Author: Serkadis

Last month we saw and heard about the Europe-exclusive Heavy Rain Collectors’ Edition. Today SCEE let loose an image giving us a closer look at the special edition and

Editor’s note: Earlier this week, guest writer Ashkan Karbasfrooshan wrote a post about the state of online video. In this post he follows up with some thoughts on what’s holding back this budding industry. Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of WatchMojo, a leading producer of premium, informative and entertaining video content. The company’s catalog of 5,000 videos has generated over 100 million streams since 2006. Photo credit: Flickr/Paraflyer.

After four years in the online video business, one thing is clear: if you produce high quality content and build sufficient distribution across a large enough number of consumer touch points, you can generate more than enough revenue from multiple sources and platforms to build a profitable, stand-alone business.  But no one said it would be quick or easy. Building distribution isn’t obvious and most producers fail to build any meaningful reach, but if you can hatch an editorial direction and business strategy that can attract an audience, over time you will be able to create a real business around it.  But keep in mind the surprises below.

Surprise #1: Lack of Definitions and Standards After All of These Years

Steven Spielberg was trying to transition online with Pop.com in the 1990s and, until his resignation last week, Real Networks’ Rob Glaser has been “at this” for 16 years since 1994 .  Yet to this day, in online video, we still don’t speak a common language.

Heck, we’re not even on the same planet. The first thing you realize about video advertising is that most of the money being generated from video content isn’t derived from in-stream advertising (such as pre-,mid-, or post-roll) but rather by in-banner ads (be they standard display ads or rich media). Yet when you look at the projections being forecast by eMarketer and Forrester, they focus mainly on videos sold inside the video player.

Meanwhile, as online video consumption continues to soar, it is clear that the share of total advertising for video content is going to be much larger than the projections suggest.  YouTube, for example, sells pre-roll ads on an infinitely small percentage of its videos. They generate the lion’s share via display banners. Personally, I think that while display banners aren’t worth much in articles because a reader scrolls down quickly past them, next to video content they are worth a lot more.

But with so much video being consumed on third-party sites, how can producers stay in business, let alone thrive?

One answer, of course, is branded content, which remains unproven at best, and the latest fad at worst.

Surprise #2: The Myth That Branded Content Is a New Thing

Branded content can be many things. It is ultimately the blurring of church and state, or information and advertising. Examples are numerous and include:

• Soap operas, which were funded initially by Procter & Gamble
• That ubiquitous Coca Cola cup on American Idol
• A web series about a couple trying to conceive sponsored by a home pregnancy test
• How-to videos featuring products, such as the use of a particular vodka or gin in a how-to-make-a-martini video.

Whereas publishers have always relied in part on advertiser support, branded content tends to be fully supported by a marketer.  With the so-called death of the 30-second spot and the short-form nature of online video entertainment, the appeal of branded content is growing among video producers desperate to make a buck.

Problem is if a producer waits for the green light from a marketer to produce content that bakes in advertising, they just won’t scale their libraries, which means they won’t grow overall streams.

Also, it begs the question: does branded content fall into video advertising or sponsorship? That detail isn’t clear yet. But with so many competitors vying in the genre, it’s worth questioning how important it will be over the long term and if audiences will accept it.  What looks like the light at the end of the tunnel for many struggling online video producers could turn out to be an oncoming train.

Surprise #3: It Takes A Different Playbook

The biggest difference with regards to monetizing videos as opposed to articles is that it requires a “distribution-over-destination” strategy. When Quincy Smith took over as CEO of CBS Interactive, he said that the Tiffany network’s Innertube project should have been renamed “CBS.com/NoOneComesHere.”

No wonder then that the first video content companies went out of business—because they sought to build “owned-and-operated” properties. This strategy might work with text content but is nearly impossible with videos. Search engines don’t pick up video content well. Hosting videos is expensive. Plus, audiences who read a business article don’t automatically watch business videos (and so on).

Looking at the leading video destinations, you quickly realize that they are all basically aggregators or traditional media companies who still reasonably view online video with suspicion and fear.

Surprise #4: Video Consumption Patterns Are Whack

From our experiences, we see that audiences (readers, listeners, viewers) consume content by type (video vs. articles vs. podcasts) and not categories (auto, business, fashion, etc). And when it comes to videos, some categories are much more popular than others, which lead to unreachable expectations for marketers.

According to TubeMogul, 25% of views come in the first four days after a video is published and, over time, the average YouTube video is seen 500 times. Articles are the opposite: search engines tend to drive people to older articles.  This is alarming. In order to win, it is imperative to grow video views over time and generate exponentially more video views than the average.

Surprise #5: Just Because You Build an Audience, Doesn’t Mean The Advertisers Will Come Knocking

There are three main ways to build an audience: the old way and the new ways.

1. The first is a retail approach where viewers watch your videos on your site and your network channels. This is historically how publishers have built audiences.
2. The second is through wholesale partnerships, which are facilitated by MRSS. (RSS – or Real Simple Syndication – has change the way users consume content and publishers ingest and distribute content  Analogously, MRSS – or simply Media RSS – was designed in 2004 by Yahoo! and the Media RSS community. Unbelievably, it has made distributing videos even easier than syndicating text content).
3. The third is through social media: be it bloggers and/or social media referrers on Facebook, Twitter and the countless other outlets.

YouTube pioneered the embedding and viral distribution of video.  It is certainly true that bloggers are the new “newspaper editors” who can make or break a producer. Similarly, the same way that MySpace helped build YouTube’s success at the macro level, social media referrers will help a video take off on the micro level.

Between MRSS simplifying distribution and video’s embeddable nature, syndication exploded . . . but revenues didn’t. But don’t worry.  Over time, marketers follow the audience, they always will.

Surprise #6: When It Comes to Sales, Sell Your Audience, Not Your Videos

Historically, publishers sell ads by audience. But with online video and the lure of branded content, some have developed a tendency to pitch individual videos or a series of videos to advertisers.  Publishers don’t sell by individual articles, so why should they think that they should sell by individual videos, especially when you consider the widespread nature of videos and where they ultimately end up.

Nonetheless, I see way too many producers sell videos over audience, and then when they fail to generate any meaningful distribution, the marketer gets disappointed, blaming the strategy over the tactic.  You have to create audiences for your content. It can be one audience or it can be many.

With a magazine, you can take any one article and project the demographic of that one piece to the whole publication. With videos, due to their embeddable nature, each video can have its own audience profile and as such can embody the demographic of the site that embeds or distributes the video.  So videos have the potential to reach a broader demographic than content locked into one site.  Regardless, until videos generate more revenue from in-stream ads than in-banner ones, videos’ embedding nature remains a double-edged sword.

For a producer to distribute through third party distributors, it means:

1. less recognition of your reach initially. This hurts producers in the short term, but over time, services such as comScore and Nielsen will catch up and offer something while startups like TubeMogul seek to establish the best practices. More importantly, agencies recognize this phenomenon and will let you build your case.
2. less control of the ad inventory, which can be seen as a negative or a positive. Ultimately, as a producer, you have to position this as a plus because you can offer advertisers more reach and share of voice across a larger segment of the online video universe. But, it takes time, especially with a lack of data to support your reach.

Surprise #7: The Myth and Danger of the Viral Video

Too many clients get enamored with the idea of green lighting a viral video. You might as well just flush your money down the toilet instead of approving such a campaign. It is impossible to actually plan for this and if the ad agency you hired is guaranteeing video views, then fire that ad agency yesterday!

But by the same token, who cares if a video generated a million views last month. If an advertiser runs banners next to that video next month and the video fizzles away, it’s moot. This is why it is more important to publish and syndicate videos that over time can generate incremental and sustainable views.  This makes the real estate before and next to the video more valuable.

Surprise #8: With Advertisers Sitting on the Sidelines, Partnerships Need to Make Sense for Producers

Historically, advertisers seek revenue-share deals with publishers to mitigate risks. With video, advertisers have sat out the dance, so the commercial nature boils down to producer/publishers and distributors, who in turn seek revenue share deals with producer/publishers. Problem? Most can’t generate any sales, so producer/publishers don’t get any revenue out of the deals. So my advice is to seek revenue guarantees until advertisers really embrace video advertising.

By and large, most revenue share deals flop because:

• Media companies have great sales teams, but they are only warming up to online video. So while they might be starting to generate revenue from online video, it is immaterial to their operations. Most of these traditional media companies are not producing or publishing enough online, so they are turning to new media producers like us. However, even though they have great sales organizations, they lack volume to make a dent.
• A lot of the video views are coming from video social networks, but most of them are just not set up to sell ads. They are technology companies operating in the media space, not media companies that understand advertising. Often times their VCs bring in experienced sales executives but have very unrealistic expectations. They also have not yet mastered shifting large portions of their audiences from non-sellable user-generated or pirated material to professional content. It has been stated that YouTube, for example, only sells ads next to 15% of their total streams.

However, social media and user generated content has increased pageviews and ad impressions greatly on these sites. Across the web, there is a chance the equilibrium is broken for good. As a result, CPMs are dirt poor and sell-through rates are abysmal. This adds to the challenge and forces a producer to take over the sales process which, while expensive, should ultimately be the end-goal.

Surprise #9: Don’t Chase Hits

Chasing hits is perhaps the most surefire way to kill your business. We adopted the Field of Dreams content strategy: creating content we’re passionate about and/or think audiences will watch, build an audience around it, and only worry about monetizing it afterwards.

It’s not ideal, but the reality is that what works online is very much random. When we look at our most popular videos, we are flabbergasted! This is why online video is such a challenge to TV companies, because they cannot program a show in a time slot and force it down audiences’ throats.

Surprise #10: YouTube is More Open than Challengers

What kind of online video article would be complete without an observation on the leader in the space: YouTube. While far from perfect, YouTube has actually been fairly friendly with producers by allowing them to sell ads around their content.

Surprisingly, this is an “open” strategy. Usually, open strategies are adopted by challengers, not dominant market leaders. You would think that Daily Motion, Veoh and others would allow for this, but they don’t. This hurts their standing and importance in the space. Time will tell if they change their policies and follow the market leader YouTube.

Surprise #11: Everything Won’t Be Ad-Supported

To quote Ty Ahmad-Taylor, it’s true that in theory “if you make television shows, films or music, your business is actually the audience business.  In practice, however, right now there aren’t enough ad dollars to support the “audience” business. So let’s leave the theory for academics. Those in the trenches will tell you it’s about survival, and judging by the past year… it is still about surviving more so than thriving.

After we got disappointed by weak revenues in our earliest syndication deals, we held back distribution and began to pursue licensing deals.  Licensing can generate insanely high eCPMs for a producer, but most producers don’t have the kind of libraries that can command guaranteed and recurring licensing fees. So your best bet to keep the lights on is to command licensing revenues in the short term while you position yourself for syndication revenue over the long term. By doing that, you will in turn build a large enough library to command the richer branded content deals that will push you over the top.

Surprise #12: Search and Video are Still Miles Apart

Ultimately, video is where search was in 1999: a major part of the online ecosystem is still looking for a business model. But history repeats itself and without a doubt video streams will be monetized just as search queries were.

But differences shall remain, with the two leading ones being:

1. Expectations: Google saw over a dozen search companies precede it, most of them had gone out of business, sold or exited search for portaldom. By the time the Nasdaq crashed, Google had an open field with practically no competitors. Video is the exact opposite: even though only YouTube has had a gargantuan exit, VCs have continued to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into so-called YouTube clones (Veoh, Daily Motion, Metacafe) as well as enablers (CDNs and content management systems) and advertising networks (Tremor, Broadband, Yume, Scanscout).  It seems as if everyone is looking for the Google of video, even though for all intents and purposes, Google will be the Google of video thanks to its acquisition of YouTube.
2. Short term vs. long term nature of the payoff. Search is largely a performance kind of medium, whereas video is a branding one. While search captures intent, video captures interest. Both are valuable, but in a very different way.

We’re still early in the development of the online video business, but we are starting to figure it out.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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I’m not normally a t-shirt slogan person, but there are so many on this site that I love…

Saracastic Politics

The upcoming PS3-exclusive title Last Rebellion has been confirmed for a European release by publisher Koei. More info after the jump.
 
Thanks to Peter for the tip!

Filed under: EV/Plug-in, Mitsubishi, North America

It doesn’t take much to have the biggest electric vehicle fleet in Canada. In fact, if you can get 51 EVs together, you win. The aspiring record-holder is Mitsubishi Motor Sales of Canada, which is about to bring “up to 50″ i-MiEV all-electric cars to the Boucherville suburb of Montreal. Mitsubishi is partnering with Hydro-Québec to bring the EVs to the city in what the automaker is calling the, “largest Canadian project ever fielded to integrate, test, and evaluate all-electric vehicles on urban streets under real-world conditions.” More information on who will be involved when were not released, but we can assume this will be a longish trial, since Mitsubishi is saying that the cars will be tested “in both fall and winter urban conditions.” More details in this PDF.

[Source: Mitsubishi]

Continue reading Canada’s largest electric vehicle project? Mitsubishi’s 50 i-MiEVs in Boucherville

Canada’s largest electric vehicle project? Mitsubishi’s 50 i-MiEVs in Boucherville originally appeared on Autoblog Green on Sat, 16 Jan 2010 08:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A few weeks ago, Rogers decided not to upgrade the aging HTC Dream to Android 2.0 but offered existing owners the opportunity to switch to the HTC Magic for free in a limited time promotion. We thought this would end all controversy surrounding the Dream but, alas, the saga of the Rogers’ Dream is not over yet. Rogers is now apparently halting all sales of the Dream due to a GPS and software issue which hinders 911 calls. An internal memo circulating on Friday instructs employees to halt all activations, upgrades and sales of the Dream effective immediately. Both the white and black Dream will be removed completely from all sales systems by the end of the day today. Current Dream owners are being advised to turn off GPS satellite tracking on their phones until the next Android 1.5 upgrade is released. Hit the jump for the internal memo with all the details.

Thanks to all who sent this in!

[via MobileSyrup]

Taken from Sales Central

Start Date: January 15, 2010
End Date: On-going
Regions: National
Reference # NDP 2010-01-17

——————————————————————————–

!!! ATTENTION !!! Cease ALL HTC Dream Sales!
EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY

Due to a software issue, ALL sales (activations, upgrades, and device sales) of HTC Dream are to STOP IMMEDIATELY until further notice.

In addition:

There will be NO SUBSIDY paid for activations or upgrades on the HTC Dream effective as of end of day today;
This applies to all SKUs of the HTC Dream;
DREAMBLKR
DREAMWHTR
These devices will be removed from Vision21, Sales Central, point of sale systems, Rogers.com, and telesales effective as of end of day today;
More information to follow.

Unofficial Statement from Rogers

I’m writing to share some urgent news with our Rogers HTC Dream customers.
We have contacted all of our Dream customers by text message asking them to disable GPS location

on their HTC Dream device to ensure all 911 calls complete.

HTC is expediting a software fix to the 1.5 Android Operating System

that will address this issue – and provide several other improvements to the OS.

We expect this upgrade to be available very soon. In the meantime, Dream customers need to follow these steps:
1) Select Menu
2) Select Settings
3) Select Location
4) Uncheck Enable GPS Satellite

Please note that the Rogers HTC Dream is the only device affected.
Protecting our customers’ safety is our top priority and we communicated with our customers as soon as we were made aware of the issue. We have texted all affected customers and we have immediately requested that the device be taken off the shelf until HTC implements its upgrade.”

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Article Tags: ClimateGate, Lawrence Solomon

Googlegate: The search engine may be standing up to Chinese censors. What about Google’s own censors?

This week, Google announced an end to its long-standing collaboration with the Chinese Communists — it will no longer censor users inside China.

That’s good of it. Maybe Google will now also stop using its search engine to censor the rest of us, in the Western countries.

Search for “Googlegate” on Google and you’ll get a paltry result (my result yesterday was 29,300). Search for “Googlegate” on Bing, Microsoft’s search engine competitor, and the result numbers an eye-popping 72.4 million. If you’re a regular Google user, as opposed to a Bing user, you might not even know that “Googlegate” has been a hot topic for years in the blogosphere — that’s the power that comes of being able to control information.

Source: network.nationalpost.com

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must read – great charts – Deflation, Inflation or Stagflation – You Be the Judge! – Submitted by Reggie Middleton – Zero Hedge

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Lessons from Bernstein, Rosenberg and Farrell – Posted by Prieur du Plessis – 3 important lists – worth printing and saving – Investment Postcards from Cape Town

pp1     Inflation expectations approach pre-crisis range – Posted by Prieur du Plessis  – Investment Postcards from Cape Town

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The Blowback Effect: 2020 – Michael T. Klare – … What, then, will be the dominant characteristics of the second decade of the twenty-first century?  Prediction of this sort is, of course, inherently risky, but extrapolating from current trends, four key aspects of second-decade life can be discerned: the rise of China; the (relative) decline of the United States; the expanding role of the global South; and finally, possibly most dramatically, the increasing impact of a roiling environment and growing resource scarcity … – Huffington Post

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Bubble warning – Markets are too dependent on unsustainable government stimulus. Something’s got to give – The Economist print edition

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The Top 10 Items Shaping Interest Rates in 2010 – Steven Abrahams – Where will interest rates go this year? Keep on eye on the economy, the banks and foreign investors, for starters. – Forbes

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Slowly Regaining Ground Lost – by Diane Swonk, Chief Economist, Mesirow Financial 

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Dow Industrials hit record, top 15,000 by 2011? – By Paul B. Farrell, – But first, Shilling’s 2010 warnings: 17 picks = 6 buys + 11 sells – MarketWatch

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America slides deeper into depression as Wall Street revels – By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard – December was the worst month for US unemployment since the Great Recession began. – Telegraph.co.uk

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Three Foreign Banks Interested in Becoming Primary Dealers – By MIN ZENG – Three major foreign banks are interested in becoming primary dealers, the select group of firms that trade directly with the New York Federal Reserve, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.  The three banks are French bank Société Genéralé SA and Canadian banks Scotia Capital, the investment-banking arm of the Bank of Nova Scotia, and TD Securities, the investment arms of TD Bank Financial Group, according to these people. – WSJ Europe

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CRISIS SECTION:

THE PROBABILITY OF A CRISIS WILL BUILD DURING 2010 – So says the team of equity analysts at Barclays.   Although policymakers helped avoid the second Great Depression, Barclays believes we have simply kicked the can down the road.  As their head of U.S. equity strategy said in November, the likelihood of Japanese style de-leveraging stagnation remains very high. – The Pragmatic Capitalist 
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Abandoned + Our Narrow Window of Economic Opportunity – Kimball Corson – … If GDP growth forecasts are correct, the results of these efforts will likely be pretty good. They just might give us a window of opportunity to clean up our fiscal mess and put our financial house in better order. However, if we don’t take advantage of that opportunity and continue with excessively eased monetary and fiscal policies during the better times coming, we will make a big mistake. Improved tax revenues from higher GDP must be used to pay down debt, cut our deficits and adjust for our increasingly aged population, with all that entails. We have to act sharply here to dig out and do well. … – Wandering the Oceans

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Sovereign Debt Crisis Could Be Story of 2010 – JAMES CULLEN – DailyFinance

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we analyze and challenge Facebook’s sweeping new privacy policies, explore what would happen if RFID chips are integrated into the next generation iPhone, present our hands-on review of Google’s new smartphone the Nexus One, and more. And as usual we check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteStart (our daily resource for entrepreneurs) and ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ trends and products).

Also read on for details about the newly released printed edition of our current premium report, about the Real-Time Web.

Sponsor

Now Available: Printed Edition of The Real-Time Web Report

At the request of the librarian community and people that just like paper, we have made The Real-Time Web and its Future report available in print.

For those of you that prefer it digitally, you can still download it.

Don’t forget about our Community Management Report. It too is coming in print soon, so watch out for it!

Web Trends

Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience this week that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was for years until the company changed dramatically in December.

In a six-minute interview, Zuckerberg spent 60 seconds talking about Facebook’s privacy policies. His statements were of major importance for the world’s largest social network – and his arguments in favor of an about-face on privacy deserve close scrutiny.

Why Facebook is Wrong: Privacy Is Still Important

Has society become less private or is it Facebook that’s pushing people in that direction? Is privacy online just an illusion anyway? Below are some thoughts, based primarily on the pro-privacy reactions to Zuckerberg’s statements from many of our readers this weekend. Though there is a lot to be said for analysis of public data (more on that later), I believe that Facebook is making a big mistake by moving away from its origins based on privacy for user data.

iPhone as RFID Tag & Reader: Coming Soon

We began a series called Mobile Web Meets Internet of Things this week, starting with a look at barcode scanning. We wrote that smartphones are increasingly being deployed as readers for barcodes – in particular via apps available on iPhone and Android. However, RFID tags are more functional and flexible than barcodes. While barcodes are cheaper and getting traction in the U.S. with the QR format, the potential for RFID tags is even greater. Apple knows this and if rumors are to believed, RFID will be integrated into the iPhone 4G later this year.

The Evolving Online Finance Ecosystem

Last week we analyzed how the Web is transforming personal finance. This week we took a broader look at the world of online finance, from personal to small business tools. To get an understanding of the online finance space, we spoke to the founder and CEO of one of the most promising startups in online finance, Rod Drury from Xero. Rod told us that he sees four types of markets in online finance: 1) Personal Finance (e.g. Mint, Wesabe, Yodlee); 2)
Small Business Accounting (e.g. Xero, Kashflow); 3)
Cloud ERP (e.g. Netsuite, Salesforce); and 4)
ERP (e.g. Microsoft, Oracle).

Editor’s note: This story is part of ReadWriteWeb’s Online Finance series, a weekly, three-month long look at how the Internet has transformed finance.

iPhone App Piracy Reaches $450 Million? Doubtful

According to an independent analysis performed by investment-watching blog 24/7 Wall St., Apple’s iTunes App Store has lost $450 million due to iPhone app piracy since it opened for business back in July of 2008. Although that number sounds high, they note it is small in comparison to the overall size of the App Store marketplace. However, our sources say that the real number is closer to $15-$20 million instead.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

Social Media Secrets and Resources Revealed

Presentation company Slideshare recently released its list of “5 Social Media Secrets for 2010″. While these secrets certainly sound like great suggestions, we thought we’d connect them to some concrete tactics and resources that you can use to improve your social media strategy.

Never Mind the Valley: Here’s Boston

With tourists flocking to the Boston to walk the cobblestone streets of the Freedom Trail and visit various historical landmarks, Boston is often thought of for its ties to the American Revolution. But Boston is also the birthplace of a revolution of a different sort. In 1946, Georges Doriot, a professor at the Harvard Business School, founded the American Research and Development Corporation (ARDC) in Boston – one of the very first venture capital firms.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise, devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ and using social software inside organizations.

VMWare, Microsoft and the Battle for the Business Market

VMware’s acquisition of Zimbra from Yahoo this week points to a new form of partnership in the tech word. It’s one that could define the big winners in the battle for a major piece of the enterprise market. By packaging Zimbra’s popular, open-source collaboration software, VMware can provide a service that combines virtualization technology with email and calendar applications. It is similar to Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard’s alliance announced today that will package Microsoft technology on HP servers.

Web Products

Google Offers Satellite Images of Haiti, Post-Earthquake

In the immediate aftermath of a 7.0 earthquake that caused an unbelievable amount of destruction to Haiti’s capital, Google has been asked by relief organizations and users to show images of what’s actually happening on the ground. In partnership with geospatial imagery company GeoEye, Google released a new layer for Google Earth showing post-earthquake devastation.

Nexus One and Android 2.1: Apple Better Watch Out

Less than a week ago, Google introduced its own Android phone, the Nexus One. Over the weekend, we got a chance to take the phone through its paces and while we aren’t quite ready to give up our iPhone yet, the Nexus One is a formidable challenger. In terms of features, the Nexus One is already on par with the iPhone platform and beats it in many areas. When it comes to the overall user experience, the iPhone is still a step ahead of the Android platform – but that could easily change in the near future.

Going Mainstream: eMusic Signs Deal with Warner Music

EMusic, the popular subscription-based music service, this week announced that it has signed a deal with Warner Music – the world’s third-largest music company. This is eMusic’s second deal with a major record label. In its early days, eMusic mostly focused on featuring music from independent labels. Since the middle of 2009, however, eMusic has worked on expanding its reach by bringing more mainstream music to its catalog.

Facebook Blocked at Work? Use Your Email Instead

In our continuing obsession with all things Facebook, we looked at a new feature that was announced by the social networking behemoth that will further enmesh the site into our every waking breath: replying to comments through email. Before now, email notifications from Facebook contained a link that you had to follow, which logged you into Facebook where you could reply. You’ll now notice that the email contains a line reading “New Feature: Reply to this email to comment on this link.”

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Discuss

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Article Tags: Comment, Piers Corbyn, UK Winter Forecast 2009/10

It would seem even the UK Sport section have taken on board Piers Corbyn Winter forecast……This could be a first, as the Met Office push him to one side as a crank!

Racing facing yet another freeze in this winter of discontent for the sport by Marcus Townend, Daily Mail

Twelve blank days for jump racing ends on Saturday but a long-range forecaster who predicted the January snow back in July believes it will only be a brief respite for the sport.

The forecasts of Piers Corbyn, who runs weatheraction.com, will fill trainers preparing Cheltenham Festival prospects with dread.

Kempton and Huntingdon, providing the latter survives an 8am inspection, race, Ffos Las on Sunday and the outlook is optimistic for Fakenham and Plumpton on Monday.

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The Automotive News World Congress held at the Detroit Marriott Renaissance Center last week was "disturbed" by a group of Teamsters Union representatives who protested against Chrysler because of the manufacturer’s moving away from the professional car-haul companies in search of cheaper ones.

The "disturbance" happened when Chrysler’s CEO Sergio Marchionne held his speech. The protesters raised a banner attached to helium balloons reading "Fiat Chrysler: Damaged Wh… (read more)

Windows Mobile smartphones have been tending towards less and less buttons, which is certainly not ideal for many.  Fortunately Windows Mobile does support Bluetooth peripherals quite well, which should make the above Bluetooth mini-keyboard, which sells for only $25, pretty usable.

At 140×17x13mm, the keyboard is only slightly larger than the HTC HD2, and is powered by 2 AA batteries. 

Read more about the keyboard at DealExtreme here.

Has anyone tried this particular hardware?  Let us know your experience below.

Article Tags: ClimateGate, John Droz, Jr, Wikipedia

If a model has not been proven to fully reflect reality, then it has very limited use and should be treated like a horoscope

Everyone readily admits that things aren’t always what they seem. But are we really applying this knowledge in our daily dealings? Are we consciously ferreting out the illusory from the reality? I think not.

For instance, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we aren’t really being run by pandering politicians, self-serving lobbyists, fanatical environmentalists, and greedy Wall Street manipulators. They are the illusion.

There is another even more powerful (but much less visible) agent behind all of these puppets.

The person behind the screen is the computer programmer. And, just like in the Wizard of OZ, they do not want you to look at this real controller.

Source: pajamasmedia.com

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Article Tags: Cartoon, Comment, Met Office

The media have started to question the Met Office daily forecast, this article from The Telegraph summed up a very poor forecast… The Met Office has admitted that it failed to warn the public of the heavy snow that brought swaths of Britain to a standstill on Wednesday.

Cartoon source below

Source: express.co.uk

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