Author: Frederic Lardinois

Students at UCLA don’t have to rely on torrent sites to get their fix of online TV anymore – or at least that’s the message the school wants to send. UCLA just announced a partnership with Clicker, a programming guide for online TV content. Thanks to this partnership, students at UCLA will soon be able to use a co-branded version of Clicker that will give them convenient access to student-generated content, university-generated content and regular online TV content and music videos from services like Hulu.

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Clicker launched in November 2009 and tries to offer its users a comprehensive TV Guide-like database of online video content. The service indexes TV shows from most American broadcast and cable networks, as well as Web originals. UCLA students will also be able to access proprietary UCLA content, including videos of lectures and university events.

Clicker currently indexes well over 400,000 episodes from more than 7,000 different TV shows. You can find our in-depth review of Clicker here.

Making the MPAA Happy

One organization that is particularly happy about this new collaboration is the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). According to the MPAA’s general counsel and chief content protection officer Daniel Mandil, the organization applauds “Clicker.com and UCLA for fostering a campus culture that respects creativity and supports the livelihoods of the millions of people across the United States and around the world who create the movies and TV shows that we love, and for helping to ensure that these great jobs will be there for future college graduates.”

UCLA – like most colleges in the U.S. – has been trying to discourage students from use illegal file sharing services on campus. UCLA’s associate vice chancellor of information technology actually testified about the university’s attempts to stop file sharing on campus in front of the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property in 2004.

It will be interesting to see if UCLA’s students will use this program and if file-sharing traffic on the UCLA campus will decline because of it.

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Google and the Associated Press haven’t exactly been on good terms for the last few months. Due to fundamental disagreements over copyright and payments between the companies, Google stopped hosting AP content on its site in December after the existing contract between the AP and Google expired. Yahoo, however, is a step ahead of Google and just announced a new deal with the AP. The details about the contract between Yahoo and the AP weren’t disclosed, but chances are that Yahoo agreed to pay higher licensing fees in return for the right to host AP stories on its properties.

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Google and the AP

Until the middle of December, Google hosted AP news stories on its own servers. As the relationship between the AP and Google continued to deteriorate, however, the AP apparently wanted to get a better deal from Google and Google decided to stop adding new content from the AP. According to the old agreement with the AP, Google only has the right to host articles for 30 days after they were published.

Now, however, it looks like the two companies are close to reaching a new agreement that will allow Google to continue to host AP content on Google properties like Google News. For now, however, Google will not add new hosted content from the AP to its properties.

Regarding Google and the AP, Danny Sullivan reports that he just received the following statement from Google:

We have a licensing agreement with the Associated Press that permits us to host its content on Google properties such as Google News. Right now we are not adding new hosted content from the AP. The licensing agreement is the subject of ongoing discussion so we won’t be commenting further at this time.

The question, of course, is why Google would say that it has reached a deal with the AP but still isn’t adding any new content to the site.

We have contacted Google for comment and will update this post once we hear back.

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The iPad clearly dominated the discussion on Twitter over the last few days, but in the early days of January, the devastating earthquake in Haiti, Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, Lady Gaga, Avatar and the Cincinnati Bengals were among the most hotly discussed people and topics on the popular microblogging service.

Social Media monitoring and analytics service Sysomos analyzed over 100 million tweets from January 1 to 15. Overall, the company looked at topics in six different categories: people, locations, film, business, sports and miscellaneous entities.

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Even though it didn’t take the top billing in all categories, the news from Haiti had the unfortunate honor of being represented in almost all of the topics that Sysomos looked at. Given that the disaster only happened on January 12 – just before the cutoff date for this report – chances are that this topic will trend even higher once we get the data for the full month.

Haiti, Obama and Avatar

In the early days of January, President Barack Obama was the most often mentioned person on Twitter, followed by Lady Gaga and Michael Jackson. Thanks to his inane comments about the disaster in Haiti, Pat Robertson came in at number four.

Unsurprisingly, the most talked about location on Twitter in early January was Haiti, followed by the United States, China, Texas and Canada.

YouTube, Facebook and Google were the most often discussed businesses on Twitter, followed by Microsoft and Yahoo. This list is clearly dominated by the usual suspects, including like AT&T, Netflix and Starbucks, though it also features Etsy and the Fox News Channel.

Avatar was the most talked about movie on Twitter in early January, followed by Sherlock Holmes and Start Wars. The Cincinnati Bengals were the most often discussed sports franchise.

2.4 Million Tweets About the iPad

Of course, we couldn’t help but ask Sysomos about the iPad. According to the company’s data, the iPad would be the number three item in the miscellaneous entities section – following iTunes and Microsoft’s Xbox. Overall, Sysomos registered 2.4 million tweets that referenced Apple’s latest creation.

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Google just announced that its Apps Script scripting language is now open to all users of the Google Apps Standard Edition. Until now, Apps Script, which allows users to create scripts that automate common tasks in Google Docs, was only available to paying Google Apps Premier and Education Edition users. Every Google Apps user can now, for example, create scripts that automatically import stock prices into a spreadsheet, convert foreign currency amounts based on today’s exchange rate or email team members when their task status is updated.

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To access this new feature, just open up any spreadsheet in your account and look for the new scripts option in the tools menu.

Powerful – But Needs Some Programming Experience

Making Apps Script available to a wider range of customers is an important move for Google as it tries to compete with desktop office suites. Microsoft and most of its competitors on the desktop have long offered similar scripting features in their products. One of Google’s advantages is that its scripts allow users to easily hook into Google’s own APIs, which makes bringing in stock quotes or other data relatively easy.

Given that these scripts are written in JavaScript, building these scripts takes a fair amount of technical knowledge. Google has created a good set of tutorials to get you started. To create these scripts, users can use Google’s online Web Script Editor or any other text editor. Sadly, though, Google doesn’t offer a repository where Apps Script users can exchange useful snippets of code.

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So far, the reaction to Apple’s iPad has been very mixed. For some, the absence of a camera is a deal breaker, while others bemoan that Apple still doesn’t allow multitasking on its iPhone OS and that Safari still doesn’t support Flash. Others, however, are excited about the iPad’s potential as an e-book reader and gaming device. Here at ReadWriteWeb, opinions are still mixed as well. Reactions among our writers range from advising people to wait for the iPad 2.0 to giddy excitement about the prospect of a better couch-surfing device.

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Tech Pundits: Mixed Reactions

All of the tech pundits who attended the launch event and actually used the device for a few minutes were impressed by the iPad’s speed. John Gruber, who also wrote one of the most balanced evaluations of the iPad launch so far, went as far as to argue that Apple’s A4 processor is the iPad’s most revolutionary feature.

Walt Mossberg is cautiously optimistic about the iPad’s potential. Mossberg says that the software “looked impressive,” but also notes that the virtual keyboard “may be a liability.” In the New York Times, David Pogue writes that just calling the iPad a big iPod touch doesn’t do it justice, and that the iPad “as an e-book reader is a no-brainer.” Pogue also cautions critics that it’s too early to draw any conclusions. Nobody, after all, has really used the device yet and we haven’t seen any iPad-only apps that really push the device to its limits.

Stephen Fry puts the launch into a historical context and notes that quite a few pundits expected Apple’s iPhone to be a flop as well. MG Siegler, on the other hand, looks forward and says that holding the iPad is “like holding the future” (if you are already used to the iPod touch and iPhone).

A Paradigm Shift?

Nicholas Carr and Slate’s Farhad Manjoo take a slightly different angle. Both argue that the iPad will represent a paradigm shift in how we look at our computers. Manjoo lauds the iPad’s interface and ease of use and thinks that using the the iPhone represents a breakthrough in doing away with the old multi-window desktop metaphor. Carr writes that the success of the iPad is not a sure bet, but also argues that “whether it finds mainstream success or not, there’s no going back; we’ve entered a new era of computing, in which media and software have merged in the Internet cloud.”

Indeed, just like the iPhone changed our expectations of what mobile phones should be able to do, the iPad might just change our expectations of how laptops should work and what they should look like.

What do You Think? Let us Know!

What do you think? Is the iPad just an oversized and overhyped iPod touch, or is there more to it? Is it a Kindle killer and an awesome gaming device that will replace your Kindle and iPod touch? Does it represent a paradigm shift in how we will look at our computers in the future? Are you going to wait for iPad 2.0? Or are you waiting to give it a try at the Apple store before you render your final judgment?

Let us know your opinion in the comments.

See also: ReadWriteWeb’s complete coverage and analysis of the iPad on our iPad topic page.

Discuss

Yesterday’s iPad launch continues to dominate the tech news today. Besides announcing the iPad, however, Apple also quietly announced a major change to its iPhone policies yesterday: Apple now allows developers to use a 3G connection to make VoIP calls. The first application to make use of this is iCall (iTunes link), but chances are that Skype, Truphone and other VoIP providers are already working on updated iPhone apps as well.

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Until now, Apple’s iPhone SDK prohibited developers from developing VoIP-enabled apps that used the carrier’s 3G network. Developers who wanted to use VoIP in their apps had to restrict themselves to using this feature over Wi-Fi connections only.

This restriction was purely Apple’s decision. AT&T had already lifted its own ban on VoIP apps over 3G last October. Back then, Skype’s CEO, Josh Silverman, praised AT&T for this move and called it “the right step for AT&T, Apple, millions of mobile Skype users and the Internet itself.”

In our own tests, the iCall application worked just like advertised, though we did experience some lag and the application wasn’t 100% stable.

VoIP and the iPad?

While the iPad won’t have any built-in telephony apps, some versions of the device will come with optional 3G connectivity. Thanks to today’s change in Apple’s iPhone SDK policies, the iPad – which features a built-in microphone – now has the potential to work as a VoIP phone as well. We still have to wait and see if Apple will allow this, however.

See also: ReadWriteWeb’s complete coverage and analysis of the iPad on our iPad topic page.

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Judging from what we have seen so far, Apple’s new iPad will be a great device for reading e-books. The iPad will obviously come with Apple’s own e-reader software – but that’s only half the story. Users will also be able to read their Kindle and B&N e-book purchases on Apple’s new device. After all, nobody is going to stop Amazon, B&N and any of the independent e-book publishers from creating their own applications. That is, of course, unless Apple decides that these apps now “duplicate” a core feature of its own apps and decides to ban all other e-reader apps from the devices.

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We have to admit, though, that this seems like a highly unlikely scenario. Apple surely doesn’t want to get caught up in another Google Voice-like brawl.

It’s all About the Apps

The iPad has the potential to kill off the Kindle and other e-readers – though some will always prefer e-paper displays over the iPad’s backlit display.

For Amazon, the discussion between proponents of e-paper displays and those who prefer the flexibility of Apple’s color touchscreen is almost irrelevant, however. After all, the Kindle software is already available on multiple platforms – including the iPhone – and while Jeff Bezos would surely like to see the Kindle become the dominant player in this market, Amazon’s core business is selling books and not selling it’s own hardware devices.

B&N and every other player in the e-book business will surely develop their own applications as well and for almost everybody in this business but Sony, creating hardware is more of a distraction than a core competency.

As far as we know, Apple plans to sell most e-books in the iBook store for around $14.99. That’s more expensive than books in the Kindle store or the B&N e-book store, but it’s still significantly lower than the price of a hardcover book. Unlike Amazon, Apple also won’t have to subsidize the prize of the books. If anything, Apple’s pricing strategy might just give Amazon an excuse to bring its prices up to a point where it doesn’t lose money on every sale.

Good for Textbooks, Too

We should also note that Amazon has had absolutely no success in positioning the Kindle as a device for textbooks. The iPad, on the other hand, seems to fulfill all the requirements of most students. The device can display interactive content and thanks to its touchscreen, optional keyboard and the ability to easily annotate text, textbooks might just turn out to be one of the iPad’s killer features.

Apple’s Advantages and Disadvantages

Apple’s largest advantage right now is that it’s the default e-book store on the iPad. The iPhone, however, has clearly shown that downloading a free app from the app store is something users are very comfortable with and Amazon and B&N have enough marketing power to spread the word about their apps.

The iPad is obviously a far more expensive device than the Kindle or the Nook. Even the cheapest iPad will sell for almost twice the price of a standard Kindle and users will have to pay for the 3G connectivity that is free on the Kindle, Nook and some of Sony’s Readers. On the other hand, though, the iPad offer far more functionality than today’s e-readers.

We also still have to see if Apple’s claims about the iPad’s battery life will hold up. One of the big advantages of today’s e-paper e-readers is definitely their battery life.

What do You Think?

What do you think? Will the iPad turn out to be a great device for e-books? Or do you simply prefer e-paper and you can’t imagine reading a book on the iPad’s LED screen? Or are you afraid that the iPad will be so successful that it will kill off local bookstores?

Discuss

Apple just announced the launch of the iPad, Apple’s rumored tablet computer. Judging from what we have seen so far, the iPad is basically a very large iPod touch with a modified interface. According to Steve Jobs, the device will be far better than an iPhone or netbook for browsing the web. The iPad will also feature most of the standard apps we have become used to on the iPhone platform, including maps, contacts and a calendar. Apple also announced a new e-book store and a version of iWork for the iPad.

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Price and Availability

The lowest-end version of the iPad with 16GB of storage will retail for $499. The 32GB will cost $599 and the 64GB version will sell for $699.

The higher-end versions with 3G connectivity will cost $130 more.

The Wi-Fi versions of the iPad will go on sale in 60 days, and the 3G models will go on sale in about 90 days.

Image credit: GDGT

3G Connectivity

Some versions of the iPad in the U.S. will come with 3G connectivity over AT&T’s network.

One plan, which will come with 250 MB of data will cost $14.99 per month; the unlimited plan will cost $29.99 per month. These plans will come without contracts and can be activated right from the device.

For the rest of the world, Apple is still working on making deals. The iPad, however, will come unlocked and users will be able to just put in their own SIM cards.

Hardware

The iPad will weigh 1.5 pounds and feature a 9.7-inch IPS display (the same size as a Kindle). The device will feature all the standard wireless networking features like 802.11n, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR.

The device will be powered by a 1 GHz Apple A4 chip and come with anywhere between 16GB and 64GB of flash storage.

Other hardware features include an accelerometer, compass, a speaker, microphone and a 30-pin connector.

The battery, according to Apple, will last for about 10 hours and the device will be able to remain in standby mode for one month.

Unsurprisingly, the iPad will sync with iTunes over a standard Apple 30-pin USB connection.

Just like the iPod touch and the iPhone, the iPad features volume control on the side and a home button.

Apple is also making a keyboard dock and a stand.

Software

All the standard apps like the calendar and email apps have been redesigned for the larger screen. The new interface, from what we have seen so far, looks extremely crisp and has been greatly simplified to accommodate the multi-touch interface.

Runs iPhone Apps (With Really Large text)

According to Apple, almost every current iPhone application will run – unmodified – on the iPad. Judging from the images we have seen so far, however, the iPad just scaled these apps up to the large screen, which doesn’t necessarily look that well. Games, though, seem to look extremely well on the large screen. Apple simply scales the graphics up.

Apple plans to release a new SDK today that will make it easy for developers to make use of the large screen.

Native Apps: NYTimes and Electronic Arts

Among the apps Apple demoed today was a newspaper application from the New York Times, which has already developed a native application for the iPad. Electronic Arts, too, demoed a racing game on the iPad that makes use of the iPad’s accelerometer. Major League Baseball also announced a native app today.

Image credit: GDGT

iBooks App and iBooks Store

As rumored, Apple also launched its own e-book reader today. This new application, named iBook, includes a built-in iTunes-like e-book store. Apple already has deals with five publishers, including HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Penguin.

Books can include images and video. Apple hasn’t announced any standard prices for these books yet, though some of the ones that appeared on screen were priced around $14.99. E-books will come in the ePub format, which could mean that the app could theoretically be able to read files from the Sony and B&N e-book stores, too.

iWork: Office Apps for the iPad

Besides the new e-book store, Apple is also launching a version of iWork for the iPad, which features a new version of KeyNote, Numbers and Pages. All the apps have been redesigned for the smaller screen and the multi-touch interface. Slides, for example, can now be rearranged with just a few simple gestures, and images can be rotated by simply using the same gestures users are already familiar with from the iPhone.

The iWork apps will sell for $9.99 each.

Photos, Music and Videos

The iPad will also feature an iPhoto-like application with integrated maps and advanced slideshows.

Unsurprisingly, the iPad will also feature an iPod, which can display iTunes LP album art and videos.

Maps

During the presentation, Jobs also highlighted the maps application, which, thanks to the large interface, looks very nice, and also features Google’s StreetView imagery. Before the event, there were quite a few rumors that Apple was going to announce its own mapping service, but judging from this, Apple will continue to use Google’s maps.

Image credit: GDGT

Mac, iPhone and App Store

Steve Jobs opened today’s presentation by talking about the iPod ecosystem. According to Apple, the company just sold its 250 millionth iPod. Jobs also announced that Apple now has 284 retail stores that had 50 million people come through their doors last year.

Developers have now created over 140,000 applications for the iPhone platform and consumers have downloaded over 3 billion apps.

Regarding the Mac platform, Apple announced that it ended its holiday quarter with $15.6 billion in revenue from the Mac platform. Most of the computers Apple now sells are laptops. Jobs stressed that Apple is now the world’s largest mobile devices company.

Before talking about the tablet, Jobs also recapped Apple’s history in the laptop business. Specifically, Jobs wondered if there was space in the market for devices that fit between a laptop and a smartphone – a device you could use for watching videos, enjoying music, playing games and reading e-books.

Jobs also took a jab at netbooks, which, according to him, aren’t really good at doing anything.

Discuss

On the eve of the Apple tablet announcement, a lot of people are talking about the role the tablet could play in saving the newspaper industry by making paid content a viable alternative to ad-based revenue models. Clearly, though, this strategy won’t work for every paper. Newsday, a Long Island newspaper, instituted a paywall three months ago. Since then, according to a report in the New York Observer, the paper has sold a grand total of 35 subscriptions at $5 per week. The paper’s owners spent $4 million on redesigning the site to prepare for the paywall.

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Bad News for Paid Content? Or Just a Bad Example?

Newsday was one of the first newspapers in the last few years to erect a full paywall around its site. Unsurprisingly, this has meant that the traffic to the site also slowed down over the last few weeks. By December, the number of unique visitors to Newsday’s site was down 43% compared to last year.

The question, however, is how representative Newsday is for the newspaper industry in general. There are quite a few reasons why Newsday’s numbers are this low. Among other things, everybody on Long Island who subscribes to Optimum Cable gets a free subscription to Newsday. Maybe this is worthwhile model for Newsday, but it’s questionable if this could work for a lot of other newspapers.

According to the paper’s publisher Terry Jimenez, 35 subscribers is “35 more than I would have thought it would have been.” Jimenez clearly sees the paywall as a way to keep potential readers who don’t subscribe to the paper in some other form away from the papers website. Given this attitude, it doesn’t come as a surprise that getting home delivery of the paper is cheaper ($4.50 a week) than subscribing to the online version.

What Do You Think?

What do you think? Is Newsday just a bad example for paid content and the site only sold 35 subscriptions because everybody else is getting the paper for free with their cable subscription anyway? Or do you think this is representative of what other papers will experience when they erect their own paywalls?

Discuss

Last July, MySpace decided to get into the email business and launched MySpace Mail. According to the latest data we just received from MySpace, this initiative has turned out to be a success for the social network. In total, over 15 million MySpace users now use the service to receive and send email with an @myspace.com address. MySpace smartly coupled its users’ email addresses to their vanity URLs, which surely helped the adoption of the service.

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Thanks to this connection to vanity URLs, all of MySpace’s users have access to what is very likely to be their preferred email handle, even if they haven’t started to use the service yet. MySpace also offers unlimited file storage for MySpace Mail users.

Exceeded Expectations

According to MySpace’s Rajit Marwah, who headed the launch of MySpace Mail, “Hitting the 15 million mark exceeded our expectations – at launch we set a goal of 10 million accounts created within a year – we surpassed this goal in less than a quarter.”

Some Perspective

Of course, it’s important to put these numbers into perspective. Most email services don’t release very detailed statistics about their user base, but according to ComScore, Gmail had about 30 million unique visitors in February 2009 and Hotmail had around 45 million visitors.

According to ComScore data we received from MySpace, MySpace Mail now gets over 38 million unique visitors every month (this includes users who only use MySpace mail for internal communication but don’t use it to send out emails outside of the MySpace network).

It’s also worth noting that the number of unique users to MySpace has declined over the last year. According to the latest data, however, MySpace has been able to stop this decline and the numbers have now stabilized.

At the time of MySpace Mail’s launch, the site’s messaging system accounted for about 20% of MySpace’s traffic. Chances are that the increased popularity of MySpace mail is helping the service to stabilize its user numbers, though chances are that it isn’t bringing a lot of new users to the service either.

Discuss

Opera just released its latest State of the Mobile Web report. In this report, Opera focused on analyzing the behavior of users of Opera Mini, the company’s mobile Web browser. Worldwide, Facebook is the leading social network among Opera Mini users, and the social network saw its traffic from Opera Mini users increase by 619%. Twitter’s global growth rate was close to 2,900%. In the US, however, Opera Mini’s users are not very interested in using Twitter. Traffic to Twitter from Opera Mini users declined 21% over the course of the last year.

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Update: Opera just informed us that there was a large error in the report. Twitter’s numbers didn’t drop 21% last year. Instead, Twitter’s numbers actually increased by 689%. You can find the rest of the original post – including the conclusions we drew based on the faulty data – below.

Opera collects its data from users of its Opera Mini browser. As every request is routed through Opera’s servers, which then compress the sites to speed up delivery, Opera is able to collect very accurate statistics about its user base. In total, over 46.3 million people use Opera Mini every month and these users access close to 20 billion pages.

It’s important to note that some of this data is skewed towards the countries and regions where Opera is highly popular. These include Russia, Southeast Asia and Great Britain. This explains the large number of Russian social networks like vKontakte and spaces.ru in Opera’s global top 10. If anything, however, this strong bias towards Russian sites makes Facebook’s growth rate even more impressive.

Opera Mini in the US

In the US, the most popular site among Opera users is Google, followed by Facebook and Yahoo. Also in the top 10 are Wikipedia, MySpace, Opera’s own homepage, YouTube, CNN, ESPN and AccuWeather.

Twitter.com’s Growth Rate in the US in 2009: -21%

With regards to social networks in the US, Opera registered a 194% year-over-year growth for Facebook.

MySpace, which hasn’t gotten a lot of good press lately, managed to grow 25% in the US, while the number of users who went to Twitter.com on their Opera-enabled mobile phones declined by 21%. Globally, however, Twitter grew 2,859%.

Considering that some of these users probably opted to use a dedicated Twitter client instead of a mobile browser, these numbers by themselves aren’t too alarming for Twitter. It could also be that very few of the most active Twitter users are also Opera Mini users. In the context of some of the other numbers about Twitter we have covered in the last few weeks, though, this decline lends more credence to the theory that Twitter isn’t attracting a lot of new users in the US anymore.

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Google just announced an interesting update to Google Reader. Google’s online feed reader now allows you to track changes on any page – even those that don’t feature an RSS feed. Google will create its own custom feeds for these sites and update the feed whenever it notices a change. Google Reader will display a short snippet of the page changes in the RSS feed.

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Until today, Google Reader would simply respond with an error message if you tried to subscribe to a site that didn’t offer an RSS feed. Now, Google will simply create a new feed for the site and track updates. It’s not clear how often Google plans to ping these sites, however.

Thanks to this, you can easily track the latest discounts on Macys.com or updates to Zillow.com’s homepage.

As far as we were able to see, Google Reader creates very clean RSS feeds for these items. While Google doesn’t make it obvious, you can find the newly created feed by clicking “show details” in Google Reader. Thanks to this, you can subscribe to this new feed in any feed reader and not just in Google Reader.

There are, of course, a number of other sites that also allow you to track when something changes on a site. ChangeDetection.com, for example, is a popular online service that will alert you whenever a page changes. Unlike Google Reader’s new feature, ChangeDetection.com also gives you a very detailed overview of of what exactly changed and what the page looked like before. The service also offers an RSS feed of these changes.

Discuss

For the most part, digital music has killed the liner notes that used to come with CDs. Now, MusicDNA, a new file format that looks a lot like Apple’s iTunes LP format, wants to bring liner notes to the 21st century. MusicDNA is a new rich-media extension for digital music files that enriches songs and albums with additional data like lyrics, videos, RSS and Twitter feeds, as well as up to 14 additional pieces of metadata like mood and tempo. Artists and record labels will be able to ship up to 32GB of data with these files.

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MusicDNA is the creation of Dagfinn Bach’s Bach Technologies. Bach worked on building one of the first MP3 players in 1993. One of the most prominent backers of MusicDNA is Karlheinz Brandenburg, one of the co-inventors of the MP3 format. The company plans to ship its software in the spring.

Just a Wrapper

It’s important to note that MusicDNA doesn’t propose a new format for encoding the music itself. Instead, MusicDNA is simply an XML-wrapper for music files. In theory, this should make it easier for music labels and artists to adopt this new format as the actual music file will be compatible with virtually every MP3 player on the market. These devices will just play the MP3 track and ignore the rest of the data. To get access to the additional information, though, you currently have to use MusicDNA’s own player. The company plans to release plugins for iTunes and Windows Media Player later this year.

Is MusicDNA Doomed?

We have to wonder, though, if anybody is really interested in yet another proprietary file format for distributing music. While the iTunesLP format hasn’t exactly caught fire yet (though the mythical Apple tablet could change that), Apple isn’t likely to license this technology from Bach. It’s also important to note that Sony, Warner, Universal and EMI have developed their own file format for bundling music files with additional content.

At this point, it seems rather unlikely that MusicDNA will be a major success. While the developers claim to have 10 partners on board for the launch, none of these are major labels. Unless MusicDNA can get the major labels to give up their own format and to drop support for iTunes and the iTunesLP format, this venture isn’t very likely to succeed.

Discuss

Google just released a new stable version of Chrome for Windows PCs that includes two of the most frequently requested features: extensions and bookmark sync. This change won’t affect those users who are already using these features through Chrome’s beta or developer preview channel. Windows users who are using the stable version of Chrome, however, will finally be able to use extensions and sync bookmarks between multiple machines.

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Extensions for (Almost) Everybody

Google first made extensions for Chrome available in a developer release in December. Since then, developers have created over 1,500 extensions for Chrome. Some of the most popular include an extension that checks your GMail for new messages, an extension that allows users to open certain sites in an Internet Explorer window inside Chrome, as well as various ad blockers. Google also just updated its own Google Voice extension for Chrome.

Here at ReadWriteWeb, some of our personal favorites include Type-ahead find and the Google Similar Pages extension.

For now, the only stable version of Chrome that supports bookmarks and extensions is the Windows version. If you want to use extensions on the Mac, you will have to switch to the developer preview channel. For Linux users, extensions are already enabled in the beta channel.

Bookmark Sync

Starting today, the stable version of Chrome will also feature Google’s bookmark sync. We reported that Google was planning this feature last August and the first version to support bookmark syncing was released in early November. Right now, this feature only supports the syncing of bookmarks, but as our own Sarah Perez pointed out last year, the infrastructure is flexible enough to also allow Google to sync other data (passwords, favorite sites on the New Tab page or your browser history) in real time.

With Weave, Mozilla is working on a similar project. For the time being, however, this is just an extension and not a core feature of Firefox.

Discuss

During Google’s Q4 earnings call, a lot of the discussion focused on the mobile web. Google clearly thinks that the mobile web is poised for massive growth over the next few years and projects like Android show that Google wants to control as much of this market as possible. One of the most interesting comments during yesterday’s call came from Jonathan Rosenberg, Google’s vice president for product development, who said that “with all the capabilities these phones that are coming out have like GPS, cameras, we think there is the potential to actually make this mobile web better than the PC web.”

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For Google, It’s All About Ads

Google, of course, is mostly interested into turning the mobile web into a lucrative market for its advertising products. For Google, making the mobile web better than the PC web means that you can call advertisers directly from a mobile ad and increase conversion rates.

For most users, however, the ability for ads to let them make calls on their mobile phones is probably not very high up on their wish lists. In the broader context of recent trends on the mobile web, however, Rosenberg’s comment does ring true.

Using Sensors to Personalize the Mobile Web

Just a week, ago, for example, Google introduced location aware searches for mobile phones. If you go to google.com on your phone today, Google tweaks its search results based on your current location. Google’s regular browser-based search can’t do this.

Thanks to the sensors in today’s mobile phones and the potential for adding more complex sensors in the near future, the mobile web has the potential to give us a more personalized user experience than our current laptops and desktops are able to.

What do You Think?

Does the mobile web have the potential to be better than the PC web on your desktop? Isn’t the small screen a serious impediment for making this experience better than the desktop experience? Or will Apple’s mythical tablet solve all these problems and give us a mobile web experience that’s somewhere in between the user experience a phone and on the desktop?

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According to the latest data from comScore, Internet users over the age of 15 conducted over 29 million searches per minute in 2009. Overall, the global search market grew 46% in 2009. Unsurprisingly, Google continues to have a commanding lead in this market. Worldwide, Google accounted for 66% of all searches conducted in 2009 by Internet users over 15. Microsoft’s search properties, including Bing, commanded only about 3% of the total market, but Microsoft also saw the greatest gain (70%) among the top 5 search properties. In total, comScore estimates that Internet users now conduct close to 131 billion searches per year.

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Russian search engine Yandex was the fastest growing property among the top 10 search engine. Yandex registered a 90% gain in 2009. Except for Alibaba.com, every one of the top 10 search engines in comScore’s index registered a growth in the total number of searches conducted on their sites.

Worldwide, Internet users conducted over 131 billion searches in 2009. Every day, people over 15 around the world conducted about 3.6 billion searches. That’s almost 25 million searches conducted per minute.

According to comScore, Internet users in the U.S. conducted the highest number of searches on the top 10 search engines in 2009. U.S. Internet users over 15 conducted over 22 billion searches last year, followed by China (13 billion) and Japan (9 billion).

Just yesterday, we reported that traffic analyst firm Hitwise’s latest data shows that the traffic to social networks in Australia is getting to the point where it will soon surpass traffic to search engines. Judging from these numbers, even if social networks pass search in terms of traffic at some point, search still has a lot of headroom to grow and will continue to do so in the near future.

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Google just announced that it has started to integrate some of the research that makes Google Squared work into its core search engine. When you perform searches that have factual answers like [empire state height], Google will now highlight the answer to this question in the search results. If you are looking for the height of the Empire State Building, for example, the search engine will now display a snippet from the site that highlights the answer to this question.

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This is only a small change, but it does mean that users won’t have to click through to the site if they are just looking for a straightforward piece of information like the date of John Lennon’s murder. Microsoft, of course, has made these shortcuts one of the core elements of the search experience on Bing.

Great for Users, But What About the Sites that Supply these Answers?

For users, this is a nice step forward as it makes it easier and faster to get the answer you are looking for. It will, however, be interesting to see how website owners will react to this change. After all, if you don’t need to click through to the site to get the answer, the site that produced the content won’t be able to benefit from Google’s traffic.

Also New: Rich Snippets for Events

In addition to this change, Google also announced that it is introducing rich snippets for events. Rich snippets allow webmasters to annotate their pages with structured data that can then be displayed in the search results. In the case of events, Google could, for example, display upcoming events at a theater or concert hall right on the search results page.

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YouTube just launched a streamlined video player and redesigned video pages. The new video pages give YouTube a more minimalist and streamlined look, with a stronger focus on the video. For now, these new features are opt-in only. It is not clear when Google plans to make this new design the default theme for YouTube.

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You can join the experiment by clicking on this link and you can opt out again by clicking here.

New Video Pages

As Google emphasized in the announcement today, the new pages put the video at the center of the experience. The new video pages are very stripped down and somewhat reminiscent of the YouTube “Feather” experiment Google launched last December.

The description of the currently playing video has moved underneath the video, leaving more space on the sidebar for related videos or a list of other videos in the current playlist. The new pages also put a larger emphasis on related videos.

If you start a search on YouTube while a video is playing, the results will appear right on the same page without interrupting the video that is currently playing. Search results appear on the right side of the screen, while the video continues to play in a smaller player on the left side of the page.

Improved Video Player

The player itself has also been redesigned. You can now switch between different player sizes. Switching between different video qualities (SD, HD or 1080p) is now done through a drop-down menu.

New Ratings System

YouTube also did away with the old ratings system. Instead of rating a video on a 1 to 5 star scale, YouTube moved to a “Like/Don’t Like” model. According to Google, YouTube’s users only gave 1 and 5 star reviews to videos anyway and skipped over the intermediate ratings.

What do You Think?

To us, the new pages are a welcome departure from the crowded old YouTube pages. What do you think? Is this a step forward for YouTube or will it be a failed experiment?

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Amazon quietly made a major change to its Digital Text Platform last week that went largely unnoticed: Small publishers and individual authors who use the Digital Text Platform can now opt out of the Kindle’s digital rights management (DRM) program. While this change only affects a relatively small number of publishers and authors for now, this move could hint at a larger change in Amazon’s DRM policy. Right now, Amazon’s DRM policy means that its customers can’t transfer their books to a non-Kindle e-reader.

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Update: Amazon just contacted us to let us know that a DRM-free option always existed for publishers using the Digital Text Platform. Amazon just added new functionality that makes it easier for publishers to set these options.

For Amazon, it makes sense to experiment with this new option on the Digital Text Platform. Given that this is a self-publishing tool, the company doesn’t have to explain this change to its partners in the publishing industry while allowing the company to experiment with a DRM-free solution. Most publishing houses tend to be very conservative when it comes to DRM-free e-book solutions. In the self-publishing world, however, DRM-free books are very common. Self-publishing platform Smashwords, for example, doesn’t even offer a DRM solution.

Right now, you can’t take your Kindle e-books to a Sony Reader, for example. While the Kindle is a huge success for Amazon, the current DRM solution is surely holding quite a few potential customers back from making the jump to e-books.

The Beginning of the End for E-Book DRM?

If the e-book world follows the same path as the music industry, however, chances are that restrictive DRM solutions will disappear over the next few years. At least for Amazon, giving its self-published authors and small publishing houses this option is a first step in the right direction. For O’Reilly, publishing a DRM-free e-book has turned out to be an advantage. Hopefully, other publishing houses will also realize that DRMed e-books do very little.

Tip of the hat to Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton for noticing this change first.

Image Credit: Nieman Journalism Lab.

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KnowEm allows individuals and brands to ensure that they have claimed their favorite username or their brand’s name on over 350 social media services. Just type in your favorite username and KnowEm will check if it is still available on these sites.

Today, KnowEm announced the launch of a number of premium services aimed at small businesses and enterprises. For a one-time fee, KnowEm will create profiles for a brand or individual on over 150 social media sites. For a slightly higher fee, the company will also populate these profiles with your information.

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In addition, KnowEm also announced that it has acquired FriendsCall.Me, a service that is quite similar to KnowEm and also aims to help brands to make sure that their names aren’t being used by squatters.

Is Your Name Available?

The basic free version of KnowEm makes it easy to find out if your favorite username is still available on the 350 social media services. Just type in your favorite username and KnowEm will check if your name is still available on these sites. Given how closely our online identities are often tied to one single username, it only makes sense to claim the same username on every site and to ensure that somebody else isn’t impersonating you. Other services that offer similar free features include Namechk (148 sites) and Usernamecheck.com (68 sites).

Premium Services

The new premium services extend KnowEm’s portfolio by giving businesses additional services for claiming and monitoring their brands. For users of the Corporate Edition ($349), KnowEm will create profiles on 150 social media sites and populate them with photos, bios and descriptions. A cheaper version of this services ($99) only includes the signup process, and users will have to populate their profiles by hand. For an additional $49 per month, KnowEm will also register your name or brand on new social media services as they launch.

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