The ongoing Google/YouTube-Viacom litigation has now officially spilled over to users with a court order requiring Google to turn over large amounts of user data to Viacom. If the data is actually released, the consequences could be far more serious than the 2006 AOL Search debacle. Louis L. Stanton, the senior judge on the United […]
The ongoing Google/YouTube-Viacom litigation has now officially spilled over to users with a court order requiring Google to turn over big amounts of user data to Viacom. If the data is actually released, the consequences could be far more serious than the 2006 AOL Search debacle.
Louis L. Stanton, the senior judge on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, issued the view and order, which is here (PDF).
That data includes each YouTube username, the associated IP address and the videos that user has watched on YouTube. Google will also be required to hand over duplicates of every video removed from Youtube for any reason (DMCA notices or user-initiated deletions). Stanton dismissed Google’s argument that the order will violate user privacy, saying such privacy concerns are merely “speculative.”
Meanwhile, the judge denied Viacom’s request that Google turn over YouTube’s source code as it could “cause catastrophic competitive harm to Google by sharing them with others who might create their own programs without making the same investment.”
I have the ability to comprehend why Judge Stanton, who graduated from law school in 1955, may be absolutely and utterly clueless when it comes to on the web video services. But perhaps one of his bright young clerks or interns could have told him that (1) handing over user names and a list of videos they’ve watched to a highly litigious copyright holder is extremely apt to result in lawsuits against those users that have watched copyrighted content on YouTube, and (2) YouTube’s source code is about as valuable as the hard drive it would be delivered on, since the core Flash technology is owned by Adobe and there are countless YouTube clones out there, most of which offer higher quality video.
YouTube’s core value is in it’s network effect - the library of content along with its massive user base.
The privacy fallout of this ruling is spectacular. The EFF has already chimed in, noting that the order is highly apt to be in violation of federal law.
Judge Stanton doesn’t seem to care much about that law, for now. And he clearly doesn’t understand that far more data is being transferred than is necessary to comply with Viacom’s core said concern, which is to comprehend the popularity of copyright infringing v. non-infringing material. Viacom has asked for far more data than that, and there’s only one use for that data: to sue individual users (or shake them down via the threat of lawsuit, which has been perfected by the RIAA) who have watched a few music videos or television shows on YouTube.
I say this with the utmost respect, but Judge Stanton is a moron. And Google simply can’t hand this data over without facing a class action lawsuit of staggering proportions.
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Mike Butcher at TechCrunch UK reports: Word has reached me that Netherlands-based Nimbuzz, the mobile VoIP and IM startup that extends into social networks, has raised $15 million in a second round led by Naspers/MIH, with Nimbuzz’s other major existing investor Mangrove Capital Partners also participating. It’s already had $10 million from Mangrove (the original Skype […]
Word has reached me that Netherlands-based Nimbuzz, the mobile VoIP and IM startup that extends into social networks, has raised $15 million in a second round led by Naspers/MIH, with Nimbuzz’s other major existing investor Mangrove Capital Partners also participating. It’s already had $10 million from Mangrove (the original Skype investor). Apparently deals with 10 major social networks and three operators are already on the table. The latter see these kinds of apps as a way of boosting data use and therefore revenues. The cash will be used to extend to Windows Mobile, iPhone and Android. They are looking at a million registered mobile users so far.
Nimbuzz offers free mobile VoIP, conference calling, IM and group chat and pic and file sending across multiple IM communities, including Skype, MSN, Google Speak, Yahoo!, AIM, Jabber and ICQ, plus 23 social networks, including apps/widgets for Facebook and Myspace.
The indignity of it all. On top of everything else that Yahoo is dealing with right now (testy shareholders, departing executives, reorganized employees), it also just got dumped by Maxim. The magazine’s site, Maxim.com, now uses Quintura to power its search instead of Yahoo. Its sister sites Blender.com and Stuffmagazine.com, will […]
The magazine’s site, Maxim.com, now uses Quintura to power its search instead of Yahoo. Its sister sites Blender.com and Stuffmagazine.com, will also soon be dumping Yahoo as well. All three sites are operated by Maxim Digital, which is owned by the private equity firm Quadrangle Capital Partners, where former Yahoo COO Dan Rosensweig happens to be an operating principal.
Quintura’s search interface creates a semantic tag cloud above the results. By clicking on different tags, users can refine their search and reorder the results.
I’m a big fan of the search tag cloud. But I’m not sure the final results are any better than Yahoo’s, and they certainly take longer to come up. The appeal to publishers like Maxim Digital, though, is that they have the ability to keep searchers on their sites longer by helping visitors find exactly what they’re looking for—which in the case of Maxim readers is “hot girls” and “stupid fun.”
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Amazon’s customer reviews are an indispensable feature on the online mega-store, allowing shoppers to get a quick read on products without having to turn to magazine reviews or external sites like epinions. But many products, particularly electronics, have hundreds of reviews. Who has time to read through them all? Pluribo, a new startup […]
Amazon’s customer reviews are an indispensable feature on the online mega-store, allowing shoppers to get a quick read on products without having to turn to magazine reviews or external sites like epinions. But many products, particularly electronics, have hundreds of reviews. Who has time to read through them all?
Pluribo, a new startup out of New York, has just released a Firefox extension that looks to filter through the noise of Amazon customer reviews. The plugin automatically culls through every review on a given product and generates a concise two sentence summary that highlights the most common positive and negative comments. For the time being automatic product reviews are restricted to electronics, but the site plans to implement support for other products, like books and kitchen appliances, in the near future.
Beyond providing a condensed summary, Pluribo also tries to justify its conclusions. To see the plugin’s explanation, users need only mouse-over one of the underlined terms, which will generate a list of excerpts from the relevant reviews. For example, hovering over “This product scratches easily” will show a list of quotes that contain phrases related to scratches, scuffs, and other similar terms.
So does it work? Sort of, but I wouldn’t go by Pluribo’s word alone. The system seemed to work well enough for ruling out obviously bad choices, but when it comes down to making a final selection, it’s best to turn to the reviews themselves. Pluribo doesn’t always seem to catch the most obvious problems, and the quotes it uses to justify its conclusions don’t always make sense. There’s also no way to tell which products Pluribo has indexed without opening each individual product page.
It’s also unlikely that many people will be willing to install a Firefox extension to get reviews from Amazon alone(the company says more stores are on the roadmap). Even with its problems, Pluribo is a handy tool and one that could gain some traction once it expands its supported product base.
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As Yahoo prepares for its upcoming shareholder meeting, it is fighting to convince enough investors that it did the right thing by spurning Microsoft’s various offers, especially the last one which had Microsoft just buying Yahoo’s search business, in favor of doing a search advertising deal with Google. Today, Yahoo filed the slide deck […]
As Yahoo prepares for its upcoming shareholder meeting, it is fighting to convince enough investors that it did the right thing by spurning Microsoft’s various offers, especially the last one which had Microsoft just buying Yahoo’s search business, in favor of doing a search advertising deal with Google. Today, Yahoo filed the slide deck that it will present to shareholders at its annual meeting on August 1 (embedded below). There is a lot of he-said, she-said going on here, and the tone of the presentation is extremely defensive.
The slides go through familiar territory, marshaling Yahoo’s arguments for why Microsoft’s offer would have been bad for shareholders. But Yahoo does make some new points. Namely:
—Microsoft’s proposed $1 billion for Yahoo’s search business would be taxable, so shareholders would see less. —Microsoft was only offering a 70% rev-share (TAC) for search ads on Yahoo, which is low for such a huge deal. —Cost savings would be no more than $750 million, not the $800 million to $1.5 billion that Microsoft estimates. —Conveniently, the $750 million in cost savings that Yahoo estimates is equal to the 30% of revenues it would be sharing with Microsoft under the terms of the deal, thus offsetting any impact on operating income. —Microsoft was only willing to guarantee its price-per-click rates for three of the 10 years of the proposed deal.
Yahoo’s strongest argument is that separating display and search advertising makes tiny sense strategically in a world where those two forms of advertising are colliding. (The Microsoft deal would have required that Yahoo give up its search advertising business and prevented it from re-entering that market in the future).
Towards the end of the presentation, Yahoo takes on activist investor Carl Icahn (who wants to replace the board with his own slate of directors) by pointing out that his track record with companies he has become actively involved in trying to change (Blockbuster, Motorola, Time Warner) has not been so great in current years. It also points up the weakness in Icahn’s five-point plan to repair Yahoo.
Meanwhile, investors are not sure that Yahoo has a plan either. In a note this day, Citi analyst Mark Mahaney wonders if maybe an AOL-Yahoo merger isn’t the best remaining option. Excerpt:
—Yahoo!-AOL merger possible - Four motivations: 1) $900 million of annual synergies, 2) Yahoo! gains display scale and keep search options open, 3) Time Warner gains Internet scale via a passive equity stake in larger entity, 4) Yahoo!’s clear interest in remaining independent.
The $900 million in “synergies” he sees are mostly from cost savings. But he also thinks there is value in keeping display and search advertising together. In fact, in another note this day he made Google his top World wide web pick, in part because of “continued marketing budget shifts to Search.”
Now, if Microsoft were to come back to the table with a serious offer for all of Yahoo, many of these objections would go away.
(Disclosure: As a former employee of Time Warner, I own shares in the company).
Second-tier social network Hi5 has acquired app developer PixVerse for an undisclosed amount, just four months after launching its app platform based on the OpenSocial specification. PixVerse offers several applications such as Pix Chat and Pix Wall, which are Flash-based and run on not only Hi5 but other social networks like Facebook as well. The company […]
Second-tier social network Hi5 has acquired app developer PixVerse for an undisclosed amount, just four months after launching its app platform based on the OpenSocial specification.
PixVerse offers several applications such as Pix Chat and Pix Wall, which are Flash-based and run on not only Hi5 but other social networks like Facebook as well.
The company was founded in February 2007 and is financially backed by Venrock. It was also one of the earlier adopters of Google App Engine.
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Google just announced its odd Google Media Server, a Windows app that finds photos, music, and video and makes it available to DLNA devices like the PlayStation 3, XBox 360, and most Media Center Computers. Google Media Server is a Windows application that aims to bridge the gap between Google and your TV. It uses […]
Google just announced its odd Google Media Server, a Windows app that finds pics, music, and video and makes it available to DLNA devices like the PlayStation 3, XBox 360, and most Media Center Personal computers.
Google Media Server is a Windows application that aims to bridge the gap between Google and your TV. It uses Google Desktop technology such as Desktop gadgets for the administration tool and Google Desktop Search to locate media files. All you need is a Personal computer running Google Desktop and a UPnP-enabled device (e.g. a PlayStation 3). At the touch of a button, you can then:
* Access videos, music, and pics stored on your PC * View Picasa Web Albums * Play your favorite YouTube videos
This shows that Google is very interested in getting its message out across multiple platforms. With the launch of Android forthcoming, could the Google set-top box be next?
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Need to schedule a meeting or phone call, but can’t agree on a time that is good for everyone? Try using When Is Good, a dead-simple Web app that does just one thing: zero in on a meeting time that’s good for everyone without sending 20 emails back and forth. There are […]
Need to schedule a meeting or phone call, but can’t concur on a time that’s good for everyone? Try using When Is Good, a dead-simple Web app that does just one thing: zero in on a meeting time that is good for everyone without sending 20 emails back and forth. There are plenty of other apps that help you find a mutually convenient time time for meetings or events (such as Presdo, Scheduly, or Jiffle). But When Is Good strips the process down to its bare essentials.
No login is required. You simply highlight the times that are good for you and create an event. You’re given a code and a link. You send the link out to your invitees and they’re shown the available times, and they choose the ones that are good for them. Easy.
The UK-based service is working on Outlook and Google Calendar integration, as well as premium features. For instance, you can pay 180 Pounds a year to have a branded version of the app hosted on your company’s own subdomain.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Some technologies take things down a notch. For instance TinyPaste, a service obviously built with Twitter in mind that lets you link to ramblings in excess of the regular 140 character limit. Just like TinyURL and other URL shortening services, TinyPaste produces a short address that you can enter into microblogging and IM services with caps […]
Some technologies take things down a notch. For instance TinyPaste, a service obviously built with Twitter in mind that lets you link to ramblings in excess of the regular 140 character limit.
Just like TinyURL and other URL shortening services, TinyPaste produces a short address that you can enter into microblogging and IM services with caps on message lengths. But instead of directing users to a regular webpage, a TinyPaste’s URL sends its clickers to a easy page displaying the poster’s message.
Who would use this? Perhaps those who don’t maintain blogs but who still want to expound on their thoughts from time to time. It’s common practice for bloggers to adopt Twitter as a marketing tool that drives traffic back to their sites. This could begin a reverse trend of sorts, one that introduces tweeters to the art of blogging. Or maybe I’m just extracting too much.
In any case, TinyPaste also comes with a Firefox extension for when you want to pass along a clip of text you found on the web. The service and plugin come from the same guys who brought you ControlC.
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Virgin Mobile purchased Helio this day for $39 million in equity. Helio is a small MVNO that made its name by selling powerful and high-end telephones aimed at technophiles and, thanks to an investment by South Korea’s SK Telecom, Korean-Americans. As part of the deal, Virgin Mobile is also receiving $50 million to pay down […]
Virgin Mobile bought Helio this day for $39 million in equity. Helio is a small MVNO that made its name by selling powerful and high-end telephones aimed at technophiles and, thanks to an investment by South Korea’s SK Telecom, Korean-Americans. As part of the deal, Virgin Mobile is also receiving $50 million to pay down Helio’s debt (half from SK Telecom, and half from its parent company Virgin Group), as well as an additional revolving credit facility of $60 million. Just last September, SK Telecom tried to save Helio by pouring an extra $270 million into it, to no avail.
The Helio brand will be subsumed by Virgin Mobile. All of the Helio stores will close except, it’s reported, the flagship store in New York, and there’s a full restructuring of the company going on right now. Thus, after much struggling, Helio enters the deadpool.
Helio had 170,000 subscribers while Virgin Mobile currently has about 5 million. The deal will also give Virgin access to a number of technologies owned by Helio including customer management and cellphone deck applications.
Helio also has received investments from Earthlink, but when Earthlink pulled out last year and charismatic CEO Sky Dayton stepped down it was clear something was afoot.
Peter Ha at CrunchGear wrote a full analysis of the merger:
So what exactly does the merger mean for customers of Helio who have grown to love the hardware and features that Helio is best known for? Well, Virgin Mobile will be keeping all of those goodies in place. If you’ve seen any VM devices, you know they stink. VM is relatively boring and absorbing the technology Helio is best known for will certainly boost the MVNO’s status and appeal to a broader audience. That means future VM devices will include apps such as Google Maps with GPS, YouTube and MySpace… all of which Helio brought to the table before other carriers.
What about the Ocean 2? If you haven’t already figured it out by now, the Ocean 2 has been delayed over the last few months because of merger talks. It’s unclear when the device will actually launch, but it hasn’t been scrapped.
While I hate to see Helio dissolve, this is great for both brands. VM knows how to make money while Helio knows how to create technology that works and is appealing.
With Helio gone Boost Mobile in the only targeted MVNO running in the US right now.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
The ongoing Google/YouTube-Viacom litigation has now officially spilled over to users with a court order requiring Google to turn over big amounts of user data to Viacom. If the data is actually released, the consequences could be far more serious than the 2006 AOL Search debacle. 
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