Author: Om Malik

A few years ago, who would have thought that phones would one day be running chips with PC-quality oomph? Today one such platform was announced when STEricsson, a joint venture of Ericsson and ST Microelectronics, released the U8500. It’s powered by a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor, with each processor core running at 1.2 GHz. A demo, currently being showed off at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, is utilizing Google’s Android OS to show off its various capabilities. The new platform gives us a chance to peek into what awaits the Android ecosystem and what kind of Android phones we should expect over next few months.

First of all, we should assume that the raw processing power is only going to enhance Android’s performance. The 45 nm manufacturing process ensures that the chip is small enough to help build more powerful, yet slimmer, touchscreen devices. The U8500 supports a full 1080p HD camcorder, a 20-Megapixel still camera, advanced 3-D graphics as well as multichannel home theater-quality audio. The platform also has built-in support for HDMI-out. More importantly, it features very low power consumption. For instance, the new platform has 120 hours of audio playback or 12 hours of full HD video playback on one battery charge when equipped with a standard 1,000mAH battery.

As more and more devices –- phones, netbooks and tablets –- come to the market, the demand for Wi-Fi-based connectivity is only going to rise. The question is, how much are you willing to pay for it? For despite its ubiquity, Wi-Fi is still an expensive proposition — especially while on the go. The other option, of course, is to get ad-supported free Wi-Fi access.

According to San Bruno, Calif.-based startup Devicescape, nearly 68 percent of 3,000 people surveyed said they’d watch ads in exchange for free Wi-Fi. About 16 percent, however, want nothing to do with ads and are happy to pay for their access. Nearly 25 percent said that they are willing to pay up to $3 an hour for Wi-Fi.

Charts courtesy of Devicescape; thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user suttonhoo

My fondest memory of my childhood was the day when my grandfather gave me a slate. I was four years old. There was no silicon in that slate — unless you count the silica in the earth itself — that was essentially a thin smooth slab, almost volcanic in color. Along with it came a little piece of chalk, which I would eventually use to write on this slate whose rough edges were covered by a well-made maple wood sheath. I have no idea what this slate cost — maybe one-twentieth of a penny at that time — but to me it was priceless.

For hours at length I would sit with my grandpa and with my mom — learning math, learning how to write proper English sentences, often getting wrapped on the knuckles for messing up my articles. Sometimes I would draw — but mostly I would try and write.

Paper and pencils were expensive and were restricted to finishing up school assignments or “homework” as it was called back then. Over the next few years, whenever I used that particular slate and its subsequent upgrades (it would break way too often), I would start with the proverbial blank screen (or a blank slate). I would write, calculate and articulate.

To me it represented two things. It was a way to spend time with grandpa.  It was also a tool for constant education and self-improvement. Of course, I didn’t know these fancy words then. I just knew it was something I couldn’t live without. The very low-brow slate was the very antithesis of cool, but I just loved it.

It was simple, elegant and utilitarian. It was cheap. And in hindsight it fueled by my imagination, though at the time I had no idea.

On January 27th, when I first picked up the iPad, I was that four-year-old boy again. I felt like I was getting that old slate of mine one more time. Today the meaning of cheap may have changed for me, but the iPad’s elegance, simplicity and utilitarianism is firing up my imagination. Just as I would sit with my grandfather, learning the basics of English grammar from Wren & Martin and then constructing sentences, I am now thinking about what I can do with the iPad and where will we go with it.

The minute I touched the iPad at the Apple event a few weeks ago, I knew my world and my idea of computing had been transformed, irrevocably and irreversibly. I’m not sure why some of my friends, who have helped me shape my thinking about devices, Antonio Rodriguez for example, are disappointed with this device, whose potential is limited only by one’s imagination.

When I look at the iPad, I see a clean slate to reinvent pretty much how we think of media, information and in fact the whole user experience. Why do we have to think in terms of a keyboard — real or virtual? How can we not be excited about the very idea of a media experience based on touch? Why do we have to limit ourselves to one kind of media when building information experiences? Why can’t we leverage everything that is around us — location, social connections and persistent connectivity — to build a whole new media consumption experience?

When I walked out of the Apple event, in an on-camera interview, I told David Carr, media critic for The New York Times, that this device is first and foremost about media consumption. Our world, as I have outlined in many previous writings, is overrun with information. For the past 15 years we have perfected tools for creating information (or content). From camera phones to cheap laptops to open-source blogging platforms, the world of the web has been about creating a tidal wave of media/information/data. What we have used to consume this information is a 30-year-old technology, the personal computer and lately, the cell phone.

While the PC was created for personal computing, it never really became personal enough. The mobile phones weren’t quite cut out to consume content beyond phone calls, some text messages and maybe emails. Today’s smart phones are proving that when done right, they can become great tools for consuming information — from little tweets to Yelp reviews to blog posts to Tom Friedman’s latest rant. The explosive and unstoppable growth of mobile data traffic only reinforces the fact that if you give people a better way to consume information, they will use it!

With that as context, you start to see the implications of the iPad and get excited.  Paul Buchheit, Gmail creator, FriendFeed co-founder and an angel investor, wrote in a blog post:

By focusing on only a few core features in the first version, you are forced to find the true essence and value of the product. If your product needs “everything” in order to be good, then it’s probably not very innovative (though it might be a nice upgrade to an existing product).

The essence of the iPad, as Joe Hewitt, the creator of the Facebook app for the iPhone, says is that “the Internet is an integral part of the iPhone OS, and it is the part of the OS you can tinker with to your heart’s delight.”

This is one of the reasons why I am spending most of my waking (and some of my sleeping hours) thinking about what would be the kind of application a media startup should build for the iPad, in the process creating a whole new media experience. While some folks might be satisfied with their iPhone application for media consumption, I’m not one of them.

We are in the process of building a fairly unique and distinctive iPhone app, but I’m also ruminating on an iPad-only app that leverages everything from its distinctive menus, large screens, location information and more importantly ability to interact with content by touch.

Hewitt, when talking about the iPhone, recently wrote, “Once I got comfortable with the platform I became convinced it was possible to create a version of Facebook that was actually better than the web site!” He was right. Facebook has more than 100 million mobile subscribers and a substantial portion of those are using the iPhone (or iPod touch.)

iPad is an incredible opportunity for developers to re-imagine every single category of desktop and web software there is. Seriously, if you’re a developer and you’re not thinking about how your app could work better on the iPad and its descendants, you deserve to get left behind.

If you are one of those developers who has doubts about the iPad and needs something to change your mind, I recommend you read RoughlyDrafted’s Ten Myths of Apple’s iPad: It’s a curse for mobile developers.

My mind is made up. I have a brand new slate to create upon. I know sooner or later I will be able to create something new on this. The bad news is that I am not a developer. That is my curse. That is my opportunity. I am four years old again.

Related GigaOM Pro Research (sub req’d):

• Web Tablet Survey: Apple’s iPad Hits Right Notes
• 5 Tips for Developers Targeting the iPad
• How AT&T Will Deal with iPad Data Traffic
• Why Google, not Amazon, Should Fear the iPad

Google on Wednesday announced an audacious plan to build what is essentially the most cutting-edge broadband network in the U.S. While it’s being misportrayed in certain segments of the media as an ISP effort, in reality it’s nothing more than an experimental network, much like Google’s early efforts to provide municipal Wi-Fi in the city of Mountain View, Calif.  It will be a trial-only network, not Google’s entry into telecommunications services. And while the planned network won’t be cheap, in the end it will be worth the price.

The idea behind the network: provide bandwidth and see if it fosters new user behavior and thus innovations.  I admire Google for creating a real-life laboratory that will provide intelligence to predict not only the future of the web, but also help it develop new products to stay relevant. By announcing this network, Google also showed why it’s quite distinct from its onetime peers such as Yahoo and AOL.

When I said that Google’s plan was audacious, I said so because of the cost. For starters, Google wants to offer 1 gigabit-per-second speeds to some 50,000 to 500,000 people. At 2.6 people per household, that roughly translates to between 20,000 and 200,000 homes. Our friend Ben Schachter, Internet analyst with Broadpoint AmTech, estimates that it will cost Google between $3,000 and $8,000 per home, or roughly $60 million to $1.6 billion, depending upon the final size and footprint of the network. If Google reaches, say, 100,000 homes, it would cost the company about half a billion dollars.

The folks from Calix Networks, a company that sells gear for FTTP networks, have developed an equation that allows them to calculate the cost per household depending on population density, which, according to them, is the single most important factor in calculating the cost of FTTP connection per home. These costs are quite varied, in some cases as much as $4,000 to connect a single home. Google’s final tab will depend on where it decides to build out the network.

The end cost is also determined by the kind of technology the company uses. While Passive Optical Networking technologies have come a long way — newer versions of Gigabit PON (GPON) have a range that extends up to 40 kilometers — there is a better than good chance that Google will opt for an all-Active Ethernet approach. Mike Fox, business development manager for the carrier networks division at telecom equipment maker Adtran, says that both technologies can get the job done. It just depends on how Google wants to build its network. Fox helped me break down the comparative costs of the two technologies.

A typical PON is made of two pieces: an optical line terminal (OLT) at the service provider’s central office, and an optical network terminal (ONT),  which is used to terminate the fiber optic line and is typically outside the customer’s premises. A single ONT costs about $330, according to Fox. Since PON is a shared fiber technology, OLT costs are calculated in terms of ports and are about $80 per port. So the total per household is about $410. The fewer the number of ports, the higher the per-home costs.

Of course, when taken together with other costs such as fiber and construction, things start to add up pretty fast. In comparison, an Active Ethernet-based network is pretty much like a corporate Ethernet network. It’s a giant switched Ethernet infrastructure. It costs over $600 in electronics for an Active Ethernet-based network. This is closer to what Google has in mind, according to some experts I spoke with. But that’s not all.

Mike Day, chief technology officer of ADC Telecommunications, told me that this network is going to be a lot more expensive than somewhat similar ones. It would need a really fast switching fabric that in turn would be connected to the Internet backbone at astonishingly fast speeds. This seamlessness is what will bring true speed to the homes on the test network. Think of this as building a smooth Autobahn from the home to the backbone. Day said the network would need to overcome some major design challenges such as different data center architecture and a different style of servers that don’t become a bottleneck and are able to leverage the 1 Gbps speeds.

Is spending this much money — even for Google, which has about $25 billion in cash — a good idea? I think so. Just as car companies spend their R&D dollars on Formula One Racing teams to get a better idea of what new features could be included in their commercial vehicles, a company such as Google needs to explore the outer limits of broadband. (I will explore more on this topic in a different post.)

In addition, “Google has a secondary motivation here and that is to also push the FCC to accelerate its examination of using TV white spaces for wireless broadband,” says Jeff Heyman, broadband and video analyst for Infonetics Research. He points out that if “Google can make this endeavor successful for a number of communities, why couldn’t they do so for even more using white spaces? This FTTH initiative, in other words, could be a proving ground for Google as infrastructure provider.”

Is that likely? Perhaps not — but as someone who hearts broadband, I hope Google’s desire to push the limits brings about the change we so badly need.

It’s not a good idea to speak ill of the dead. It is OK, however, to speak the truth, however harsh it might seem, about the living dead.

Rupert Murdoch’s $580 million MySpace purchase has outlived not only its utility, but has also finally hit its expiration date. That last step came with the announcement this afternoon that Owen Van Natta was stepping down as chief executive of the company.  This was nine months after he joined the Los Angeles-based venture. It’s circling the drains, if you ask me.

Is anyone surprised that Van Natta left? I’m not. Rupert Murdoch had put him in charge. Then Jon Miller, the head of News Corp.’s digital operations, brought in two more guys -– Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn. I think you can read between the lines here. You have three guys with a strong emphasis on operations –- sort of like three short-stops on the same baseball team.

When the trio came together, I asked the question, Can Internet’s Free Agents Save MySpace? My take was simple:

News Corp is counting on the equivalent of three Internet free agents to replace Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson and revive MySpace, the big but not so bountiful social network. The three free agents are CEO Owen Van Natta (former COO of Facebook), COO Mike Jones (founder and CEO of Userplane) and Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn (former president of SlingMedia.) These three men are certainly capable, but they are on a mission impossible. I think MySpace Music is a nice niche opportunity — how big of one remains to be seen. For the three free agents — good luck guys! You are really going to need it.

From what I gather, there were conflicts between Van Natta and his boss, Miller. It was clear that someone had to go and it wasn’t going to be Miller, mostly because Murdoch wasn’t around to save Van Natta. This kind of corporate infighting is a sign of a bigger malaise. In many ways, News Corp and Murdoch have lost any and all interest in the web. The fire sales of Photobucket and Rotten Tomatoes are clear indicators that any and every digital property is up for sale. I bet if you showed up with a decent offer for, say, IGN or MySpace, News Corp would be willing to make a deal.

I don’t blame them. With “Avatar” bringing in more revenues than all their digital properties put together, COO Chase Carey, I am told, doesn’t care much for these headache businesses. News Corp’s other businesses, such as its cable networks, are making a decent amount of money as well. The web doesn’t hold much attraction for Rupert Murdoch, who is now enamored with e-readers and tablets.

Tablets, according to those in the know, are being viewed as saviors for News Corp.’s core business: news and information. He thinks that since devices are not that useful without his content, he eventually wins because he will get people to win pay for his content. “Content is not just king, it is the emperor of all things electronic!” he recently said. But as our Kevin Kelleher essentially summed up in discussing Murdoch and News Corp’s business strategy in this post over the weekend, “Murdoch is right that those devices are lifeless without content, but he neglects to mention that it’s a symbiotic relationship.”

Kevin also noted that Murdoch, and every large media company, need to think like startups. Unfortunately that is no longer in the DNA that defines Murdoch. If he thought like a startup, instead of hiring three managers, the company would have hired a strong chief technology officer, who had the vision and the guts to essentially take the living corpse of a social network and send a shock through its system. They needed someone who could think of and build a Spotify based on MySpace Music!

What the company needed was radical transformation. But what it got was infighting, politicking and constant contraction.  At the time Van Natta, Jones and Hirschhorn joined the company it had two things going for it -– the audience and the social graph. There was a time when celebrities used MySpace to stay in touch with their fans. Now they’re all using Twitter.

The audience has started to fritter away, moving to better, more current social environments such as Facebook and Twitter. As for the social graph, I wonder if MySpace really had one. I wouldn’t be surprised if more executives, including those from recently acquired startups such as imeem and iLike, left for greener and more viable pastures.

As my friend Pip Coburn has told me many times, turnarounds never really turn. They usually run aground. Time for Myspace N.O!

* Photo of Rupert Murdoch courtesy of World Economic Forum via Flickr.

• Photo of Owen Van Natta by JD Lassica via Flickr

Google earlier today announced that it would be launching an experimental fiber-to-the-home network that would offer speeds of as much as 1 gigabit per second. The question is, what can you do with this much speed?

Our philosophy has long been that broadband is a platform of innovation and thus there will emerge new applications from the proliferation of fat pipes — whether they are wired or wireless.

Stacey had offered up five bandwidth-hungry applications that included high-definition telepresence, telemedicine, video instant messaging and video presence, HD television and real time data back-ups. Internet-based storage services and in-cloud personal video recorders are other options for fat pipe usage. Of course, with that much speed even our desktops can be offered on desktop.

So the question to you gentle readers: If you had 1 gbps to your home, what would you do with it?

The incumbent carriers may be considering Long Term Evolution (LTE) as their post-3G wireless broadband technology, but new research from Telegeography shows that WiMAX is no slouch and that deployments of the other wireless broadband technology are on the rise. According to their research, there are about 600 WiMAX networks either live or in planning-deployment stages. Last time we checked, there were about 519 wireless deployments around the planet using WiMAX.

In comparison, only around 300 cellular networks have been upgraded with HSPA technology (including T-Mobile USA’s network) and fewer than 70 operators have committed to deploying LTE equipment. That should change in 2010 and beyond as we start to see large carriers such as Verizon and AT&T start to roll out their LTE-based wireless broadband networks.

But some analysts believe that all is not over for WiMAX. As we have mentioned in the past, WiMAX is finding its feet in emerging markets and that is why it makes sense that Asia, South Americas and Africa are the top regions when it comes to WiMAX deployments.

About 25 months ago, when I first met Jeff Lawson, formerly of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the founder and CEO of Twilio, I was skeptical of his chances. After all, he wanted to marry the world of voice to the world of web applications. This oft-discussed marriage of web and voice has been attempted many times and has often met with failure. So for the longest time I resisted writing about it.

Fast-forward to today and my skepticism about Jeff’s business is decreasing, for multiple reasons. For starters, the company, which has raised $4.3 3.7 million in total funding from the likes of Union Square Ventures, The Founders Fund and well-known angel investors, has been very smart about leveraging AWS to build a massively scalable telephony platform cheaply. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, when describing his fascination with Twilio recently, remarked:

“Twilio excites me with their programmable voice platform and that is a company where you see the power of the cloud, of a startup becoming a platform to challenge any incumbent. The cloud is helping make an even playing field.”

More importantly, it’s gained traction with developers, its target market. In a marketplace where giants like BT (via Ribbit) and Telefonica are stalking similar opportunities, Twilio’s early traction is testament to the company’s laser-sharp focus on developers and their needs. It has taken what had been a complex task and made it simple. Using Twilio, developers can add new phone numbers in real time, allowing them to re-sell them to their customers.

The dead-simple service gives even voice newbies an ability to add voice-to-web apps. It’s garnered the support of nearly 6,000 developers, who have built 1,000 applications that utilize Twilio’s voice API in their web applications. From Heineken to Sony to Intuit — all are users of Twilio’s service.

Today Twilio is launching Twilio SMS, which allows app developers to add SMS-based functionality to their web apps for about 3 cents a message. By working with SMS wholesalers and developing such a simple SMS integration platform, the pay-as-you-go service means that any app can have notifications or can be made to do specific tasks via SMS. In addition, the company has cut the per-month, per-phone number price to $1 a month from $5. Toll-free numbers cost $2 a month. Lawson says that even at $1 a month he makes money, so he is happy to discount.

With my initial skepticism subsiding, it’s clear that I’m going to be keeping an eye on this little company, looking forward to their next disruption.

GIPS, a San Francisco-based company that licenses intellectual property including codecs for audio and video, says it’s come up with a technology that would allow third-party developers to embed video chat in their iPhone-related applications. The new technology is called VideoEngine (VEI) Mobile.

The VideoEngine utilizes H.263 (video codec), GIPS wideband/HD voice (iPCM-Wb) and G711 (audio codec) to provide functionality that would allow real-time video chat or multipoint video conferencing. GIPS is using the H.263 codec because it (and in turn the developers who use VEI) doesn’t have to pay royalties.

Despite GIPS’s statement, VEI can’t really offer real two-way video chat today. Why? Because the iPhone doesn’t have a frontal camera. At best, VEI can be embedded in a mobile application and thus can receive video from some PC-type application, say, from your PC using your IM client to the iPhone. Just not the other way around. Audio is bidirectional. In December 2009, Fring launched a one-way video calling service as well.

That said, I can only see one real value proposition of this new offering: tight synchronization of voice and video that will end up on the iPhone. And I’m not sure if that will be enough for GIPS to get the traction. For video conferencing to take off on the iPhone platform, two things need to happen: First, there needs to be a frontal camera for two-way video chats. Second, Skype needs to make available a video chat offering.

Skype it seems is unlikely to use VEI. It’s already licensed H.264 video technology, which is being included in many mobile phones. I wouldn’t be surprised if Skype ends up using some sort of scalable video version of H.264 for its mobile clients, one that adjusts the video quality based on the network conditions.

As for GIPS, let’s just hope the iPhone gets an upgrade of its dreams — one that involves a video on the front of the device.

The Wall Street Journal in a blog post today points to a research note by Credit Suisse analyst Bill Shope that he wrote in the wake of meeting with Apple executives. It reads:

Apple wants the iPad to be the best device for a few key use cases. For instance, the company believes it could eventually be seen as superior to both handheld and notebook devices for browsing the Internet, using the App Store, and consuming mobile media (video, photos, and e-books). Nevertheless, in other areas, notebooks, the iPhone, or an iPod may be more appropriate. This clear segmentation of capabilities suggests that cannibalization may be less of a concern than most currently believe.

As The Wall Street Journal then goes on to explain:

Shope also wrote that despite the seemingly aggressive pricing of the iPad — the lower-than-expected price points range from $499 to $829 — Apple seemed to indicate it would respond with price cuts if demand for the device wasn’t revving up the way it liked. ‘While it remains to be seen how much traction the iPad gets initially, management noted that it will remain nimble (pricing could change if the company is not attracting as many customers as anticipated),’ Shope wrote.

Initially everyone was expecting Apple to launch a device that would cost as much as $1,000, but instead the company came in at half that price — and it’s still getting criticized. Given that the iPad hasn’t even made it to the market yet, this conversation about price cuts is kinda moot.

Let’s assume that Apple does have to cut the device’s price — it still has lots of room to make a profit with it. According to Broadpoint AmTech analyst Brian Marshall, the base model $499 iPad will cost about $290 to manufacture and has a gross margin of 42.9 percent. Have you checked the gross margin on a netbook, Nokia smartphone or even a Motorola device lately? I rest my case.

Regardless, I’m amazed at the play being given to this iPad price cuts story. People seem to be overlooking the fact that Apple’s business model is in transition. In addition to being a hardware and software company, it’s becoming a “transactions” company.

Apple, thanks to its exclusive deals with phone companies such as AT&T, has learned the art of making money over a period of time. Selling digital media — video games, books, music, videos and periodicals — is just an extension of that very basic idea: an ongoing relationship with customers. Thanks to iTunes and the App Store, Apple has one-click access to customers. If Apple can sell a lot of video games, songs and videos (via iTunes) and books (via iBooks) and gets to keep 30 percent of the total sales, then it behooves the company to sell more and more iPads. Even if it means cutting iPad prices — which it won’t have to.

I am of the opinion — admittedly a minority opinion for now — that the iPad, despite all the early skepticism, is going to find its place in this world. In fact, over a period of time (admittedly longer), I believe its success will replicate that of both the iPhone and the iPod touch.

And I bet Steve Jobs believes the very same thing. As he told Rolling Stone back in 1994:

“I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed.”

At our GigaOM company meeting, Simon Mackie, editor of WebWorkerDaily shared his views on why every weekend he publishes and shares a collection of articles & blog posts he had read over the week. Taking a cue from him and my friend Paul Kedrosky, I am sharing a list of articles/posts which I think you should read this weekend.

• Rolling Stone Magazine interviews Steve Jobs: One from the archives. This interview conducted in 1994 lays out Jobs’ vision of the future. Much of it is coming true.

• Google Me to the Moon: In a beautiful nostalgic essay, Angels Riechers writes on Google Maps, GPS and the lost art of navigation & discovery.

• Davos is for wimps, ninnies, pointless, skeptics: Michael Lewis, perhaps one of my favorite writers skewers the Davos set. Rightfully so.

• Why spray on glass is going to change everything: This could be one of those game changing technologies that changes everything we touch.

• A rebuttal to Fraser Speirs’ Future Shock/ iPad Essay: Brian Dear writes a coherent, spew-less piece that is a joy to read, even though I don’t quite agree with many things he says.

• Winners, losers from Apple iPad roll out. EE Times does a good job of breaking down the silicon winners and losers of the Apple iPad rollout.

• Better user experience with story telling: Francisco Inchauste outlines how we can use story telling as a way to stand out in our increasingly crowded digital world. He thinks we can use stories to connect “as real people, not just computers.” I totally agree and have used this technique in my work as a magazine writer. Now as part of the new new media, I am constantly striving to learn how to do that on the web.

And a bonus self-serving link to my post about MTV’s new logo in almost 30 years. Even though I was part of MTV generation, for me in this post Internet age, MTV is completely irrelevant. Have a read!

PS: If you would like to send interesting essays and writings, please drop me a note using the “contact” form.

As you know, we’ve been following Mozilla’s Weave Sync project for a long time. Last week, the Weave Sync add-on for Firefox was made available. Installable as an extension for Firefox, Weave is way to synchronize bookmarks, saved passwords, browsing history and open browser tabs across multiple browsers and computers.

Now Mozilla Labs is hoping that developers will adopt Weave Sync and build upon the service using a set of Weave Sync and User APIs. Mozilla is launching a whole range of developer resources that also include Python & Javascript client libraries.

The idea behind this effort is “to increase the number of places where you can securely access, and have your personal data readily available to you, independent of whether or not Firefox is available,” Mozilla notes on its blog. In other words, developers can use Weave Sync services in new products independent of Firefox and thus build new apps-based that leverage our browser & browsing specific data.

This first set of APIs focuses on enabling Weave clients to provide user’s access to their stored data from other devices and environments. Future APIs will provide third-party web sites and applications the ability to request permission and obtain explicit access only to specific user data to augment a users’ Web experience, e.g. providing personalized recommendations based upon a user’s bookmarks or search history.

Mozilla has also released a couple of experimental clients such as the web-based Weave Client, an iPhone Weave Client, a WebOS Weave Client and a command line Weave client. Mozilla Weave has been over two years in the making. I first wrote about it in 2007

If you’ve know who Richard Rosenblatt is, chances are you’ve already formed some strong opinions about the man — especially if you work in media. Thanks to his position as the founder and chief executive officer of Demand Media, a Los Angeles-based company that’s often labeled as content factory, he has become a divisive figure. Not a day passes when he is not criticized for paying writers infinitesimally small amounts of money.

However, when you meet Rosenblatt in person and listen to him with an open mind, the logic of his business quickly becomes clear. Much as Michael Dell made the just-in-time production of computers his forte, Rosenblatt has brought a mathematical rigor to the world of content. Demand-owned sites such as eHow get more than 100 million unique visitors a month — and the company is valued at over a billion dollars.

Demand got its start by buying little-known Internet properties. Rosenblatt, who in the past was the head of both Intermix Media and iMALL (which collectively fetched $1.4 billion when they were sold), was able to raise $320 million in funding from the likes of Goldman Sachs, 3i Group, Generation Partners, Oak Investment Partners and Spectrum Equity Investors. That big slug of cash has not only helped Demand grow and scale its business, but to build a proprietary back-end system that’s become its secret sauce.

How Demand Media Works

The system allows the company to calculate the average cost per click of a particular search query and multiply it by the likely traffic in order to figure out how many dollars it would bring in over a period of five years. That gross revenue is then divvied up amongst the people who work on the creation of a related piece of content, including those who write the copy, fact-check and copyedit it. Essentially, the data tells Demand what’s a good and valuable piece of content and what’s not. The revenue potential is an overriding factor when it comes to making content decisions.

Such a system, used in combination with a domain registration business its owns, means Demand Media is able to generate content based on what people are searching for on the web. So much so that others — such as the newly independent AOL — have started to imitate his business model.

This approach has come under heavy criticism. Michael Arrington recently wrote:

These models create a race to the bottom situation, where anyone who spends time and effort on their content is pushed out of business. We’re not there yet, but I see it coming. And just as old media is complaining about us, look for us to start complaining about the new jerks.

ReadWriteWeb’s Richard McManus was even more blunt:

I can’t help but think that the rapid rise of these two companies may be bad news for the Web. If a small number of companies come to dominate a content market, usually blandness and lowest common denominator fare follows. The network television and radio markets in almost any country in the world are evidence of that.

Last week, when interviewing him onstage at the Twiist-up conference in LA, I asked Rosenblatt about allegations that his company was flooding the Internet with unwanted content. He dismissed my question with a laugh, saying, “People actually want the information and we are providing it,” he said.

About 2.0

Demand Media, according to Rosenblatt, is not in the news business, but the information business. Think of it as the long-tail version of service journalism. “Did you know that every month 50,000 people search on ways to make detergent at home?” Rosenblatt said. “We create content to answer those [types of] questions.” Some 100,000 pieces of every month, in fact.

What Rosenblatt is doing isn’t anything new. About.com created a network of low-cost, human-curated/generated web sites in the late 1990s and grew to great heights before losing its way. One of the reasons why About.com lost its way (after being acquired by The New York Times) was because it never developed a way to bottle the search genie.

Yet the approach taken by About.com has only become more relevant as our world has become more complex. And rather than look to just our friends for answers to questions on everything from how to set up a TiVo to buying art to filing for bankruptcy, we ask Google, Facebook and Twitter. A lot of this information is not available via traditional media sources.

A Content Factory or Not?

Rosenblatt bristles at the idea that he’s running a content factory, noting the Demand works with over 5,000 writers –many of whom are old media reporters — and has about 650 copy editors. Such an arsenal is bigger, he claimed, than “the three biggest publishing companies,” adding that he was hiring at a time when big media companies have been laying off people.

Writers can make anywhere from $15 to $1,000 for a piece of content. While some have alleged that Demand pays its freelancers next to nothing, Rosenblatt said that the people who make very little money spend very little time creating that content.

Demand already has over 500 employees; it did sales of over $200 million last year and is profitable. And 2010 promises to be even better, thanks to the return of online advertising dollars. When I asked him if the company would go public in 2010, however, he dodged the question. But if the current growth rate of Demand continues, I wouldn’t be surprised to soon see it try to raise capital on the public markets.

Kill the Old News Business

In his opinion, the newspaper business as it stands today needs to die and the industry needs to re-invent itself as an Internet-centric one. “News that is 12-24 hours old just doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Consumers don’t want their content that way.” He dismissed The Los Angeles Times as “public service” and not “a business, because it cannot make money by doing what they are doing.” He thinks some billionaire should buy the paper and run it as a philanthropy. Ouch!

And what would he do with the LA Times, if given the chance? He was quick to answer: He would outsource most of the generic content creation to companies such as Demand Media, stop distributing the paper version of the publication and go all-digital. And he’d put in place an advertising strategy around content that people want. For instance, articles about hiking should attract an advertiser like REI. As for the truly important content — the news — he thinks that newspapers should focus all their resources on higher-end investigative journalism.

When I asked him what he thought of new devices such as the iPad and their impact on content, Rosenblatt said that “the iPad is symptomatic of what’s going on” because it shows that there are now even more new ways of consuming content. “Consumption on different devices is very exciting.”

Photo of Richard Rosenblatt by Jim Alden via Flickr.com/Techfrog

While Apple and AT&T have started allowing VoIP apps on the iPhone to use the 3G data network, it seems like the big kahuna, Skype, is staying away from making any such move for now, arguing it wants to wait till it can give decent audio performance. From the Skype blog:

You may have seen other apps offering calls over 3G, but we’re holding ours back for a little bit longer. Why? So that we can give you the very best audio quality we can. When our 3G-capable Skype for iPhone app is released, it’ll let you make calls in wideband audio, giving you greater clarity and fidelity – because that’s what you expect from Skype.

In other words, don’t expect Skype to offer a version that allows calls over 3G in the near term, though the company had made it abundantly clear that it will be releasing a 3g version of the app . We had earlier pointed out that Skype over 3G wasn’t working.

Earlier this year, thanks to our friends Andy Abramson and Pat Phelan, we offered up an alternative theory about VoIP over 3G : “The voice-over-3G experience is so bad, it makes sense for Apple, AT&T and others to not even bother with VoIP over 3G.” Skype it seems is merely agreeing with that alternative theory and making sure that its app actually works as expected over 3G connections.

Skype is also looking at developing a version of Skype for the Apple iPad. As the same blog post notes:

Last Thursday, Apple introduced the iPad, which we’re very excited about here at Skype. David Ponsford, who features in the video above, and his team are reviewing the device and its specs, and you can expect to hear more from us about Skype for iPad in due course. What does this have to do with calling over 3G? The SDK (Software Development Kit) which Apple provides to developers like Skype has been upgraded for the iPad. The new version, 3.2, removes the restrictions on calling over 3G, which is great news.