In order to have access to iPad testing units, developers and testers had to agree to keep the device tethered to a fixed object in an isolated room with blacked-out windows, according to a report by BusinessWeek.

That’s pretty hardcore. It’s unclear from BusinessWeek’s report if that was a condition enforced before the iPad was unveiled to the public or if it’s something that will be kept up until the April 3 launch date.

Apple is a notoriously secretive company, especially when it comes to new products. Outside of partnerships with content publishers like The New York Times, Wired and The Wall Street Journal who have either confirmed interest or already shown demonstrations of their applications, the few developers that do have access to the iPad are keeping their mouths shut.

It also appears that in order to be on the list for the iPad, developers or companies had to be pretty high on the totem poll. Not even Trip Hawkins, who founded Electronic Arts and once worked at Apple, could get a testing unit for his new company, Digital Chocolate.

Now, not having physical access to the device doesn’t preclude developers from creating apps for the iPad — Apple actually started accepting apps for review today — but it does make refining the app much more difficult.

As was the case with the iPhone, we expect the best iPad apps to be those that can take advantage of multi-touch in ways that just feel better. Gestures and interactions on a bigger screen are probably features that will need to be refined over time — just as they were with the original iPhone.

The degree of Apple’s iPad-related secrecy might sound well, paranoid, but the fact is, at least for now, the company can get away with it. The mobile ecosystem is so hot — especially for the iPhone — that getting on the iPad and getting on early is worth the hoop-jumping for many developers. Some would even to settle for using an emulator until the product is officially launched.

What do you think of Apple’s corporate culture of secrecy? Let us know!

Tags: app store, apple, developers, ipad, secrecy

On complex issues, as is often said, it is possible for intelligent people to disagree. That was certainly the case March 15 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, when five leaders of the space exploration intelligentsia met to discuss NASA's plans for human spaceflight. [More]

Banks, cable companies, and utilities all want to get rid of their paper bills and get customers on their electronic billing systems. Just as there were back-office billing providers for the paper era, there are now back-office electronic billers. A company in Charlotte, North Carolina called Transactis is one of them, and it just raised a $2.5 million round led by New York City-based Metamorphic Ventures. CEO Joe Proto and other existing shareholders also participated in the round.

Transactis works primarily with banks and payment processors to take over the whole e-billing process for them, from presenting the bills via email to collecting the cash. More and more consumers are opting to go paperless (it’s the green thing to do), and companies save on the paper, printing, and postage costs.

Email billing is a growth business, and Transactis is carving out a nice little niche for itself.

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

The key issue at the heart of Viacom's case against Google and YouTube, filed in March 2007, concerns whether an Internet service that probably knows that files are traded or shown illicitly or without license there, deserves the "safe harbor" provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that protect ISPs from liability for their customers' actions. In a summary judgment motion filed yesterday with US District Court in New York and unsealed this morning, Viacom is bidding to have the judge wrap up the case -- an obvious signal that it believes its case is already strong enough.

As US law stands now, a service such as Grokster or the original Napster (not the Best Buy division that today uses that name) is liable when it intentionally establishes its service for the express purpose of trading in illicit files. It's especially liable when it finds some way to advertise itself for that purpose. An Internet Service Provider such as Comcast or Cox is not liable when its service is used for accessing one of these sites, when it doesn't advertise or offer these services explicitly, and when a customer can access them without direct intervention from the ISP. And a video site such as Veoh is not liable when any measure it might take to stop customers from sharing illicit files may also conceivably infringe upon the free speech rights of other customers who may not be trading such files.

Google, the current owner of YouTube, has been arguing the Veoh case in its own defense. But Viacom's argument -- which courts have been wrestling with for over two-and-a-half years and which we now know today -- is that YouTube is a different, special case. It's more like Grokster, it argues, in that it was founded on the principle of gathering an audience around illicit files.

"Defendants are liable under Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. Grokster Ltd., because they operated YouTube with the unlawful objective of profiting from (to use their phrase) 'truckloads' of infringing videos that flooded the site," reads the opening passage of YouTube's founders single-mindedly focused on geometrically increasing the number of YouTube users to maximize its commercial value. They recognized they could achieve that goal only if they cast a blind eye to and did not block the huge number of unauthorized copyrighted works posted on the site. The founders' deliberate decision to build a business based on piracy enabled them to sell their start-up business to Google after 16 months for $1.8 billion. The Supreme Court in Grokster found no legal or societal justification for such intentional copyright infringement."

FOR MORE:

• Viacom and YouTube: Timeline of pertinent events by Tim Conneally

In a talking points document released today (PDF available here), Viacom cites various e-mails from various YouTube and Google executives, including YouTube founders Chad Hurley (CEO) and Steve Chen (CTO). Assuming these excerpts were not taken out of context, which is possible, they indicate that YouTube's founders were clearly building up a high-audience business with illicit files at their core, with the intention of selling out to somebody as soon as possible.

One excerpt has Chen suggesting that YouTube, apparently during its startup phase, "...concentrate all our efforts in building up our numbers as aggressively as we can through whatever tactics, however evil." Another suggestion, by an unnamed YouTube exec in response to an non-excerpted suggestion -- apparently asking, where should be get all this content -- reads, "Steal it! . . . We have to keep in mind that we need to attract traffic. How much traffic will we get from personal videos?"

And one excerpt attributed to Chen suggests that the whole legal process of handling DMCA takedown notices is so long and dragged on, that by the time YouTube should ever comply with one, it would be too late anyway: "But we should just keep that stuff on the site. I really don't see what will happen. What? Someone from CNN sees it? He happens to be someone with power? He happens to want to take it down right away. He get in touch with cnn legal. 2 weeks later, we get a cease & desist letter. We take the video down."

Viacom's argument that Google knows what kind of trafficking goes on via YouTube is substantiated by evidence in the form of e-mails, evidently sent prior to its acquisition of YouTube, from executives objecting to elements of what they perceived to be its business model. One message from Google's then-VP of Content Partnerships David Eun (now with AOL) to CEO Eric Schmidt cautioned, "I think we should beat YouTube . . . but not at all costs. [They are] a video Grokster." And in another excerpt, an unnamed Google executive asks, "Is changing policy [to] profit from illegal downloads how we want to conduct business? Is this Googley?"

Evidence cited in Viacom's motion for summary judgment tells the story of how Google Video failed to be competitive against YouTube, even though its engineers persisted with efforts to filter out illicit content. One memo cited says Google Video may have been throwing out 90% of its uploads, for containing suspected copyrighted material or for being generally indecent.

"But Google's good intentions and compliance with the law were not paying off," Viacom argues. "YouTube was way ahead of Google Video in the race to build up a user base. Google executives understood that YouTube's success was largely due to what they euphemistically labeled its 'liberal copyright policy' of freely allowing infringing material. Losing the user race to YouTube because of the latter's copyright infringement, Google Video executives engaged in a 'heated debate' in 2006 'about whether we should relax enforcement of our copyright policies in an effort to stimulate traffic growth.' A top senior executive, Peter Chane, Google Video's Business Product Manager, argued point blank that Google Video should 'beat YouTube' by 'calling quits on our copyright compliance standards.' Chane specifically advocated switching Google Video to YouTube's 'reactive DMCA only' policy because 'YouTube gets content when it's hot ([Saturday Night Live's] Lazy Sunday, Stephen Colbert, Lakers wins at the buzzer)' and it '[takes us too long to acquire content directly from the [legitimate] rights holder.'"

It is that statement which Viacom appears to present as a smoking gun: a suggestion from a Google Video executive that it should acquire its competitor solely because its allegedly illegitimate business model is more successful than its own, legally compliant one.

In Google's memorandum in support of summary judgment in its favor, filed after Viacom, its attorneys do not take the tack or rebutting Viacom's scorching citations -- which, if substantiated, could theoretically become the basis for future criminal complaints. Instead, Google reiterates the argument that it's a service provider which, like Veoh, is entitled to safe harbor since it looks the other way, and does not actively seek infringing uploads.

Citing the Veoh finding, Google's attorneys argue, "What matters is that Veoh 'established a system whereby software automatically processes user-submitted content and recasts it in a format that is readily accessible to its users...Inasmuch as this is a means of facilitating user access to material on its Web site,' Veoh did not lose the safe harbor 'through the automated creation of these files.' YouTube is indistinguishable from Veoh in these respects."

YouTube, Google argues, did not have direct knowledge of the circumstances whereby the specific content Viacom claimed was infringed upon (much of it from Paramount) was shared with YouTube users. Since Viacom's arguments must, at some point, focus themselves upon the specific infringing of the content in question, the DMCA protects YouTube on that count as well, Google continues. But all that may be moot, Google points on, by virtue of the fact that under current US law, the alleged infringers must have directly profited from their actions. YouTube gains revenue through advertising.

Writes Google, "A service provider loses safe harbor eligibility only if the plaintiff can show both that the service provider had the right and ability to control the alleged infringements and received a financial benefit directly attributable to those infringements...As with knowledge, the DMCA's control inquiry is specific, not general. The analysis focuses on the service provider's legal and practical control over the particular infringing activity at issue. The statute's text makes that clear: The question is whether the service provider has the right and ability to control "the infringing activity" alleged by the plaintiff and to which a financial benefit is directly attributable."

A number of declarations in support of both motions were filed today. One supporting Google was particularly interesting, because it goes to specifically that last paragraph: It's from the owner of a marketing firm who promoted the works of recording artists who appear on MTV, a Viacom property. He claimed that some of the very works Viacom claimed were infringed upon through unauthorized uploading to YouTube, actually were authorized by none other than MTV itself, as part of the promotion of the artists under his contract.

If Google's interpretation of the law is affirmed, and if this gentleman's claims are proven, then this whole case could become history faster than a judge can even say "summary judgment."

• There is no admission fee -- tickets are completely free
• The event is all ages
• Ticketing will begin at the Times Center at 2:30PM on Saturday, doors will open for seating at 4:30PM, and the show begins at 5PM
• You cannot collect tickets for friends or family -- anyone who would like to come must be present to get a ticket
• Seating capacity in the Times Center is about 340, and once we're full, we're full
• The venue is located at 41st St. between 7th and 8th Avenues in New York City (map after the break)
• The show length is around an hour

Continue reading The Engadget Show tapes tomorrow, with Nicholas Negroponte and PlayStation Move!

The Engadget Show tapes tomorrow, with Nicholas Negroponte and PlayStation Move! originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 15:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Fox News reportedly draws a distinction between its "news hours," which it claims are objective, and its "editorial" programming. But on May 19, purported "news hour" anchor Megyn Kelly constructed an entire segment around "editorial" host Glenn Beck's criticism of New York's proposed restaurant salt ban, airing clips from his show and asking her guest to respond to Beck's arguments.

Kelly introduces segment by airing Beck clip. Kelly began her segment by airing a clip of Beck on the March 10 edition of his Fox News program in which he stated:

BECK: The government cannot make people healthy. If I want to stuff my face, I'm going to stuff my face. If I'm going to have a heart attack in 15 minutes because I stuff my face, it's my fault. If the firemen have to come to my house and cut a huge hole in the side of my wall because I'm stuck to my couch because I'm a big fat fatty just eating marshmallows all day and the firemen have to come in with a crane and pull me out and put me on a flatbed truck to take me to the hospital, you know what? I should have to pay the bill!

Kelly then said of the proposed ban, "It's got Glenn Beck all fired up."

Kelly repeatedly demands NY Assemblyman Ortiz respond to Beck's criticism. Kelly's first question to her guest, New York State Assemblyman Felix Ortiz -- who has introduced legislation banning salt in New York restaurants -- was: "Glenn Beck is all upset with you, Assemblyman. What do you have to say to him?" She later asked, "Ok, salt's not great for you, certainly not in large amounts in any event, but why isn't it up to us? As Glenn said, if I want to become a fatty fat fat, what business is it of yours?"

Kelly to Ortiz: "You wanted Glenn Beck to start talking about you." After Ortiz stated that he introduced his legislation in part because doing so focuses media attention on the issue of the health risks of excessive salt, Kelly stated: "So it's a media stunt. I'm on to you, Assemblyman. Ok. So you just wanted to get on America Live, you wanted Glenn Beck to start talking about you."

In response to criticism, Fox News claims its news hours are objective. The New York Times reported on October 11 that in response to White House criticism, Fox News claimed that its news hours -- which it reportedly defined as "9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 6 to 8 p.m. on weekdays" are objective:

In an interview, Mr. [senior vice president for news Michael] Clemente suggested that there was an element of "shoot the messenger" in the back and forth. "Sometimes it's actually helpful to have an organization or a person that you can go up against for whatever reason," he said.

Fox argues that its news hours -- 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 6 to 8 p.m. on weekdays -- are objective. The channel has taken pains recently to highlight its news programs, including the two hours led by Shepard Smith, its chief news anchor. And its daytime newscasts draw more viewers than CNN or MSNBC's prime-time programs.

"The average consumer certainly knows the difference between the A section of the newspaper and the editorial page," Mr. Clemente said.

America Live replaced Live Desk in early 2010.

In a written statement provided to media outlets, Clemente compared Fox News' purportedly separate "news" and "opinion" programming to "the A-section of the newspaper and the editorial page":

An increasing number of viewers are relying on FOX News for both news and opinion. And the average news consumer can certainly distinguish between the A-section of the newspaper and the editorial page, which is what our programming represents. So, with all due respect to anyone who might still be confused about the difference between news reporting and vibrant opinion, my suggestion would be to talk about the stories and the facts, rather than attack the messenger...which over time, has never worked.

Fox's "news" division routinely promotes and echoes Beck. Fox News' reporters and "news" programs have routinely promoted and echoed Beck on stories such as the 9-12 Project, tea party protests, ACORN and former White House officials Van Jones and Anita Dunn.

Fox's news programs echo its "opinion" shows. Fox News' purportedly straight news programs echo its "editorial" programs, featuring smears, falsehoods, doctored and deceptive editing, and GOP talking points.

A non-profit organization called Reboot has a mighty challenge for you this Friday night: Power down your cellphone, let your FarmVille crops languish and sign out of Skype for a full 24 hours. What do you think: Can you hack a single day sans technology?

We’re seen efforts of this nature before — remember when John Mayer wanted you to make like a Luddite for the first week of 2010?

But this event, which Reboot is calling The National Day of Unplugging, goes the extra mile with promotions (ironically enough) through Facebook, Twitter and a website called the Sabbath Manifesto (the day itself is part of a larger movement called the Sabbath Manifesto, a movement started by a group of Jewish artists, writers, filmmakers and social media professionals seeking to integrate traditional rituals into their modern lives).

There will also be a series of events in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco (according to Reboot, they’re private and space is limited). All guests at these events will be asked to check their phones at the door, where they will sleep the next 24 hours away in a cell phone sleeping bag [pictured above].

Tanya Schevitz, a Reboot rep, told us that the idea is spreading. “We are hearing from people all over the county –- and beyond –- that they will create their own events, gather with friends, family, etc. to embrace the Sabbath Manifesto and the National Day of Unplugging,” she said.

Participants are also encouraged to sign on to the Sabbath Manifesto website and report back on their technological withdrawal experiences.

This venture is certainly interesting in light of recent stats that point to our society’s obsession with technological communication and increasing fascination with social media.

“There’s clearly a social problem when we’re interacting more with digital interfaces than our fellow human beings,” said Dan Rollman, Sabbath Manifesto creator and founder of the Universal World Record Database. “Rich, engaging conversations are harder to come by than they were a few years ago.”

What do you think? Do you think digital communications are eroding our ability to truly connect with others? Or do you think Twitter, Facebook and the like serve as channels to bring people together? Let us know in the comments.

Tags: apple, facebook, iphone, twitter

News broke yesterday that popular online Q&A startup Formspring.me had raised some $2.5 million in venture funding and would be relocating to Silicon Valley from Indianapolis. As a user and fan of the service, I am happy to see the company rewarded for its success, and I am excited to see how they can improve their already great product. However, as a follower of the national and global startup culture, it is a little disappointing to see the company leave their home and head west to the Valley.

Sponsor

Formspring.me was spun out of Formspring.com, a platform for creating online forms, when users began creating forms to answer personal questions. According to the New York Times' Brad Stone, Formspring.me has raked in $2.5 million from investors based solely in Silicon Valley. VC firms Baseline Ventures and Freestyle Capital teamed with angels Kevin Rose, Dave Morin and Ron Conway's SV Angel to provide Formspring.me with some well deserved, and high profile funding.

Silicon Valley is certainly the mecca of venture capital and social web applications, and in many ways, moving the company to the Valley is a smart move. As we mentioned back in January, Formspring.me plans to rewrite its application to scale more efficiently as the product grows in popularity - something that requires talented programmers. The company has already listed four job openings in San Francisco for a pair of developers, a designer and a data analyst.

By moving to the Valley, Formspring.me will be able to tap the enormous talent pools to find top tier programmers and designers to take their app to the next level. If they want to build out an API and create mobile applications for their app, they are in the right place to do it. When the time comes to look for further funding, having set up shop in the Valley will certainly benefit the company in their efforts.

For other cities outside of the Valley looking to build competitive startup and venture capital communities, these are unfortunate truths. It is not uncommon to see successful startups leave their cities of birth for the Valley to find talented employees and raise their chances for finding funding. We recently discussed Chicago's growing startup scene, which is not far from Indianapolis, but the opportunities in the Midwest do not yet compare to those available in other booming startup cities.

Had Formspring.me been founded in a city like Austin, Boulder, New York or Boston, they would have likely remained there upon receiving funding. That is, perhaps, if they received funding locally. While the Midwest is growing its startup culture, there are far fewer VC firms, and far smaller talent pools when compared to other locations. Until more cities have their own thriving startup scene, stories like Formspring.me's will continue to play out across the country.

The fact that Formspring.me attracted funding from the Valley before relocating raises the question of whether the decision to move was theirs or if it was a recommendation or stipulation of the investors. We have reached out for comment on this question and will update this post as more information becomes available. In the meantime, let us know what you think of Formspring.me or any other startup moving to the Valley in the comments.

Disclosure: The New York Times is a syndication partner of ReadWriteWeb

If you weren’t able to pick up tickets for Conan O’Brien’s “Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television Tour” the first time around, you’ve just been given a second chance by way of a contest the former late night host announced on Twitter.

The contest is a promotion for American Express (disclosure: also a Mashable sponsor), asking users to follow the credit card company on Twitter and then tweet “Hey @americanexpress I want to be with Coco in (insert city from list below). Pick me! http://bit.ly/bEUqsh #amexConan.”

The winners – who will get two tickets for Conan shows in either New York, Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, or Los Angeles — will be selected at random from the tweets sent out between now and 11:59pm ET on Monday.

American Express is sponsoring the tour, but this new twist on their promotion should give the company an opportunity to gain thousands of followers in a hurry, assuming the Twittersphere is still as crazy for Coco as they were when he signed up only a month ago.

Tags: conan o'brien, twitter

March 24 will mark the day that the first sports game ever will be broadcast live in 3-D to a U.S. audience, thanks to a cooperation between MSG and Cablevision. Hockey-loving Cablevision subscribers will be able to catch the Rangers face off against the Islanders on iO TV channel 1300, according to Engadget. New York-based fans will also be able to watch the game live at at the Theater at Madison Square Garden. You know, just in case you haven’t spent $3000 on one of the 3D TV sets that have only been available for a few weeks.

MSG said that it is currently in discussions with other operators about carrying the game as well, but Cablevision definitely scored a bit of a prize with this one. Comcast announced earlier this week that it will broadcast the Masters Tournament in 3-D, which would have given it the bragging rights for the first 3-d sports event ever broadcast in the U.S. ESPN previously announced that it will start a 3-D network in time for the World Cup in June, and DirecTV also has some 3-D sports coverage in the works for the coming months.

Rangers vs. Islanders will be shot with technology from 3ality Digital, which also powered BSkyB’s January 3-D Premiere League Soccer broadcast.

Related content on GigaOm Pro: Are We Putting the 3-D Cart Before the Horse? (subscription required)

Splinter Cell: Conviction event at several GameStops on April 1 originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Splinter Cell: Conviction event at several GameStops on April 1 originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Yahoo chief technologist Sam Pullara is quitting to become entrepreneur-in-residence at at Benchmark Capital, TechCrunch reports.

Sam follows EVP Ash Patel and sales boss SVP Joanne Bradford out the door.

Read the rest of this story »

See Also:

• AOL Gave CTO Ted Cahall A $354,000 Retention Bonus 10 Days Before He Left The Company
• AOL's Golden Parachutes: $28.4 Million For Four Former Executives
• Arthur Sulzberger Jr.'s Nephew David Perpich Joins New York Times To Prepare For Paywall

The first time you walk into an Apple Store and pick up an iPad, you’ll understand the hype: Apple has managed to create a beautiful, thoughtfully designed, compelling product in a space where mediocrity was, until now, status quo. But odds are you probably won’t buy one — at least not yet. And that’s OK.

For despite the high level of anticipation for and proclamations associated with the launch of the Apple device, the fact remains that outside of a few select vertical uses (like medicine), tablets are constrained by their own form factor, stuck in the nether realm between productivity and portability. Standing onstage during the device’s unveiling, Steve Jobs himself posed a question that acutely underscores the tablet dilemma: Is there room for a third category of product that sits between your two most essential devices, the laptop and phone? As much as I’m looking forward to the iPad, I’m still not sure there is.

To date, no one’s been able to scale tablets as a core personal computing product, though it’s certainly not for lack of effort. Just about every player in the electronics world has given tablets a go, from Nokia with its Maemo-based N-series Internet communicators to Dell with its Android-based mini-slates to all manner of Windows-based convertible and slate tablet PCs. But the problem with all of them — and the iPad may also be included — isn’t that they’ve been unable to offer fundamentally differentiated experiences from the devices we already own and carry.

Think back to the iPod — before it existed, there wasn’t such a thing as taking your entire music (and eventually, video) library with you wherever you went. But the concept proved to be so elemental that it transcended the iPod as a device, and became a staple in nearly every product Apple makes, from iTunes on the Mac to the iPhone. In his iPad launch presentation, Jobs seemed pretty clear about the fact that the iPad won’t replace your phone or laptop (at least not any time soon), and yet Apple has still been deficient in demonstrating more than scaled-up iPhone experiences (like browsing, light email, and gaming) or scaled-down desktop experiences (like iWork).

Of course, it would be a failure of imagination to assume there won’t eventually be something built on the iPad platform that simply couldn’t be hosted on a phone or laptop. But so far Apple hasn’t shown it to us, which may be why so many are still lukewarm on the device’s prospects. This also might be why iBooks was January’s dark horse announcement — it was the only app Apple showed off that seems to call out for the iPad by name. But long-form reading is still arguably better suited to devices like the Kindle and Nook, which benefit from E Ink displays, while shorter-form media (namely periodicals) went all but ignored by Apple, which punted to publication-specific apps like the New York Times reader. Had Apple attempted to create a new, ubiquitous, standard format for magazines and newspapers, and leveraged its sales infrastructure for subscription content, the iPad might have been hailed as the iPod of publishing.

There’s no question Apple has (re)defined the tablet dialog and raised the bar for the space moving forward. For browsing the web, the iPad experience is second to none; the product itself almost seems to melt away, leaving the user to feel as though they’re literally reaching in and touching the content. And by the time the iPad’s price drops in a year or two, Apple may be able to parlay a groundbreaking product into a market leadership position. But in the mean time, the countdown to launch has begun and Cupertino’s set its sights on building yet another market, we’ll have to see just how many people are ready to put their money where Apple’s tablet is.

Ryan Block is the co-founder of gdgt and the former editor in chief of Engadget. Disclosure: gdgt is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Greg Sargent / The Plum Line:
SEIU To Yank Support For Arcuri, Will Search For Challenger  —  It appears SEIU is dead serious about this business about yanking support for House Dems who vote No on the health bill.  —  The SEIU bluntly informed Dem Rep Michael Arcuri of New York yesterday that it's pulling support …