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Use HTML 5 to View YouTube Vids Without Flash

Kevin C. Tofel — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 04:26:37 PST

When I saw a version of Google Maps in HTML 5 earlier this year, I was impressed. I simply couldn’t tell the difference between it and a Maps version coded in some true programming language. Next up on the list is YouTube viewer in HTML 5 that works without using Adobe Flash. NeoSmart wrote up a YouTube viewer in HTML 5 and although it might not work on every browser, it does work on Google Chrome on Mac — I was able to watch one of our latest videos directly in my browser without any plug-ins. Here’s what the NeoSmart folks say:

“HTML5 poses the answer providing a way for browsers to use the native implementations to render videos directly in the browser without resorting to ActiveX and 3rd-party browser plugins… it just has yet to be embraced. But now you can uninstall Flash and enjoy your online videos in peace. Just go to http://neosmart.net/YouTube5/ and enter the URL of a video to watch it in the embedded HTML5 viewer. Yes, you can skip, skim, pause, resume away to your heart’s content.”

Of course, I tried this on mobile browsers but they’re simply not there yet. The iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre and T-Mobile G1 all rendered a message saying “You must have an HTML 5 capable browser.” We know that HTML 5 is coming soon — as is Flash for most handsets — but it can’t come soon enough for me on the mobile side. I’d rather not use a dedicated YouTube application to view vids if I can simply watch them more efficiently in a native browser.

The fall of the Berlin wall in digital media

Mercedes Bunz — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 05:15:33 PST

Digital media are playing an important role in today's celebration of the fall of the Berlin wall. It is interesting that much of the mainstream press have left their historical medium behind for their online coverage, as each have chosen the format which is best for a story. For example, the Guardian has put some impressive films online in which Berliners describe how the city was divided while, readers of the New York Times submitted magnificent photos and memories of the wall and the BBC has displayed in a map how far pieces of the former wall have spread around the globe. In addition to an interactive mainstream coverage, there are several social media projects worth looking at.

The Berlin Twitterwall supported by Reporters without Borders displays Twitter messages which are using the hashtag #fotw on a virtual East Side Gallery. The aim of the project is to share thoughts on the fall of the wall as well as to focus on "which walls still have to come down to make our wold a better place". The page was blocked in China after nearly 2,000 web users in the country left messages on the wall.

To prevent spam, users can only post up to five messages a day. Additional camera icons can be clicked to view some of the 1,000 huge styrofoam dominoes painted with messages of peace by students, celebrities and politicians. These dominoes are the center piece of tonight's festivities as they snake along the old wall line and are supposed to be toppled during the celebrations.

The Berlin Project by five young reporters also uses social media, but is not a crowd-source project. The aim of the project is to explore the use of mobile media and social platforms to cover today's celebration. The News 2.0 project by former students of the City University's Graduate School of Journalism is backed up by Reuters and will try to demonstrate the possibilities for innovation within journalism available with new media.

A third project is The Mauer Mob, in which British performance artist and curator Martin Butler is using the organisational power of today's online platforms for a wall made of people, a "temporary monument of reflection". 20 years after the wall came down 33,000 people are asked to stand united for 15 minutes to form a human chain marking the path where the wall once stood. The Mauer Mob used social media such as Facebook to reach out to the people and organise the event. On their website they rearranged the volunteers along 330 different sectors where they will start the flashmob tonight at 9.15 pm.

And these are only some social media approaches among others. Indeed, it will be interesting to evaluate afterwards if it really made sense to use social media, or if it was more or less just used, because it is a trendy idea.

Mercedes Bunz

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Recent NYTimes Infographics: Jobless Rate and Berlin Wall

(author unknown) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:56:00 PST

The NYTimes (info)graphics department has released two stunning pieces recently.

The Berlin Wall: 20 Years Later - A Division Through Time [nytimes.com] consists of a small collection of photos that show Berlin now and 'then', or the city without or with the Berlin wall, while allowing the user to slide one picture or the other to the foreground.

The Jobless Rate for People Like You [nytimes.com] is a revealing animated line graph that allows the comparison of how the economic crisis has affected different groups of people, in terms of race, gender, age and education level. It is a beautiful example of how animation can be used as an informative visual cue, even (and maybe especially) when the line moves temporarily 'out of bounds' for specific categories (try "Not a high school graduate", for instance).

Record labels keep blaming P2P, but it's a hard sell

nate@arstechnica.com (Nate Anderson) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:15:00 PST

In response to a new survey suggesting that P2P file-swapping might not be harming music sales, music's international trade group IFPI today put out a statement. "The net effect of illegal file-sharing in the UK and elsewhere has been to reduce legitimate sales," IFPI asserts. "This is why spending on recorded music has fallen every year since illegal file-sharing began to become widespread."

In other words, P2P file-sharing is the main cause of the revenue decline and the (very real) job losses in the recorded music business. It's a strong assertion, but it's not necessarily accepted outside the music industry. And we're not talking about the usual copyrighters, or groups like EFF, or Pirate Party backers; complaints about P2P have failed to convince even people like the European Commissioner for Information Society and Media, Viviane Reding.

Fictional Character Interactions Over Time

Nathan — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:54:12 PST

Popular nerd comic xckd takes a look at character interactions over time in Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Jurassic Park, 12 Angry Men, and Primer. The horizontal axis is time and the vertical axis indicates which characters are together at any given time. The result is something that looks like famed Minard graphic. Well, sort of. And of course it's all hand drawn, which adds to the nerd-ish charm.

[Thanks, Wesley & Dave & Everyone else]

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Do chimps grieve?

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:39:32 PDT

Look at this photograph and just try to tell me the answer is no.

This incredible image was shot for National Geographic by Monica Szczupider, and shows chimpanzees at the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center in Cameroon. They're observing as the body of an elder troop member named Dorothy is taken to burial. She died at 40 years of age, which is pretty old for a chimpanzee.

The photo appears in the November issue of National Geographic Magazine, in the "Visions of Earth" section. [ Thanks, Marilyn Terrell ]

San Francisco Opens The City’s Data

Guest Author — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 07:00:27 PDT

This guest post was written by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who was elected to the position in 2003 and reelected in 2007. Newsom is also running for governor of California in the upcoming 2010 election. In this guest post, Mayor Newsom details the launch of DataSF.org, a new website that will offer convenient access to city data that is relevant to the community.

San Francisco has a long history of innovation. We are home to hundreds of technology companies that are changing the way the world operates from Twitter to WordPress to Kiva.

In an effort to engage our highly skilled workforce we are launching DataSF.org, an initiative designed to increase access to city data.

The new web site will provide a clearinghouse of structured, raw and machine-readable government data to the public in an easily downloadable format. For example, there will be updated crime incident data from the police department and restaurant inspection data from the Department of Public Health. The initial phase of the web site includes more than 100 datasets, from a range of city departments, including Police, Public Works, and the Municipal Transportation Agency.

We imagine creative developers taking apartment listings and city crime data and mashing it up to help renters find their next home or an iPhone application that shows restaurant ratings based on health code violations.

The idea behind the site is to open up San Francisco government and tap into the creative expertise of our greatest resource – our residents. We hope DataSF.org will create a torrent of innovation similar to when the developer community was given access to the platforms behind popular technologies and devices like Facebook and Apple’s iPhone.

Our effort to improve access to city data has already led to the creation of new services never imagined within the walls of government. Earlier this summer, our Department of Environment released recycling data that was used by a third party to develop EcoFinder, an iPhone application that helps residents recycle based on their location.

By bringing city data and communities together in one location, we hope to stimulate local industry, create jobs and highlight San Francisco’s creative culture and attractiveness as a place to live and work.

As we look to deepen and broaden citizen engagement we will face common challenges: resistance to change, political will, and sustaining data streams from government sources to name a few. Collaboration with citizens, non-profits, vendors, academia, and our peers in government will be critical to overcoming these barriers. It will also take leadership as we’ve seen from President Obama and his CIO, Vivek Kundra to establish our ideals and set forth a shared vision for a more transparent and open government.

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Jeff Jarvis: Transparency benefits us all, even when it hurts

Jeff Jarvis — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 01:12:50 PDT

In the company of nudists, no one is naked and there is nowhere to hide. In this space and on my blog, I have been arguing that with the internet, we are entering an age of publicness when we need to live, do business and govern in the open. So I was left with little choice when I learned I had prostate cancer. I had to blog it. So far, no regrets. Oh, one troll tweeted that in my blog post, I had merely used my cancer to plug my book (which, by the way, is entitled What Would Google Do?). But my Twitter friends beat him up on my behalf. I got emails pushing nutty cures on me – yes, there is cancer spam – but Gmail's filters killed them for me. And I have had to be mindful not to bring my family into my glass house; my transparency shouldn't necessarily be theirs.

But it has all been good. On my blog, on others', in Twitter, and in email, I received an instant and lasting shower of good wishes and some good advice about my choice of surgery. My brothers in malignancy have shared their experiences with generous candour. I even inspired a few of them to blog their own stories. They joined me in urging men to have the PSA blood test that revealed my cancer.

After my blog post sharing the diagnosis was republished last week in the Guardian, I heard from Emma Halls, chairman of the UK Prostate Cancer Research Foundation, who said the disease affects almost as many men as breast cancer does women, but it gets less funding and little attention.

That stands to reason. We men don't like talking about penises – certainly not when they malfunction. Discussing one's incontinence and impotence post-surgery – both temporary, we hope – well, it doesn't get much more transparent than that. It's one matter for me to disclose my business relationships, politics, religion, and stock ownership on my blog's "about" page; it's another to do this.

So I think I've become about as transparent as a man can. I am living the public life. There are dangers here. I risk becoming merely a medical and emotional exhibitionist. And I know I have violated my own privacy to an extreme.

But I think we need to shift the discussion in this era of openness from the dangers to privacy to the benefits of publicness. It's not privacy that concerns me, but control. I must have the right and means to keep my disease secret if I choose.

By revealing my cancer, I realise benefits, and so can society: if one man's story motivates just one more who has the disease to get tested and discover it, then it is worth the price of embarrassment. If many people who have a condition can now share information about their lifestyles and experience, then perhaps the sum of their data can add up to new medical knowledge. I predict a day when to keep such information private will be seen by society as being selfish.

Collectively, we will use the internet's ability to gather, share and analyse what we know to build greater value than we could on our own. That is the principle of transparency that I want companies and governments to heed: that openness in their information and actions must become their default, that holding secrets only breeds mistrust and robs them and us of the value that comes from sharing.

I believe this openness at the source will become a critical element in a new, linked ecosystem of news, as institutions and individuals will be expected to provide maximal information on the web. Such open intelligence also allows an unlimited number of watchdogs on those in power, helping to bring about a new, collaborative – and ultimately, I hope, more effective and efficient – system of journalism.

So for me, transparency is a necessary ethic of the age. That is why I used my medium, my blog, to share my prostate cancer. If I believe in the value of publicness, how could I not?

Jeff Jarvis

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Which Search Engine Do You Choose In The Blind Test?

Michael Arrington — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 17:22:32 PDT

Have you tried out this blind search tool yet? It provides results from Google, Yahoo and Bing in three columns but doesn’t tell you which column is which search engine. You then tell it which one you think shows the best results, and you then see which answers are from which engines. I keep choosing Yahoo as the best results.

A few search engine experts we’ve spoken with over the years say that users tend to think Google results are better just because they’re from Google. If you take any search engine and put the logo on top, it tests better. So Yahoo results with a Google logo will always test better than, say, Google results with the Yahoo or Bing logo. People are just used to thinking about Google as the best search.

This search tool strips out all the branding, so you’re forced to really think about which results you like better. And early results showed a much more even distribution than Google’s 70% market share would suggest: Google: 44%, Bing: 33%, Yahoo: 23%.

The score keeping feature was removed when people found a way to game it, but you can still run the test against yourself and see which search engine you really like the best. Too bad the one I seem to like will shortly be mothballed.

The tool was created by Michael Kordahi, a Developer Evangelist at Microsoft.

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The "End of Politics" Delusion

Jamais Cascio — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 14:21:14 PDT

You have my express permission to kick the next person -- especially someone advocating the embrace of radical forms of technological advancement -- who tells you that they wish nothing more than to get rid of, move beyond, or otherwise avoid "politics." Kick them hard, and repeatedly. They have adopted a profoundly ignorant and self-serving position, one that betrays at best a lack of understanding of human nature and society, and at worst a malicious desire to preemptively shut down any opposition to their goals.

The trigger for this bit of anticipatory violence is the still-smoldering debate over the writing of one Peter Thiel, a poster boy for socialist revolution. Staggeringly rich, he espouses a form of "I got mine, Jack" libertarianism that is openly and gleefully anti-democratic. In a widely-criticized essay for the Cato Institute, Thiel claims that the extension of the vote to women and the poor has undermined capitalism; unsurprisingly, this argument hasn't gone over well, and even his apologists -- happy to continue getting his money for their projects -- have distanced themselves.

But my focus here is on another line from his essay:

In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms...

Unless Thiel means that libertarians must live in splendid isolation from society and each other, he's going to have a problem.

He's not alone in making this claim, of course. I've heard the sentiment that advocates of Revolutionary Technology X "must seek to escape politics" repeated in various forms time and again, even by people and groups I otherwise respect. It's a fascinating and sad delusion, characteristic of a movement that sees itself as both smarter than everyone else and unbound by the problems of the past.

In the early days of the dot-com era, this attitude resulted in the absence of digital tech industry voices in Washington, DC, allowing the incumbent telecom and entertainment industries free rein to write laws and buy politicians without opposition. Companies and industries that had considered themselves beyond politics found out just how wrong they were. Stung by that experience, today's advocates of the "escape politics" position usually articulate it as more of a wishful whine, as with Thiel's line quoted above.

It's a position I've fought hard against for quite awhile. It was the heart of the presentation I gave at the 2007 Singularity Summit (where I heard a lot of people making the "let's escape politics" cry). More recently, I talked about it in my interview with the Dutch consulting group FreedomLab; here's a video clip of that part of the conversation. It runs just over two minutes:

Technology is Political from Jamais Cascio on Vimeo.

The core of the argument is straightforward: Politics is part of a healthy society -- it's what happens when you have a group of people with differential goals and a persistent relationship. It's not about partisanship, it's about power. And while even small groups have politics (think: supporting or opposing decisions, differing levels of power to achieve goals, deciding how to use limited resources), the more people involved, the more complex the politics. Factions, parties, ideologies and the like are simply ways of organizing politics in a complex social space -- they're symptoms of politics, not causes.

Calls to get rid of politics can therefore mean one of two things: getting rid of persistent relationships with other people; or getting rid of differential goals. Since I don't see too many of the folks who talk about escaping politics also talking about becoming lone isolationists, the only reasonable presumption is that they're really talking about eliminating disagreements.

It's the latest version of the notion that "a perfect world is one where everyone agrees with me." It rarely gets expressed like that, of course. It's more like...

After the Singularity, we'll be too smart to have politics...
[Or] Once we develop strong (and friendly) AI, we'll let them make decisions for us, as they will be far smarter and wiser...
In a post-scarcity, nanotech world, nobody will have politics because everyone will have what they need and want...
Once we get off-world, politics will go away because you can always move away from someone you disagree with...
After we can reengineer the brain, we can do away with conflict and disagreement...

No. Wrong. Bad technophile, no upload!

This is why I was so frustrated at the deprecation of politics in the Singularity University curriculum -- there's a profound ignorance across the tech advocacy community of the importance of politics to human society. Politics means conflict, debate, and frustration. It also means choice. A world without politics is a world where disagreement is illegitimate. It's a world where your ability to choose your future -- to make your future -- has been taken away, whether you like it or not.

Spotify and the Great Leaps of Faith

Sarah Lacy and Paul Carr — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:08:29 PDT

Last month at The Europas - TechCrunch Europe’s version of the Crunchies - a lot of impressive start-ups were honored. But one was clearly cleaning up: Spotify, the sexy online music app that has music lovers in Europe swooning.

Each time the company won, you heard two reactions from the crowd: fan boys screaming with joy and other companies’ founders groaning. “Too big for their boots,” was a phrase heard muttered a lot.

But player hating is just part of life as a hot start-up right? Of course - but Spotify is living in a particular dual reality. It’s caught between the rapture of music lovers who say it’s the site they always dreamed could exist and the cruel reality of the online music business.

And that meant there was a lot more drama than immediately meets the eye behind that reported $50 million funding and $250 million valuation. As one investor who ultimately passed on the deal told us, “This was one of those where you hold your nose and just pay up. Before you’ve done anything the majority of the economics are right out the door to the labels. You need huge scale to pay for all that, and then you’re still in bed with a bunch of numb nuts.”

Someone in the comments of TechCrunch’s previous Spotify story said it was Europe’s YouTube. We don’t know if they meant that in a good way or a bad way—but we agree on both. The problem with the comparison? YouTube found Google; a deep-pocketed public company that was also trying to build a video offering online and was willing to pay top dollar for YouTube’s streams, and their associated business model challenges.

Several VCs we talked to used the words “leap of faith” over-and-over again in describing the decision to invest in Spotify or not. In reality an investor has to take multiple leaps of faith to do this deal, especially at a $250 million valuation. Looking at those leaps explains why so many VCs who were awed by the product ultimately passed - and yet why a few ballsy investors saw the elusive upside worth the role of the dice.

Leap of Faith #1: The Labels Want an Apple Alternative. This seems like common sense, right? But how often do music labels act according to common sense? There’s a whole Internet graveyard full of online music start-ups that VCs invested $20 million or more in, cut deals with labels and the labels happily sucked them dry. It’s a good sign that the labels have been taking equity investments in Spotify, but that hardly makes it certain they’ll support the company. It’s common for big public companies to invest an immaterial amount in a promising start-up in order to keep a close eye on it.

According to people close to the company, the deals being negotiated with labels are similar to past subscription deals. There’s a minimum in royalties that has to be paid, and once that’s cleared there’s a more reasonable revenue share. But that minimum bar is so high, that’s where most subscription services have died. “The labels are entertaining how to work with them in a way everyone can make money, but they’re still clearly taking a pound of flesh,” said one person with knowledge of the negotiations.

Leap of Faith #2: Audio Advertising Will Shift from Radio to Online. So far, the money Spotify is getting from audio ads is likely to be “chump change - less than you could earn from those crappy ads at the bottom of instant messenger clients,” according to one industry expert we talked to. For the service to still have a free element, a larger-than-just-Spotify industry shift is going to have to occur where audio ads move from terrestrial radio to the Web in material amounts. We’re knee-deep in that shift in print, and only beginning to see it in online video. Will it happen in audio? Probably, but not next year.

Leap of Faith #3: Millions Will Pay for Subscriptions. That means the real opportunity for Spotify to build a business is the subscription model - something no online music company has succeeded at to date. Right now the company claims it has “just under 100,000 users” paying $10 a month. Other sources confirm that it’s growing at a fast clip. While impressive, the onerous costs from the labels mean that revenue - $12m a year, before that “crappy” audio ad money - is not nearly enough. For this business to work Spotify needs millions of paying subscribers.

The fact is, Spotify is not only trying to break the online music subscription curse, they’re trying to do something few have done on the Web. To date people have shown themselves unwilling to pay for content and premium services en masse. Even the mighty Netflix only has 10 million subscribers; Match.com has less than 1 million. And again, thanks to the pressures from the labels, Spotify doesn’t have years to get there.

Leap of Faith #4: Apple Won’t Kick Spotify Off the iPhone; Other Mobile Carriers Will Champion it as an iTunes Alternative. Apple isn’t open. It’s territorial. And with good reason—it owns the dominant mobile Web and music platforms. Why on earth would it allow Spotify’s offline music player app to compete on its own hardware with iTunes?

That leaves other mobile devices to champion Spotify as an iTunes/iPhone alternative. That strikes us as highly likely. What’s more: People are more willing to pay $10 a month for a music app that’s not tethered to their computers. This would seem to be the company’s best bet to solve its business model woes and get enough future investment to hit scale.

Leap of Faith #5: US Launch Goes Well. Spotify is saying it will launch in the US by early 2010. That doesn’t seem feasible, given their business model challenges and the fact that this round was only 50 million. Investors who looked at the deal confirmed they’d need a much larger war chest to make that happen. Also, there is some confusion over whether the round is even closed at all - with some close to the company saying it’s still open but the company itself saying it has been closed for two weeks.

Much seems to depend on just how much demand there is to invest in Spotify, which is hard to read. The company claims that it got nine term sheets and a 20% premium on what we understand was a requested €150 million valuation. The latter appears to be true, but we know that the bulk of the major European VCs—including names like Balderton and Index that don’t normally balk at price if a company is good enough—turned down Spotify or offered a term sheet at a substantially lower valuation, due to all these leaps of faith. And, we contacted six of the top US consumer Internet partners who said they weren’t even pitched. This leaves us wondering from where these nine competitive term sheets came. In addition, the deal took a reported five months to close– unusual for a “hot” company.

There are certainly billions in cash in the world of private equity for promising companies, even in this economy. But it’s unclear how much more there is for Spotify while all these questions remain.

Leap of Faith #6: If All the Above Fails, Someone Buys the Company for $100 Million. In other words, what are the odds the incoming investors lose money? We think chances are good they’ll at least make their money back. After all no one disputes the beauty of the product or how many people love it. That’s clearly worth something even in a worst-case, fire-sale acquisition. Any investor worth their salt would have insisted on a liquidation preference given the risks and the high valuation attached to the deal.

It bears noting that while Spotify has been wildly promoting themselves in off-the-record conversations with the press (including us) they have been less than forthcoming with information publicly. In several weeks of reporting this story in the Valley and in London, we talked to more than a dozen people including investors who looked at the deal, people close to the company and other people in the online music industry. We’ve found a host of troubling contradictions that we tried to comb through for this story, with little help from Spotify.

We sent two emails to the company detailing the discrepancies we were hearing on both sides of the pond and got little back but a note saying the founders “wouldn’t comment on financial matters” and “didn’t like (our) tone.” This after their representatives had been providing us, off the record, with hype about subscription numbers and claims about term sheets and increased valuations.

Given the mass of uncertainties in the business and how many users love the service, it’d be nice to see the company be a bit more forthcoming about its future.

[Photo credit: Dirk Lindner for TechCrunch Europe]

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Spotify

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What does Spotify's funding say about freemium music fortunes?

Robert Andrews — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 01:54:07 PDT

paidContent: Analysts say that despite funding for Spotify, the company still faces challenges and must convert more users to its premium service

Does Spotify's new VC funding now suggest confidence that ad-supported music service can really work? Depends who you talk to…

Steve Purdham, CEO of ad- and premium-funded streaming site We7, is seeing it as a positive rather than as a victory for a competitor: "We see this as an outstanding announcement given the stage in the maturity of the ad-funded music market, and it is exceptionally positive for We7's potential valuation going forward."

But Forrester research director and music analyst Mark Mulligan cautions: "Spotify has made a great start but it hasn't even finished the first lap yet." He warns Spotify will find challenges in growing ad income in an ad recession and in attracting premium customers: "Until those are fixed, every new user for Spotify is cost to the bottom line."

Free streaming music services are growing up to rival pay-for download stores but, just as newspaper publishers in the ad downturn are looking back toward the pay-for model, recent months have seen music streamers wobble. Last.fm has introduced radio subscriptions in some countries, YouTube has pulled premium music in the UK and Germany while baulking at royalty outgoings; We7, too, is experimenting with premium offerings on top of its core free.

But, after a wobbly start when its original aim was to include audio ads inside track downloads, We7 claims to have had its best month to date in July on ad sales, reach (2.5 million UK users) and off-site widget uses (1.5 million). We7 is funded by John Taysom, Peter Gabriel, Purdham himself, Spark Venture and Eden Ventures, and is expected to eye further funding in Spotify's wake later this year.

But Purdham remains realistic: "Despite the hype, the focus still has to be on sustainability ahead of scalability. Spotify have done a great job hyping up this area but, as I have always said, giving away lots of music has never been the hard bit - sustainability is the real challenge.

"With good companies like Pandora and Hulu, you are starting to see really positive signs of that, and that is our mantra. Once sustainability is covered, then scale becomes a natural step. Imeem have shown that the reverse of that is not true."

If freemium music streamers can make a success of their own businesses, they will go a long way to helping the music industry itself, which is placing hope in income from these licensing payments as actual retail purchases wane in the face of an online market that's 95 percent illegal.

Mulligan, though, writes that Spotify needs to hit three triggers if it's not to be just the latest flash-in-the-pan: "Break through the 15-20 million user bar like Pandora did", "convert roughly five percent of its user base to premium offerings" and "build a sustainable ad business that helps shoulder the cost of its free users".

"Spotify itself is not about to become 'the future of the music industry'," he says, but "the music industry needs Spotify to get a decent shot at being a success".

Robert Andrews

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

10th Largest Site Online To Launch Microformat Integration Network

Marshall — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 10:19:01 PDT

As a part of my ongoing thoughts about blog post titles, I thought I’d see how much traction what I think is a very big story would get with a different headline. Instead of “MySpace to Unveil Integration With Sites Around the Web, Using Open Standards” how about we leave the tech-tarnished name MySpace out of it. It’s still the 10th most popular site on the whole internet!

From that story yesterday:

MySpace will announce in the next few weeks a major new feature being added to its MySpaceID product that will allow third-party websites to write updates into the MySpace activity feed just like Facebook Connect, but will also incorporate open semantic microformat code in order to comprehend what those updates are about and make more sophisticated update highlighting and recommendation decisions.

It’s a major move being worked on with both the Activity Streams and Open Social communities – it could push the rest of the web, outside of Facebook, in a direction that supports radical app innovation through the creation of a level playing field of readable data. And it could make MySpace a lot better, too.

“We don’t want to do anything without semantics, to be honest,” Monica Keller, group architect for activity streams at MySpace, told us by phone today. “We can’t afford to show a user content on their home page that they aren’t going to like.” At a time when MySpace is in serious trouble and trying to regroup, a home run by Keller and crew could make MySpace more relevant to people again and impact the rest of the web in positive ways radically unlike the impact of Facebook’s proprietary software.

Here’s the rest. Tell me, is this not a really big deal? Maybe people don’t have confidence in MySpace to pull such an ambitious plan off – but I suspect most readers didn’t even look past the company’s name.

Delicious Freshens Up With Twitter. Founder Hates It.

MG Siegler — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:59:00 PDT

Delicious was once one of the hottest social sites on the Internet. That’s why Yahoo bought it in 2005. But it’s weird now to even think about it as a social site, I get more of the utilitarian vibe from it these days. People still use it, but it’s more of a repository. Or, to put it another way, it’s where links go to die.

Contrast that with services like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed where people are sharing and re-sharing links all over the place, and having conversations about the content, making it feel alive. And that’s what Yahoo wants to tap into now, with another revamping of Delicious. And not surprisingly, this revamp is very Twitter-centric.

The biggest difference is that the main Delicious homepage is now an area called “Fresh Bookmarks.” Previously, the main page contained the most popular bookmarked pages on the site, but that is now relagated to the second tab. This redesign is all about freshness, which is to say real-time-ness. Delicious looks at and refreshes this list of links every minute or so based on what people are bookmarking and what they’re tweeting. This model, while flawed (I’ll get to that), does make the main page of Delicious more interesting.

“Design” is the most popular tag on Delicious, according to Yahoo, and that meant a “Popular Bookmarks” area that was dominated by things like “200+ Paper Brushes For Photoshop.” For some people, that is useful, but for at least just as many, those types of links are not useful in the least bit. The redesign is an effort to move away from that.

One problem I see with this Fresh Bookmarks area is that the tweets it uses in its equation, often don’t have anything to do with the content being linked to. Yahoo did this on purpose, noting that some 81% of tweets don’t contain URLs, and they still wanted to use data from the most amount of tweets to populate this area. So instead they use keywords in tweets, but this often results in tweets populated below the shared content that have absolutely nothing to do with it.

And on top of this new Fresh Bookmarks area, when you bookmark things, Delicious now allows you to also tweet your links out at the same time. This should be useful to people who want to save stuff for later, but also want to let others know about it. You can also easily email links to people, and send them to your Delicious contacts. This is all done through the bookmarklet.

And the search aspect of Delcious has been completely revamped as well, making it easier for power users to dig through things they’ve bookmarked in the past. The new search area also features rich content, so if someone shares a YouTube video, you can play it inline. The same is true with Flickr images.

All of that is great, the problem is that it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. Delicious has long just been about saving links and not about sharing them like many of the new, more versatile social sharing services out there. If Yahoo wanted to tie the product into Twitter, it should have done that months ago, to get ahead of the curve, rather than at the back of it.

The problem now is that there are plenty of other services people are already using to share stuff on Twitter. Most people still just paste links right into the update box, and Twitter uses Bit.ly to shorten them. This is allowing Bit.ly to collect a huge amount of data about what people are sharing — something which it could use soon to take on Digg and Delicious.

And on the bookmarking side of things, the trend seems to be towards simple. Mike likes a service called Pinboard, I’ve long been a fan of Instapaper. Both require less effort to use than Delicious, and are quicker.

But you don’t have to take our word for the downsides of this new Twitterification of Delicious, just listen to its founder, Joshua Schachter (who left Yahoo last year, to go work for Google). He’s not even waiting for the embargo to lift on these new changes, he’s just ripping them left and right. First, he notes:

I can’t BELIEVE delicious delicious did integration with other social networks before finishing with its own. sigh

But later he completely rips the new feature:

i hate the delicious twitter integration (sharing != saving) but i like the new search a great deal.

Well, at least he likes the new search, I guess.

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RealEstate.com Launches Useful Twitter Bot

Robin Wauters — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:58:25 PDT

I continue to be amazed at how companies are starting to use Twitter in a professional way (see for example my profile on Best Buy’s efforts with @Twelpforce). Another case in point: RealEstate.com is today launching the beta version of @Housewatch, a Twitter bot that can instantly deliver statistics and information to home buyers, sellers and agents who use the social networking service.

Here’s how it works: you follow the (protected) account, and as soon as the bot follows you back you can use a variety of commands through direct messages sent to the account. RealEstate.com’s Housewatch can respond to simple commands to automatically deliver data on everything from median home values to neighborhood crime statistics and monthly mortgage calculations. To get an overview of which commands are supported, you can DM the word ‘commands’ to the bot, but here’s the full list:

Stats - median home price (by city)
Value - home value (by address)
Income - median, per capita and median disposable income (by city)
Weather - monthly high and low temperatures (by city)
Demographics - population count and density (by city)
Cost - cost of living including local sales tax and a ranking of household expenses based on an average of 100 (by city)
Transportation - median travel time to work in minutes, and average use of public transportation (by city)
Environmental - air pollution and ozone indices based on an average of 100 (by city)
Crime - total, personal and property crime rankings, based on an average of 100 (by city)
Fixed - monthly loan payments including insurance and taxes
Equity - amount of home equity using current value minus outstanding mortgage balances
Amort - full amortization schedule including monthly payment, total interest paid and total amount paid over the lifetime of the loan

Information sent in response to most of these commands will evidently include a link to more comprehensive information found on the RealEstate.com website, but the company has humans on Twitter who can guide people looking for more info as well (Dennis Kuntz aka @RealTweet). Ironically, Kuntz appears to be on holiday so the automated responses will have to do for the moment.

All in all, it’s pretty cool way to get access to this type of information from RealEstate.com, even if I’m not sure how many people exactly will be using it, unless they’re die-hard Twitter fans who refuse to simply visit the website and also happen to be looking for a house while tweeting.

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Step-by-Step Guide On How to Get Shot by the Sartorialist

Nathan — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 00:46:21 PDT

The Sartorialist is a unique fashion blog that highlights people's hot styles on the street. I'm pretty sure there's very little overlap with its readers and FlowingData's, but maybe I'm wrong. The above infographic shows how you can get shot by the Sartorialist. I'm all over it.

[Thanks, @MacDivaONA]

Why The FCC Wants To Smash Open The iPhone

Erick Schonfeld — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 07:27:08 PDT

Right about now, Apple probably wishes it had never rejected Google Voice and related apps from the iPhone. Or maybe it was AT&T who rejected the apps. Nobody really knows. But the FCC launched an investigation last night to find out, sending letters to all three companies (Apple, AT&T, and Google) asking them to explain exactly what happened.

On its face, it might seem odd to some people that the FCC is investigating the rejection of a single iPhone app. After all, iPhone apps are rejected every day. But the Google Voice rejection caused an unusual amount of uproar, and there is nothing like a high-profile case to make an example out of in pursuit of pushing a bigger policy agenda. The FCC investigation is not just about the arbitrary rejection of a single app. It is the FCC’s way of putting a stake in the ground for making the wireless networks controlled by cell phone carriers as open as the Internet.

Today there are two different sets of rules for applications and devices on the Internet. On the wired Internet, we can connect any type of PC or other computing device and use any applications we want on those devices. On the wireless Internet controlled by cellular carriers like AT&T, we can only use the phones they allow on their networks and can only use the applications they approve. This was fine when the wireless networks were used mostly just for voice calls. But now that they are increasingly becoming our mobile connections to the Internet and mobile phones are becoming full-fledged mobile computers, an argument has been growing that the same rules of open access that rule the wired Internet should apply to the wireless Internet.

While Apple and AT&T cannot be too happy about the FCC investigation, Google must secretly be pleased as punch. It was only two years ago, prior to the 700MHz wireless spectrum auctions, that it was pleading with the FCC to adopt principles guaranteeing open access for applications, devices, services, and other networks. Now two years later, in a different context and under a different administration, the FCC is pushing for the same principles.

In its letters requesting more information from all three companies, the FCC cites “pending FCC proceedings regarding wireless open access (RM-11361) and handset exclusivity (RM-11497). That first proceeding on open access dates back to 2007 when Skype requested that cell phone carriers open up their networks to all applications (see Skype’s petition here). Like Google Voice, Skype helps consumers bypass the carriers. The carriers don’t like that because it erodes their core business and turns them into dumb pipes.

But dumb pipes are what we need. They are good for consumers and good for competition because they allow any application and any device, within reason, to flower on the wireless Internet. So if you look at the questions the FCC is asking, it wants to know why the Google Voice app was rejected and whether AT&T (the carrier) had anything to do with that rejection:

2. Did Apple act alone, or in consultation with AT&T, in deciding to reject the Google Voice application and related applications? . . .

3. Does AT&T have any role in the approval of iPhone applications generally (or in certain cases)? If so, under what circumstances, and what role does it play?

The FCC also wants Apple to explain the arbitrariness of its app approval process:

4. Please explain any differences between the Google Voice iPhone application and any Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications that Apple has approved for the iPhone. Are any of the approved VoIP applications allowed to operate on AT&T’s 3G network?

5. What other applications have been rejected for use on the iPhone and for what reasons? Is there a list of prohibited applications or of categories of applications that is provided to potential vendors/developers? If so, is this posted on the iTunes website or otherwise disclosed to consumers?

6. What are the standards for considering and approving iPhone applications? What is the approval process for such applications (timing, reasons for rejection, appeal process, etc.)? What is the percentage of applications that are rejected? What are the major reasons for rejecting an application?

Good questions. Hopefully, the FCC will share Apple’s answers with the rest of the us. It is all a bit absurd, though. Why does it take a formal request from a government agency to get Apple (and AT&T) to explain what the rules are to get on the wireless Internet? More importantly, why are these companies allowed to be the gatekeepers to the wireless Internet? The iPhone needs to be smashed open, and the FCC is swinging the hammer.

Update: AT&T responded to this post with the following statements:

AT&T does not manage or approve applications for the App Store. We have received the letter and will, of course, respond to it.

Customers can use any compatible GSM phone on our network, not just the ones we’ve approved and sell. And they also can use apps we don’t approve. We don’t approve iPhone applications.

So there you have it. You can use any mobile app you like on AT&T—unless it is an iPhone app (that’s been rejected by Apple). Does Apple ever reject apps at the request of AT&T though? Maybe they’ll give the FCC a straight answer.

(Flickr photo credit:Stephen Heywood).

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Gmail Kisses “On Behalf Of” Goodbye, Enables Support For Third-Party Outbound Servers

Jason Kincaid — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:08:36 PDT

Anyone who has ever tried to use Gmail as a central hub for their Email has likely fallen prey to one of the service’s annoying flaws: there was no way to use another site’s outgoing SMTP servers to send Email. For the vast majority of people this wasn’t an issue — Gmail was happy to send your Email for you from your Gmail account, along with message indicating that it was being sent “On Behalf Of” your other account. But those three words were still there, serving as a constant thorn in our sides. And to make matters worse, it could also confuse people: they might start sending messages to your Gmail account rather than your primary Email address. Today, you can kiss those “On Behalf Of”’s goodbye, as Gmail has just started allowing users to send their messages from third party SMTP servers.

If the previous paragraph confused you, here’s an explanation: Many people like to use Gmail’s web interface for their Email but don’t have the option of using Google Apps on their mail server, especially when it’s for their work account. Fortunately there’s a work around to this: simply have your work Email account auto-forward all incoming messages to your Gmail account. The option even allows you to send messages and make them look like they’re coming from your work account, rather than you Gmail account, but with one caveat: rather than actually send these messages from your work address, Google includes a message that says the message was sent “On Behalf Of” your address, while still showing the name of the Gmail account it was actually sent from.

It’s true that most people never noticed this (in fact many mail clients don’t show the “On Behalf Of” at all under default settings), and even if they did see it they probably didn’t care in the slightest. But it’s still been a source of annoyance for many of us.

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Mixx Turns To Twitter To Start Surfacing Hot Links, Launches TweetMixx (Invites)

Jason Kincaid — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 14:28:30 PDT

Mixx, the Digg-like site that got a total makeover earlier this year, is launching a new site today that takes a different approach to surfacing hot links: Twitter. The site is fittingly called TweetMixx , and it’s currently in private beta. TechCrunch readers can grab one of 1000 invites by going here and using the following credentials: username=techcrunch, password=tweetmixx_beta.

TweetMixx works by skimming through tweets and looking for links. The more times a given link appears on Twitter, the higher placement it gets on TweetMixx. Likewise, you can log-in using your Twitter credentials and receive a personalized hotlist of tweets based only on the Twitter users you follow.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because the idea isn’t a novel one. TweetMixx is facing off with plenty of competition — Tweetmeme has become quite popular, and sites like twitrollr and tweetlinx do very similar things (and we just saw TuneIn launch this month at our RealTime CrunchUp).

But CEO Chris McGill says that there are a few differences that help set TweetMixx apart. For one, the site will figure out the name of the article being linked to, so rather than seeing something like http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/24/adwords-gets-more-local/, you’d see the article’s title, “AdWords Gets More Local”. One other feature offered by TweetMixx is a much-improved version of Twitter Search. Using the standard engine offered by Twitter, you can only search through the text of tweets, but not the articles they’re linking to — if someone fails to explain what a link is in their tweet, then it won’t show up in results. Using TweetMixx, you can search through both standard tweet text and the names of the articles that are being linked to, which can turn up many more relevant results.

Mixx’s decision to launch TweetMixx is yet another display of how powerful Twitter can be when it comes to surfacing new content, as it’s often much faster than a Digg-like voting system. The biggest clash is yet to come, though: pretty soon bit.ly, the very popular URL shortener, is going to be launching its own Digg competitor, which is going to have a huge volume of metadata to draw from.

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Go Sightseeing Without Leaving Yahoo Image Search

Leena Rao — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:54:57 PDT

Even though Google gets more than three times the amount of traffic, Yahoo Search continues to add some pretty innovative features that its main competitor doesn’t have. In the past year and a half, Yahoo introduced Search Assist, thumbnail images and preview panes for Image Search. Yahoo even had the ability to search for Creative Commons licensed images before Google. Now, Yahoo Image Search is rolling out a travel image refiner in its search, which is definitely worth a look.

When you type in a city in image search, Yahoo will suggest related points of interest to your search, giving you more contextual information about your destination. For example, if you type in an image search for San Francisco, you will see a box to the left side of the page that will include image results for various points of interest and popular destinations within San Francisco, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz or Fisherman’s Wharf.

If you click on one of the points of interest, you will see an overlay of the images so you can take a virtual tour of the Golden Gate Bridge without having to leave the search results for San Francisco. Yahoo says that by providing these suggestions, tapping into what the company calls a “Web of Objects,” you will be able to take a virtual tour of a city without having to input many different sites or places. Basically, Yahoo Image does all the work for you.

This is no doubt a useful feature, especially considering that researching travel spots is now conducted primarily online by consumers. Having this sort of feature only enhances the travel planning process on the web. Yahoo says the Image Search Refiner is currently available for location-specific searches, but is planning to expand this functionality to other types of image searches in the future.

Of course, while Yahoo is adding these nifty features to its search capabilities, it’s facing challenges from Microsoft, with Bing nibbling at Yahoo’s search share. But a little competition never hurts, and perhaps even livens up the fight between the two underdogs.

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