Broadband Life
You are currently browsing the articles from the VoIP Digest matching the category Broadband Life.
Time Warner has an uncanny ability to pick Internet’s red letter days. Its merger with America Online signaled the beginning of the end for the Internet Boom (or Bubble) 1.0. Today, by deciding to make AOL free, they sent dial-up to its final resting place.
Sure you can buy dial-up connections (and related services) and many will continue to do so, but for all practical matters from this point forward, its broadband or nothing.
Broadband, the platform not the service, is an omnipresent connection that has trained us to become intimate with the Google Search bar, spend hours on MySpace and get our just desserts on You Tube.
By throwing in the towel on its access business, AOL/Time Warner is telling all its $25-a-month paying customers: you can give this money to our competitors such as AT&T or Comcast, just keep using our friendly services. Either this is an incredibly astute strategy or simply the biggest corporate bungle since… well AOL & Time Warner merged.
Dick Parsons’ decision to tear down the (AOL) wall could go either way – just like the fortunes of the opposing super powers on two sides of the Berlin Wall. If online advertising continues to boom, it would be bouquets for Parsons, Jon Miller and AOL’s self proclaimed savior, Jason Calacanis. If the advertising market heads south, the trio would find themselves on the wrong side of the street.
Nevertheless, AOL’s decision is testament to broadband’s disruptive powers, and not even the biggest company with the deepest pockets is immune to it. Why? Because broadband causes behavioral change, and when a company can bottle that behavior change into a business model, it can make a lot of money. Google is a good example.
Thanks to broadband, Google is just a click away. We search, find and consume information; a marked shift from the old days when we went to destination sites and looked for what was available. Is it hard to imagine that in five years from now, most broadband users will expect real listings sans a map, and a video tour of the property. Or that online personals would come with an ability to chat, either via phone, IM or video.
AOL is simply seeing the writing on the wall. And changing … though the jury is still out on whether they can survive the change. Who’s next? Lets just say every Internet company from the pre-broadband era will need to reinvent, and rethink or lose everything. AOL, and a reluctant Time Warner are just the harbinger of the future.
Charts source: eMarketer
Written by Om Malik on August 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Google and Broadband Life and AOL.
“The whole world is drunk and we’re just the cocktail of the moment. Someday soon, the world will wake up, down two aspirin with a glass of tomato juice, and wonder what the hell all the fuss was about.” — Dean Martin, in The Rat Pack.
That’s perhaps the most appropriate description of what is going on in the online karaoke space. In less than a month we have seen two start-ups throw their hats in the ring. Bix, which we wrote about a few days ago, and now SingShot, a San Francisco-based start-up is offering all budding Taylor Hicks’ to find fame and fortune.
The company offers a cross platform, cross-browser tool that uses Adobe Systems’ Flash technology. The tool allows users to “record their own personal versions to backing music and lyrics from the service, and share them with friends, family and the rest of the web.” Others can listen, rate and comment on the recordings ala, Simon Cowell. Mike has all the details.
Unlike most new online services, SingShot is not free. After free 2 weeks, SingShot charges a $9.95 monthly plan, but prices fall to $7.95-per-month if you sign up for a quarterly plan, and a $4.95-per-month for an annual billing plan.
Thinking about revenues - that’s a good thing, but the biggest question is how will the company compete with deep pocketed rivals such as Fox Interactive Media’s kSolo. FIM plans to use the kSolo service in conjunction with other FIM properties such as MySpace and American Idol. FIM can also offer the service for free, and pose challenges to SingShot.
“While MySpace is definitely the big dog of the social networking sites, there are a lot of other great sites to work with on the web,” says Ranah Edelin, founder of the company. Edelin used to work for Listen/Rhapsody and claims that partnerships worked for that company, and similar strategy would work for SingShot as well.
Edelin thinks because his service has a lot more features than kSolo, he can win against kSolo/MySpace combination. Maybe for a while, because in the end “I also think that the opportunity is bigger than just “online karaoke” because with the user ratings and comments, the site really becomes an online talent platform, thus broadening the scope of potential offerings (a la American Idol.)”
Even if the service does manage to overcome those challenges, the big question is will they sing? Your thoughts people?
Written by Om Malik on July 31st, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband Life and Start-Ups and singshot.
BPL, the technology that could work, or not is getting another test, this time in Austin, Texas. The Austin City Council is planning to spend around $317,500 just to test the technology, though there are no plans at present to bring this to the city dwellers. The money will be spent to see if Austin Energy’s gear is good for carrying broadband.
“Everyone is saying how great this is,” Peter Collins, the city’s chief information officer told The Statesman. “All we want to know is, what does this really do? I don’t like to jump on a new technology just because everyone else is jumping on it. This is an education pilot program for us.”
Will Collins come to the same conclusions some of my readers have, after spending the tax dollars? Chances are yes! As Jesse Kopelman says, “BPL is like LEO satellite service — I wouldn’t say there is no hope that it will become economically viable, but it is still likely decades away.”
Written by Om Malik on July 29th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband Life.
The easy availability of broadband and the sharp increase in the number of high-speed Internet users makes it a perfect time for entrepreneurs to experiment with content in general, and user generated content in particular, despite the lack of what could be sustainable business models.
The venture investors are happy to back these plays, because many believe that we are seeing a fundamental shift in the media consumption methods. From online video to online curators such as Digg and are all part of this trend. Add Bix, a start-up previously known as 900 Seconds, to this list.
The company was started by Mike Speiser, co-founder of Epinions.com and has raised $6.77 million from Sutter Hill Ventures, Trinity Ventures and a gaggle of individual investors including ex-Yahoo Geoff Ralston.
Bix is a platform for creating contests online much in the mold of American Idol. From singing contests, photo contests to video shootouts, the company will allow end-users to become their own producers and editors. Speiser says the company was inspired by the growing popularity of contents such as American Idol, and Top Model.
Here is how it works - I create a contest inviting participants to submit their photographs of San Francisco. The community can then vote and pick their favorites. The photo submission with most votes bubbles up to the top. You can also have a head-to-head competition between various photos as well. You can do the same for picking say the top videoblogger or what not. Basically Bix is using community to do the editing and selection - off loading all the cost of creating and managing content.
Speiser says the fact nearly 500,000 people camped out to tryout for American Idol, shows that there is a large number of people who are waiting to be discovered. “Internet is perfect for the discovery of the microstars, such as the Chinese BackStreet Boys,” he says. He thinks that there are more such acts waiting to be discovered.
Bix will compete with the likes of kSolo, a company acquired by Fox Interactive Media earlier this year. Like kSolo, it will provide lyrics for online karaoke and has licensed those rights from various music labels. Speiser says they have more features. For instance a Java-based online tool will allow users with video cameras built into their laptops to record video in addition to audio clips. Bix, works with a Mac as well as a PC, which at least gives the company a shot at acquiring customers from the “creator class.”
The company plans to allow end-users to download their own audio clips and use them as ringtones for a small charge. Eventually the same content could be sold to others, and at that point the company is going to split the proceeds with the creators. Of course, like all eyeball-based start-ups, Bix is hoping to cash in on the shift of ad-dollars to the online medium. Speiser says that these contests will be ideal vehicles for brand advertising.
Written by Om Malik on July 17th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband Life and Start-Ups.
Pooch lovers (and by extension the pooches themselves,) who are members of the Dogster social network will soon be able to instant message each other. The San Francisco-based company is going to introduce the IM service later this month. (Another micro-IM network? We are seeing a trend here!)
Over a foo-foo coffee drink at Om Office 2.0, founder & CEO Ted ‘Top Dog’ Rheingold said that he wants to introduce a video chat as well. He wants to bring pooches of the world together. He was gracious enough to thank the relatively easy availability of broadband. To that we say… bow wow wow!
Perfect Pooches: Jack and Lucy via LisaAndBrian.Com
Written by Om Malik on July 14th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband Life.
I got a chance to check out Metalink’s wireless chip technology a few months ago, as the company played a crystal-clear high definition movie and ran it over three blazing-fast wirelessly-connected TV’s. If the demo was the norm, it was as easy and fast as wireless networking should be. Today Chinese consumer electronics-maker Haier said it tested its high-def TV’s that are using Metalink’s new WiFi chip set–N-compliant standard–for wireless networking.
But the technology won’t likely land in your living room for a good long while, if it makes it that far. Metalink is an Israeli fabless chip company, that has plans to work with other consumer electronics makers to embedded really fast WiFi in products like set-top boxes, DVRs and residential gateways. While the technology is the latest wireless breakthrough for the digital home, the company isn’t making any money off its innovation just yet. The company lost $4.1 million in the first quarter of this year, and competitors like Airgo, and Broadcom could very well have the upper hand.
Written by Katie Fehrenbacher on July 10th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Uncategorized and Connected Home and Unwired and Broadband Life and WiFi.
Match Activity, a new online dating site is ready for your profile.
The 14-month-old Los Angeles online dating start-up is betting that it can carve itself a niche in the online dating market by incorporating some of the newer technologies and focusing on activity based match making. It uses tags, ajax and other such features to offer a better user experience compared to the old school dating sites.
Match Activity is the latest amongst many start-ups taking a bite at the online dating pie. Consumating.com was the first to lead the charge, and was acquired by C/Net. The Knot bought GreatBoyFriends for $600,000 a little while ago. In Canada, there is the most fabulous Verbdate.
Online dating is estimated to be a $1 billion a year business, and growing. Online dating sites have shed some of their stigma, and now are often featured in movies, even ones as terrible as Must Love Dog. According to Pew Internet, some 11% of Internet users have used online dating websites. As broadband spreads, we are only going to see an increase in usage of online applications such as online dating.
Match Activity is going up against some established players including industry leaders, Match.com and Yahoo. Craigslist is another fast growing (and free) online dating site. Of course there is MySpace, not exactly a dating site, but…
That doesn’t deter Yoni Avital, the founder of the company, who believes that actions speak activities speak louder than words. And since most activities are mostly time sensitive, people are more like to be proactive and not mull too long over emails. Sort of adding an auction-like urgency to the whole dating process? The man speaks from experience, it seems. “My best dates happened when we weren’t interviewing one another, but just having fun,” Avital says.
The site is free to use if you post activities publicly or respond to posted activities. However if you want to invite a specific person (or people who approved you already) you will need pay (”$7.99 a month. The company has a two-person staff working out of a LA garage. The development team is based in Israel. Match Activity, angel funded so far is looking for more capital, Avital says. They are currently in talks with some Silicon Valley angels.
Openings for Start-ups?
Over past decade online dating, travel and auctions have been steady money earners for Internet companies. In recent months, however the giants of these categories have hit a glass ceiling. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone because many of them have sat on their haunches. This is an opportunity for start-ups who can nibble away at niches. We noted that might be the case in the online travel industry. Perhaps, it is a perfect time for someone to step up and build a rival to eBay. (In South Korea, Gmarket has done exactly that. Rob Hof of Business Week has a story on that in the current issue, but no link available as yet.)
The flip side is, that these start-ups will have to figure out a low-cost way of building traffic, and figure out how to build a profitable franchise. Exits-via-acqusitions by big boys are an option, but its like betting on Portugal to win the World Cup.
Written by Om Malik on July 9th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband Life and Start-Ups.
Hitwise has analyzed the data and come up with the conclusion… Digg is not a patch on The New York Times. Which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone since The Times website has been around for a very long time, and Digg, well is just a puny little infant in web terms.
What I have to say about Digg is that it doesn’t cost as much to make, it doesn’t win Pulitzers, but it is still a lot of fun. Surely, you can’t go grab a brew with Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. But Kevin Rose, now that’s a whole different story.
More importantly, there is that other thing which the raw numbers miss: Digg is the new king maker. If that was not the case, then why else with big media outlets including BBC put the little “digg it” button next to their important stories. Sure, The Times at one time decided the fate of presidential candidates or in some cases Presidents, but in these harsher times, when page views have an impact on the bottom-line, Digg is the new king maker.
Funny part - Hitwise blog post has a little button that says: Digg It. Too bad it doesn’t say Time(s) It.
Written by Om Malik on July 7th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband Life and Start-Ups.
Amanda “Rocketboom” Congdon has been unboomed! What a bummer since I really enjoyed her video podcast on Net Neutrality. She did not specify the reasons for the break-up or where she will go, but I have a suggestion.
Folks at PodTech should hire her - right away! (Doh… Scoble is already thinking along those lines.) With Scobelizer already in the house, they have the whole video podcast thing almost figured out. Add Amanda to the mix, and they become a serious player in the video-podcasting business. Video podcasts are more fun, and are likely to get more mainstream interest than podcasts. (Okay that is just my theory!) If done right, video podcasts can become big money earners, since they get higher CPMs. Say what John?
Written by Om Malik on July 5th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Web 2.0 and Broadband Life and Online Video.
This past week, while I was away in London, there was a frenzy of activity around the “instant messaging” client. Microsoft introduced its Microsoft Live Messenger Beta which is some rudimentary form cross talks with Yahoo Messenger. Yahoo opened up its IM and introduced new ways to add widgets to its client. Skype and Paypal did a bit of integration. In other words, all the moves that do nothing but add more bulk to the aging IM client(s).
Back in 2004, when I wrote The Incredible Importance of Instant Messenger, I pointed out that it is going to be a way to get some traction in the VoIP business, and hopefully will help the companies fight off the challenge from upstarts like Skype. More than two years later, most IM clients have VoIP calling. But they have a lot more than that.
I am with Jason when he says that AOL needs to put AIM on a diet. Most IM companies are forgetting that IM is a very personal tool whose emphasis is on instant communication. Everything else comes in the way. The more features that companies - the big three - cram into their products, the more they run the risk of alienating their user base, which frankly might migrate to newer IM options such as the MySpace built in IM.
“If all your friends are on Myspace and with the click of a button you can add 100 of your friends to Myspace IM, why bother with AOL IM anymore?,” writes Rich Greenfield, an analyst with Pali Capital in a note to his clients, and asks. “If AIM e-mail has not really worked, what are the odds that AIM extensions such as AIM Pages or AIM Phoneline will succeed?”
I agree. Those are separate properties and not to be pushed into AIM. It is time for not just AIM but to all other IM companies to rethink their approach. With this on my mind, it was pretty nice to invite Seth Sternberg co-founder and CEO of browser-based instant messaging company Meebo to join Niall and me on our weekly podsession. One of the things he said stuck in my mind - and I paraphrase - in this feature race, none of the companies are actually including things what users want - a quick and easy way to communicate. (You can hear Seth and us debate on our podsession by downloading it from here.)
Written by Om Malik on June 23rd, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Podcasts and Broadband Life.
Sequoia Capital Partners, which normally focuses on US-based start-ups is reported to have made an investment in Stardoll.com (formerly known as Paperdoll Heaven.) The total amount of funds invested in the company remain unknown, but highly reliable sources say that Sequoia Capital General Partner Mark Kvamme invested in the company.
Back in February 2006, Index Ventures and angel investors had invested about $4 million in the company, and Mattias Miksche, serial entrepreneur responsible for DVD rental site Boxman and E-TRADE Northern Europe taking over as the chief executive of the company. This is not the first company Sequoia and Index are co-investors. The two firms are also backers of FON Wireless.
The company was started by Scandinavian-born Liisa, a retired woman in her late 50s, who drew dolls and accompanying wardrobes and put them on the web. The site, since then has grown in popularity and gets more than a million visitors every week, most of them girls between ages 7 and 17. It now features paper dolls of famous people including actresses Lindsay Lohan and Bollywood temptress Ashwariya Rai.
Written by Om Malik on June 22nd, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband Life and Start-Ups.
Photobucket, the plain vanilla photo hosting site is now officially the king of online photo business. It now has a whopping 44% of the total market, ahead of old timers - Yahoo, Webshots and Flickr. According to data collected by Hitwise, “its share of visits increased by 34% in the four months from February 2006 to May 2006.” Flickr is growing fast too - up 44% in the past four months.
Why is the company doing so well? Well a lot of MySpace users seem to love the company and host a lot of photos on that site. Amazing - success has nothing to do with Ajax, or cool stuff. It has everything to do with simplicity and giving users what they want.
Written by Om Malik on June 22nd, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband Life.
CNN Money’s Paul La Monica thinks it is time for New York Times, the Gray Lady of Journalism to join the merge-or-be-purged trend sweeping across old media. Given the severe under-performance of NYT stock, well, he is right.
The New York Times Co. chief executive officer Janet Robinson has different ideas and wants to do a digital nip-and-tuck. Robinson, and the company are interested in more online investments, and acquisitions. They have stakes in Indeed and Federated Media, for example.
The paper, however has a terrible record. Any remember the JV/investment in The Street.com. That did not work out too well. How about, the latest move of putting its top columnist behind a paid firewall and calling it Times Select?
Times Select has generated just $6 million in sales so far, a rounding error for a company expected to post $3.5 billion in annual revenue this year.
Written by Om Malik on June 22nd, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband Life.
Folks from The Radicati Group, sent me their latest market stats, which actually made for interesting reading. Here is a graphical summation of the stats, designed by a good buddy of mine.
Written by Om Malik on June 12th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband Life.
Doppelganger, a San Francisco-based startup is launching a virtual world today that’s part nightclub, part billboard. And it could have figured out an online advertising model that could become common place over next few years. My story about the company is now up on the CNN Money website.
The steady shift of advertising dollars online has entrepreneurs scrambling to come up with business models that will help them capture part of the bounty. So far, most of the attention has been on the search advertising gold-rush that propelled Google from puny startup into a behemoth worth $115 billion.
The advertising community will need this new thinking, especially as the younger (and the more lucrative) demographics move away from traditional media outlets. Online community, Bolt, just released a research report which says that 80% of 16-18 year olds can’t name all four top TV networks - NBC, ABC, CBS and FOX. Admittedly, this is a small smaple size - about 417 odd people, but still the data is pretty stunning.
But there are other forms of advertising besides search, and for its virtual world, The Lounge, Doppelganger has settled on a product-placement model popularized by Hollywood, where advertisers pay up to have their products featured in movies and TV shows. Music label Interscope Records has already signed up for a trial to have Doppelganger build a virtual club for its Pussycat Dolls band within The Lounge.
Written by Om Malik on May 15th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband Life and Start-Ups.
Viacom is buying X-Fire for $102 million, according to company sources. Think of it as the consolation prize for Viacom, which was rumored to be in talks with Facebook!
XFire is a tool that automatically keeps track of when and where gamers are playing PC games online and lets their friends join them easily. The two-and-a-half year old company was co-founded by Mike Cassidy, Dennis “Thresh” Fong (World Champion of Doom, Quake, and Quake 2) and Adam Boyden.
The company was backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, NEA, and Granite Global Ventures. Business 2.0 had an interesting article on the company and its appeal as a marketing channel to twenty-something males.
Written by Om Malik on April 24th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband Life.
Business 2.0 has a short but sweet story on Netflix, and the evolution of its envelope from its early days to now. (Photos are here.)
In 1999, Netflix started out with a heavy cardboard mailer. With only 100,000 subscribers, costs weren’t a concern yet. Then the company experimented with plastic envelopes, which proved not to be recyclable, and padding, which added too much to postage costs. Both top-loading and side-loading envelopes made an appearance. Seven years of tweaking have paid of… How well those iconic red envelopes will help the company fend off the newest threat - video-on-demand - remains to be seen.
Written by Om Malik on April 22nd, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband Life.
If you are interested in keeping an eye on what files - music, movies and software is flying over the Darknet, check out this site, Peer Mind. This is a service of a company called Nareos. Peer Mind doesn’t track BitTorrent traffic, but will soon track Fast Track and Bit Torrent in addition to eDonkey and Gnutella networks.
Written by Om Malik on April 17th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband Life.
D-Link, which makes network equipment for the home and other sundry stuff has been blamed by some for choking the Internet Time Servers by hitting them so often that the whole time thing is running late. D-Link apparently had been hitting the time servers hard since August 2005.Poul-Henning Kamp has been trying to get D-Link to mend its ways but nothing has happened so far.
BBC reports that it nearly accounted for 90% of the traffic on some Danish Time Servers.
Mr Kamp said a new line of products sold by D-Link has the list of the net’s time servers written into the software that keeps the devices running. This has revealed that D-Link hardware is also causing problems for 50 other net time servers. The list includes some run by the US military, Nasa, US research organisations and government groups around the world.
Time Servers, while not something we pay attention to are critical part of the broadband life. For instance they play some kinda role in determining times for eBay auctions etc. Like most useful things on the Internet Time Servers are maintained on a non-profit basis and don’t have much money to splurge on bandwidth and hardware.
I find it strange that all these companies who want to make money selling devices or what not to the consumers, but don’t invest in their own infrastructure. D-Link can easily afford to sponsor (or pay for) a time server. It can’t be that much money!
Written by Om Malik on April 14th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband Life.
Every so often, you run into some entrepreneur and that one thing he (its mostly he) who laments about: lack of available domain names. Which means people use dyslexic spellings of popular words, or even translate words from other languages and then Valleywag gets a chance to make fun of them. Nevertheless, it is becoming increasingly obvious: its easier to find one great true love in New York City than it is to find one great true love. (Oh, if you go by the money spent by the likes of Sphere, Dabble, and Flock on their domains, the “love ain’t cheap” theory ports well to domains as well.)
The domains are so hot that domain squatters are making more profits than some of them real estate speculators. About 2.2 million new domains are being snapped up every month in the US alone, according to some estimates. Marchex, a Seattle-based public startup which has built up a massive portfolio of domains, makes money when people miss type a domain and end up a strange looking page with basically ads. Marchex claimed in a Business 2.0 article that it was nearly 10 percent of the global paid search market, about $9 billion or so. Another proof, Donald Trump is no money-genius.
The madness is going global it seems. IPWalk says that new .eu domain, when opened to all European Union residents last week (aka Landrush) has zoomed past the .biz domain and will lap .info in about four months. EURid, the registry of .eu, received 346.218 applications, in comparison with approximately 800.000 applications within the first 24 hours. Today there are 1.454.128 active .eu domain names, a number that surpasses 1.352.984 active .biz domain names.
Given the frenzy, looks like GoDaddy, the domain registrar with enough power to unleash major swings in web-server market share might begoing public. Wow… the company most known for its steamy commercials, hasn’t filed any documents with SEC, but boy, it could be an interesting read. Folks over at Techdirt think that a known name like GoDaddy could be the trigger to get IPO-lemmings out of the door as well.
Just a few things I gathered about GoDaddy.com from IPWalk. The company uses three name servers for its domains, WildWestDomains, Jomax.net and of course Godaddy.com. The only name server, WWD is going up, while the other two are trending down. WWD is the #1 host in the US. GoDaddy has a total of 6.66 million domains registered to it. At a very rough average of about $10 a year for registration, that would work out to about $66 million in annual sales just form domain sales/renewals. Warning: This is a very very very rough estimate.
Written by Om Malik on April 13th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband Life.
Heather Green reports that YouTube, has raised $8 million, from backer, Sequoia Capital, bringing the total to around $11.5 million. Why the need for the money? I bet it is to pay for their ever growing need for storage, hardware and bandwidth. They are also trying to clean-up their act and avoid the fate of Napster.
Written by Om Malik on April 5th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband Life and Start-Ups.
With MPAA cracking down on Usenet services, it is no surprise one of the bigger ones, GUBA is trying to go legit. The San Francisco-based start-up which lets you download videos from Usenet groups via a web interface, today introduced a new video upload and sharing service, well which is much like any other 95 odd video services.
The only difference is that the new service, GUBA Upload, allows you to upload videos and then have them automatically formatted for the Apple iPod / iTunes, Flash and Sony PlayStation Portable formats. Does anyone want to make odds on how quickly this formatting feature is going to be copied? Also, the 200 MB in uploads is puny space. GUBA says it will expand this limit to 1 GB in April 2006, which is like ten days from now - so why start with 200 MB to begin with.
GUBA Upload provides video creators with an individual URL to their GUBA Upload page so they can share their videos with friends, family and fans.
Site visitors can download and view videos in their preferred format and can subscribe to the video creator’s content via an iTunes video podcast (using RSS) which automatically pushes the newest videos to the end-user’s computer.
GUBA will roll out additional video upload features in Q2 2006, including reporting tools to track viewer visits, comments and monetization capabilities enabling content owners to profit from the viewing of their videos by a vast Internet audience.
I wrote about GUBA last year, though wasn’t explicit in pointing out the nefarious content on their site and the problems that go along with it. That alone should be reason for a makeover. GUBA is fortunate that the MPAA hasn’t come after them (and instead gone after, NZB-Zone, BinNews, and DVDRS), mostly because they don’t index full length movies. From the looks of it, the Usenet search game is going to get a lot of attention from the MPAA types.
Written by Om Malik on March 20th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband Life and Start-Ups.
I just realized that besides my Apple Mail email app, the most used application on my desktop is NetNewsWire, the feed reader that is a force to reckon with. Following closely there after is Ecto, my blogging client, that I use for not only writing posts, but also as an informal word processor, and post all my interviews, and notes to a local edition of WordPress, that hums peacefully on my mac. Wow… how much of our information comes via feeds now, and hopefully we can see more innovation around it.
Oh sorry for digressing from the point of the post: the NetNewsWire. I have been using it for so long, that I feel bored with it. It feels a little sluggish and little dowdy. While waiting for the recently released, NNW 2.1 Beta, I decided to cheat on NNW and looked for options that might fit the bill. I mean, I am fairly happy with the read, preview and built in browser features of NNW, and especially dig the three-pane view. Still, no harm in looking. What I discovered were many many and many options.
I think in many ways we Mac Users are blessed by a community of great programmers who whip-up excellent apps. I think the three feed readers I tried were NewsFire, the NewMac Pro and the Vienna, a free open source client so good, that the developers might as well charge good money for it.
And just when, I decided that these should be enough, Adriaan Tijsseling, who had crafted the most lovely, Ecto dropped me an email, informing me that he has released a brand new feed reader called, Endo.
My intention is not to do a review of all but instead highlight what I found were the most appealing after using these for an extended period of time. Each one has its own benefits. News Fire, coded by the most talented David Watanabe, is faster than a Ferrari - handling hundred of items so rapidly, that it has become one of my favorites. NewsFire blocks ads by default. You can add your own stylesheet to apps like NetNewsWire, Vienna, or Endo to restyle the page, drop ads, and even add some corporate branding if you’d like.
If it is speedy, then NewsMac Pro is absolutely luscious - a visually stunning work of art, which has its own quirks, but boy, I like how it looks. The best thing about it is that it has a built-in podcast player. It lets you save searches as folders, and uses tabs very efficiently. It has an automatic multi-colored headline flagging (marks news stories containing keywords different colors) which is very helpfl when you read nearly 500 feeds. Here is the best part, iPod headline synchronisation. ThinkMac Software has promised a universal version of the software, and perhaps that will help on my new MacBook Pro.
That brings me to Endo. I have not been able to play with Endo as yet, but clearly it is a big departure from traditional feed readers. It has a built in torrent client, and can easily handle torrents linked to in articles. It is too early to tell, but like Ecto, Endo is an acquired taste. I am getting used to it, and like what I see so far. My favorite feature of Endo is an offline mode that downloads images locally so you can see the full post when you are offline. It’s great for browsing your feeds when you are offline such as on a train or airplane
Still, I have waited for NNW’s next big update, which dropped on Friday. The best part about it is that it syncs with Newsgator Online services. That is crucial, because I have multiple computers and tend to use them at different times of the day. For instance, at work I have a G5 iMac, while at home I have a Powerbook and a MacBook Pro, in addition to a PC which is mostly used for testing PC products. So far, the new NNW 2.1 meets my expectations - at least from a syncing perspective. NetNewsWire 2.1 has undergone a large code refactor resulting in faster response times - which means it is faster than the previous versions of the software. It has loads of other features.
So if you are a Mac user, you have excellent choices. You can pick a feed reader that fits your style of reading. Hope this helps…
Also check out Niall Kennedy’s excellent essay, The State of the RSS Aggregator and where the current market is headed.
Written by Om Malik on March 18th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Web 2.0 and Broadband Life.
A little while ago I had pointed to “copyright” material that was showing up on You Tube was one of the main reasons for their growing popularity. I certainly enjoyed the cricket clips. It also got them into hot water with NBC’s legal department.
The good news is that they are listening, and have started warning those who are putting copyright infringing material on the You Tube site. (Some entrepreneurs who had decided to put their evening news (television clips) online have been warned by You Tube!)
Now Dave Coustan has found out that they are making people sign-up for what amounts to be an age-verification form. (Girls of You Tube might be the reason?) Maybe cleaning up the act (and respecting copyright) was part of their recent partnership with MTV? “his is just a start, we’re in discussions with lots of networks, movie studios and record labels to feature more cool videos on YouTube,” Tubers says on their blog.
Written by Om Malik on March 7th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband Life.
Playboy’s Girls of MySpace, sexual predators and other crimes have tarnished have descended on MySpace like a flock of hungry vultures. The social networking site which has spawned many a few imitators is dealing with a whole lot of analog problems; problems sadly most social networks will have to face up-to in months and years to come. The Wall Street Journal looks into MySpace, and how it ended up with these headaches.
Robert Young, a guest columnist who is fast becoming our resident “MySpace” sage over at GigaOM wrote about all these issues in his provocative essay, Sex, Crimes and MySpace nearly a week ago. News Corp, the parent of MySpace, has responded quite quickly, and its efforts are laudable. “News Corp. plans to appoint a “safety czar” to oversee the site, launch an education campaign that may include letters to schools and public-service announcements to encourage children not to reveal their contact information,” writes the Journal.
Written by Om Malik on February 16th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband Life.
ntl, a UK-based cable broadband company is teaming up with BitTorrent and Cachelogic to conduct a technical trial to evaluate ultra high-speed, legal video downloads in the UK. The trial download service will feature a large amount of licensed broadcast quality video content including popular movies, music videos and television programmes. As part of the trial, Cachelogic’s P2P content cache devices will be deployed in ntl network and will accelerate delivery of the content. BitTorrent client will be used for distribution. If this works, this could have huge implications for legal video distribution. This will also help legitimize BitTorrent, and give a big leg-up to company’s plans to distribute legal content. Clearly media players are beginning to realize that P2P is not going away, and trying to harness the technology’s potential to meet their own ends. Recently Time Warner (Germany) and AOL announced plans to tap P2P for video distribution.
Written by Om Malik on February 10th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Wired and Broadband Life.
Mike is raising some serious and legitimate concerns about the recently released Google Desktop 3.0 and how slowly it erodes end-users privacy. Here is the old privacy policy, and here is the new one. Mike singles out a new Google Desktop 3.0 feature called “Search Across Computers” that stores file content on Google servers. Given Google’s ongoing tussles with the DoJ, it makes you wonder about the wisdom of downloading and installing desktop software. (I for one, an quite grateful that I use a Mac. Just to make sure, I am not going to be downloading the software on the new X41.)
You can’t simply lay the head of privacy at Google’s feet alone and turn them into devil’s incarnate. The telecom industry is under the gun as well. A dear friend reader emailed earlier today, expressing his concern about how none of the online offerings, can guarantee end-user privacy. His lament was across the board and included everyone from Microsoft, Apple, and AOL to Google. (My thoughts on our so called cached life can be found here!)
The current situation with “online offerings” is not that different from other consumer interfacing sectors such as financial, banking and health care sectors. Those sectors were eventually regulated due to privacy concerns and personal data disclosure violations, mostly because of pressure from politicians and consumer rights groups. Should consumer groups step-up and take the mantle of protecting a semblance of privacy? How does one reconcile the desire for digital progress with almost victorian values about privacy? Please weigh in more intelligently on this topic.
Written by Om Malik on February 8th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband Life.
Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and now a partner at Kleiner Perkins, recently addressed a group at the MIT. He talked about “Six webs, 10 years On.” Six webs were “far†web (typical TV viewer experience); the “near†web (desktop computing); the “here†web (mobile devices); the “weird†web voice recognition systems); the “B2B†web; and the “D2D†web, of intelligent buildings and cities. Video of his talk is here.
(Ten years later) he believes the “here†web will figure most prominently in our lives, with its “nomadic idea that instead of being tethered to an office, we carry around things of most interest to us.†Says Joy, “Doing things with people you know through a small screen makes enormous sense.â€
Hat Tip, Gary Price
Written by Om Malik on February 8th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband Life.
The presence of sexual predators on online social networks is getting attention on the mainstream media. Most of the spotlight is on MySpace.com (supposedly bigger than Google in sheer traffic). Dateline recently ran an investigative series on the topic of online sexual predators. CBS recently aired a piece as well, that talked about 14-year-old Judy Cajuste who met a man in his 20s through MySpace.com and was later murdered. This is not an isolated case.
Authorities are looking at multiple cases, and in a Newsweek interview Rupert Murdoch said, “We’ve also got a third of our work force monitoring the site to prevent inappropriate material from being posted.” Murdoch’s Newsweek statement suggests that MySpace is taking the situation pretty seriously.
Robert Young, who has in the past written guest columns about Rupert Murdoch and MySpace thinks that that these developments could cause major problems for MySpace and limit its money making potential.
Guest Column By Robert Young
Here’s a quiz: What is the absolute worst question that a web community service can face when dealing with advertisers, especially inter/national brand advertisers?
Answer: “How do you intend to deal with sexual predators?”
Put simply, if that question is on the table, you can pretty much kiss major ad buys goodbye; and even if you’re lucky enough to persuade a few of them with a well-thought-out containment plan, good luck securing high ad rates.
As of this past week, this is the unfortunate predicament that Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace finds itself in.
The recent press coverage (which was surprisingly massive) will, without doubt, be a much-discussed topic among brand managers as well as media planners & buyers all over corporate marketing departments and Madison Avenue. While it may seem that I’m going over the top with alarm, rest assured that I am not. This is a huge problem; as large as anything that a web community will ever deal with. Now, I’m not saying anything here that advertisers don’t already know, but I sure hope that someone on Murdoch internet crew advised and prepared him of this risk early on in the game.
The root of the problem lies in the fact that there is no definitive solution to the core problem of eliminating predators within a web community. Actually, there is one way - by verifying the real identities of every member. But doing so is not practical, as it would effectively destroy the community. As anyone who has battle-scars from running a large community can attest, nearly every effort that attempts to ensure higher safety & security will have a diametrically opposite effect on the growth and attractiveness of the service to existing members and potential members alike. At the end of day, people online will generally prefer the benefits of anonymity, even when weighed against extreme risks.
Does this mean MySpace will not be able to monetize their enormous inventory of pageviews? As I wrote in my last piece, where I compared MySpace to Google, the challenge is a tough one to begin with. How does MySpace over come this challenge, and still be the money machine for Murdoch’s web ambitions. So, in conclusion, does this mean that Murdoch made a mistake by buying MySpace, after all? Absolutely not. Even if he cannot directly monetize the community to the levels that he had hoped for, this group of 50 million people (the new new MTV generation) is the most valuable strategic asset he owns as he transitions his empire into the digital age.
Robert Young is a serial entrepreneur. He was an exec at Delphi Internet Services (which he sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.), and founder/ceo of Freemark Communications. His past columns for GigaOM.com include Inherent truths and value of Community; Why Murdoch Bought MySpace and Murdoch, WiMax and the Two Way Web..
Written by Om Malik on February 6th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband Life.
Breaking: Heavy.com, a New York-based online broadband content community is close to announcing a new round of funding, sources say. The new funding round is likely to bring in around around $10 million. Polaris Ventures is said to be reading the round. I have also heard, Avram Miller, former Vice President of Intel Corp. and current CEO of the Avram Miller Company, will join Heavy’s board.
Heavy.com gets about 10 million unique visitors a month, and is the 7th fastest growing web brand by Nielsen-NetRatings. My favorite program on Heavy network is “Behind the Music that Sucks.” The company was started way back in 1999, and has gone through some makeovers, but with broadband usage on an upswing, Heavy has finally found momentum. The best part is that you can get their video-downloads to go for Sony PSPs and Video iPods. More Details To Follow…
Written by Om Malik on January 29th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband Life and Venture News.
“You have zero privacy anyway… Get over it.” —
Scott McNealy , CEO of Sun in 1999
Scott McNealy, the CEO who should have been a stand-up says a lot of things. Many you can ignore, but when he said the aforementioned words, you knew he was right. It was only a matter of time before what was perceived as a tempest in a teapot would become a tornado, and spill into the public consciousness. The Department of Justice’s subpoenas against Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are just that - a wake-up call, that privacy as we know it is over.
Scott, had also famously uttered that the only privacy you will have will be in your thoughts. And how prescient he was.
Search engines are like the digital sand, where we leave foot prints. Corporate email systems (as Microsoft and Bill Gates know all too well from their DoJ adventures), instant messaging systems, and even shopping carts - we are leaving a tiny bit of privacy wherever we go. Of course you could turn to paper and pen, disconnect yourself from the grid and move to a mountain cabin, but the options are all but none. In fact, we find ways to erode this privacy every little time.
Somewhere on some server, in some SAN your life is cached. We are living a cached life. And it is going to get even more cached, as we turn to always-on wireless devices. Our RSS will be cached somewhere. So will be our thoughts that appear on blogs. Our TiVo watching patterns to music listening patterns in iTunes, and other such new conveniences are part of a new cached, convenient albeit less private life.
I found it amazing that not many people thought of this when they looked at Root Markets, a start-up that garnered favorite comments from many, including Erick Schonfeld, one of my colleagues at Business 2.0. Unlike him, when I see the company, the first thought that ran across my mind: so I spy on me, so to speak, build a collection of information about myself, and then heaven forbid for some odd reason, I get subpoenaed. Oops!
Take a more everyday scenario. A messy divorce is in the works, and wife’s attorney can get hold of the laptop, and twist everything around… and build a compelling case against you. I am not trying to pick on Root Markets, but what I am wondering - shouldn’t we be spending our creative and technological energies on building something that offers a semblance of privacy. Just a little bit? Don Dodge, formerly of Napster, whose blog is a relatively new but important addition to my blog-reading list, says
We should again consider what rights and privacy we have in the new digital world. You will probably be surprised to learn you have very little privacy and very few rights. Over the years we have rationalized this away, traded privacy for convenience, accepted targeted ads for free content, and assumed our email, even at work, was private. It isn’t.
Don offers seven rules of how to safeguard your privacy in a digital world, and many of them are frankly quite easy to implement. Writing private emails during work hours? Not a good idea. More conversations, instead of sensitive emails, which after all can be cached anywhere. And so on. I am going to think long and hard about Don’s suggestions, and try and follow them.
Everything works out just fine 99.9% of the time. We live in a great society of honest and decent people who want to do the right thing. Even in government…most of the time. Principles are important. We do have a right to privacy, but we have been lulled to sleep about where the boundaries of our privacy begin and end, and what compromises we have made along the way. Something to think about over the weekend.
PS: Any good privacy tool recommendations for OS-X?
Written by Om Malik on January 21st, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband Life.
Online video is hot, and you can judge that from the break neck growth of You Tube. The San Mateo, California company was founded in February 2005, and a year later it is serving more than 3 million video views a day, receiving about 8,000 video uploads a day from users and transferring 16 terabytes of data a day. Add to the mix Google video and half-a-dozen others, and you get the idea that video-sharing is the hottest thing on the Internet. But many of these videos that are being shared are infringing on copyrights of some content creators.
Google Video, thanks to its massive infrastructure has become a repository for all sort of foreign films. I have personally watched dozens of Bollywood movies, many of them released recently. Here is a little sampling. Since the time I got in touch with Google last week, a lot of material has been taken off their site, but some Bollywood songs etc still remain. I guess, this is going to be a policing issue going forward for Google and everyone else. You Tube still features a lot of Bollywood content like this and this. Its not just fare from overseas markets, but I found a lot of music videos and television show clips, which make me wonder about how these video sharing services are going to protect against copy right infringements. I pinged Google and asked them about the said copyright infringements. A spokesperson emailed me this response.
As for infringement, Google respects the rights of copyright holders … For all of the content we host – whether from premium content providers or creative end users – we require the content provider to hold all necessary rights to the material. We work to identify and remove any infringing content that may appear on Google Video using the process set forth in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). If we receive a notice or otherwise have reason to believe that content submitted by a particular user infringes another person’s copyright, their account may be terminated.
You Tube in an email statement pretty much said the same thing.
“All of the content on YouTube — including videos, comments, and ratings — is posted at the direction of users. We take copyright issues very seriously. Our terms of use make it clear that
users should own or have permission from copyright holders to post any videos. We encourage copyright holders to contact us appropriately if they have any objections about specific postings.”
The news of Bollywood movies being shared on Google video hit the news wires this morning in India. Sunil Thakur, founder of WahIndia!, a website that syndicates its entertainment segments online to sites like Sify and Planetguru told IANS news service, that “he received a response in which Google suggest(s) he “contact the user directly”, to remove content, or “file a complaint” using standard form to contact Google Video. These users (that Google asks us to contact) are usually untraceable and could be from anywhere in the world. While one waits for the issue to resolve, the filmmaker could be losing real money as new releases are downloaded and passed around on PC, iPOD, Sony PSP.”
I am not sure if this is a problem that is going to go away. Online video companies will have to figure out a policing mechanism… after all if CSI shows start showing up on Google video (not the store), Google’s partners at Viacom are not going to be too thrilled. Similarly SNL videos now for sale on iTunes store, available for free are going to become a headache of sorts for folks at You Tube.
Archives: Did MySpace Censor You Tube?
Hat Tip, Manthan
Written by Om Malik on January 15th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband Life.
Timing they say is everything. It is especially true in the start-up space. Knowing when to cash out is more intuition than science. Some have it, most don’t. A perfect example is Friendster, which was one of the early leaders in the “social networks” space, but since then has fallen on hard times.
Metaphorically speaking, its efforts to find a special friend have not amounted to much. It has been quite well known that the company which has had its fair share of upheavals has been on the block. And that is when VCs are ready to buy a piece of TheFacebook at a ridiculous valuation, and “OG” Murdoch spent over $500 million for MySpace.
There was word of Disney being interested in them. Staci Kramer over at PaidContent reports that Viacom had a-look-see at the company but decided to pass, after kicking the tires. The price tag for the company has been sliding, the report indicates, down from $200 million back in early 2005 to rumored $5 million.
The biggest problem for Friendster has been that it had been too broad a network, when the real market was looking for “interest specific” networks. The success of MySpace and more recently The Facebook is a good case in point. David Hornik argues that the best days of social networking are still ahead of us.
…..entrepreneurs have come to realize that social networks are enablers of other compelling consumer experiences. Thus, social networks are becoming an important ingredient of all sorts of consumer experiences.
That certainly is the case with Tag World, which is trying to take on MySpace. Will it succeed? Not quite sure, but its an evolutionary step. There is another one, Dogster. (All my friends with dogs says they have better odds of meeting other singles with pooches, than saying going through Friendster!) I wrote about 30 Boxes earlier today. If you boil it down, in its rawest form, it is a calendar driven social network - where network is restricted to those you have offline interactions at least some point during your daily existence.
But back to Friendster. Staci, sums it up nicely …
The company has social networking tools, a user base and, despite some of the comments I’ve head and seen, a brand that could be a start. You’d think that might be worth something. Then again, as far as I know, Friendster is still for sale.
Written by Om Malik on January 11th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Web 2.0 and Broadband Life.
Time Warner’s AOL has bought video search company, Truveo, according to Jeff Clavier’s blog. Recent partnership with Brightcove, and now Truveo, when married to TW’s own video efforts, seems like AOL would soon be, You Got Videos. Given that Google just invested a billion dollars, and AOL went and bought an outside video search company, doesn’t speak very highly of Google’s video search efforts. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it seems its not as much as the $435 million TW paid for Advertising.com and more than what Jason got. Reuters says that the “The deal was the largest purchase by the Time Warner Inc. division in 2005 and smaller than the $435 million purchase of Advertising.com in 2004.” More here!
Written by Om Malik on January 10th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Web 2.0 and Broadband Life and Start-Ups.
Dan Primack has to be one of last remaining true news-hounds. In his latest PE Wire email newsletter he digs up a funding deal for Evil Twin Studios, a San Francisco-based online gaming company.
This is one of the former VSP Capital companies that went up for (very) limited auction after the venture firm’s collapse last year, and was won by former VSP pro – and current legal adversary — Vince Vannelli. The filing reports that Evil Twin has called down $7.9 million of an $8.5 million Series B round. Trident Capital came into the deal, and was joined by return backers Draper Richards, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Vannelli (listed as KPG Investments)
Written by Om Malik on January 9th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband Life.