A new standalone streaming TV service called Sezmi has launched a pilot program in LA, after announcing it had raised another $25 million in funding. So what is this thing?
The Sezmi plans to compete with cable and satellite TV by offering live TV and on-demand and Web video content -- all through one set-top box that looks like a more sober cousin of the TiVo. You'll finally be able to ditch your cable and dish and go what I call "full Hulu" -- all your video will be Internet-delivered.
Of course, you'll need all your usual channels. Sezmi has partnered with 25 of cable's most-watched networks (Discovery, MTV, Turner, etc.) and all the major broadcasters (ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, CW, Univision, and Telemundo), so most of the channels you're accustomed to getting from your current TV provider will be available. Sezmi has also partnered with movie studios to deliver their content: Sony, MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., Lionsgate, and Universal are all participating.
At the risk of launching into another who's-who list, I'll just say Sezmi is well-funded by a variety of VC firms you've heard of, as well as one "unnamed strategic investor," according to Variety.
How much? The service plans start at just five bucks. You read that right. In fact, to go all-out and get the full on-demand package, it's only $25 a month. Of course, these prices could change once Sezmi does its final rollout, but for now, the details are an auspicious start. We'll learn more at CES come January.
It's called "hNews," and it could provide instantaneous context for any online news article.
HNews is the product of a project overseen by none other than Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the physicist who created the first Web protocol in 1990 and is widely regarded as the "inventor" of the World Wide Web. The Columbia Journalism Review explains how hNews would change online news thusly:
Imagine this: you visit one of your favorite news sites and the homepage displays a notification that an article you read yesterday has been updated with new information, and a story you read last week has been corrected. The notification enables you to click on a link and read the correction, or to be taken to the updated story.
After checking those items, you continue reading articles on the site, and each story includes a box of information explaining the type of sourcing used within the story (anonymous, etc.), as well as a link to the organization's relevant policies and standards. If you spot an error in an article, you can easily submit a request for correction via that same info-box. And if the article is corrected, you'll receive a notification during a future visit to the site.
The purpose of hNews, says its creators, is twofold: its first goal is to enable media outlets to "tag" their sources and make them searchable and dynamic. Its second is to make that information readable by computers, an effort more broadly known as "semantic Web." The thinking goes that if computers can recognize and "read" the content of a website, instead of just browsing for keywords, it will enable more accurate searching.
As the Web crowds with data, these technologies might become crucial to readers' ability to separate wheat from chaff. An early example of this technology is something called "Value Added," which auto-generates a reading list (pictured below) at the end of an article. You can see it in action here.
Spammers can only operate for so long before they're found out and shut down. Once eradicated, they leave a virtual ghost town behind them.
Scores of Internet addresses have been abandoned this way, says The Washington Post, creating eerie pockets of deadness that few legitimate businesses are willing to take over. If a spam host operates for long enough, its addresses become known to IT and security professionals, at which point IP addresses originating at that host get "blocklisted." But once an IP reaches a blocklist, it's rarely, if ever, revisited and considered for removal--no matter if the address now points to a legitimate entity.
The result has been ever more clever malware. Once spammers were privy to the vulnerability of their hosts, they began designing their software to distribute itself from a litany of hosts--a perversion of "cloud computing." Conficker, one of the most aggressive bot-net viruses built to date, works this way and has found its way onto an estimated 7 million PCs.
The solution might be a centrally-controlled block-list that could conflate and test the dozens of lists currently in circulation. But such a list could run into legal obstacles presented by the Commission's proposed net neutrality regulations, which might effect the ability of Internet providers to deprioritize or block certain hosts.
Verizon Wireless is on a roll: its Droid phones are making headlines, advertisements are getting under AT&T's skin, 4G is almost ready to roll and everyone seems convinced the carrier will eventually get the iPhone. But could customer animus destroy everything the company is working to build?
Witness David Pogue's post this afternoon on Verizon's ethically dubious money-grabs. Starting next week, the nation's largest mobile carrier will double its early termination penalties for smartphones--cancel before your two years is up, and you could pay up to $350. The old penalty was $175. Congress looked into these fees in 2007, prompting some carriers to reduce them.
Not only is Verizon "gouging" contract-breakers, Pogue says, but it's also siphoning off small amounts of money from hapless customers. One reader and Verizon customer who got wise to the scam describes it to Pogue in a letter. The reader says:
"Virtually every bill I get has a couple of erroneous data charges at $1.99 each--yet we download no data."
"Here's how it works. They configure the phones to have multiple easily hit keystrokes to launch 'Get it now' or 'Mobile Web'--usually a single key like an arrow key. Often we have no idea what key we hit, but up pops one of these screens. The instant you call the function, they charge you the data fee. We cancel these unintended requests as fast as we can hit the End key, but it doesn't matter; they've told me that ANY data–even one kilobyte–is billed as 1MB. The damage is done."
"Imagine: If my one account has one to three bogus $1.99 charges per month for data that I don't download, how much are they making from their 87 million other customers? Not a bad scheme. All by simply writing your billing algorithm to bill a full MB when even a few bits have moved."
Charging a couple of bucks erroneously to 87 million people is a great way to accrete some additional revenue, but it's also a hell of a way to infuriate those 87 million people. It doesn't much matter how good your network is--or how bad your competitor's network is--when your customers loathe you.
Neither of two area Verizon wireless spokesmen were immediately available for comment. We'll update this when they respond.
Just this summer, Verizon came under similar customer scrutiny for its voicemail system. Because its pre-programmed greeting is so long-winded, customers felt as if the company was eating up wireless minutes without giving callers the option to skip to the beep. Pogue undertook to change all that, and several carriers responded to his badgering. Verizon didn't.
All this pent-up frustration won't manifest itself much right away; two-year contracts keep customers trapped even as they fume. But customers don't forget the feeling they're getting screwed, and slow user-attrition is a specter that looms large. Apple/AT&T and Sprint may not need to do so much advertising or 4G-infrastructure investment if Verizon manages to keep up its self-sabotage. But then again, as Pogue points out in an update, it looks as if AT&T may be charging the same sketchy two bucks.
Just a day after being publicly excoriated by an influential developer, Apple has introduced new tweaks to its App Store approval process to make it more friendly to submissions.
Joe Hewitt, developer of Facebook for iPhone and an in-house Facebook employee, has vowed never to develop for iPhone again. Widely considered the most popular app in the iTunes Store, Facebook for iPhone set benchmarks for UI and interaction design on the phone.
"My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple's policies," he told TechCrunch. "I respect their right to manage their platform however they want, however I am philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process. I am very concerned that they are setting a horrible precedent for other software platforms, and soon gatekeepers will start infesting the lives of every software developer."
Hewitt, who has a background in Web development and also worked on the Netscape and Mozilla Firefox projects, is a strong advocate for open source software. Much of his backend work for the Facebook app he made available publicly under the open source title of Three20.
Meanwhile, Apple was busy rolling out notifications for developers that will tell them how far along in the review process their apps have gotten. Apple's often-draconian reviews have been characterized by long wait times, indiscriminate rejections, major slip-ups and the occasional baby-shaker scandal.
Microsoft also rolled out its own app store this week as a part of its Windows Marketplace site.
The company that made its bread on Web advertising has a new idea: let users skip the ads they don't like seeing.
Google is testing the new "skippable" pre-roll video ads on selected partners' YouTube clips, according to PaidContent. Right now, in-video YouTube ads consist of semi-transparent textual banners that slide up below a video, and which can be clicked off. Playing video ads before clips could boost Google's "cost for engagement" ad model, but the company is treading carefully in its quest to make the world's biggest video repository into a profitable entity.
Google will reportedly continue to use the textual banner ads as it implements pre-roll video. The company has also experimented with post-roll video ads, but found that model "lacking," says PaidContent.
Another more lucrative model might be made-for-YouTube video ads build into the site itself. Apple has just launched one such video, a successor to their popular Mac vs. PC television series, pictured above. Instead of serving it as a regular YouTube clip, the site has embedded the video in the top section and the sidebar, as was done with a similar New York Times ad campaign earlier this year. The ad, which stars Justin Long and John Hodgman in their familiar roles as Mac and PC, might be one of the few ad franchises consumers may find palatable enough to watch (if foisted upon them as an embedded video). The model represents a lucrative opportunity if YouTube can find other fitting content.
Whether you think the World Bank is an engine of worldly improvement or a bunch of corrupt plutocrats, you'll probably still want to look at their exhaustive trove of data, which Google made available today.
Google has mashed up its public data search with the World Bank's API (who knew?) and the result is this: a robust data system that capable of giving you real data-driven results to questions like "life expectancy in Brazil" or "energy use of Iceland." (Below, some graphical comparisons of various nations' GDP.)
While the data might be World Bank's, the interaction design is all Google. Clicking results lets you play with interactive charts which are fully embeddable, and can be created either statically or always-updating dynamic graphs.
Query results are based on 17 indicators of "World Development" tracked by the World Bank. You can see those indicators here.
Google says on its blog that the World Bank data program is in keeping with its intention to support fact-based debate. If you've come to believe that those words are synonymous with The Daily Show, then take a look at the video below to see what Google means.
In a culimation of talks that began in spring '08, Intel has just agreed to pay $1.25 billion (cash, due in 30 days) to its biggest rival chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) and agreed to a set of "business practice provisions" aimed at staving off future antitrust complaints. The agreement settles a federal case in Deleware and two in Japan, and AMD has agreed to drop all of its antitrust and patent suits worldwide and effectively end the complaints it's registered for five years. It's the latest blow to Intel, who has been fined $18.6 million by by Korea's Fair Trade Commission and $1.45 billion in May by the European Union.
When European commissioner for compeition Neelie Kroes read aloud the judgment then, he ended by adding, "Finally, I would like to draw your attention to Intel's latest global advertising campaign, which proposes Intel as the 'Sponsors of Tomorrow.' Their Web site invites visitors to add their 'vision of tomorrow.' Well, I can give my vision of tomorrow for Intel here and now: Obey the law."
For Intel's then chief of sales and marketing Sean Maloney (now executive vice president), it was the equivalent of twisting the knife in Intel's gut, he recently told Fast Company. "That was almost the most emotional thing about the whole day," he said. "We were bracing ourselves for what was going to happen and then this sarcastic remark."
In a conference call following the announcement of the settlment Thursday morning, AMD CEO and president Dirk Meyer said "This signals the beginning of a new era. It's a pivot from war to peace." A few significant issues, however, remain unresolved -- AMD will continue to ask regulators to look into Intel's retro-active discounts and some of the company's pricing structures, AMD officials said. Intel co-founder Andy Grove added in a separate conference call Thursday, "One of the examples they [Intel] gave is if a customer doesn't buy a certain amount from us, we punish that customer." He insisted Intel didn't do that and will continue... not doing it. "They believe we conduct business in certain ways we dont believe we do," Grove said.
So, if Intel did nothing wrong, why pay $1.25 billion? "Anti-trust cases are incredibly complex," Intel CEO Paul Otellini said, "and it's a jury trial, which has its own vagaries ... While it pains me to write a check at any time, in this case, I think it made for a practical settlement. It was a good compromise between the two companies. In many ways, it was a small multiple of the potential damages that could be awarded in a jury trial." Grove added that paying a settlement was "better than taking a risk with a jury trial in a complex case."
Going forward, both companies have agreed to written rules to be filed with the Federal Trade Commission that ban many of the contentious practices. Disputes, additionally, will be handled in mediation and outside of courts, both company heads said Thursday.
At the of the day, Intel has consistentely continued to whup AMD in quarterly results. And the payment, though steep, would seemingly remove the knife from Intel's gut. AMD's Meyer, himself, acknowledged Thursday that "the industry isn't going to change like a lightswitch." But the settlement does consititute half of a one-two punch by AMD, on it surely sees as its ultimate nerd's revenge.
On Wednesday, the ailing chip maker also debuted its Fusion chip.
It takes the central processor (the CPU) and the graphics processor (the GPU) and alchemically combines them into one four-core "APU," or "accelerated processing unit." If none of that made sense, think of it this way: why put your eggs in two baskets when one basket is cheaper, and ... uses less battery power?
If the basket analogy fits, it's because AMD spent $5.4 billion acquiring GPU-maker ATi in 2006 in the hopes of producing this very wonder-chip. While the Fusion will arrive first with four processing cores, a power-sipping two-core version will come later, and AMD says it hopes to have a 12-core chip on the market by 2012. Most popular Intel chips, by comparison, are dual-core; its high-end chips like the Xeon have four cores.
Since Fusion chips will be small--32 nanometers, as opposed to the standard 64 used by most x86 chips--AMD says they'll be equally at home in desktop machines as in battery-powered netbooks. That could allow AMD to shrink its product line, saving on production costs and allowing it to plow ahead with more Fusion R&D. (Intel's influsion of $1.25 billion in bonus cash won't hurt that effort, either.) Using Fusion chips would also save computer-makers money, because they'll be able to buy one chip instead of two.
The only issue left to be resolved: memory. Graphics cards not only contain dedicated processors, they also house dedicated RAM to prevent graphical work from loading up a computer's main memory. Fusion-equipped computers would need to support more RAM to have equivalent performance. Example: the MacBook Pro I'm typing this on has 4GB of main memory but also has two dedicated graphics cards with a total of 512MB dedicated memory. Fusion motherboard-makers will need to support upwards of 6GB or 8GB of RAM to maintain parity.
The Fusion will begin shipping in 2011.
The full text of Intel's News Release:
AMD and Intel Announce Settlement of All Antitrust and IP Disputes
SUNNYVALE/SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Nov. 12, 2009 – Intel Corporation and Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD) today announced a comprehensive agreement to end all outstanding legal disputes between the companies, including antitrust litigation and patent cross license disputes.
In a joint statement the two companies commented, "While the relationship between the two companies has been difficult in the past, this agreement ends the legal disputes and enables the companies to focus all of our efforts on product innovation and development."
Under terms of the agreement, AMD and Intel obtain patent rights from a new 5-year cross license agreement, Intel and AMD will give up any claims of breach from the previous license agreement, and Intel will pay AMD $1.25 billion. Intel has also agreed to abide by a set of business practice provisions. As a result, AMD will drop all pending litigation including the case in U.S. District Court in Delaware and two cases pending in Japan. AMD will also withdraw all of its regulatory complaints worldwide. The agreement will be made public in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Regulators in Europe have approved a new law that would require users to approve each cookie stored by their Web browser. Cookies are little informative tags that tell a Web site details about your last visit there.
The EU Council chambers in preparation for a meeting in October, courtesy of the EU Council.
The law contains a caveat for cookies that are "strictly necessary," referring to those that help a user maintain an online shopping cart, for example. But all other cookies will prompt a barrage of pop-up approval dialogues, perhaps reminding users of the over-active super-ego of Windows Vista. Microsoft's new version of Windows aims to ameliorate the barrage of approval requests.
The law could also bruise online advertisers, whose ad modules collect click-counts and other analytical data that help to determine pricing. The Wall Street Journalsuggests that the impracticality of the cookie law went unnoticed because of a "bigger argument" about a new "three strikes" law being considered by the EU Council. That law would allow authorities to punish peer-to-peer piracy by cutting off a user's Internet access.
Even as Apple celebrates the release of its 100,000th app--and that cash machine it calls the app store--Palm and RIM are running fast to catch up, and woo developers to their platforms. Earlier this week, Palm introduced a Web-based development environment in an effort to lure creative code monkeys, while RIM added a few crucial new technologies that developers will be able to show off at the first Blackberry app developer conference.
PALM ARES
Dubbed "Ares," the new site packs features such as a drag-and-drop interface (similar to Apple's development environment), which should make designing and testing Javascript apps easier. It's aimed at pro coders, though, and Web developers who want to transition to coding for Palm devices. After testing and prototyping in Ares, developers will be able to package the app and download it to a phone for testing, or submit it for entry into Palm's app store.
Some app developers have been frustrated by Palm's disorganized app
approval process and have defected to off-brand Palm app stores like PreCentral that allow users to download "homebrew" apps. Others, such as open source guru Jamie Zawinkski have unceremonious dumped their Palms. That's led to a dearth of new apps for the device. Both Palm and Google Android rely on Javascript for their applications--Javascript is one of the most commonly-known programming languages. But while the Android Market boasts over 12,000 apps to date, Palm's app catalog hovers around only a few hundred programs, many of them incredibly lame. Hopefully that will change with Ares.
BLACKBERRY APP WORLD
On Monday, RIM announced that it will finally open its famously robust email and alert servers to third-party apps, allowing other developers to use the Blackberry "push" notifications. That means that new apps will be able to stream data like sports scores or stock quotes without the app having to go out and search for updates on a server. RIM has touted its push system as more bandwidth-efficient and battery-friendly than those offered by its competitors.
Opening up push is just the start of a new developer-friendly set of policies as the company aggressively courts app makers. RIM also announced new developer tools to streamline the notoriously difficult app-writing process. The tools will support 3-D graphical development for games, which are the most popular downloads in Apple's app store. Although Blackberrys don't have the robust graphical capabilities of the iPhone, this move ought to stimulate app sales.
Lastly, RIM said it would be making it easier for app-makers to include advertisements in their apps, which should bring more financial incentive to Blackberry development. The Canadian phone-maker is also enabling in-app purchasing, which will help draw game developers.
Yet none of these improvements address the major flaw of the Blackberry App World: its reliance on 3G downloads for installing apps. On the iPhone, Apple allows you to download any app under 10MB over AT&T's network--a reasonable limit. But fewer and fewer iPhone apps meet that criteria. That's because they're reaching a level of such graphical and data-intensive richness that they're routinely ballooning to 120MB or more.
On Blackberrys, by contrast, a 2MB app is considered massive--and with these new RIM tools, app size is about to grow up fast. Staying under 10 or 15MB, the practical limit for 3G downloads, doesn't leave much room for space-hungry game developers or map-makers to work with.
Still, RIM could make provisions for big apps later. Its newfound love for its developers is certainly a boon for its platform, but it may be too little and too late.
The purpose of hNews, says its creators, is twofold: its first goal is to enable media outlets to "tag" their sources and make them searchable and dynamic. Its second is to make that information readable by computers, an effort more broadly known as "semantic Web." The thinking goes that if computers can recognize and "read" the content of a website, instead of just browsing for keywords, it will enable more accurate searching. 
