. I think with the world moving to metro ethernet, things could look up for them in the near future. Still, they really need to bring their cost structure down and increase the number of customers. They still have long term problems -tThe price pressure from the Chinese is going to eventually flatten the profits in the long haul business. As Inventing Money writes, I would like to see more cost reductions at CIEN, especially in R&D and G&A and revenue growth from acquired companies that sell non-optical products with higher gross margins.
Take a look:
Since the beginning of Q2 (Since April 1, 2005): 
About a year ago, Microsoft made great strides in legitimizing its technology for broadcasting by getting its Windows Media 9 video codec (now grandly titled Video Codec One, or VC-1) accepted by the industry's standards body SMPTE.
And both the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray groups, representing the two competing High-Definition DVD hardware formats, have agreed to support Microsoft's codec as well as the MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding standard in their new hi-def players.
This presents an interesting question. The Windows VC-1 and MPEG AVC camps are fighting over which is the "best hi-def codec". But with the future media players supporting both codecs, does it matter which one content producers choose? I think the software doesn't matter anymore.
Syndicate Conference (May 17-18, 2005): Themed RSS: Risk, Reward and
Revolution, a strategic event not to be missed by publishers,
marketers, advertising and PR executives. www.syndicateconference.com Continued reading
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(Martin Hill on May 27, 2005 11:23 PM) I think you are neglecting the full scope of MPEG-4 acceptance vs Windows Media and the importance CE manufacturers place on non-proprietary vs proprietary standards. MPEG-4 has immense traction in the CE space from cellular phones to digital TV, cable, satellite as well as the HD DVD standards, something MS has failed to achieve. MPEG-4 AVC only removes any remaining niggles about quality differences. Yes Windows Media will be available in lots of Windows devices - but even that bastion is being eroded by Apple's inroads into the Windows space with iTunes and iPod which default to AAC (MPEG-4 audio) for audio ripped from CDs. Last year Quicktime (immensely assisted by it being the defacto MPEG-4 player) accelerated to 36.7% marketshare second only to Windows Media at 38.1% while Real rapidly dropped off the radar at 24% - this after QT used to be a distant third. It'll be very interesting to see current figures courtesy of the 92% marketshare position Apple holds in the hard-disk based MP3 player market and the 70% marketshare in the legal online music space. Then of course, there is the recent introduction of video (MPEG-4 of course) as a purchasable item from Apple's iTunes store - the thin edge of the wedge in the nascent online video industry for sure. Microsoft is also guilty of codec rot - can you say obsolete windows video codecs that won't play in the latest Windows Media Player? In contrast Quicktime v1.0 video clips from 1991 still play in the latest Quicktime. The WM story is not one DVD player owners want to see repeated. The industries mentioned above are very aware of the abuses MS is capable of perpetuating when it manages to achieve market dominance with it's in-house standards - these industries are much more interested in continuing the progression begun with MPEG-1 (video CDs etc) through MPEG-2 (DVD video, satellite TV, digital cable, digital TV etc) to MPEG-4 (everything). Viva la non-proprietary standards revolution. -Mart
(Xerox on May 28, 2005 6:06 PM) From the consumer electronics angle, what you suggest Damien, makes perfect sense. But from the computer angle, player-specific video is an inconvenience. No one really wants to have to use 3 video players. Given the choice, we'd prefer to learn and use a single player. But with video wrapped up in multiple proprietary formats, often tied to specific player software, it's not that flexible. We either *have* to maintain multiple players - or if you are like me, you ignore 2 of the 3 formats and just pretend they don't exist. The Mp4 format was apparently intended to free us from the inflexibility of maintaining multiple players for multiple formats, and free publishers of web video for example, from the redundancy of creating multiple versions of videos.* The only problem is, I've never seen it work in practice. From casual use, I would not expect a Microsoft Mp4 file to open with Apple's QuickTime. Nor a QuickTime created Mp4 file to open with Windows Media Player or Real Player. They don't seem to be compatible at all. (Probably willfully incompatible, rather than due to any technical issues.) Not having a single standard may not hurt DVD players, but it's going to prolong the inconvenience for computer users. In fact, it would aggravate the problem: my TV and DVD player are a computer (which might be something like your future scenario.) My TV broadcasts follow the DVB standard which uses industry standard Mpeg2, and TV recordings are Mpeg2. And of course, DVDs use industry standard Mpeg2. I can choose different players to watch recordings or play DVDs - but I don't *have* to. Having a single standard makes it flexible. With 2 video formats for DVDs, either developers pay twice to support 2 formats, or I have to get a second DVD player application, or the DVDs get format labels and I choose which ones I want, much like the days of Betamax vs. VHS. Would the studios would distribute every disc twice, or lower the resolution to fit 2 versions of a movie on one disc? Having 2 codecs seems like an exercise in inefficiency and an excuse for everyone to chip in to pay Microsoft for no particular reason. Single standards are important for efficiency, convenience, and flexibility. To be effective, the standard has to be free of any ties to any particular player software, and open for any developer to adopt at a reasonable price. I hope we don't have to wait too much longer before we see a standard like this for web video. Does anyone know *why* Mp4 doesn't seem to work? * There are many implementations of Mpeg4 video which will be player-specific and the file name extensions will be player-specific. But there is also a more highly specified version whose file name extension is ".mp4". We *should* be able to play these ".mp4" videos using any player or device - like a phone or a DVD player - that supports it.
(Sam on May 28, 2005 8:09 PM) If that Mart's world were the real one. Many large cable companies have chosen Microsoft's codec, as have many mobile phone markets. The only one AVC has locked so far is the satellite folks. Hopefully Apple's early and aggressive marketing of their MP4 AAC video production software will affect the codec in which content is originally produced, but in terms of transmission standards, I think AAC is still in 2nd place.
(David on May 29, 2005 1:47 PM) Do you know that there is already a television service that is using the version of MPEG-4 that really counts (i.e. MPEG-4 AVC)...see http://digital-lifestyles.info/display_page.asp?section=platforms&id=2122 In addition you can go to http://www.mpegif.org and get a lot more information there
I am not a fan of the Patriot Act, as you can see here. The Times has an editorial about the next rev of the act, many parts of which are due for renewal this Fall. The first act redefined many key legal terms so as to make your search history and the like far more susceptible to government snooping without notification, but this second rev sounds scarier. From the editorial:
One of the most common complaints about the Patriot Act is that rather than addressing the real but narrow problems with existing law, it was a wish list of powers law enforcement officials had yearned for over the years that Congress had rightly resisted conferring. Now the Bush administration and its Senate allies have come up with another: a proposal to let F.B.I. agents write their own "administrative subpoenas," without the need to consult prosecutors or judges, in demand of all manner of records, from business to medical and tax data. There is no serious evidence that agents have been hamstrung by the lack of such wide authority.
agents from getting a judge's sign-off is an invitation to overreaching and abuse, as is a proposal to let the F.B.I. ignore postal law restraints when antiterrorism agents choose to monitor someone's letter envelopes and package covers.
Hell, it's not the post office we should be worried about, it's Google Desktop and its ilk. Remember my ephemeral to eternal riff? Uh huh.
Google continues to offer PC users a great photo organizational tool as it rolls out Picasa 
2.0. You can find the download and learn more about the program at www.picasa.com.
e Google description: Picasa is software that helps you instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC. Every time you open Picasa, it automatically locates all your pictures (even ones you forgot you had) and sorts them into visual albums organized by date with folder names you will recognize. You can drag and drop to arrange your albums and make labels to create new groups. Picasa makes sure your pictures are always organized.
Picasa also makes advanced editing simple by putting one-click fixes and powerful effects at your fingertips. And Picasa makes it a snap to share your pictures – you can email, print photos home, make gift CDs, instantly share via Hello™, and even post pictures on your own blog.
Now who says I never look out for the PC users? :-)
Six Apart Pronet had this link really great resource for you MT Developers Movable Type Cheat Sheet it's published in both German and English.
Anita over at the RFID Weblog has a good piece on possibly arising M&A activity in this sector:
"The premise of the paper is that the RFID money is not in the hardware side, but, rather, in services. It predicts that the smart companies will understand this and that hardware providers and the systems integrators will align themselves."
As I said last week Skype is clearly taking aim at the video conference space.
For companies like XTEN and SightSpeed this could pose a real threat if they don't make the right moves soon. SightSpeed has a new update to their client due out in a day or so. It will feature SIP based on a note I received yesterday from their customer relations group. I think that's the right move for them. XTEN is already using SIP. So too is Packet8 and they too are developing their own client. Yahoo's new Messenger is also SIP based. Skype at this point isn't.
Skype has more users. The other guys are using a standards. Skype has more users. Thus, that begs the question, why don't the software clients all talk to one another that are using SIP? Interoperability is the key for growth, yet Skype will likely amass more users (or claim them by downloads) than the rest simply due to the Skype hype
At last report Yahoo had 13 million or so users of their Webcam software that is embedded inside Messenger. According to well placed sources, a great deal of the usage is the amateur adult variety, something that tells me videocam usage will rise over time, as the adult market is one of the proof points for adoption and behavior indicators of new media taking hold. Just think of the VCR, DVD and downloadable movies. Adult content always paved the way.
With Skype entering the Video Conferencing space along with their superior sound codecs, I can only imagine the moaning and groaning over peer to peer.
Gawker Media just took the wraps off the newest and 13th member of the blog empire, Oddjack. It's all about the world of gambling, from poker tournaments to sports betting all the way to betting on politics in the news. The primer on betting is a great way to get started.
While I'm not a gambling type, I do like cards and it'll be interesting to watch at least for the poker championship coverage. I'm curious to see how the site balances advertising, since the feds are cracking down on casino site ads. — Matt Haughey
Yahoo! Mindset showcases "intent" driven searching.
A Yahoo! Research Labs demo that applies a new twist on search that uses machine learning technology to give you a choice: View Yahoo! Search results sorted according to whether they are more commercial or more informational (i.e., from academic, non-commercial, or research-oriented sources).
What you do is enter your search terms as you normally would, then, by using a neat slider-based application, you re-sort the results based on what you're trying to do--your "intent". The two poles are "Shopping" and "Research" which allows for quite a range of different results. Interesting stuff.
[posted by D. Keith Robinson]
TeleGeography says that there will be 4.1 million VoIP subscribers by end of 2005 and these subscribers will spend around $1 billion on their VoIP home services. U.S. residential subscriber totals have jumped from 150,000 at the end of 2003 to well over 2 million as of March 2005. Vonage says it has about 700,000 of those 2 million subscribers, but cable operators are catching up. By the end of 2005, TeleGeography predicts that Cablevision, Comcast, and Time Warner together will have 2 million subscribers and nearly one-half of the total residential VoIP market. In other words, the heat is on, and it will be interesting to see how long Vonage can hang around in the top tier. I hope they do - because they are keeping a lot of people honest.
Still you can see the “mainstreaming” of VoIP show up in the equipment sales, which are up 40% in 1Q 2005 from 1Q 2004 to about $493 million. These are world wide numbers. “The market continues to move further mainstream, and last month’s announcement from BT is further indicative of the maturation of the market,” said Infonetics Research’s Kevin Mitchell, directing analyst.
From Infonetics Research: 1Q05 Market Highlights
At present, there are two exchange-traded-funds (ETFs) that offer the opportunity to invest in China - iShares FTSE/Xinhua China 25 Index Fund (ticker: FXI), and Golden Dragon Halter USX China Portfolio Index Fund (ticker: PGJ). Here is a quick performance update:
FXI, PGJ year-to-date chart.
(FXI in green, PGJ in brown)
Since the beginning of Q2 (As of April 1, 2005): 
