To display the most relevant entries to you in priority,
vote for the stories you are interested in
()
and reject those that you are not interested in
()
BitTorrent has emerged as the dominant filesharing protocol in recent years.
Hundreds of millions of computers have a BitTorrent client installed and torrent sites are among
the most frequently visited websites on the Internet.
BitTorrent’s leading role can be partly attributed to its technical superiority, but there
are other, perhaps even more defining factors that have propelled BitTorrent’s popularity.
One could argue that Google has been one of the greatest contributers to its success.
Unlike competing filesharing applications, BitTorrent has a dominant presence in search engine
results. A site like isoHunt for example, has 13,500,000 million indexed pages on Google and The
Pirate Bay has 3,760,000. All public torrent sites combined, there are probably over a billion
torrent pages indexed by Google alone.
It is needless to say that this overwhelming web presence has created a huge advantage for
BitTorrent compared to P2P applications such as Limewire, that mostly reply on searches within
the application. Over the years, millions of people have been introduced to BitTorrent through
search engines like Google.
We’re now at a point where torrent sites top the search results for nearly search phrases
related to downloading movies and music. For example, a Google search for “Shutter Island
download” returns 6 torrent sites in the top 10 results and no legal download options. The
same is true for nearly all similar searches.
While Google and other search engines have helped BitTorrent popularity to a great extent, this
could not have been possible without the people who developed the torrent indexes in the first
place. That is where another key aspect of BitTorrent’s popularity, which also ties into
the web-based nature, plays an essential role. Money.
BitTorrent sites can generate some serious revenue, enough to sustain the site and make a decent
living. In general, ad rates per impression are very low, but thanks to the huge amounts of
traffic it quickly adds up. This money aspect has made it possible for sites to thrive, and has
also lured many gold diggers into starting a torrent site over the years.
Initially, most torrent sites were operated by students or hobbyists with a passion for
filesharing and coding. Most of the larger sites today started out that way, but in the years
that followed they were joined by groups of people that are mainly interested in the cash, not so
much in offering a good service to their users.
Despite this darker side, the possibility to monetize torrent sites has been essential to the
success and the survival of BitTorrent. Without a return on investment, nobody would spend tens
of thousands of dollars each month to keep a large site or tracker online.
All in all it is fair to say that BitTorrent is as popular as it is right now simply because
it’s web-based and findable through search engines. Although we don’t have any
numbers to back it up, it would not be an outrageous claim to say that most of the people who use
BitTorrent today were introduced to it through a Google search.
Ellie Bland, 4, in fatal accident on Daytona beach while on holiday
A four-year-old British girl on a family holiday died after being hit by a car on a Florida beach
at the weekend.
Ellie Bland, from Nottingham, was walking hand in hand with her great-uncle on Daytona beach when
she was struck by a car just before 3pm on Saturday, according to the Daytona Beach News Journal.
The great-uncle, John Langlands, 53, told the paper that Ellie had walked a step ahead of him
when suddenly the car, a silver Lincoln, was "barrelling down" on them, giving him no time to
pull her out of the way.
Holly Harding, 18, who witnessed the accident from her car, said: "She darted into the lane of
traffic. She was hit in the centre of the car. Everyone panicked. Everyone started screaming."
The Florida highway patrol said Ellie was struck by the car and that people had shouted for the
driver to stop as the four-year-old lay in front of the vehicle. But after coming to a halt, the
driver appeared to panic. "For an unknown reason, the driver panicked and hit the accelerator
instead of the brake," police said.
Ellie died instantly. The driver was named as 66-year-old Barbara Worley, from Elberton, Georgia.
No arrests have been made but police said charges were pending. The car had been travelling in
the beach's travel lanes below the 10mph speed limit before the accident, according to the
highway patrol.
Paying tribute to Ellie, Langlands said she was "a princess". "She was beautiful," he told the
Journal. Her great-aunt Karen Langlands, 44, said the girl had struggled through medical issues
including a heart murmur and digestive tract problems. "She was a quiet little girl," she said.
"She'd play in activities at nursery, but she'd rather go off and read a book or a newspaper."
Ellie was on her sixth trip to Florida, accompanied by her five-year-old sister, her great-aunt,
great-uncle and family friends. Her relatives had planned to take her to Disney's Magic Kingdom
yesterday. Ellie's parents were not on holiday with her and learned of their daughter's death by
phone back in England, the Journal reported.
Warm weather had attracted crowds to the beach on Saturday and beach umbrellas were used to
shield Ellie's body until it could be removed from the scene.
A Foreign Office spokeswoman said: "We can confirm the death of a British national in Florida on
20 March. The next of kin have been informed and we are providing them with assistance."
Driving on Daytona beach is described as a tradition dating back to the early days of the
automobile. Motorists have to pay for a permit during the high season and are advised to watch
for pedestrians, sunbathers and wildlife. Many people are opposed to the practice because of the
safety risk and Ellie's death is likely to intensify calls for a ban.
The highway patrol said it was not unheard of for people to be hurt by cars on the beach. The
Journal said it was Florida's first beach traffic death for 14 years.
Who
knows if this little bit of database wizardry would actually cause the traffic camera's
picture-parsing computer to drop a table? Even if it doesn't it's covered up his actual license plate. [See
Also]
More »
Who
knows if this little bit of database wizardry would actually cause the traffic camera's
picture-parsing computer to drop a table? Even if it doesn't it's covered up his actual license plate. [See
Also]
More »
In Silicon Valley, every startup fears than an
established brand will one day acquire a rival or build a similar offering and instantly become
the industry gorilla. When it comes to advertising, Google, which claims not only both the
largest ad network and number of relationships with advertisers, but the most automated and
profitable system on the Internet, is the most obvious example of this phenomenon. Ditto for
Oracle and Cisco in the enterprise software space and eBay and Amazon in e-commerce.
Yet while fear of the 800-pound gorilla rightfully looms, upstart ad ventures can take heart in
mounting evidence that suggests online ad categories are not cornered by deep-pocketed brands,
but by new market entrants. This has held true across several different categories, including
Google in search, DoubleClick in ad serving, Advertising.com in display, NexTag in CPA,
RightMedia in exchanges and AdMob in mobile. Each
of these companies emerged from humble beginnings to become billion-dollar businesses, and did so
in the face of large, incumbent competitors. Additionally, a slew of other firms exited at
valuations in the hundreds of millions of dollars, among them Overture (search), Atlas (ad
serving), ValueClick (display) and Quattro (mobile), to name just a few.
So, what makes online ad categories so likely to be won by new entrants? History sheds some
light:
First, on an economic front, online ad businesses exhibit clear network effects that ultimately
preclude incumbents from contending in the category. When Advertising.com began to scale its
network in the early 2000s, two trends emerged. As the company generated more leads for
advertisers, the advertisers were willing to pay more per lead, and as it bought more inventory
from publishers, they become more willing to accept lower per-impression CPMs. Per-impression
ad-serving costs for DoubleClick and per-impression publisher onboarding costs for AdMob
demonstrate similar network benefits. Each of these examples make clear that in online ad
categories, new entrants grow so quickly that they effectively create a market dynamic in which
slower-moving and less nimble incumbents simply can’t compete.
Second, on an innovation front, the classic innovator’s dilemma is unusually powerful in
new ad categories because incumbents are hampered by legacy business models and technology
infrastructure developed during a prior market development phase. When NexTag entered the
education and finance lead-generation business, it brought with it a new model for buying traffic
and valuing it on a per-impression basis based on advanced algorithms. Within a few years,
NexTag’s internal media buying tools were so automated and accurate compared to the
company’s predecessors that it was able to far out-pay for good inventory
— and avoid paying for bad inventory at all. NexTag’s suite of media
technologies put it at an advantage as the category grew and the cost of inventory rose, further
enabling it to pull away from the pack and eventually exit for more than $1 billion. Incumbents
often underestimate the importance of iterating early in a market, which means that as a category
matures and the price of learning goes up, they find themselves falling behind.
Third, relationships with key inventory sources matter. On the Internet, there are millions of
inventory sources, but only a few that can change the dynamics of the category. In search, it was
the relationship that Google developed to monetize Yahoo search results. In display, it was
Advertising.com’s entrenched relationship with the AIM client that enabled it to generate
millions of dollars in profit from view-through conversions. And in exchanges it was the Yahoo
partnership that solidified RightMedia as the No. 1 ad exchange. Incumbents seem more willing to
give huge inventory opportunities to small, up-and-coming companies than they are to building out
solutions internally. Such tight-knit relationships ensure the success of new entrants across the
board.
The final lesson history has taught us is that
focus leads to superior execution. Perhaps the least recognized but most valuable asset new
entrants have is focus. In their respective times, Google was the best search engine, RightMedia
was the best ad exchange and AdMob was the best mobile ad platform. Yes, incumbents often build a
better product down the line (DoubleClick’s Ad Exchange is one example), but by that point
the new entrant has already exited, as RightMedia did for $680 million. Incumbents
know this fact implicitly, so it’s imperative that startups invest in and preserve their
focus as they continue to grow.
The next generation of online ad categories is already repeating history. The key for investors
and entrepreneurs is to identify which areas are going to be categories, not features, and get
involved with them early.
Tod M. Sacerdoti is the CEO and co-founder of BrightRoll; follow him on Twitter at
http://twitter.com/todsacerdoti. Disclosure: Brightroll 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.
Complaints against Toyota for unintended acceleration have nearly doubled in the last two weeks,
but the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s latest findings could explain that
phenomenon.
The YouTube
vs. Viacom lawsuit has turned into quite the exciting drama this weekend, with both sides making
accusations via their respective blogs. YouTube says Viacom constantly uploaded its own material
from fake accounts, and then filed DMCA complaints about it. Viacom accuses YouTube of being a
pirate organization that profits from copyright infringement.
Here are the key points each side has made so far, condensed for your convenience:
Viacom not only uploaded its own content to YouTube, but it hired 18 different
marketing agencies to take on the task. Once the content was up, Viacom seemingly couldn't tell the
difference between independent infringers and the people it hired. In many cases, Viacom even
called YouTube and asked to have infringing content reinstated. There are also some juicy
accusations that Viacom employees uploaded videos from Kinko's, so they'd be harder to trace.
YouTube also says that the current lawsuit is sour grapes on Viacom's part, after it tried and
failed to buy YouTube years ago.
"YouTube was intentionally built on infringement and there are countless internal
YouTube communications demonstrating that YouTube's founders and its employees intended to profit
from that infringement."
According to Viacom, YouTube intentionally "steals" videos, because copyrighted content brings in
tons of traffic and profit. Viacom accuses Google of holding its videos for ransom to coerce Viacom
into licensing the videos to YouTube on the cheap.
The key point of Viacom's case is that YouTube was aware of "rampant" infringement, and had the
means to stop it, but chose not to.
Who's right? That's for the courts to decide, but you can still debate it in the comments. Whose
side are you on, Download Squad readers?
Ten years ago this week,
online music pioneer Justin Frankel released a
little application dubbed Gnutella that enabled file sharing through a distributed P2P network.
Frankel, whose previous claim to fame was programming the then hugely-popular Winamp MP3 player software, supposedly named the
client after his favorite hazelnut cream spread, and the first version
published online was really more of a proof of concept than anything else.
Still, Gnutella hit a nerve. Napster had been sued three months before, and many file sharers were rightfully
fearing that the music industry would eventually prevail in court and force Napster to switch off
its servers. With Gnutella, no such switch existed, as the client was allowing direct P2P
connections without the help of any centralized server. Add to it the fact that Gnutella, unlike
Napster, allowed users to swap videos and software as well as MP3s, and you begin to see why many
immediately viewed Gnutella as the next step in P2P file sharing.
A step, one should add, that made Frankel’s employer AOL more than a little nervous. It
only took the Internet giant a day to force Frankel and his colleagues to take down
Gnutella – but even that was too long, as countless sites quickly started to first
mirror, then build upon Frankel’s official Gnutella client. There’s always been a
little bit of mystery surrounding the exact happenings of those days, but some people have been
musing that a person with a surprising amount of insider knowledge showed up in one of the first
IRC chat rooms dedicated to Gnutella soon after AOL pulled the plug, only to provide some very
detailed information about the inner workings of the client’s P2P protocol.
Speaking of IRC: Early versions of the software didn’t really have any way for users to
connect, save for entering another user’s IP address, which is why IRC quickly became an
integral part of the early days of Gnutella. It was also in those IRC chat rooms that the myth of
Gnutella as a seemingly invincible P2P protocol was born, and the fact that AOL tried but
couldn’t contain the software seemed to fit right into that picture. Gnutella was one of
the very first P2P apps I ever wrote about, so I lurked in those chat rooms as well, where people
were cheering the fact that someone finally found a file sharing solution that couldn’t be
shut down. I still remember one IRC user saying: “We’ve started a damn cult
again!”
Only Gnutella wasn’t really ready to be a cult. The network routed search requests from
peer to peer, leading to an exponential growth of traffic as its network became bigger. Napster
programmer Jordan Ritter described the problem early on in a paper titled “Why Gnutella Can’t
Scale. No, Really,” and Frankel himself, who has hardly ever gone on the record about
Gnutella, once stated that he was
fully aware of “how poorly it would scale” when he released the client.
Still, Gnutella captured the imagination of many, one of them being Mark Gorton, founder of the
New York-based Lime Group. Gorton was at
the time pursuing a vision of automating businesses through structured data, and Gnutella, as
something that could, for example, distribute real estate listings wrapped in XML, seemed to fit
that image quite nicely. Early versions of the Gnutella client of Gorton’s LimeWire venture were still written with this
vision in mind, hoping to build a P2P network that could eventually be used to do all kinds of
things with which we’re now familiar on the web, thanks to web services.
LimeWire’s engineers joined a growing group of developers loosely connected through web
sites like the long-defunct Gnutella.wego.com (whose admin Gene Kan tragically committed
suicide in 2002) and mailing lists like the one for the Gnutella Developer Forum, and one of
the first issues to be tackled was scalability. The introduction of a two-tiered system of
ordinary clients and so-called Ultrapeers helped grow both the network as a whole and each
user’s search horizon. The idea was also later adopted by the developers of KaZaA, whose
own take on this two-tiered approach still lives on in Skype’s P2P network.
Technical improvements like these helped Gnutella to grow, but the competition was quick to catch
up. Bram Cohen unveiled a first version of
BitTorrent only two years after Frankel had published Gnutella, and BitTorrent quickly became the
file sharing client of choice for sharing videos online. Part of BitTorrent’s quick rise to
fame was its modular simplicity: Cohen had outsourced much of the search and indexing of files to
torrent web sites, only handling the actual distribution of data within the client. Gnutella on
the other hand was meant to work without any web server. That made it much more invincible, but
also much less accessible to users who migrated from apps and clients to a world of web services.
Another issue that has plagued Gnutella from the beginning is not technical, but legal. The
protocol was supposed to outsmart trigger-happy lawyers, but the mere fact that there
wasn’t a central switch to turn off the Gnutella network didn’t stop rights holders
from going after people and companies associated with it. Lawsuits and legal threats forced Morpheus, Xolox, Bearshare and
a number of other companies and developers to throw the towel.
LimeWire got sued by the music industry as well in 2006, but that hasn’t
stopped the company from continuing with the development and monetization of its client.
LimeWire’s client also utilizes BitTorrent these days, but LimeWire’s VP of Product
Management Jason Herskowitz told me during a phone conversation that Gnutella has “worked
really well” for the company, and that its engineers are looking into ways to make Gnutella
once again more attractive to developers by exposing some of its functionality through web
services. “There is still a long future ahead for Gnutella,” he predicted.
Not everyone agrees with that outlook. Adam Fisk, who was hired by LimeWire as one of its first developers in the summer of
2000, but left the company in 2004 to eventually start his own P2P venture dubbed Littleshot, believes that some core assumptions
of the Gnutella protocol are outdated. “I don’t think that distributed P2P search
makes any sense,” he told me, explaining that the very server-less search functionality
that made Gnutella superior to Napster also ended up being its biggest burden, and that it would
be much easier to have servers handle search and just use P2P to deliver data – a recipe
that has already helped BitTorrent succeed.
Sure, LimeWire and some other Gnutella clients could still stick around for a long time, Fisk
admitted, but he was skeptical that we would ever see any significant new project based on
Gnutella. “That would be shocking,” he said.
The last week has seen some interesting progress for the n900. Firstly it was great to see
phototranslator finally being availiable in
extras-devel. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about having lost patience waiting and played
with OCR myself. However phototranslator has put it together in a slick package and combines
with google translate api to provide a pretty cool application.
Obviously it is of most use if you are travelling to a foriegn country, translating signs and
menus as you go, but it is still interesting to play with and just show off the capabilities of
the device (without having to drop to a terminal).
Perhaps the major new item this week is sygic’s mobile maps being released
for sale. There was much rumour that they had been waiting to release via Nokia’s ovi
store. However, they have made it aviliable for sale via their own site.
I purchased it on Friday after some of the initial rush had died down, and sygic had some chance
to get their servers working properly. Some of the first off the mark reported painfully slow
downloads which dropped and they had to use resuming downloaders to get all the way through. At
1.8gb I didn’t really want to deal with download problems. Given that the program requires
activation via their site, it’s not clear why they didn’t just torrent the file and
save their servers a lot of problems.
Nonetheless when I came to make my purchase I got about 200kb/sec and it downloaded in about
90mins.
I had read the maemo forums and seen people had trouble with segfaults if the data folders
weren’t in the right place. So I copied to the /home/user/MyDocs folder as instructed. What
I didn’t do was unplug my usb cable, just unmounted the n900 and left it charging only. I
got a segfault running the application
I rebooted the phone, unplugged the cable and then it ran fine to the point of product
activation. Where I selected ‘automatic’ and entered my product code. Only to find it
sat doing nothing for a minute then segfaulted….
At this point I was a little concerned about the quality of the app. It’s response to the
unexpected seems to be to segfault, which doesn’t seem like good code to me.
However, after actually reading some instructions I realised I should go through manual
activation, and that product code != Activation code. I went via their site and got my activation
code and at last I was up and running.
Once going, I’ve had no further problems. It’s a fast application and seems very
good. I’ve only used it to route me home from work, but it did so well. The thing I noticed
was how fast it recalculated when I intentionally deviated from the route. No sooner than I made
the turn than I looked down to see new route laid out. To be fair I’m comparing to a now
pretty old tomtom, but it’s recalculation always took a few seconds of processing.
The other thing I noticed was that the map has a housing estate in my town that was built perhaps
5 years ago, but does not have some mini roundabouts on my route home from years before that.
I also note that it doesn’t seem to care about traffic lights. By which I mean it gives no
indication that it would consider them as a factor in routing decisions. I don’t know if
any do, but I hold out hope one day to get routing that knows that 9am on a weekday could mean
several extra minutes going through traffic lights.
The maemo forums where quickly full of interesting tips/hacks to enable fullscreen operation
& open up more menu options. This allows for portrait operation and more controls. I
don’t know why sygic didn’t have these enabled by default, perhaps they are not fully
tested so have been left in an implicit ‘unsupported’ state, but easy to switch on.
Some think it’s crazy to pay €59 for something nokia might do for free in
ovi maps. However given nokias track record so far I’m not at all convinced they are going
to give away anything even close to as good as sygics offering. In terms of price, I paid more
for just the France maps addition on my old tomtom, so €59 for the whole of
europe seems very good value to me. Now I just need my brodit active holder to ship…
Rumours have increased that firmware release 1.2 is imminent. Based on some wishful thinking and
the fact that the UK has finally gotten the 1.1.1 release that the rest of the world got weeks
ago. Along with a number of bugs being marked explicitly as in pr 1.2. Neither of these things
need have any baring on the release of the next update, but wishful thinking is hard to put down
.
I also became aware this week of TweeGo, a new twitter
client. This one written with c++/qt and looking very nice. A much slicker ui than my own witter.
I am really glad to see more options being actively developed, bringing more choice to n900
users.
Perhaps more significantly than the other things this week… I wrote the code to add avatar
support to witter. Though as yet it’s not ready to release, it should be reasonably
shortly. (Perhaps this should really be something for next week rather than last)
For a long time I pretty much refused to consider avatar support. I figured it would do nothing
but take up memory, use up screen space, and slow things down. And it would cost time in coding I
was unwilling to spend. However, this week I came accross a thread on maemo forums with some good
examples of what I would need. So I had a play and found it didn’t take too long to get
basic support working. Although it must make the memory footprint bigger, it doesn’t appear
to hurt performance. So at somepoint soon witter will look something like this:
To have a few new things arriving for the n900 in a short space of time really gave me the
feeling that it is gathering momentum. Getting better and better all the time.
This momentum enourages more development, and hopefully more good information such as the thread
I found, which in turn leads to more, better applications.
With a cool new technology demo in phototranslator, a great pay-for gps option from sygic and a
slick new twitter client in TweeGo, it’s hard not to feel optimistic about the future for
the N900 after a week like this.
"Shortly before midnight, the Eyjafjallajökull glacier, the island's fifth
largest, started to spew smoke and lava from several craters along a rift which is popular with
hikers. Police declared a state of emergency and sent rescue teams to evacuate about 500 people
living in the thinly populated area near the site. No injuries or damage to property were
reported. Three Red Cross care centers were opened in nearby villages to assist the evacuated
population."
Eruptions from Eyjafjallajökull have traditionally been tied to a more powerful
neighboring volcano, says
one geophysicist:
"Eyjafjallajökull has erupted three times since the settlement of Iceland in the 9th century
AD, in 920, 1612 and 1821. All three eruptions were rather small but caused flooding. However,
there is a short distance to Katla, Einarsson said, which is a powerful and vicious volcano,
ruv.is reports. 'Katla is of a completely different kind [...] but they seem to be connected,
because all known eruptions in Eyjafjallajökull were related to Katla eruptions and
therefore it seems that they might a prelude to eruptions in Katla,' Einarsson said.
'Eyjafjallajökull might to a certain extent work as a detonator for a dynamite explosion,'
the geophysicist added. 'If it goes off it is like Katla can’t resist it and also wants to
join in. Those eruptions can be big and cause extensive damage.'
NetWorx helps collect bandwidth usage data and measure the speed of your Internet or any other
network connection. NetWorx can help you identify possible sources of network problems, ensure
that you do not exceed the bandwidth limits specified by your ISP, or track down suspicious
network activity characteristic of Trojan horses and hacker attacks. It allows you to monitor all
your network connections or a specific network connection (such as Ethernet or PPP) only. The
incoming and outgoing traffic is represented on a line chart and logged to a file, so that you
can always view statistics about your daily, weekly and monthly bandwidth usage and dialup
duration. The reports can be exported to a variety of formats, such as HTML, MS Word and Excel,
for further analysis.
Recently Edelman Digital launched a brand new web site,
which features rich insights from across the organization as well as interviews with different
people inside and outside the firm. Definitely check it out. One of the cool things we're running
are interviews.
For one of the first installments, my colleague, Blagica, conducted an interview
with me on some of the latest trends. It's follows beow and on the new site...
Blagica Bottigliero: Let’s start with the basics. Your last
name. Is it pronounced like the Russian currency? I’ve heard multiple versions, so help us
set the record straight.
Steve Rubel: Actually it isn’t – it’s pronounced
Roo-Bell, rhyming with “blue bell.”
BB: As a lifestreamer, you spend quite a bit of time online digesting
content. How much time per day do you spend doing this? How do you break up your day to consumer
such a large amount of data?
SR:I would say that on average I spend two-three hours a day
“studying.” How and where I fit this in really depends on my schedule in a given
week. If it’s a particularly heavy week and I am traveling or in lots of meetings,
it’s whenever I can steal a few minutes during the day. If it’s a
“normal” day then it’s often over breakfast, lunch or at night when I get home.
But I make it a commitment to keep current since our teams and clients look to me to help them do
the same.
My workflow here, however, has changed a lot over the last few years. Until fairly recently I was
a heavy user of Google Reader. Now, however, I find myself relying more on Facebook, Twitter and
reading email newsletters from my favorite blogs. Also, I am increasingly using my mobile device
to consume much of it as well.
BB: In the last few weeks, you’ve put a stronger emphasis on
utilizing Facebook as your epicenter for news and communication. With Facebook’s history of
sharing its TOS, along with concerns around privacy, do you think more users will shift their
attention to Facebook? The addition of Facebook’s new settings come in handy, but do you
feel that users don’t feel like adding privacy settings to every single action?
SR: Facebook is at a pivotal moment in its history. All of the data
points are trending up – time spent (a staggering seven hours/month in the US), total users
(400M worldwide), mobile use (100M users), traffic patterns (one of the top drivers of views to
news/broadcast sites), etc. This makes it impossible to ignore.
What’s more, I believe we have passed a key tipping point where a network effect takes
over. Randall Stross summarizes this nicely in his New York
Times column, comparing it to similar situations like Microsoft Windows. So I don’t see
the train slowing down here in any way.
Still, there’s no doubt many have privacy concerns. Facebook needs to make this easier to
manage so that an individual can really more easily separate personal and professional circles
– if he/she chooses. The settings they have now help. But they have a long way to go.
The other trend to note is how businesses are starting to use Facebook as a hub. There are more
than 1.4M Facebook Pages. Some 700,000 are small businesses. This also creates a network effect
the way that Google did with Adwords. Also, I have noticed that more brands and movies are
prioritizing their Facebook page in ads over their own web site. This is controversial, but in
many ways it makes sense.
BB: You just created a fan page on Facebook.
How will you decipher information that appears in this stream versus your blog?
SR:I have been on Facebook since 2007 when they opened it up to all
users. At first, I was skeptical of their prospects for success. I saw a scenario similar to what
AOL did back in the 1990s – e.g. a walled garden. So while I have been on Facebook for
years and I was engaged there, I didn’t see a real opportunity, at least for me, to use it
to connect professionally with our customers.
However, the statistics I mentioned earlier and my own use recently have evolved my thinking. I
began to see that, professionally, there is a real opportunity there for any business to deeply
engage their customers in a way that perhaps is not as easy to do elsewhere – and to build
thought leadership. One key reason is that clearly people I care most about like our clients are
spending time there. It’s easier to go where the people are than to get them to come to
you. What’s more, it’s a broader audience than the people who subscribe
to my blog or
follow me onTwitter.
So as of right now I am largely creating exclusive content there. I am finding Twitter is better
for link sharing but that Facebook is more ideal for short bits of insights that spark a larger
conversation. My blog will probably evolve into just a place for essays. But I am syndicating the
posts into Facebook as well. It’s all evolving right now.
In short, I believe that Facebook will become my primary content platform in the next few months.
But I will continue to do it all. As should businesses that have stakeholders scattered on other
networks like Twitter.
BB: Your opinions on Google Buzz are pretty strong. What do you think
they could have done differently at launch? Do you think it was wise they launched the tool in
Gmail?
SR: Google Buzz suffers from complexity because they only tested it
within Google, which has a very tech-savvy engineering driven culture. Facebook and Twitter are
simple. You get it right away. Buzz feels like something Google is forcing on millions of users
to catch up in an area it’s not strong in – social. It would have been better if they
launched in in beta or Labs.
Still, I see Buzz remaining an important niche player for the time being. But I would never count
Google out. They can get it right.
BB: It seems that there are new tools popping up every second.
Whether it’s checking in at a local bistro with Foursquare or taking a picture of a sunset
and sending it to a larger network via Yfrog, there is a hefty amount of information to keep
track of. Will there come a time where a mini social ‘revolt’ will occur?
SR: I feel there’s way too much focus in marketing on the
venues and the technologies – even in the recessionary climate. Businesses must focus first
on their stakeholders and the trends and then figure out how to leverage the technologies. Many
still go about it in reverse.
In terms of the consumer, I believe we’re already seeing a winnowing down. Facebook is tops
for the broadest group. Twitter is loved by a smaller, yet arguably more influential crowd. And
YouTube meanwhile sits in the middle. The others, even FourSquare, are more niche.
In the end there’s only so much time in a day and everyone will need to make choices on
where to invest. I see Facebook being the big winner and Twitter sitting in neutral for now. The
others may eventually just become features of the big sites rather than stand alone entities.
BB: In the 90s, consumers may have sent a complaint via written
letter or email to one of their favorite brands. Today, it may be a Facebook status message,
YouTube video or tweet. What do you think this says about consumers’ expectations when it
comes to corporate two-way dialogue?
SR: I don’t see it being an expectation around dialogue as much
as it is power. People now know they have it and that some businesses will bend over backwards to
meet the legitimate gripes in real-time. This creates a virtuous or some would argue a vicious
cycle that just exacerbates the situation further.
This means that every business needs to understand what they will address and when – with
the expectation that it will scale.
BB: With web sites incorporating tools like Facebook connect, video
and real-time tweets, do you see social media being more ingrained in a digital strategy, instead
of being an after-thought?
SR: Yes, I believe that we’ve passed an inflection. Everyone is
looking at the data and the hype in the media and they realize that this is where our time and
attention are flowing so they need to front-load social networking into their budgets. This is
not just limited to consumer marketing but b2b as well.
BB: You are a big gadget fan and need to be connected a good portion
of your day. How do you plug in? What is your go-to gadget that you can’t leave home
without?
SR: Without a doubt my mobile phones. I switch back and forth between
the Blackberry (a client) and the iPhone depending on what I plan to do in a given day. There are
days or even weeks when all I use is a mobile device. I often travel without a computer –
sometimes for 10 days at a time and internationally as well. It’s amazing what you can do
with these devices. And both fit the bill nicely.
BB: You are a man on the move, visiting many up and coming tech
start-ups. ExacTarget recently purchased CoTweet. Do you see more consolidation happening?
SR: Absolutely, I believe that integration between various systems
will be key – especially for those providers who serve enterprise customers. It’s no
different than how we saw similar consolidation in the desktop/enterprise software markets and
for web-based platforms in the early 2000s.
BB: I know you are a big Yankees fan. If you could be a Bat Boy for a
day, would you do it?
SR: Wow, I definitely would. I would love to travel with the team and
and ask Derek Jeter all kinds of questions about his work ethic and efforts to be a better
ballplayer every day. That’s what I hope to do too in my field. Jeter is a rare yardstick
of professionalism and quality in a sports word that increasingly lacks such role models. And I
find lots of metaphors in sports to inspire me in business.
BB: What is your newest tech obsession?
SR: I would have to say any tools that I an use for free that give me
data. My favorites are Google Insights and Ad Planner, Facebook Insights and YouTube Audience
Insights.
WASHINGTON, March 20 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Liberal Blog Advertising Network
http://web.blogads.com/advertise/liberal_blog_advertising_network refused today to sell online
banner ad space intended to drive traffic to http://SpeakerPelosiHatesThis.com, a lighthearted,
inoffensive, helpful rem
This year's Emerald City Con was... an extraordinary experience.
Truthfully, I'm still trying to get my head wrapped around some of it. Doing our Artist's Alley
table as a fundraiser for the Cartooning Class was very much a last-minute, spur-of-the-moment
decision, we weren't organized about it at all... and I was very moved, and a little awed, at how
well the kids came through. Not just the current students but many of our grads, as well.
The experience could be summed up in this exchange between our friend Lorinda and myself. At one
point, I shook my head and muttered, "This is so amazing... I mean, teaching, it's like putting a
note in a bottle and throwing it in the ocean, you never really know how it's going to work out."
Rin replied, "Well, you sure had a lot of bottles come back this weekend."
We took a lot of pictures and I think I'll just run those for you and talk a little bit about
each one.
*
This is what it looked like before we opened.
And another.
This is the last time we would experience quiet until Sunday evening. LATE Sunday evening. My
ears are still ringing a little.
Outside, the crowd was milling around panting to get in.
Clearly, convention security was going to be overtaxed so the stormtroopers thought they'd assist
with crowd control.
And then we were off....
This may give you a little bit of an idea of the swarms that descended once the doors were open.
Saturday, in particular, was Hell Day.
Fortunately, we had a great crew. I honestly don't know how Julie and I ever used to do this by
ourselves. It takes a teenage metabolism to keep up with the Saturday hordes at a convention.
In the rear we have Rachel, Aja, and that's Katrina under the mop, with our friend Rin in the
front. Rachel decided to be Rogue again this year, as you can see. Katrina wanted to dress up too
but couldn't decide on an outfit (she'd brought a couple.) This is the one she started with, a
character of her own named Connor, but Connor only lasted till noon or so.
Once again this year, we won the lottery by having awesome neighbors. One one side we had Jeffrey
Ellis and the crew from Cloudscape
Comics, a small-press artists-collective outfit based in Vancouver, British Columbia.
I bought their anthology book EXPLODED VIEW partly to say thanks for putting up with us but it
turns out that I really like it.
It looks a lot like a grown-up version of what we do in class, actually -- every member of the
group contributes a few pages' worth of work and then there's bios in the back. Same basic
format, just with real production values. A lot of good stuff in here.
They do a raunchy humor self-published book and a podcast as well.
I'm so embarrassed I can't remember their names -- I know I introduced myself at some point, but
I couldn't really hear them very well. The echo chamber in the hall, once the crowds were in,
made it nearly impossible to converse on Saturday. But they were great, swore up and down they
loved being next to us and claimed we brought them a lot of extra traffic. They were especially
hilarious about pretending to almost-swear in front of the kids but they never actually did.
Since we were doing a for-real fundraiser, and thus actually accepting money, our setup changed a
little this year.
The idea was that we had students on the left, alumni on the right. As people would approach, the
kids would offer them a giveaway book, and if they stopped, then they'd volunteer to sign it.
Ben, Marie, and Eileen, working hard.
Then Katie or myself would explain about the budget shortfall and collecting for donations, and
add that anything over $10 got you a custom sketch from an alum. More often than not, they'd at
least stop and admire the sample sketches we had up, and put a couple of bucks in the box.
Here's a customer getting The Spiel. Marie, especially, was really good at explaining to people
what we were doing.
Many did in fact commission sketches.
Once we were set up it went fairly smoothly despite being a bit cramped, up against the wall as
we were.
That's me and my boss, Katie. For the last seven years I've exhorted my various supervisors at
school to come to the convention and really see how hard the kids work, but this was the
first time anyone took me up on it. It really was a lot of fun having Katie there as she knew
nothing about comics, conventions, or geek culture in general. But she adapted quickly. Watching
her take in the experience was a lot of fun, and by the end of her day there she was a complete
convert. At one point Katie was even speculating on the possibility of doing this kind of thing
more often and wondering what other shows there were that we could attend as a class. The
Stumptown Festival in Portland, especially, was a possibility we talked about quite a bit. (Katie
was also interested in hearing about WonderCon and APE, but I told her, "Baby steps. I'm only
just now getting to a place where I think I know how to get us to THIS show.")
The alumni were kept very busy sketching all day both days.
Fortunately they love to draw but my GOD they worked hard. I wish I'd gotten more shots of their
work, it was of an extraordinarily high level, especially the high school kids. I was so proud of
all of them and the way they've all kept learning and growing as artists, years after leaving my
charge.
I did get a few. Here's one of Aja's.
And this is one of Katrina's custom commissions. She asked the lady what she wanted and the woman
said, "Well, I like octopuses." (Yes, I know it's octopi but that's what she said.)
For a second I thought Katrina was going to be stuck but then she blew out this caricature of the
woman herself with an octopus on her head. Yeah, the kids are THAT good.
Some people were kind of crass about it. This mother, especially, was really annoying. First she
wanted to know what she'd be getting for her ten dollars.
It takes a special kind of chutzpah to haggle with a sixteen-year-old volunteer over your
CHARITABLE ACT.
Katrina rather helplessly pointed to the samples, but it developed that this woman wanted to see
the actual sketch before she would pay for it.
And this woman wanted something special, too-- a caricature of her two boys... an action pose of
the two of them in their martial arts class. Geez lady, demanding much?
Here's Katrina working on the commission -- I cropped her out, but cheapskate Mom is hovering
just out of frame, watching like a hawk to make sure she gets her money's worth.
Katrina was amazingly diplomatic about it. I thought Rin was going to go ballistic on the woman
and I had to squelch a few sharp remarks myself. She deserved some kind of smack.
The two boys with the final product. I think they were a little embarrassed over how their mother
treated Katrina.
Fortunately, the finished product satisfied everyone and we got the ten bucks.
But most of our visitors were much nicer. You remember Rachel's shot of the X-Men at the beach?
Guess who got that one.
Yeah, that's Matt Fraction, proud new owner of Rachel's X-Men Beach Party. This may be my
favorite photo from the show. Only in comics do moments like this happen: my former student
Rachel, the world's most ardent fan of the X-Men, posing with Matt Fraction, current writer of
the X-Men comic, who's just told her that her cartoon is brilliant, that he would love to do a
scene of the team at the beach and that she's caught all their personalities perfectly.
Matt was great with all the kids. He signed autographs, talked with them about comics, and
generally was awesome. Here he is signing an autograph for Emma.
It was only a couple of minutes out of his day but I know how hard it can be to
get away from your table when you're working a show, and it really meant a lot to the students to
have a pro take such an interest. Even my students, whose comics fandom usually begins and ends
with manga, know who Iron Man and the X-Men are. They were thrilled that he stopped by.
Michael Alan Nelson also visited our table briefly.
The kids loved him too, though they had only the vaguest idea of who he was -- I explained he
worked for Boom! Comics and I think many of them had the idea he worked on the Muppets or
something, since that was always where the line was over there. I enjoyed getting to meet him at
last -- I interviewed him here a while back, but it was via e-mail and we'd
never met in person. I am a big fan of his Fall Of Cthulhu series, and I got
Swordsmith Assassin at the show as well, since Chip Mosher sent us the first issue for
review and I liked it quite a lot, I'd been meaning to pick it up for a while now... though I
forgot to ask Mr. Nelson to sign it. Too busy chitchatting.
I was mostly at our table all weekend, but Julie got out some. There was no way she was missing
Leonard Nimoy.
She was actually in panels for most of Saturday, she also went to see Wil Wheaton and Stan Lee.
Of them all, I think Julie was the most impressed with Nimoy's, she said he was "inspiring."
As for me, well, I was enjoying my time at the table because it was turning into old home week.
We had many visitors from past classes -- Amethyst, Jessica, Shane, Andrew, and Jay, among
others. Some I hardly recognized because they're, you know, adults now. (The
last time I saw Jay he was a scrawny little soft-spoken kid. Today he's in his twenties, six feet
tall and ponytailed, very outgoing with an infectious laugh. And of course his voice is an octave
lower.)
Some even volunteered to put in some time sketching for us, which melted me. Lindon popped up out
of nowhere and immediately wanted to put in some table time. Of course I agreed.
A lot of the kids dressed up this year, too. Saturday Lindon was in street clothes, but Sunday
she was Pikachu.
I took this one just because it made me laugh.
That's right, Pikachu supports Cartooning in schools!
This is Lindon and Devon. I shot this because when Lindon has her head down -- even today, she
always draws with her nose to the paper like that, it can't be comfortable but she always has to
get way down there -- anyway, it tickles me because it looks like Pikachu is sitting at the
table.
Lots of parents volunteered time too.
That's Marie, Ben, and Eileen, under the watchful eye of Gus' mother Marilyn. She looks a little
annoyed, not because of the three kids but because her own son has abandoned his post again.
I get three kinds of students -- the ones who want to write, the ones who want to draw, and the
ones who just want to geek out and be surrounded by comics. Gus is one of the geeks. He will
produce drawings if you lean on him, but for him the point of being at a con is to get
cool stuff. All I ask of the kids is to put in a ninety-minute shift at our table on the
day they attend, but Gus could hardly bring himself to even do that much, he'd brought money and
it was burning a hole in his pocket. First it was Leonard Nimoy's autograph -- even if you
brought your own item for him to sign it was still a wince-worthy forty dollars -- and then he
negotiated an advance on his allowance to go buy some comics.
Marilyn has always been one of my favorite parents and her reaction to this was completely
charming. She ordered Gus to stay at the table and do his job. Then she went off to go
get her son's comics herself. Naturally, not being an expert, she consulted me.
"Randy's Readers," I told her. "He's your guy. He sells comics that aren't collectible, just in
average shape... his market is people that don't really Collect with a capital C, but only want
to read comics. If I ever get a chance to take a break I was thinking of stopping over there
myself, to be honest."
Marilyn agreed that was the place to go and the girls were exhorting me to take some kind of a
break, and Marie wanted to come too, so off we went.
Marilyn explained that Gus wanted war comics. "So violent," she said, ruefully.
Gus did the tank for the group poster. He's all about the war comics.
I laughed. "Well, I grew up on blood and thunder myself, it's not all that damaging really. The
key is that there has to be a story, I try to make sure they aren't just doing a videogame
shoot-'em-up. There's a fine old tradition of war comics that did great stories, Sgt. Rock,
G.I. Combat, Unknown Soldier.... we'll find him some of the good stuff."
Marilyn perked up. "Yes, I know Gus liked that Unknown Soldier book you loaned him. I
was going to try and find some of those."
I brought this to class to show the boys that even hardcore shoot-em-ups still had to have a
STORY. For Gus it was love at first sight.
Mission defined, we now moved with a clear purpose. Once we were at Randy's booth Randy himself
stepped in and was very helpful, explaining to Marilyn that there was the Unknown Soldier series
from Star-Spangled War Storiesand then there were the ones in his own book.
"What's the difference?" Marilyn wanted to know.
"Later ones are probably cheaper," I told her, smiling. "But I don't think Gus will care that
much, he'd enjoy any of them."
As for me, in showing the various war series to Marilyn I stumbled across this one and decided I
couldn't pass it up for six bucks.
Sorry, Gus, I got this one.
Our Army At War #269, a reprint of stories featuring work by Joe Kubert, George Evans,
John Severin, Russ Heath, and even Mort Drucker (!) I could spend hours just looking at the
pictures in this one.
I also fell for a couple of Superboy Giant reprint collections from my childhood that
I'd been trying to replace for a while. Mostly these days I'm a trade paperback guy, but
nostalgia can still get me.
Marie said curiously, "I know who Superman is, but I never heard of Superboy."
"It's like Smallville, only he actually wears the costume," I heard myself say, and
suddenly felt a hundred years old as i realized there's probably two generations of schoolkids
now who know Smallville as 'their' Superman the way I think of Bates-Maggin-Swan
Bronze-Age Superman as 'mine.'
When we got back I told Gus he had the coolest mother ever. "At your age I'd have killed
for a mom who said, 'you finish your work, I'll go make sure you get your comics.' That's unheard
of."
Gus blushed, grinned sheepishly, and gave his mother a hug. Marilyn beamed and said, "I have my
moments."
There wasn't time for me to do a whole lot of shopping -- there never is -- but Rin found a
dealer who had a big box full of graphic novels and trades for $5 and I fell for a couple of
those, too.
Empire is one of those late 1970s Byron Preiss productions where he was deliberately
trying to move comics into a bookstore market -- about twenty-five years too soon, it turned out,
but he produced some handsome books when he was trying. This one was an original piece by Samuel
Delany and Howard Chaykin, hoping to scoop up some of that newly-minted SF audience that Star
Wars created back then. I'd never actually read it and I've always been curious about it.
Holliday I've never heard of, but I'm always up for a Western comic, and for a $5 trade
paperback it's hard to go wrong.
Most of our shopping, though, we tried to do in Artist's Alley itself as much as possible. We
like to support the creators. Julie picked up the new Muppet book from Boom! where Amy Mebberson
was -- you should pardon the expression -- doing a BOOMing business.
Possibly the most popular artist at the show this year.
She was kept busy all weekend. A lovely lady, she was great with all the kids that came up to her
and sketched Kermits and Animals and Miss Piggys till her hands were raw, most likely. I don't
think a single kid went away empty-handed.
And I made it a point to pick up a bunch of stuff from Camilla d'Errico on Sunday morning. I was
able to catch her a few minutes before the show opened, when it was actually possible to have a
conversation.
Camilla's a favorite with my kids.
Camilla has been a great friend to my students for many years now... they don't remember her name
but they all know the Awesome Manga Lady From Vancouver. I bought about $25 worth of stuff from
her because A) I can use it in class and B) she deserves to be rich and I do what I can. She had
a line all weekend but I did get to chat with her for a few minutes on Sunday morning. Largely on
what became the typical Sunday conversation topic in Artist's Alley, "Great to see you, sorry I
didn't come by earlier, we were stuck at the table.... My God! Wasn't yesterday hell? How many
people did YOU get?" Everyone loved the increase in business but hated fighting through the
crowds on Saturday.
Sunday afternoon I did get around a little bit. I got a couple of books signed from Kurt Busiek
and Len Wein, and I had a flattering couple of minutes with Les McClaine, original artist on
The Middleman. He saw my badge and said, "Hey, Greg Hatcher! I love your column!"
Seriously. I was shocked speechless. I spluttered and fumfuh'd and blushed like a schoolgirl,
finally managing to choke out that I was a huge fan of his, that my students and I all adored
The Middleman. This pleased him, and we agreed that it was a shame it didn't last but it
was great to have something that cool exist at all.
And I got to say hi to Pete and Rebecca Woods, from Periscope Studios. We hadn't seen Rebecca in
about six years, she hadn't come to ECCC in a while, so it was great to catch up. Rebecca
immediately wanted to know how Brianna was doing, since when Bri was my student years ago she
practically camped out at the Periscope Studios table, and Rebecca happily adopted her. I told
her that Bri wanted desperately to come this year but she had finals up at Bellingham, she was in
college up at Western. Then we had a mutual groan about how old we are getting.
Because Bri couldn't make it to the convention this year, we wanted to at least let her know she
was missed.
When I got the idea to recruit additional Cartooning alumni to do charity sketches for our
fundraiser, my first two thoughts were Brianna and Nadine. They're both in college now, and
they've kept up with their comics work as well. They were pretty amazing in the seventh grade,
and they've only gotten better.
Here's what Bri was doing when she was in my class...
...and here's a more current piece.
Sadly, Brianna had finals or she'd have been there with bells on, she assured us.
Nadine had finals too but she did make it down, which delighted me. She was probably the single
most gifted student I've ever had. Her serial "Mermaid's Touch" still gets gasps of awe when the
kids go through the old books.
In fact, when Katrina joined my class when she was in middle school, she was so inspired by
Nadine's work that she took the same pen name, "KittyBell."
StreamTransport Grabs Hulu Videos for Offline
Viewing (Windows) It may not stick around that long once the powers that be find out, so if downloading and
watching Hulu videos offline could help you out, grab StreamTransport. The tricky little app
provides full-quality captures of streaming shows and movies.
ExtensionFM Is a Very Cool Browser-Based Music
Library, and We've Got Invites (Chrome) Chrome extension ExtensionFM automatically collects MP3s from sites you visit and adds them
to a browser-based library within the extension, allowing you to find all sorts of cool, new
music without cluttering up your local library until you buy them.
NetBalancer Prioritizes Network Traffic by
Application (Windows) Ever wish you could guarantee your BitTorrent download didn't choke your streaming YouTube
video-or vice versa-but don't feel like setting up Quality of Service rules on your
super-router ? NetBalancer shapes bandwidth allocations for different apps on your PC.
Gnome Gmail Tightly Integrates Gmail into Linux
Desktops (GNOME-based Linux) There are work-arounds to set Gmail as a default mail app in Linux, but they don't cover
right-click file sending and complex mail links. Gnome Gmail does a much better job of
integrating Gmail.
MusicBee is a Powerful, Easy-to-Use Music Manager
(Windows) Despite the many great media players out there, MusicBee earns itself a spot high on the
list with super tagging, managing, browsing, ripping, syncing, and converting powers, all on
top of an intuitive interface familiar to any iTunes user.
WeatherBar Integrates Weather Forecasts with the
Windows 7 Superbar (Windows 7) Like to keep the eye on the weather but never been too keen on sidebar gadgets or system
tray apps? WeatherBar is a simple app that puts the weather in your Windows 7 taskbar, offering
quick access to the forecast.
TestDrive Virtualizes Brand-New Ubuntu Builds for Easy
Testing (Ubuntu) Want to try out the latest build of the next Ubuntu release with almost no hassle at all?
TestDrive is a one-shot tool that downloads, virtualizes, and keeps daily Ubuntu builds up to
date.
Etacts Adds Contact Info, Social Networking, and Handy
Statistics to Your Gmail Sidebar (Chrome/Firefox) If you ever thought previously mentioned Xobni looked cool, but you prefer Gmail to
Outlook, free Gmail plug-in Etacts adds many of the same features. You get social information,
conversation history, and advanced sending preferences right in your Gmail sidebars.
LastHistory Graphically Visualizes your Last.fm
History Through Time (Mac) Just when you thought you couldn't possibly need more statistics on your music listening
habits, free Mac app LastHistory comes along and graphically analyzes your Last.fm logs, over
time, while also integrating with other Mac apps like iPhoto and iCal.
StreamTransport Grabs Hulu Videos for Offline
Viewing (Windows) It may not stick around that long once the powers that be find out, so if downloading and
watching Hulu videos offline could help you out, grab StreamTransport. The tricky little app
provides full-quality captures of streaming shows and movies.
ExtensionFM Is a Very Cool Browser-Based Music
Library, and We've Got Invites (Chrome) Chrome extension ExtensionFM automatically collects MP3s from sites you visit and adds them
to a browser-based library within the extension, allowing you to find all sorts of cool, new
music without cluttering up your local library until you buy them.
NetBalancer Prioritizes Network Traffic by
Application (Windows) Ever wish you could guarantee your BitTorrent download didn't choke your streaming YouTube
video-or vice versa-but don't feel like setting up Quality of Service rules on your
super-router ? NetBalancer shapes bandwidth allocations for different apps on your PC.
Gnome Gmail Tightly Integrates Gmail into Linux
Desktops (GNOME-based Linux) There are work-arounds to set Gmail as a default mail app in Linux, but they don't cover
right-click file sending and complex mail links. Gnome Gmail does a much better job of
integrating Gmail.
MusicBee is a Powerful, Easy-to-Use Music Manager
(Windows) Despite the many great media players out there, MusicBee earns itself a spot high on the
list with super tagging, managing, browsing, ripping, syncing, and converting powers, all on
top of an intuitive interface familiar to any iTunes user.
WeatherBar Integrates Weather Forecasts with the
Windows 7 Superbar (Windows 7) Like to keep the eye on the weather but never been too keen on sidebar gadgets or system
tray apps? WeatherBar is a simple app that puts the weather in your Windows 7 taskbar, offering
quick access to the forecast.
TestDrive Virtualizes Brand-New Ubuntu Builds for Easy
Testing (Ubuntu) Want to try out the latest build of the next Ubuntu release with almost no hassle at all?
TestDrive is a one-shot tool that downloads, virtualizes, and keeps daily Ubuntu builds up to
date.
Etacts Adds Contact Info, Social Networking, and Handy
Statistics to Your Gmail Sidebar (Chrome/Firefox) If you ever thought previously mentioned Xobni looked cool, but you prefer Gmail to
Outlook, free Gmail plug-in Etacts adds many of the same features. You get social information,
conversation history, and advanced sending preferences right in your Gmail sidebars.
LastHistory Graphically Visualizes your Last.fm
History Through Time (Mac) Just when you thought you couldn't possibly need more statistics on your music listening
habits, free Mac app LastHistory comes along and graphically analyzes your Last.fm logs, over
time, while also integrating with other Mac apps like iPhoto and iCal.
Austin Heap, the programmer from California, explains how he created Haystack, the software that
broke the grip of Iran's censors after the disputed 2009 election
If you imagined a computer hacker with the know-how to topple governments, you might well picture
someone who looks a lot like Austin Heap. He's a 26-year-old programmer from San Francisco with
long wavy hair, wearing jeans, T-shirt and aviator sunglasses the morning we meet. He is also the
creator of a piece of software called Haystack, which was a key technology used by Iranians to
disseminate information outside the country in the protests that followed the disputed election
result in June 2009, when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad unconvincingly triumphed against three
challengers.
The Iranian government already filtered its citizens' email and Skype conversations, but in the
aftermath of the election, such censorship was increased in an attempt to identify dissidents who
were using the web to organise and communicate with each other and with the outside world.
A tech wunderkind originally from Ohio, Heap developed Haystack to open up social networking
sites such as Twitter and Facebook, giving voices on the streets a platform, and people in the
west a window into a closed-down state. He's now the executive director of the Censorship Research
Centre in San Francisco, a non-profit organisation founded with his colleague Daniel
Colascione to provide anti-censorship education, outreach, and technology for free to those who
need it most.
What is Haystack and how does it work?
Haystack is a piece of software that someone in Iran runs on his or her computer. It does two
things: first, it encrypts all of the data; second it hides that data inside normal traffic so it
looks like you're visiting innocuous sites. Daniel and I developed Haystack by looking at how the
regime was using technology to filter the internet, and figured out the best strategy to get
around it.
Why did you decide to take on the regime?
I remember the day of the election, sitting around watching Twitter, watching what was going on,
reading the election results and thinking, that looks weird. Then I realised that the internet
censorship had stepped up more than normal. I thought, hey, I can set up a few proxies and help a
few people out. While I'm at it, why not post instructions online so other people could use their
computers to get around the government filtering.
Imagine what you can do if you can watch someone's internet connection: you can watch them log
into GMail, you can watch them log into Facebook, you can see who they're talking to, you can
intercept messages. That's why the encryption part of Haystack was really important. It had to
start on the user's side, on their computers. Then it makes its way through the government
filters.
Were you politically motivated?
No. I just remember sitting there watching the election results thinking, why are they violently
reacting to people who were voting? It's not like they were just jailing people; they were
killing people in the streets – people
who had a different opinion, people who wanted to share their stories and voice what they thought
was right. It shocked me that someone would retaliate in such an inhumane way, and for someone to
use the internet as a tool of oppression, as a tool to stop dialogue.
I gather that according to US law, it was illegal to export Haystack to Iran, simply
because it would flout Iranian laws – but it did virally make its way onto
Iranian computers...
I'll never forget the first person who got a copy of Haystack and sent me a screenshot of
Twitter. All of a sudden, the internet was open again. Haystack also allowed people to make Skype
calls back to their families securely. It allowed people to send GMail without worrying that
someone would try to steal their password or monitor their communication. It gave them a layer of
protection that allowed the random person to be a citizen journalist and to do so without the
risk of persecution, jail or torture.
Is there content that shouldn't be spread around the web?
The internet is used for anything from drug trafficking to human trafficking. That's completely
wrong. But when you decide that you're going to support an open internet, you have to open all of
it. You can't go down this slippery slope of saying what's right and what's wrong. Who is this
panel of people who's going to say this is OK, this is not OK? Outside the obvious things that
are human rights violations, free speech is free speech.
Isn't that a very American point of view?
I don't think [Haystack] has anything to do with American ideology. I think that if you look at
what the UN has listed as basic human rights, one of those is the ability to freely and openly
communicate. No one should ever have to stop and say, "Can I be this? Can I think this? Can I say
this?" It's what we as people deserve.
Who are your greatest critics?
I don't even know where to start. I have a whole fan club of people who hate me. There's clearly
been opposition by the Iranian government. They recently passed a law that makes it illegal to
use software or proxies that evade the censorship that they've imposed. They're detractor number
one.
In my day-to-day life I meet people who don't support what I do. One of the most shocking
examples was when someone came up to me and said, "Don't you get that Ahmadinejad is our Obama?"
That took me back.
After Google announced it was leaving China, the Chinese government said that
US-originated systems that opened up the governmental web blockades – such as
Haystack - were acts of terrorism. Are you a terrorist?
It's interesting. There are a lot of things that they [China] do and pursue, a lot of laws that I
don't feel anyone should observe. They have a long history of jailing dissidents and people who republish old cartoons. They pick and
choose how to enforce laws and they come up with laws that frankly I would consider an act of
terrorism of mankind. Maybe we should agree that we're both the same kind of threat, but to one
another.
Hilary Clinton made a speech recently that outlined the US State Department's policy on
web freedom. She argued that there was no place for censorship. What's the relationship now
between the US government and Haystack?
I don't like the view that Haystack is a puppet of the US State Department, but I'm happy to see
that the State Department is standing up for a free and open web. They have a long history of
protecting human rights around the world and documenting abuses. This is the next step. We live
in such an interconnected world. Policy makers, organisations that draft and enforce these
policies need to catch up. And they are.
What's next for Austin Heap and for Haystack?
There are a lot of places around the world that are either severely censored now that could use
people like me and tools such as Haystack, and they need to be addressed. That includes
everywhere from Australia, which is currently dipping its toes in the censorship pool, to Egypt
where there are more bloggers jailed than journalists: this is a global problem.
The way Haystack was developed was that we looked at how Iran specifically does its filtering and
we came up with a method around it. If you look at what China does with their filtering, they use
wildly different technology and have spent millions, hundreds of millions on their censorship.
They're probably the best censors in the world. We hope to run down the list. Take on each
country that has decided that it's going to try to use the internet against people.
The BBC iPlayer is about to undergo another metamorphosis,
its second since inception. The BBC iPlayer 3.0 is going to have social network integration at
its core, and the ability to share what you’re watching or listening to could have a
dramatic effect on viewing figures.
The BBC iPlayer
The BBC iPlayer has grown in both usability and popularity since
its launch over two years ago. It’s now a must-use service for all residents in the
U.K. and those outside of the U.K. who have found a way to circumvent the geo-blocking.
The man now overseeing the iPlayer as part of his job as the BBC’s director of Future Media
and Technology is Erik Huggers. And he recently spoke to
The Telegraph about the future of the iPlayer at the Changing Media Summit 2010.
iPlayer 3.0
The iPlayer 3.0 beta is set to launch soon. And it will bring integration with various social
networking sites to the TV on-demand service. Deals with Facebook, Twitter, and Bebo are already in place, with more sure to follow.
IPlayer users will be asked to integrate their accounts with the BBC site. Them every time they sign in
and use the iPlayer, they will also be connected to the social networks they use. This will
enable them to see what their friends are watching or listening to, and vice versa.
The only other feature of the new-look iPlayer discussed was a new embeddable video player being
rolled out across the whole of the BBC’s online presence. So, online video is clearly at
the very heart of the larger BBC Web redesign.
Social Networking
It could be argued that the BBC is playing catchup in offering social network integration with
the iPlayer, as social networking sites have grown phenomenally over the past couple of years,
most notably Facebook and Twitter.
The effect this integration could have on viewing figures cannot be underestimated. Social
networking sites are known to drive traffic to external sites in a big way, and if your friends
are watching a show you’ve maybe never even heard of, there’ll be a temptation to
give it a try.
Record Viewing Figures
With that in mind, I suspect the iPlayer’s viewing figures are going to continue growing,
as they have been all along.
Ten years ago this week, online music pioneer Justin Frankel released a little application dubbed
Gnutella that enabled file sharing through a distributed P2P network. Frankel, whose previous
claim to fame was programming the then hugely-popular Winamp MP3 player software, supposedly named the client after his favorite hazelnut
cream spread, and the first version published online was really more of a proof of concept than
anything else.
Still, Gnutella hit a nerve. Napster had been sued three months before, and many file sharers were rightfully
fearing that the music industry would eventually prevail in court and force Napster to switch off
its servers. With Gnutella, no such switch existed, as the client was allowing direct P2P
connections without the help of any centralized server. Add to it the fact that Gnutella, unlike
Napster, allowed users to swap videos and software as well as MP3s, and you begin to see why many
immediately viewed Gnutella as the next step in P2P file sharing.
A step, one should add, that made Frankel’s employer AOL more than a little nervous. It
only took the Internet giant a day to force Frankel and his colleagues to take down
Gnutella – but even that was too long, as countless sites quickly started to first
mirror, then build upon Frankel’s official Gnutella client. There’s always been a
little bit of mystery surrounding the exact happenings of those days, but some people have been
musing that a person with a surprising amount of insider knowledge showed up in one of the first
IRC chat rooms dedicated to Gnutella soon after AOL pulled the plug, only to provide some very
detailed information about the inner workings of the client’s P2P protocol.
Speaking of IRC: Early versions of the software didn’t really have any way for users to
connect, save for entering another user’s IP address, which is why IRC quickly became an
integral part of the early days of Gnutella. It was also in those IRC chat rooms that the myth of
Gnutella as a seemingly invincible P2P protocol was born, and the fact that AOL tried but
couldn’t contain the software seemed to fit right into that picture. Gnutella was one of
the very first P2P apps I ever wrote about, so I lurked in those chat rooms as well, where people
were cheering the fact that someone finally found a file sharing solution that couldn’t be
shut down. I still remember one IRC user saying: “We’ve started a damn cult
again!”
Only Gnutella wasn’t really ready to be a cult. The network routed search requests from
peer to peer, leading to an exponential growth of traffic as its network became bigger. Napster
programmer Jordan Ritter described the problem early on in a paper titled “Why Gnutella Can’t
Scale. No, Really,” and Frankel himself, who has hardly ever gone on the record about
Gnutella, once stated that he was
fully aware of “how poorly it would scale” when he released the client.
Still, Gnutella captured the imagination of many, one of them being Mark Gorton, founder of the
New York-based Lime Group. Gorton was at
the time pursuing a vision of automating businesses through structured data, and Gnutella, as
something that could, for example, distribute real estate listings wrapped in XML, seemed to fit
that image quite nicely. Early versions of the Gnutella client of Gorton’s LimeWire venture were still written with this
vision in mind, hoping to build a P2P network that could eventually be used to do all kinds of
things with which we’re now familiar on the web, thanks to web services.
LimeWire’s engineers joined a growing group of developers loosely connected through web
sites like the long-defunct Gnutella.wego.com (whose admin Gene Kan tragically committed
suicide in 2002) and mailing lists like the one for the Gnutella Developer Forum, and one of
the first issues to be tackled was scalability. The introduction of a two-tiered system of
ordinary clients and so-called Ultrapeers helped grow both the network as a whole and each
user’s search horizon. The idea was also later adopted by the developers of KaZaA, whose
own take on this two-tiered approach still lives on in Skype’s P2P network.
Technical improvements like these helped Gnutella to grow, but the competition was quick to catch
up. Bram Cohen unveiled a first version of
BitTorrent only two years after Frankel had published Gnutella, and BitTorrent quickly became the
file sharing client of choice for sharing videos online. Part of BitTorrent’s quick rise to
fame was its modular simplicity: Cohen had outsourced much of the search and indexing of files to
torrent web sites, only handling the actual distribution of data within the client. Gnutella on
the other hand was meant to work without any web server. That made it much more invincible, but
also much less accessible to users who migrated from apps and clients to a world of web services.
Another issue that has plagued Gnutella from the beginning is not technical, but legal. The
protocol was supposed to outsmart trigger-happy lawyers, but the mere fact that there
wasn’t a central switch to turn off the Gnutella network didn’t stop rights holders
from going after people and companies associated with it. Lawsuits and legal threats forced Morpheus, Xolox, Bearshare and
a number of other companies and developers to throw the towel.
LimeWire got sued by the music industry as well in 2006, but that hasn’t
stopped the company from continuing with the development and monetization of its client.
LimeWire’s client also utilizes BitTorrent these days, but LimeWire’s VP of Product
Management Jason Herskowitz told me during a phone conversation that Gnutella has “worked
really well” for the company, and that its engineers are looking into ways to make Gnutella
once again more attractive to developers by exposing some of its functionality through web
services. “There is still a long future ahead for Gnutella,” he predicted.
Not everyone agrees with that outlook. Adam Fisk, who was hired by LimeWire as one of its first developers in the summer of
2000, but left the company in 2004 to eventually start his own P2P venture dubbed Littleshot, believes that some core assumptions
of the Gnutella protocol are outdated. “I don’t think that distributed P2P search
makes any sense,” he told me, explaining that the very server-less search functionality
that made Gnutella superior to Napster also ended up being its biggest burden, and that it would
be much easier to have servers handle search and just use P2P to deliver data – a recipe
that has already helped BitTorrent succeed.
Sure, LimeWire and some other Gnutella clients could still stick around for a long time, Fisk
admitted, but he was skeptical that we would ever see any significant new project based on
Gnutella. “That would be shocking,” he said.
No, we’re not hiring the Hanson brothers to deal with RMT threats. As
there is no one better at beating up targets than EVE pilots, we thought we'd enlist your talents
in slapping EVE Gate into shape.
As CCP t0rfifrans
outlined on his blog introducing Tyrannis, we will
be delivering the very first iteration of EVE Gate in the upcoming expansion. It is my task to
oversee the technical direction of the Web side of things with EVE Gate, and I wanted to take the
opportunity to announce a public “Alpha” test we are planning for EVE Gate and the
steps we are taking to make sure we have a very sound foundation to build upon. What we don't
want to do is just turn all the traffic completely on the first day and pray it doesn’t
break under load. Instead we plan a measured approach that will make sure we have a solid
architecture and enough hardware in place.
The process we are following is as follows:
Develop and prototype an N-Tier web application with scalability in mind from day one (See my
first
blog on "Cosmos" ) - DONE
Release and stress an internal alpha to identify and address weakspots - DONE
Build and utilize load testing and application profiling tools to find and fix bottlenecks -
DONE
Release a public "alpha" stress test to apply real world load to the application to check our
hardware needs against estimates and monitor it under real conditions
Roll out a "beta" launch
Ramp up to full access in increments
On March 23, we will announce access to a public stress test version of EVE Gate which will be
connected to Singularity for all of you to log into and look around. What is critical for
everyone to understand is that the intent of this test is to stress the underlying hardware and
key architectural components. This will allow us to identify and address bottlenecks and
weaknesses well before launch and to make sure we have adequate hardware in place for all the
pounding you folks will put on it once you are all browsing EVE Gate routinely from work (when
your boss isn't looking). We will be watching your comments closely for feedback as well as
closely logging and monitoring the behavior of the software and hardware under load. You can help
us out greatly just by logging in, browsing around and trying the application out.
It needs to be emphasized that while it gives you an early glimpse at EVE Gate, the primary
purpose of this test is a technical one. The features included in the test are still heavily in
development and we wanted to get an early version up and available for you to beat up the
hardware well in advance. There will be elements that are not yet done or which are presented as
a simplified version for testing purposes. To make this clear the application will be labeled the
"EVE Gate Alpha Stress Test"; it will be pretty hard to miss. I am not going to go into depth
here on the features that will be included; we have an additional Dev Blog that will be presented
soon which will focus on the web based functionality which will come with EVE Gate at launch
(calendar, mail, contacts, profiles, broadcast logs, etc).
When EVE Gate does go live with the expansion it will be released as a Beta launch. It will be
fully functional and connected to Tranquility for access to production data however it will be a
Web site that we will continually modify and enhance. As it is a Web site, we have the benefit of
not being tied directly to client releases and can continue to upgrade the site as quickly as we
can get improvements completed. Once access is fully ramped up and we are comfortable that it is
fully stable and production ready we’ll rip off the Beta stamp.
When I mention an incremental ramp up to full access, what I am describing is a measured increase
in the number of players that can access the site when the Beta version goes live. We will do
this with a basic signup page on launch day and we will give X number of additional players
access each day depending on how things are going. Rather than turning the faucet fully on we are
going to open it up a bit, check that all is well, open it up a bit more, etc… until we
have it fully open and everyone has access.
Obviously we will open it up as quickly as is feasible as we have a lot more features we want to
get to work on (>cough< forums >cough<) but our emphasis is on doing this the right
way. Hopefully the ramp up will be quick, and this "Alpha" test I have announced here will play a
big part in getting us as much information as possible so we can be ready. The better the info we
get out of the "Alpha," the more accurate our hardware setup will be, the quicker we can ramp up
full access when we go live.
The team is really looking forward to rolling out EVE Gate for you to use, and we will have
greater detail on the features it will include in a future Dev Blog.
In the last few years, there's been a push by some companies to bring back the immensely troubling
"hot news doctrine," that appears to violate everything we know about the First Amendment and
copyright law. Basically, the "hot news doctrine" says that if someone reports on a story, others
are not allowed to report on their reporting for some period of time -- on the theory that it
somehow undermines the incentive to do that original reporting. Last year, we wrote about the
very troubling
implications of allowing the hot news concept to stand. Beyond the free speech implications, it
also has the troubling quality of effectively creating a copyright on facts -- which are quite
clearly not covered by copyright. On top of that, it's not necessary in the slightest. As anyone
who is actually in the online news business knows, getting a scoop gets you traffic -- even if
others report the same thing minutes later. Being first gets you the attention. You don't need to
artificially block others from reporting the news.
Unfortunately, with various publications struggling, some have picked up on the hot news doctrine
as a way to somehow block competition. Tragically, it looks like a court has now adopted the hot
news doctrine in one case. Paul Alan
Levy alerts us to the news that a judge issuing an
injunction against TheFlyOnTheWall.com, a website that would publish summaries of Wall Street
research. The Wall Street firms said this undermined their business model -- and the court agreed.
It passed an injunction saying that TheFlyOnTheWall had to hold off publishing any news about any
Wall Street research report until either 10am (if the report is released early in the morning) or
for two hours after it's released if it comes out during the day.
These totally arbitrary restrictions are highly troubling from a free speech standpoint and seem
effectively random. This seems like yet another case of a company being upset by interference with its business model,
which should be a reason to change the business model -- not run to the courts.
But what's most troubling of all is that now all the publishers who have been salivating over the
hot news doctrine have a legal ruling to point to. Can you imagine how the world would work if you
couldn't blog about or mention a particular piece of news for a few hours because the Associated
Press got to it first? It's hard to see how this could possibly stand up to a First Amendment
analysis, and it's quite troubling that the judge found the way she did.
Viacom’s $1 billion lawsuit against Google over
copyright infringement on YouTube is coming to a head, with a court battle likely to ensue
sometime this year. For now, the accusations made by both sides have been released. And they pull
no punches whatsoever.
A Brief History Lesson
Viacom Vs Google can be traced right back to May 2005 before YouTube was under the protective wing
of Google. A clip from
Paramount Pictures’ Twin Towers was uploaded to the site, and Viacom demanded to
know who the uploader was.
In October 2006 YouTube made a deal with Viacom to syndicate content. Then Google bought YouTube
for
$1.65 billion. February 2007 saw Viacom retract the previous deal and pull everything off the
site.
March 2007 saw Viacom sue Google for 63,000 counts of copyright infringement, for which it was
seeking $1 billion in damages. Google argues that YouTube is protected under the Safe Harbor provision of the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act.
BetaNews
has the full timeline with many more twists and turns. But it all builds to this point when
Google and Viacom’s documents pertaining to the court case have been released. And they
make for interesting reading, to say the least.
Google’s Claims
Google claims that
Viacom wanted it both ways, continuously uploading its content to YouTube while publicly
rallying against it. Google claims Viacom uploaded roughed up versions of videos so they looked
stolen, hiring marketing agencies to do the dirty work.
Google claims that Viacom even uploaded many of the clips which it is now suing over. And
maintains that it is protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as it removes videos
suspected of infringing copyrights.
Google also makes the claim
that Viacom was interested in acquiring YouTube at one point.
Viacom’s Claims
Viacom dismisses the DMCA defense as it insists YouTube is more than just a passive content host
and is therefore responsible for what videos were being uploaded to the site.
What’s more, Viacom also accuses YouTube’s founders of at the very least turning a
blind eye to copyright infringing clips, suggesting that traffic was sought by any means
necessary in order to ensure a quick sale. Viacom also claims Jawed Karim (YouTube co-founder)
himself uploaded infringing videos, using email correspondence between the founders as evidence.
In essence, Viacom argues that YouTube was “intentionally built
on infringement,” and deserves no leniency in court despite the measures put in place to
clean up the site since the lawsuit was issued.
Conclusions
The documents feel very much like each side is attempting to score points from the other. And
it’s almost inevitable that the case will now end up in court.
The sides have until April 30 to file opposing arguments to each other’s motions, with a
trial then set to take place later this year. And it’ll be a trial whose verdict could set
a landmark in terms of copyright owners vs. online video sites.
I had pointed this out in a comment yesterday, but with
so many press reports suggesting that Viacom's filing found some sort of "smoking gun" in the
YouTube emails concerning founders talking about "stealing" videos, it's worth pointing out that
Viacom appears to have taken these quotes totally out of context. Thankfully, TechCrunch is putting
some of them right back into context and noticing that Viacom is clearly misrepresenting what YouTube's founders were talking about.
The key quote that Viacom (and many in the press) are highlighting is the following: In a July
29,2005 email about competing video websites, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen wrote to YouTube
co-founders Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, "steal it!", and Chad Hurley responded: "hmm, steal the
movies?" That looks damning, right? Except the context shows that they weren't talking about
copyright infringement of big name Hollywood content at all. They were talking about looking at
other viral video sites that were popular on the fringes at the time -- usually showing
random silly homemade videos that went viral and putting those videos on YouTube.
Furthermore, when you see the full discussion, you can see that in the context, they were
joking about taking that content. Really, they were discussing what kind of site they
wanted YouTube to be: should it be for more serious videos, or should they focus on those kinds of
traffic-getting viral videos. In fact, in the context of the discussion, they play up the fact that
their content is user-generated, rather than pulled from outside sources: SUBJECT:
Re:http://www.filecabi.net/
Jul 29, 2005 1:05 AM, Steve Chen wrote:
steal it!
Jul 29, 2005 1 :25 AM, Chad Hurley wrote:
hmm, steal the movies?
Jul 29, 2005 1 :33 AM, Steve Chen wrote:
haha ya.
or something.
just something to watch out for. check out their alexa ranking.
-s
Jul 29, 2005 7:45 AM, Chad Hurley wrote:
hmm, i know they are getting a lot of traffic... but it’s because they are a
stupidvideos.com-type of site. they might make enough money to pay hosing bills, but sites like
this and big-boys.com will never go public. I would really like to build something more valuable
and more useful. actually build something that people will talk about and changes the way people
use video on the internet.
Jul 29 2005 6:51 AM, Steve Chen wrote:
right, i understand those goals but, at the same time, we have to keep in mind that we need to
attract traffic. how much traffic will we get from the personal videos? remember, the only reason
why our traffic surged was due to a video of this type. i’m not really disagreeing with you
but i also think we shouldn’t be so high & mighty and think we’re better than these
guys. viral videos will tend to be THOSE type of videos.
-s
Jul 29 2005 6:56 AM, Steve Chen Wrote:
another thing. still a fundamental difference between us and most of those other sites. we do have
a community and it’s ALL user generated content.
-s Not quite the discussion that Viacom implies. In fact, the more you look at the full
context of almost every quote that Viacom and the press are playing up, the more and more Viacom's
entire argument crumbles.
During my recent trip to India, I flew down to Bangalore for one
reason: To meet N.R. Narayana Murthy. Murthy is the co-founder, executive chairman and former CEO
for 21 years of Infosys, the first Indian company to go public on Nasdaq and effectively the
company that began the $30 billion Indian IT outsourcing market.
Murthy’s idea was so successful that it quickly became controversial—not
only within the United States where some Americans feel Indians are “stealing jobs,”
but also in India where many are concerned about a tech economy that doesn’t make
anything. I wanted to meet with Murthy, because in many ways he’s the best person to
address what Indians at home and abroad are facing and where Indian entrepreneurship goes from
here.
Here are a few highlights from our meeting:
His Day Job. Murthy thought he was stepping down from Infosys back in 2002, but
he couldn’t fully let go. As such, he still works pretty much full time for the company,
traveling to meet with customers and running a lot of the company’s mentoring and training
programs. The more surprising aspect of his job: He personally signs off on the architecture of
every building on each one of Infosys’ campuses that employ some 17,000 people around the
world. The one we were sitting in was spread of eight acres and had some remarkable buildings,
including one that looked like the Luxor casino in Las Vegas.
I asked why this was a top priority—after all, many Valley campuses are plush
but from an architecture standpoint look about the same. He said when GE and other American
multinationals were starting to come into his business everyone thought Infosys would lose the
local talent war. So Murthy studied why people want to work at a particular place. One of the
results was the comfort and design of the facilities. That was in 1994 when Infosys was designing
the very building we were sitting in as we had this conversation. “I’ve been in
charge of every building since– all over the world,” he says.
Hurting or Helping Local Entrepreneurship? Given exactly how plush Murthy and
his colleagues have worked to make Infosys, has he indirectly hurt Bangalore’s
entrepreneurship scene by making the risk of leaving so daunting? He smiled when I asked this and
said, “We may have unwittingly. But I do feel like the spirit of entrepreneurship is alive
and kicking in Bangalore.”
Further, I asked about Bangalore’s Zippo-flipping, free-spending generation of young
techies who’ve graduated to a huge wave of multinational jobs that pay them far more than
their parents ever made, in many cases more than the rest of their families combined. Murthy
didn’t deny that that instant-gratification, “gimmie” contingent was strong in
the city he helped build, economically speaking. But he blames the Internet and the
mass-cross-pollination of Western pop culture, not the bigger paycheck from companies like his.
“We are moving towards a uniform, global culture with an intense competitive spirit and an
intense desire for instant gratification,” he says. “But I have a firm belief that
each generation is better than the previous one. The Indian entrepreneurs today are more daring
than we were.” (This from a man who became a capitalist after after hitchhiking across
communist Eastern Europe and getting thrown in jail for chatting up someone’s girlfriend on
a train. “More daring” is a tall order, young Indian techies.)
Is India’s Tech Community Too Addicted to Services? Clearly, services has
been a great business for Infosys and the hundreds of dollar-millionaires and even more
rupee-millionaires that the company’s generous stock program has created. But a lot of
Indian CEOs and investors complain that in most cases services-based tech businesses are a great
way to get revenues quick, but not a way to build a huge, high-growth business. There’s a
big question of whether India’s tech sector has a worrying lack of product-building
know-how.
Murthy says it’s a progression. “India missed the industrial revolution, but Indians
had intelligence,” he says. “We had to make do with pen and paper. We were always
forced to look at the abstract. What is happening in India today is the creation of jobs.
Let’s create jobs as long as they are legal and ethical, it doesn’t matter, as long
as we make money. The time will come for creating products. I wouldn’t lose sleep over
this. If we create enough jobs we’ll raise the confidence of the youngsters and
they’ll create products.”
India’s Infrastructure. Here’s something it’s hard for even
Murthy to be upbeat about: India’s shoddy physical infrastructure. Murthy has traveled the
world and it’s frustrating that so much money has poured into the country he loves, and
yet, the infrastructure is still so shockingly bad.
There is progress—Infosys for instance has benefited from a new overpass that
cuts down on the drive to the campus by more than thirty minutes. (See!) But it’s
not moving nearly fast enough, he says. “I don’t know if we will reach the level of
the United States or China,” he adds.
Murthy gave a more nuanced explanation than the usual “it’s corruption” answer
you get in India. He explained that 65% of India’s population lives in rural areas and 35%
live in cities. And there’s such polarity between the quality of life that politicians have
to appear to be doing more for the villages than the cities if they want to get re-elected. That
leaves prosperous economic cities blighted by poor sewage systems, pollution spewing generators
and beggars weaving through traffic tapping on car windows. “Different emerging nations
take different paths,” he says. “In China, they chose to emphasize giving people
economic freedom first and political freedom second. In India we chose the opposite path.”
Hurting or Helping US-based Indians? All you have to do is read the comments on
one of Vivek Wadhwa’s posts to see the ugly, anti-immigrant, anti-Indian fervor
that’s been whipped up in America, post-recession. A lot of it has to do with outsourcing.
I asked Murthy if he felt his company and industry’s huge success has indirectly made life
harder for Indian-Americans. He turned the blame on xenophobes like Lou Dobbs and grandstanding
politicians who use the wedge issue to get viewers and votes.
But it’s an issue he has to address a lot. He answers it by saying every morning he gets up
and gets a Pepsi out of his GE Fridge and drives his American car to work where he sits down at
his Dell computer. India used to have companies that made soft drinks, refrigerators, cars and
computers. But the American ones were better. Allowing them in hurt Indian workers in the short
term, but provided a far better quality of life for a much bigger swath of Indians long term. He
argues outsourcing has done the same thing for US companies. Greater efficiencies and
cost-savings enables these companies to stay competitive and there’s no reason they
can’t—in theory—plow those savings into better local
jobs or job training.
This argument isn’t going to pacify hate-mongers, because nothing will. Murthy knows that
too and while he regrets it, he seems to accept it as reality.
Advice for Entrepreneurs. Murthy has started a $170 million venture fund, so
although he spends most of his time still at Infosys, he clearly cares about encouraging the next
generation of entrepreneurs. He had two big pieces of advice for them. One, be able to articulate
what you do in one sentence. If you can’t, you don’t have a good idea. And two, make
sure the market is ready. Businesses are killed, not congratulated, for being ahead of their
time.
Three million people used the March
Madness On Demand video player to catch the first round of the NCAA Men’s College
Basketball Championship online yesterday, according to a press release sent out by CBS Sports
today. Sports fans watched a total of 3.4 million hours of live streaming video and audio online
yesterday, 20 percent more than in 2009. And the most-watched game even saw 50 percent more
traffic than last year’s most popular first day face-off.
We’ll leave it to others to speculate how much of a productivity killer March Madness is,
but the fact that CBS saw its biggest spike in traffic in the hour after 2pm Eastern — 533k
streaming hours for the full hour, with a peak of 147k streaming hours between 2:45 and 2:59 p.m.
— suggests that the championship may actually be an ideal lunch time companion, at least
for us West Coasters.
Yesterday’s most popular game happened to be the match between Florida and BYU, with a
total of 521k hours of streaming video and audio. Those new audience records are another
validation for CBS’s strategy to air full live games without access restrictions online, a
strategy that’s also been paying off with advertisers, who have spent a total
of $37 million on ads for March Madness On Demand this year.
However, one should take CBS’s claim that this was “the largest single day of traffic
for a live sport event on the Internet” with a grain of salt: The 2008 Olympics had a huge
online worldwide online audience, with 1.6 million viewers
tuning in simultaneously through the Chinese P2P video client PPLive during the opening
ceremony alone.
This episode of 4MR is brought to you by the Knight Digital Media Center, providing a
spectrum of training for the 21st century journalist. Find out more at KDMC's website. It's also underwritten by GoDaddy, helping you
set up your own website in a snap with domain name registration, web hosting and 24/7 support.
Visit
GoDaddy to learn more.
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at Google TV,
the new alliance between Google, Intel, Sony and Logitech to create a new TV or set-top box that
will finally connect the TV with the Net in a simple way. Plus, Facebook last week surpassed
Google in traffic for the U.S., according to Experian Hitwise, and Facebook referrals to news
sites were more loyal visitors than referrals from Google News or the Google search engine. And I
asked Just One Question to Time magazine TV critic James Poniewozik, getting his take on Google
TV.
Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea
Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. He lives in San Francisco
with his son Julian. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit.
This episode of 4MR is brought to you by the Knight Digital Media Center, providing a
spectrum of training for the 21st century journalist. Find out more at KDMC's website. It's also underwritten by GoDaddy, helping you
set up your own website in a snap with domain name registration, web hosting and 24/7 support.
Visit
GoDaddy to learn more.
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."
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."
Crashed web sites, stolen credit
card info — imagine seeing the damage caused by Internet viruses and worms unleashed on a
fleet of vehicles. The results could include vehicle location data used with malicious intent,
the prevention of a plug-in vehicle battery from recharging, remote starting of a car, or even
— as a disgruntled young former car salesman in Texas has demonstrated this week —
stranding drivers with a car that won’t start and a horn that won’t quit.
Here’s what happened in Texas, as Wired and
the Austin News report: A
terminated employee from a car dealership called the Texas Auto Center logged into the
company’s web-based system and was able to remotely wreak havoc on more than 100 vehicles.
The dealership’s system is able to disable the starter system and trigger incessant horn
honking for customers that have fallen behind on car payments. It’s meant to serve as an
alternative to repossessing the vehicle, and the ex-Texas Auto Center employee, arrested Thursday
on charges of computer intrusion, was able to set off the horn command at will and make it so
drivers couldn’t start their cars.
Cars are growing ever more connected to communication networks, and upcoming generations of
electric vehicles will take it a step further with connections to the power grid. Already,
electric car makers have unveiled
smartphone apps designed to let users to remotely control certain vehicle functions and battery
charging. Down the road, we’ll likely see not only electricity flowing to cars from the
grid, but also the flow of data between cars, the grid, home energy management systems, utilities
and third-party service providers.
As Ford’s director of connected services Doug VanDagens told us
recently (GigaOM Pro, subscription required), “For electric vehicles, connectivity to
the web and data are “required over and above what gas engines require.” Apps can use
data — about topography, traffic, battery and vehicle health, infrastructure
availability, driving behavior — to help orient drivers in the nascent world
of electric mobility, both in and out of their vehicle.
While these tools and technologies could help reduce fuel consumption, make electric vehicles
more convenient, and enable utilities to prevent excess strain on the power grid as plug-in cars
create new demand, that shift to an increasingly digital transportation system brings with it (as
Katie has explained in the
context of the smart grid buildout) one of the banes of the Internet: hacking.
The stakes, of course, are very different. Certainly nobody wants a virus on their PC. But the
prospect of a hacker seizing control of some aspect of a car — a ton of metal capable of
going 60-plus MPH, that costs tens of thousands of dollars, and that maybe has a battery in its
belly that requires a
sophisticated system of thermal controls –Â is a far scarier thought.
The potential consequences of cyber attacks on a digital power grid could be similarly
frightening. Andy Karsner said
back in 2008, when he was with the Department of Energy: “This isn’t the
cyber-attacking that you think of just for passwords. This is the capacity to destroy hardware in
your home, at airports, at military bases, your car, if its connected through the grid.”
We should note that remote immobilization systems like the one involved in the Austin incident
have been in use for a
decade or more, and yet we have not seen vehicles crippled en masse by hackers. But companies
should realize this could be a sensitive issue among consumers, while both companies and
regulators need to recognize risks that go along with the transition to increasingly digital and
connected systems for transportation and power.
A website that sorts everyday the most relevant information to you.
Vote for the news and Matoumba will learn your tastes and the information that you like the most.
It is all FREE!
Find here the history of the stories you found interesting.
Show this to people who share the same interests as you,
and if they use Matoumba, their own votes will fine recommandations to you.
BitTorrent has emerged as the dominant filesharing protocol in recent years.
Hundreds of millions of computers have a BitTorrent client installed and torrent sites are among
the most frequently visited websites on the Internet.
The YouTube
vs. Viacom lawsuit has turned into quite the exciting drama this weekend, with both sides making
accusations via their respective blogs. YouTube says Viacom constantly uploaded its own material
from fake accounts, and then filed DMCA complaints about it. Viacom accuses YouTube of being a
pirate organization that profits from copyright infringement.
.
0
The BBC iPlayer is about to undergo another metamorphosis,
its second since inception. The BBC iPlayer 3.0 is going to have social network integration at
its core, and the ability to share what you’re watching or listening to could have a
dramatic effect on viewing figures.
Viacom’s $1 billion lawsuit against Google over
copyright infringement on YouTube is coming to a head, with a court battle likely to ensue
sometime this year. For now, the accusations made by both sides have been released. And they pull
no punches whatsoever.
Crashed web sites, stolen credit
card info — imagine seeing the damage caused by Internet viruses and worms unleashed on a
fleet of vehicles. The results could include vehicle location data used with malicious intent,
the prevention of a plug-in vehicle battery from recharging, remote starting of a car, or even
— as a disgruntled young former car salesman in Texas has demonstrated this week —
stranding drivers with a car that won’t start and a horn that won’t quit.
Recommandations
)
and reject those that you are not interested in
(
)
