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When it comes to online fashion and large digital brands, it seems social shopping might have hit a plateau. It’s pretty standard now for companies like Amazon or Nordstrom to display products along with buttons for sharing to Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. Products might have reviews and photo galleries, or the company might have its own blog.

But beyond that? There isn’t much social activity happening on most of those larger sites.

I sat down with the team at Zappos Labs last week to talk about the future of online shopping. It’s not like Zappos is struggling to find shoppers, but the company’s leadership clearly understands that as the world moves more toward social media adoption, there must be ways to use social to boost sales and improve the shopping experience.

“It’s hard for us to think of new ways to shop when people are keeping the lights on of a 2 billion dollar e-commerce site,” said Will Young, director of Zappos Labs. But social media for large e-commerce sites is tricky. ”For a lot of people, they just want their shoes overnight. And they want free returns.”

So where is a team like Zappos looking for inspiration?

Young immediately pointed to sites like Poshmark or Pinterest as having built strong communities around liking and sharing particular items. I’ve written about Poshmark before, and there’s no doubt users are engaged on the platform, but it’s unclear how many people are actually turning those likes into purchases. Wish lists do not always turn into shopping lists, even if the engagement is strong, although some sites like Wanelo are trying to change this.

And then Young pointed out that you have sites like Modcloth or Lululemon or NastyGal, which have built notoriously passionate communities of shoppers around fairly niche products, and turned those shoppers into sales. But those companies have very clearly-defined products and target audiences.

But for Zappos or Nordstrom or Amazon, who can’t just settle for targeting one specific demographic, like young women? They need to figure out if they can grab any of the social elements these other sites are using so well, and then apply them to a broader audience.

“If our main goal was just to do sales, we’d just be creating coupon applications,” Young said, noting that Zappos Labs is dedicated to understanding how people shop. “That’s one of our big challenges. Which is, how how do we put social only in front of people who care about it? Building communities is tough when we’re so wide.”

So what has Zappos come up with so far? The company has tried out a Pinterest recommendation engine that was fairly hit or miss in terms of the products it suggested, but they said it had enough positive reactions that they’re looking to improve it. They’re also trying out a site called Glance that shows curated groups of items around particular themes that users can like and save, since discovery on a site like Zappos that has so many products can be a challenge. And the company has experimented with collecting all the tweets about individual products to serve as a sort of crowdsourced Twitter review.

Young pointed out that for the majority of the company’s shoppers, getting them into the idea of social shopping at all can be tricky.

For most of our customers, “they’re on Facebook. They’re probably on Twitter,” he said. “But when they come to a site like Zappos they don’t always want to link their Facebook account or anything. They might like our fan page, but how do we create a social experience for those users?”

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Apple’s having yet another services problem and this time it’s affecting one of the core features of iOS devices: iMessage. Since about noon Pacific Time, both Apple’s messaging service and its video chat feature, FaceTime, have been experiencing problems, according to Apple’s Systems Status page.

One thing that’s not clear is how many users are experiencing the problem — many times the status page will identify a percentage. Anecdotally, I know both me and some of my colleagues on the West Coast have had issues with iMessages sending as text messages and coming in out of order, and Twitter users from a variety of areas are complaining.

While some people may be moderately annoyed by a FaceTime outage, iMessage problems are another story. Messaging is one of the most popular and important features for mobile devices. Sure, text messages can be a backup, but people using iPad or an iPod touch without a data plan don’t have that option. And even for those with a cellular plan that comes with texting, some people are having those come in out of order (“it’s the worst,” a colleague informs me).

Any company can have a services or cloud outage — many do. But for Apple, a company with a history of problems with services and its cloud-based platform in general, today’s outage is yet another reminder of how much work it has to do.

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Remember FLO TV? Qualcomm’s mobile broadcast TV service went live in 2007, promising to deliver digital video content to mobile phones all over the country. The network was supposed to be a proof-of-concept on the grandest scale, generating enthusiasm for Qualcomm’s proprietary MediaFLO multicast technology across the globe. The reality turned out to be much different.

No one seemed interested in paying a subscription fee for TV programming they already got at home. Nor were they interested in buying the special MediaFLO phones necessary to receive that broadcast signal. After limping along for three years, Qualcomm shut it down in 2010 and eventually sold its spectrum to AT&T.

Now Qualcomm is back on the live TV bandwagon, beating the drum over a new video and data multicast technology called LTE-broadcast. Recently I had a chance to catch up with Neville Meijers, VP of business development for Qualcomm, and I asked him the obvious: Didn’t Qualcomm learn its lesson with FLO TV?

Meijers readily acknowledged that FLO TV was a failure, but he claimed it wasn’t a failure of technology. Nor did Qualcomm misidentify the demand for live video content, he said. “At the end of the day it came down to economics,” Meijers concluded.

Why FLO didn’t flow

FLO TV failed for many reasons, but the biggest one was the huge ecosystem every participating player had to buy into to make the whole thing work. FLO required specialty chipsets, and thus specialty devices. It required new spectrum and a new network, and it even necessitated the negotiation of content rights to redistribute any program being broadcast. Those are huge hurdles to overcome, requiring big investments from both carrier and consumer.

If FLO had been a cheap service that you could use over any phone, then it could have worked, but the argument is moot, Meijers said. Qualcomm isn’t trying to recreate FLO TV with a new technology. Instead, Meijers said, Qualcomm views LTE-broadcast as a different kind of service proposition altogether: a means of easing congestion on carriers’ mobile data networks to make all kinds of streamed multimedia content more accessible and cheaper for consumers.

Unlike MediaFLO, LTE-broadcast doesn’t require new phones and new networks, and it uses standards-based, not proprietary, technology. What that means is carriers will be able to use their existing LTE infrastructure and spectrum through hardware upgrades for broadcast and future generations of radio chipsets will automatically support the feature.

What’s more, implementing LTE-broadcast doesn’t mean sacrificing capacity on the regular LTE network, Meijers said. If the network isn’t broadcasting content — or if no one in a cell is watching that content — it simply reverts to its normal unicast LTE state. For those reasons operators are much more enthusiastic about LTE-broadcast than they were in MediaFLO’s dedicated network model. The first trial networks will show up this year, but we won’t see LTE-broadcast on a meaningful scale until 2014, Meijers said.

What can you do with a broadcast network?

If LTE-broadcast was just about live TV, it probably wouldn’t work. As I wrote in January, there just aren’t that many live TV events that would get multiple users on the same cell all watching the same program — the Superbowl, the Oscars and the State of Union Address don’t happen every day.

But Meijers said that there is a lot of content beyond video that carriers or third-party content providers can ship to multiple phones simultaneously. For instance, instead of having each phone individually downloading app, device firmware, OS updates; operators could ship a updates in a gigantic batches to all users. Take a widely used app like Facebook — an update to its iOS software could hit hundreds of devices in the same cell simultaneously, eating up a fraction of the cell’s bandwidth.

LTE-broadcast could also be used to provide unique content at specific locations, Meijers said. At a football game, for instance, all of the cells serving the stadium could feature live video from every TV camera pointed at the field.

And while FLO TV may have failed, carriers are still interested in other video models, Meijer said. Instead of trying to convince customers to watch TV on a schedule, carriers could turn phones into miniature DVRs. At set times of the day they would broadcast programming, whether its popular YouTube videos or HBO’s Game of Thrones, which your phone could then would scoop out of the air and store for later viewing – if you have a subscription, of course.

“There are operators that have close alliances with television providers, particularly overseas,” Meijers said. “They want to offer over-the-top video services of their own.”

Right now watching an entire season of Game of Thrones streamed to your tablet over a mobile network is prohibitively expensive given the amount of data you would consume. But what if HBO paid Verizon Wireless to broadcast every new series episode to all of its HBO Go subscribers when the show aired each week? Since the program is broadcast to millions of devices simultaneously and then recorded in memory, it would cost Verizon little in network resources. That would allow it to exempt what would normally be gigabytes of data from its monthly data caps. Now that’s a compelling case for LTE-broadcast.

TVs photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Peter Sobolev

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First Solar is buying an under-the-radar startup called TetraSun to add expertise around silicon solar cell manufacturing to its technology portfolio, which until now has focused on using the material cadmium telluride to make solar cells.

The Arizona-based thin film solar giant announced the pending acquisition on Tuesday during its analyst day — its first since 2009 — in which it laid out a persuasive technology and business development plan for the next five years. Investors liked what they heard and pushed the company’s stock up by nearly 50 percent during trading.

The announcement also came after the company’s top executives spent the entire day taking shots at silicon solar technology, which they said hasn’t been able to make a big leap in its sunlight-to-electricity conversion rate for years and is approaching the theoretical limit of its efficiency. First Solar’s bread and butter cadmium telluride, on the other hand, has a higher theoretical efficiency limit, and First Solar has shifted its businesses focus from building large factories to make panels with cadmium-telluride cells to developing more efficient panels, said CEO Jim Hughes during the event.

Who is TetraSun?

So why TetraSun? Apparently Silicon Valley-based TetraSun has some disruptive silicon cell designs that set it apart from the rest of the silicon solar companies. Its designs require fewer manufacturing steps to produce conventional silicon cells, and eliminates the need for silver and transparent conductive oxide. Silver is used to transport electricity produced by the cells, while the oxide is a coating that protects the cells and helps the semiconductor material (such as silicon or cadmium telluride) to grab the light more effectively to produce electricity.

First Solar claims that TetraSun’s cells also can perform better in hot climates than conventional silicon cells. That feature will make solar panels with TetraSun’s cells more desirable in places like the Middle East and India, two markets with a lot of potentials for growth. First Solar says it plans to start making TetraSun’s cells in the second half of 2014.

First Solar believes TetraSun’s technology could produce cells at an over 21 percent efficiency at a cost that is comparable to the expense of making conventional — yet less efficient– silicon solar cells. Most silicon cells today have efficiencies in the mid-teens. SunPower stands out in its ability to make silicon cells at nearly 23 percent, but the company uses a more expensive type of silicon and has its own special cell designs to achieve that high efficiency.

TetraSun has been quiet about its technology development, and its website is just a landing page. Its name did show up as a recipient of a U.S. Department of Energy grant, announced back in January 2010.

First Solar is buying TetraSun from JX Nippon Oil & Energy Corp. and other investors, and it expects to complete the acquisition in the second quarter of 2013. It’s not disclosing the price for the acquisition.

First Solar also talking to JX Nippon about selling solar panels with TetraSun’s cells in Japan, which has become a hot market since the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster in March 2011 prompted the government to offer generous subsidies for renewable energy generation.

An efficiency play

First Solar previously used its manufacturing scale and efficient production process to roll out solar panels more quickly than its competitors. That enabled First Solar to sell its panels at a much lower price even though the panels weren’t as efficient. But the plummeting prices for silicon, which is used in the majority of the solar panels made today, has eroded that pricing advantage for First Solar and prompted the company to focus on improving its solar panels’ efficiency. More efficient solar panels could fetch higher prices because they allow developers to build a same-size power plant with less land.

But First Solar apparently doesn’t want to rely on just one semiconductor material for its solar panels. It once worked on developing solar panels with copper, indium, gallium and selenium (CIGS), but it scrapped that program over a year ago. Supposedly the decision to ditch that effort came partly because First Solar was posting losses and looking for ways to cut costs. The company’s chief technology officer, Raffi Garabedian, told analysts on Tuesday that CIGS technology has taken the most private and public funding, yet it still isn’t likely be able to deliver the big efficiency improvements that cadmium telluride can over time.

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Those who can’t wait until Friday to get Facebook Home on their Android handset can get a similar, but limited, experience now. Widdit, the maker of an Android home screen customization tool called HomeBase, quickly whipped up HomeBase Social, a Facebook Home lookalike that works on any Android 2.2 or better phone. Facebook Home will initially be limited to a half-dozen phones.

I’m not too surprised that we already have a Facebook Home clone of sorts. Even with all the hoopla of last week’s Facebook event, Facebook Home in its current state is still little more than a custom launcher for Android. These types of skins have been around for a few years now. Sure, Facebook Home has Chat Heads, which is a nifty approach to messaging, and you won’t find that in HomeBase Social.

Instead, you get full-screen Facebook status updates and pictures on your Android’s home screen, although unlike the official Facebook launcher, you can’t like a status. HomeBase Social also provides one touch lock screen access to up to five apps of your choice and your camera. You can also add custom screens and widgets to have the launcher look the way you want.

The launcher is a little buggy on my Galaxy Note 2, so I don’t think I’ll keep it installed. It’s still a limited subset of what Facebook Home will provide. My Note 2 will be officially supported on Friday, anyway. However, Widdit gives you a nice idea of what Facebook Home will look like on your own phone while also showing off their custom launcher product.

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Though Apple (AAPL) still can’t catch a break on Wall Street, the company may surprise us all later this month when it reports iPhone sales figures for the second fiscal quarter. Canaccord Genuity analyst Mike Walkley believes Apple sold more iPhones than he previously expected during the March quarter, and he adjusted his full-year EPS estimates to $43.86 from $43.59 as a result. The analyst now sees Apple selling 37 million iPhones in the March quarter, up from his earlier estimate of 34.5 million, ValueWalk reports. But strong performance from the flagship iPhone 5 wasn’t the reason for Walkley’s adjustment — the analyst lowered his ASP estimate to $601 from $651, reflecting a higher mix of iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S models and further supporting the notion that Apple would be well-served by launching an entry-level iPhone. Walkley reiterated his Buy rating on Apple shares with a $600 price target.

We’ve been writing a fair bit lately about “native” advertising or sponsored content, including a recent post about BuzzFeed’s challenges in relying on that as a business model. But as former Forbes.com founder David Churbuck points out in a recent essay, this phenomenon is about a lot more than just traditional publishers trying to adapt to what advertisers want in terms of content — it’s about brands and advertisers literally becoming publishers themselves.

Churbuck, who helped create Forbes.com and later went on to work with McKinsey, was responding to a piece in the New York Times about the increase in sponsored content, and how it is being used in different ways by publishers like BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, Mashable and Forbes — a piece that includes some pointed criticism of the trend from blogger Andrew Sullivan (Note: We’ll be discussing this and other issues around publishing at paidContent Live on April 17)

As Churbuck points out, this focus on how sponsored content is being used by existing publishers ignores a much more disruptive force, which is brands using the same tools to “go direct,” as blogging pioneer Dave Winer has described it — something we at GigaOM and paidContent have been writing about for some time now. Says Churbuck:

“The Times missed the bigger trend: marketers going direct to their prospective buyers by becoming their own publishers, producing their own media and using professional editorial placements only to rent names, just as marketers have been renting circulation lists for decades to drive their direct mail campaigns.”

Cheap tools and an oversupply of talent

The former Forbes executive goes on to detail some of the examples of this broader phenomenon that have been growing and evolving for some time, including brand “newsrooms” such as the ones that Intel and Cisco manage — which in many cases consist of unbranded content about technology that looks indistinguishable from any other tech blog. Churbuck also mentions:

• Branded partner-produced content: These are sites that get produced in partnership with a media company, such as Intel’s “Creators Project,” which is a joint venture with Vice. Another brand that is producing its own Vice-style content is Red Bull.
• Brand magazines: As Churbuck notes, in the past advertisers like IBM or the Four Seasons hotel chain would hire the “custom publishing” arm of media companies like Forbes or Fortune to produce an advertorial magazine, but now they can easily create their own.
• The talent exodus: Senior writers and editors have been moving from traditional media to content-related positions at non-media companies — Churbuck mentions Fortune’s Rik Kirkland going to McKinsey to edit the McKinsey Quarterly and oversee the firm’s editorial strategy, Steve Hamm of Businessweek going to IBM, and Dan Lyons leaving Read/Write Web to join HubSpot.

Ignoring this phenomenon is not a strategy

As Churbuck notes, the driving force behind this trend is the desire to reach customers and potential customers directly and engage with them, and producing their own content allows them to “cut out the editorial middle-man.” It also allows them to be more agile and effective when crisis strikes, he says. And most importantly, he argues that trying to remain above the fray and not even experiment with sponsored content is a head-in-the-sand approach:

“They will either produce the content as a service to the corporate advertiser or see their former editors and reporters get hired away to do it under the more stable umbrella of a big organization with deep pockets. That the press is now selling the opportunity to publish corporate content next to their own reporting is a foregone conclusion. Hand wringing and saying one is ethically ‘aghast’ is the personification of the cliché, ‘pride goeth before the fall.’”

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Goodluz

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It’s one thing to monitor social statements on Twitter and other social networks as they happen. It’s another thing to predict what will happen over the next three days.

Blab, a Seattle-based company, has emerged with a tool that lets companies do just that, with visualizations of where conversations will pop up from more than 50,000 sources, including Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and news outlets. It does this by paying close attention to where a conversation is now and then predicting based on what other conversations it could look like. For example, if people started talking about a previous Amazon Web Services outage on Twitter and then the conversation moved to blogs and then to mainstream media outlets, that same pattern could happen in the case of another AWS outage. That’s why measuring the trajectory of each conversation and storing it for future reference is critical to Blab’s operations.

Blab also shows the top three influencers of a given conversation. Comments from more influential people can help Blab identify what the dominant ideas will be around a particular topic. Following Hugo Chavez’s death, for example, customers could have seen that the Bolivarian Revolution was going to turn out to be the hottest area of discussion.

The Blab tool shows the probability and confidence of its predictions, so customers can get a sense of certainty. Possible use cases include updating advertisements and press releases with keywords and ideas to reflect forthcoming trends and get better results.

Predictive analytics and modeling have already become popular. Now companies are thinking up new ways to make predictions based on unstructured data that businesses can get a hold of, and that’s where Blab fits in. There’s also PredPol, which predicts where crime will happen, so police officers can focus on specific areas, and MindMeld, which offers up information that could be useful based on your speech. Researchers have also been trying to gain insights on possible medical treatments and, yes, social-media trends.

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WASHINGTON D.C. — IER President Thomas Pyle published an opinion piece today on National Journal’s energy expert blog in response to the question, “Is the Keystone XL Pipeline Too Risky.” Pyle, a frequent contributor to the expert blog, notes in …

Oak Hill Investment Management has completed a spin-out from The Robert M. Bass/Oak Hill organization and is now called Jasper Ridge Partners. Robert M. Bass will continue to own a minority stake in Japser Ridge, a statement says. Jasper Ridge manages roughly $10 billion across asset classes including private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, real estate, natural resources, public equity and fixed income.

PRESS RELEASE

Jasper Ridge Partners is the new name of Oak Hill Investment Management. Jasper Ridge ‘s founding managing partners originally joined the Robert M. Bass/Oak Hill organization in 1995, began managing external capital for successful entrepreneurs in 1996 and subsequently formed Oak Hill Investment Management. The new Jasper Ridge Partners name reflects the evolution and expansion of the firm’s activities and its spin-out from the Bass/Oak Hill organization. Jasper Ridge Partners will continue to provide discretionary investment management services and customized solutions to prominent families, foundations and global institutions.
(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130409/LA90449LOGO)
“The announcement of our new name strengthens our positioning as a fully discretionary manager operating independently of Mr. Bass and other Oak Hill entities. We are enormously appreciative of our heritage with the Bass/Oak Hill organization, and are pleased to have Mr. Bass as our ongoing partner in the firm,” said Jamie Alexander of Jasper Ridge Partners.
The firm became majority owned by its investment professionals in 2008. Robert M. Bass will continue to own his minority stake in Jasper Ridge Partners.
“Our new offices in Menlo Park offer a beautiful view of Jasper Ridge , which lies among the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. This area is also the home of the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve,” observed Mark Wolfson of Jasper Ridge Partners. “The principles of a preserve – the safeguarding and fostering of precious resources – are the same principles we will continue to apply to all of our work on behalf of our clients.”
In a letter to its clients announcing the firm’s re-launch, Jasper Ridge Partners noted that its clients will continue to receive the firm’s services in the same highly personal and professional manner which has been the hallmark of its business model.
About Jasper Ridge Partners
Jasper Ridge Partners provides discretionary investment management services and customized solutions to prominent families, foundations and global institutions. Jasper Ridge Partners manages approximately $10 billion across all major asset classes, including private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, real estate, natural resources, public equity and fixed income. Jasper Ridge ‘s founding managing partners originally joined the Robert M. Bass/Oak Hill organization in 1995, began managing external capital for successful entrepreneurs in 1996 and subsequently formed Oak Hill Investment Management, which became majority owned by its professionals in 2008.

 

The post Oak Hill Investment Management Now Called Jasper Ridge Partners appeared first on peHUB.

Picking up a free app with your morning coffee is about to change, as coffee giant Starbucks announced it’s doing away with redemption cards effective Wednesday. Instead, it’s opting to integrate the long-running “Pick of the Week” promotion directly into its free iOS app.

This switch to digital will see the removal of the cards typically found near cash registers, instead swapping the lengthy codes for a paperless solution. Customers will now need to either connect to the complimentary in-store Wi-Fi, or fire up the Starbucks app and follow the on-screen prompts to download their latest freebie.

Starbucks and Apple first partnered back in 2007 when the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store launched. Initially offering just free music, the promotion soon expanded to offer content from outside iTunes. In 2011, free downloads from both the iBookstore and the App Store were introduced.

Speaking to CNET, Starbucks Chief Digital Officer Adam Brotman explained that the action is a “reflection of Starbucks and Apple working together to strengthen the relationship for customers.” Brotman stated that the company’s apps are now used actively by more than 10 million users, adding that this latest move is just another step in their plan to “integrate more things” into their mobile offering.

To mark the move away from redemption codes the coffee chain is currently giving away for free Rovio’s Angry Birds Star Wars, usually priced at 99 cents.

The established Pick of the Week promotion has presented a great way to get paid apps into the hands of a broad range of customers, which is not only good for Apple as a way promote iOS apps, but also good for Starbucks who gets to give out a freebie with its cup of joe.

Now admittedly, Starbucks choosing to swap the tried-and-tested paper cards for direct downloads is a good move for those regular, more savvy users of the promotion (let alone the environment). Yet it could be argued that the removal of those physical, tangible cards may result in a drop in downloads. Customers could just forget to fire up the app and grab the freebie — the little cards served as a solid call-to-action to at least look at the latest promo item. Let’s hope Starbucks keep some form of in-store promo in place for the downloads, or they may just get forgotten about.

 

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When we last reported on PlayJam’s Gamestick project, they had started to take pre-orders for the $79 device after their successful Kickstarter campaign. Unfortunately, it appears that success has come at a price as PlayJam has announced they have delayed delivery of the Gamestick until June. PlayJam opened their Kickstarter project in January with a goal of $100,000 to be able to start delivering devices in April. However, they ended up pulling in $650,000 via pledges from around 5,700 backers. The Kickstarter fundraising effort was so successful, PlayJam was able to add a goal to provide a fourth color option for buyers. All of the additional units to be produced have resulted in some changes to production and shipping methods. According to PlayJam,

“Initially we had hoped to deliver GameStick to you at the end of April. We now expect to complete mechanical tooling about 4 weeks later at the end of May. Then the units are assembled, tested and assuming there are no issues, packed prior to shipping to each territory. We expect to ship around the 10th June. The volumes are now too large for us to be able to afford to air-freight them, which was our plan, so now we are going to have to use sea freight to deliver them. That’s going to take around 2 weeks. Then we have fulfillment in territory – which we estimate will take between 1 and 5 days depending on where you are located. This means we think the likely date of arrival of your hand crafted GameStick will be at the last week of June.”

Although it is always disappointing to see delays for any product, especially one that has garnered as much interest as the Gamestick, at least backers can take heart that the reason is due to more demand than anticipated instead of a lack of demand.

source: TechCrunch

Come comment on this article: Gamestick delayed, release slated for June

Author/artist/director Clive Barker, who wrote and directed the cult classic Nightbreed (based on his own book, Cabal), has been sharing some rare behind-the-scenes photos from the set of the film on his Facebook Page. Others have posted them, and he (or whoever updates his page, at least) has shared them with his fan base.

(Paul Jones)

(Mark Coulier)

(Fesses de Bouque)

(Nicole Leopoldine Staudigl)

(viscerart)

Recently we looked at some rare behind-the-scenes photos from Hellraiser, which Barker also shared on Facebook.

Holographic Tupac or not, Coachella looks like it will be a blast this year. And if you’re going to be unable to make it this year, and sadly most of us fall into this category, YouTube is offering a small lifeline.

For the third year in a row, YouTube is streaming the entire first weekend of the festival on Coachella’s official YouTube channel.

“Starting this Friday at 3:30 p.m. PT, YouTube’s three-channel feed, which is presented by T-Mobile, will live stream performances from five stages (including, for the first time, the Sahara Tent). You’ll be able to catch artists’ interviews with and live shows from more than 60 bands, including the xx, Passion Pit, Vampire Weekend and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.”

It’s not quite like being there, but hey, it’s something.

Austin may be feeling like one of the luckiest towns in the world today. Not one, but two big name companies have said they plan a gigabit network in the Texas Capital. But, as both Google and AT&T plan their fiber-to-the-home deployment strategies, they are testing plans that look inefficient and might bite consumers in the end. Still, innovation is needed in broadband deployment, so all eyes will be watching Austin.

Ma Bell announced its gigabit plans on Tuesday after Google said it planned to offer its own fiber to the home, gigabit network to the Texas capital.

I got on the phone with Larry Solomon, an AT&T spokesman to get details on the network. Solomon said that AT&T will expand its existing fiber-to-the-node product to “homes and buildings.”

In its release AT&T also said that this expansion wouldn’t “materially affect its capital expenditures for 2013,” which struck me as far-fetched. However, Solomon said, “AT&T spends $20 billion a year on capital expenditures. We don’t expect this year to be materially different.”

In further conversation with Solomon the rationale behind that statement became clear. The time frame here is uncertain and AT&T has learned a thing or two from Google on how to lower the cost of deployment.

AT&T has taken a lesson from Google Fiber

AT&T executives will meet with city and state officials seeking the same concessions that Google is getting in order to build out its network Solomon said. As someone who has followed telecom in Austin, and in Texas, this mostly means the ability to cherry pick where it will deploy its gigabit network. And that points to both the upside and downside of Google’s influence.

I wrote back in July that Google has changed the economics of deploying fiber in part by its strategy of getting people to sign up in advance and then choosing to deploy where demand was greatest. This eliminates the need to pass homes that might not sign up for fiber and also lets Google roll out service to neighborhoods in bulk.

Well, AT&T wants to do something similar. AT&T would like to follow a strategy where communities help drive demand for the gigabit service, Solomon said. When I asked if that means aggregating demand and then serving those communities he said that was something AT&T was interested in.

But there’s a big downside to this plan for the end user and the cities. Having both Google and AT&T trying to convince customers to sign up for their respective gigabit service effectively splits the vote. Solomon didn’t comment on that possibility, but did say AT&T wants to offer competitive pricing and build offers around wireless and other AT&T products. Google hasn’t announced pricing for its services in Austin yet, but in Kansas City a gigabit costs $70 a month and a gigabit plus TV costs $120 per month. I’ve covered AT&T’s comparable pricing in Austin here.

Two fiber networks may not be what we want — or even need.

Which brings me to my larger issue with our broadband strategy in the U.S. — the lack of a plan for delivering real wireline competition. If AT&T gets its way with city and state officials and goes head to head with Google in the neighborhoods, we’re looking at what could become — at best — a network buildout in areas where people own their own homes (Google had to develop special programs for attracting landlords to commit, which made Google Fiber in low-income areas a tougher sell) and already know they want a gigabit. At worst, neighbors who are split between Google or AT&T will not meet the threshold to get a buildout, and no one gets a gig.

And frankly, it’s dumb that both AT&T and Google might spent dollars building out fiber to the home in the same neighborhoods. Will streets get torn up twice? Will your broadband provider be determined for the life of your home based on the decisions that occur during a few pre-determined fiber sign-up periods?

A better option for Austin, and what could potentially become a model for communities everywhere, would be if Google and AT&T decide to work together to lay conduit (basically pipe in which anyone could run fiber) in areas where people want the service. When I asked Solomon about this possibility he said, “I wouldn’t rule out anything, but I wouldn’t include it either.”

However, he then pointed out that with its Android operating system, Google is not just a competitor on the fiber front, but also a partner. “Google provides the operating system for a lot of devices we sell, so in that sense Google is an indirect partner and great company. We have a lot respect for Google.”

Is the new gigabit future?

For better or worse AT&T is coming to Austin to seek the same opportunity that Google has. It wants to get city officials to let it roll out a fiber-to-the-home, gigabit network in a way that lowers AT&T’s deployment costs and allows it to put fiber exactly where people say they want it. And it is happy to take this plan on the road to other places in the U.S.

“We will sit down and work with any community that allows us to reach an agreement that allows us to accelerate our telecommunications investment,” Solomon said. “

As for timing on AT&T, Solomon says that once AT&T has its agreements from the city it plans a similar style of announcement to the one Google hosted in Austin today. “We have been looking at this for some time and seeing the Google announcement is obviously a sign that is encouraging,” Solomon said. “That telecom companies and Google or whomever can work with city officials to get policies in place to see regulations and costs lowered to speed up the infrastructure is good.”

I’m not so sure this is the best way for gigabit networks to be constructed. It is clearly less efficient than laying conduit — although in the U.S. the question of who would take on that investment has rested in the hands of private companies. There are very real questions and worries about how and when all parts of a community would be served. Google faced some of that scrutiny in Kansas City when lower-income neighborhoods weren’t signing up quickly enough, but eventually said that it would roll out fiber to 90 percent of eligible neighborhoods.

However, the telecom industry has needed innovation to get it to faster speeds, and this is clearly an innovative way to try to expand network access and upgrade the infrastructure. So instead of simply getting a gig, it looks like Austin may get a whole lot more. A starring role in the battle to bring innovation and faster speeds to the broadband industry. I just hope it’s one that consumers win.

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Pulling out a gun, even a fake one, within sight of the president of the United States is a sure-fire way to get arrested, and a probable way to ensure an even worse outcome. Luckily for one man who pulled out a BB gun near President Obama this week, the incident did not end with Secret Service agents gunning him down.

According to an Associated Press report, a man in Bloomfield, Connecticut pulled out a rifle-sized BB gun on Monday as the presidential motorcade passed by. President Obama had just given a speech about gun control at the University of Hartford, and was on the way back to Bradley International Airport to board Air Force One.

The man was reportedly pacing back and forth while acting suspicious. He was arrested by police as soon as he pulled out the gun. The man’s name has not been released, though he was scheduled for a court hearing in Hartford on Tuesday.

Hartford is less than 50 miles from the site of the Newtown mass shooting that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School last December.

During the reveal of the new Uprising map pack for Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Treyarch revealed a new zombie mode called Mob of the Dead. The new scenario takes place in Alcatraz as zombies take over the infamous prison.

Interestingly enough, Treyarch will be attempting to make its zombie mode more of a psychological horror game this time around, instead of the tower defense/survival gameplay of past zombie modes.

Mob of the Dead will be available on Xbox Live first as part of the Uprising map pack on April 16.

The annual Webby Award nominations are in, and we are thrilled to see our name in this incredibly fascinating mix multiple times. TED has been nominated for six awards – “Online Film & Video: Variety,” “Variety (Channel),” “Events & Live Webcasts,” “Social: Education & Discovery,” “Mobile & Apps: Podcasts,” and “Mobile & Apps: Best Use of Mobile Video.” Meanwhile, TED-Ed has been nominated for “Websites: Education” and “Websites: Best Practices.” And TEDxAmsterdam’s interactive brain, which captured conversations as the event unfolded, has been nominated for “Website: Events.” 

Also exciting: on Monday night, TED’s own Thaniya Keereepart accepted the Shorty Award for “Best Branded YouTube Channel.” The Shorty Awards honor the best in social media, and require all acceptance speeches to be less than 140 characters. Here is ours:

“Spreading ideas takes more than just Twitter. You need a community. Translators! TEDxers! TEDsters: This is for you!”