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Flipboard CEO McCue Likely to Step Down From Twitter Board Over Potential Future Conflicts (Or Closer Cooperation)

Kara Swisher — Mon, 07 May 2012 20:37:24 +0000

According to sources close to the situation, Flipboard co-founder and CEO Mike McCue has approached Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and co-founder Jack Dorsey about moving off the board of Twitter.

It is not clear when McCue — who became a director of the San Francisco social communications company in late 2010 — will step down, but it could come soon.

The reason, sources said, is McCue’s growing feeling that the companies are on a product collision course, with a possible troubled or perhaps more attractive result.

In other words, Flipboard will either face increasing rivalry from Twitter or will end up as a possible acquisition target for it or other companies.

“How users consume and use Twitter is a key part of its future, and that is what Flipboard does well already,” said one person with knowledge of the situation. “There is going to be an inevitable crossroads for the two companies.”

Indeed, Twitter has bought several companies that help users read and discover, such as Summify.

The goal has been to better make sense of the massive amount of data that the service produces daily; to that end, Twitter has pushed to improve its user interface design on a number of devices.

And Twitter is a big part of Flipboard’s app, which is very dependent on the tweet feed and accounts for 70 percent of its links, sources said.

Flipboard is also more of a “mobile first” company, which is where Twitter is also headed even more aggressively.

Already popular on the Apple iPad, Flipboard launched its iPhone app late last year and it is prepping a version for Google Android soon.

That’s why, in addition to being a rival, it is also an obvious acquisition target for Twitter, as well as others such as Yahoo and Microsoft.

In fact, Google already tried to buy it last year, before Flipboard did a massive $50 million fundraising round that valued it at $200 million.

Its investors include Insight Venture Partners, Comcast’s venture arm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures and a spate of well known angels, such as Dorsey, Facebook co-founder and Asana dude Dustin Moskovitz, Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin.

Co-founded by longtime entrepreneur McCue (Netscape, Tellme) and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll, Flipboard launched to much attention in mid 2010.

Its innovative social magazine concept is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via its rich app.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from media RSS feeds and sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate personalized format.

Google has mounted a competitor, called Currents, as has Yahoo with its Livestand offering, neither of which have gotten much traction. In fact, sources said, Yahoo is likely to shut Livestand down completely.

There have also been a spate of other similar readers, such as Pulse and Zite.

Spokespersons for both Flipboard and Twitter politely declined comment.

Exclusive: Flipboard Confirms $50 Million Funding at $200 Million Valuation

Kara Swisher — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 20:23:12 +0000

Late last month, BoomTown posted about a huge venture funding effort by the high-profile and even more highly designed social media reading app for the Apple iPad, Flipboard.

Today, its co-founder and CEO Mike McCue confirmed the $50 million round at an eye-popping $200 million valuation, in a wide-ranging interview at the start-up’s Palo Alto, Calif., HQ.

“We’re obviously thrilled, because we think it confirms our focus that people want a beautifully designed way to interact with content and to share it,” he said. “And there is a lot more to come–on a scale of one to 10, we’re just at a two or three.”

The bulk of the new second round of funding–Flipboard had previously raised $10.5 million–came from New York-based Insight Venture Partners.

Insight’s Jerry Murdock said in an interview that he was excited about the idea of “social endorsement” that Flipboard was pioneering.

“We back great entrepreneurs and Flipboard is that and also in an obviously unique position to solve a problem of media consumption in the digital age,” he said. “The sky is the limit. Or more precisely it is the best environment to consume curated real-time content for Twitter and Facebook, because of the user experience and social endorsement integration with the content.”

Insight is also an investor in Twitter.

Also stepping up in the new Flipboard round is Comcast’s venture arm, as well as previous investors, including Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures and a spate of well known angels, such as Twitter co-founder and product guru Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder and Asana dude Dustin Moskovitz, the ubiquitous Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin.

“From a Comcast perspective, we’re intrigued with Mike and what he’s doing with content aggregation,” said Amy Banse, Comcast Interactive Capital’s new head. “We think we can learn from him and he from us.”

Co-founded by longtime entrepreneur McCue (Netscape, Tellme) and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll in January, Flipboard launched to much attention in July.

The elegant Flipboard–which McCue recently told me in an onstage interview at the South by Southwest conference in Austin had zero revenues thus far–has changed the game on the consumption of social media.

Its innovative social magazine concept is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via its rich app.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from media RSS feeds and sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate, personalized format in a mobile tablet touchscreen environment.

In its current offering, there are pull-quotes, photos, videos, status updates and even the first paragraphs of linked-out content. There is also the ability to comment and share, as if one were on a social networking or microblogging site.

McCue said the new giant pile of cash will be used to increase its 32-person staff to about 50, international expansion, small acquisitions and more product development on more platforms.

The next in the arena will be the iPhone version of Flipboard, said McCue, followed by one for the Google Android mobile operating system eventually.

Left unsaid, of course, was the need for funding to fight the likelihood of increased competition in the hot space for delivering both professional and social content to consumers on a wide range of devices.

Rivals are varied, such as Silicon Valley’s most adorable news reader start-up Pulse and also Zite, a news reader which was recently sued for copyright infringement by a group of major publishers.

There are bigger potential players, such as Google, which is trying to find various ways to move into the social space.

In fact, said several sources, Google and others have made acquisition approaches to Flipboard, which has instead opted for raising more funding and staying independent for now.

McCue declined to talk about that, but did note that he is not surprised by publisher interest, especially of the worried and wary kind, in the arena.

“Anyone not respectful of others’ content is going to get in that kind of trouble,” he said, noting Flipboard has struck deals with 17 big publishers so far, including this morning’s announcement about a partnership with Oprah Winfrey’s and Discovery’s OWN cable network. “There is not one half to this equation.”

Right now, the Flipboard app is free and the business plan is advertising and some possible subscription scenarios.

McCue said advertising will be the key to Flipboard’s business plan in the future, although it’s not clear if the company will ever sell advertising itself.

Rather, it will partner with publishers seeking better distribution in the explosive tablet and smartphone market, where Flipboard has been gaining traction quickly.

But until that is sorted out, there is now $50 million more in the Flipboard kitty to figure it all out.

“With this funding, we can grow at the right pace and have a lot of flexibility to get the product right,” said McCue. “And, that’s the most important thing.”

Pretty Flipboard Fundraising at an Even Prettier $200 Million Valuation

Kara Swisher — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 14:15:12 +0000

Flipboard, the high-profile and highly designed social media reading app for the Apple iPad, is out raising another round of funding at an eye-popping $200 million valuation, according to numerous sources close to the situation.

The Palo Alto, CA, company declined to comment on its new funding efforts, which sources said had recently accelerated.

While that valuation might change, several sources considering the investment said it is unlikely to go down in the current frothy financing market in Silicon Valley, especially given Flipboard’s splashy profile and top-drawer pedigree.

Co-founded by longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mike McCue and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll in January, Flipboard launched to much attention in July.

That included $10.5 million in venture funding from Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures and a spate of well known angel investors, such as Twitter Co-founder Jack Dorsey, Facebook Co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, the ubiquitous Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin.

At the time, it was unclear what Flipboard’s valuation was. But now, said several sources, it’s clocking in at a hefty $200 million, which is perhaps no surprise at a time of increasingly lofty investments in tech start-ups.

Suddenly, Foursquare’s $95 million valuation seems like a bargain! (Sorry, Dennis Crowley, for comparing you to the Kool-Aid pitcher dude.)

In any case, the elegant Flipboard–which McCue recently told me in an onstage interview at the South by Southwest conference in Austin had zero revenues thus far–has changed the game on the consumption of social media.

Its innovative social magazine concept is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via its rich app.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate, personalized format in a mobile tablet touchscreen environment.

In this offering, there are pull quotes, photos, videos, status updates and even the first paragraphs of linked-out content. There is also the ability to comment and share, as if one were on Twitter or Facebook.

Flipboard has since added a number of features and will be launching its new iPhone app later this year.

Right now, the Flipboard app is free and the business plan is advertising and some possible subscription scenarios.

It will be interesting to see who will jump into this leader in a nascent market, besides its current investors. Sources said one likely target group for Flipboard could be a large traditional media company.

Until the financial dust settles, here is the video of an onstage interview by the Digital Solution’s Katherine Boehret with McCue at the All Things Digital event, D: Dive Into Mobile, in December:

[ See post to watch video ]

(Full disclosure: ATD is part of Flipboard’s publisher beta program.)

Former Apple and PopCap Engineer Launches App to Make iPhone Camera Useful

Liz Gannes — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 17:12:23 +0000

A new app called VisualList offers a simple but natural extension of the iPhone’s camera, allowing users to organize and remember things by taking a picture of them.

Many of us already pull out our smartphone to take a quick photo to document a shopping list, the diagrams on a whiteboard or the contents of a moving box. It’s just quicker and more informative than writing things down.

VisualList isn’t some massive feat of engineering; there’s no image recognition or anything like that. And it’s a lot simpler than other personal memory apps out there, like Evernote. What the iPhone app does is organize photos into checklists and let users tag items through the touchscreen, then formats the lists into emails and Facebook albums for sharing.

The app was created by Martin Gannholm, who worked at Apple on projects like the Newton for 10 years ending in 1995, then founded the hosted enterprise software company Allegis, and more recently worked on engineering projects at Microsoft and PopCap. The self-funded two-person company behind the app is called Way2Clever.

Gannholm is charging $2.99 for VisualList and anticipates selling future thematic versions–for instance, a wedding-themed app for users to take pictures of the dresses they try on or the centerpiece arrangements they want to re-create, or what have you.

Three bucks seems a bit much for something users can nearly do without an app, but perhaps not in the context of a big, expensive or ongoing project that’s helped by thinking visually–say, remodeling a home.

Having played around with the app, I’ll say it seems like the kind of thing Apple and other smartphone makers could think about making part of their own camera software.

Update: As of Feb. 10, VisualList’s price has been lowered to $0.99.

"Final Jeopardy" Question: Would You Buy an E-Book Without an Ending?

Peter Kafka — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 12:24:45 +0000

Stephen Baker has a great story to tell you. He just won’t tell you how it ends, yet.

It’s about IBM’s years-long effort to build a computer smart enough to beat the world’s best “Jeopardy” players. And we’ll know how it turns out next month, when the quiz show airs a series of pretaped matches between Watson–IBM’s machine–Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, “Jeopardy”’s most successful champions.

But Baker and publisher Houghton Mifflin aren’t waiting for the end of the show to start selling the tale.

You can buy an e-book version of “Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything” via Amazon or Barnes & Noble today, and start reading immediately–you just won’t get the last chapter, about the climactic battle.

Then in mid-February, immediately after the face-off has aired, the booksellers will send readers the end of the book, either beamed directly into their e-readers or shipped to their PCs.

(And if you’re into delayed gratification, or paper and ink, you could also just wait till mid-February to buy the complete edition in hardcover.)

Novel, right? Sort of. For e-books, the serial approach is a new one, and both booksellers had to be coaxed into doing it.

But selling books on an installment basis is a really old idea, dating back at least to the 1800s, when greats like Balzac and Dickens used to serialize their stories. New Yorkers supposedly gathered at the docks to ask incoming passengers for updates on Dickens’s characters.

And perhaps we’re headed back that way, since digital media allows creators to put out work in as long, or short, a format as they’d like, at whatever pace they want.

Amazon is already playing around with this with its clever “Kindle Singles” format, which sells mini e-books (i.e., novellas or long magazine articles) at mini prices.

And in Baker’s case, the strategy theoretically allows him to piggyback on a wave of publicity that IBM and “Jeopardy” are generating in advance of the shows. If you watched the NFL playoffs this weekend, there’s a good chance you saw, or at least fast-forwarded past, this spot:

Now the trick is to figure out how to turn that kind of media into book sales, which isn’t a given.

But Baker’s a clever guy–prior to writing this book, he was a longtime BusinessWeek writer and editor, and spent the last several years of his tenure covering technology–so I give him decent odds. He was able to get me to write this piece, for starters….

Codec Capers: Google Drops H.264 Support in Chrome

John Paczkowski — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 23:42:33 +0000

Here’s one way to spur adoption of your new video codec. End your browser’s support for a widely used rival codec.

That’s what Google did today, announcing that its Chrome browser will ship without native support for H.264, the video specification on which the Web is arguably standardized (certainly it’s the one prefered by folks like Apple and Microsoft). Instead it will support WebM, Google’s open-source, royalty-free codec, and Theora, another open compression developed by the Xiph.org Foundation.

“We are changing Chrome’s HTML5 video support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open Chromium project,” Google said in a post to the Chromium blog. “Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.”

A ballsy move on Google’s part and one that will certainly spark off the video codec contretemps once more. Sadly, it’s going to make the the HTML 5 transition even more messy than it already is. Right now, video can be encoded in H.264 and served up to pretty much any browser or mobile platform–using a Flash wrapper if necessary. But once Google ends support for H.264, video producers will have to encode their content a second time to play natively in Chrome.

Which seems unfortunate. Particularly because Google is billing its decision as a move to free, open standards and away from proprietary ones like H.264 that must be licensed. By ending support for H.264, Google is actually encumbering video producers with additional costs. Said SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill, “I’m left with two choices: Gulp and double my costs on an unknown tech, or return to Flash as primary solution. Ugh. Thanks, Google.”

But Flash isn’t free and open standard, either. If Google’s goal is to “enable open innovation” shouldn’t it be dumping Flash from Chrome as well? Evidently, that’s not part of the master plan which includes Adobe as a WebM partner …

PREVIOUSLY:

Google’s “Royalty-Free” WebM Video May Not Be Royalty-Free for Long

Google Open Sources VP8 Video Codec. Will Apple, Microsoft and Intel Use It?

Converting Songs From AAC to MP3 in ITunes

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 23:10:58 +0000

How do I convert songs in iTunes to plain MP3 files? I want to use them in another program that doesn’t recognize the AAC song format that iTunes prefers.

Assuming you are using the latest version of iTunes, for either Windows or Mac, first go into the General section of preferences, select “Import Settings” and then change to “Import Using MP3 Encoder.” Next, choose the AAC song you want to convert, go to the Advanced menu, and select “Create MP3 Version.”

Note that this works with songs you have imported into the AAC format from your CDs, or purchased from the iTunes store in unprotected AAC form. It won’t work with songs you bought in the days when iTunes song purchases were sold in a special copy-protected form of AAC. You can tell which type of song you have—purchased, but unrestricted; or copy-protected—by turning on the “Kind” column in your iTunes song listings. You do this from the View menu under “View options…”.

For years I have run a Norton Antivirus product and a Webroot antispyware product on my computers. For the 2011 version of the Norton product, installation requires uninstalling the Webroot program. This concerns me. Should I be nervous?

I haven’t tested Norton 2011, so I don’t know for sure. But I do know that standalone antispyware products are less and less needed because security programs that once focused mainly on viruses, and ignored spyware, now are designed to protect against both. Even Webroot now sells a combined product.

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at walt.mossberg@wsj.com

The My-Fill-In-the-Space Reset Is Here, as Struggling Social Network Morphs Into Entertainment Hub

Kara Swisher — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 05:56:52 +0000

Empty bracket or no empty bracket: Will it work?

That’s pretty much the big question at News Corp. tonight, as its much beleaguered social networking site, Myspace, rolls out a new beta version aimed at shifting its fortunes.

And how will it do that? By moving dramatically away from its roots as a social networking site–and far, far away from powerhouse Facebook–and becoming a “social entertainment” hub aimed directly at the Gen Y audience.

That means heavy emphasis on the sharing and discovery of music, television, movies, games, videos and photos from within Myspace and without. There is also an upcoming new mobile site and better apps for smartphones and tablets.

And it also includes a new logo that features “my” with an actual fill-in-the-space bracket after it.

By the way, it’s now “Myspace”–dropped second cap–rather than the old “MySpace,” and the new color palette is black, not blue.

It is a bold, if risky, move, which could result in a dramatic decline of users or–despite the grim reality of second acts on the Internet–reset Myspace to begin a new cycle of growth.

For sure, as you can see from the screenshots below, it is a cleaner, hipper and much more attractive offering, with a tile format, ridding Myspace of its longtime cheap and noisy feel.

You can still toggle to a list or video view of the homepage.

Still, Myspace continues with the irksome moving parts, such as continually updating live notifications and real-time rolling number tickers that move constantly as people share various content.

It sort of reminds me of that national-debt clock in Times Square in Manhattan, but not as riveting.

Amid the better ability for bands and artists to more easily attract fans and promote themselves on Myspace, regular users can also become social arbiters–called “curators”–by active and useful sharing of their tastes.

And, perhaps most important of all, you can bring in a lot of outside sources, broadcast out to Facebook and have a two-way feed with Twitter.

Behind the scenes, Myspace has also done a major overhaul of its tech structure, which has been much maligned. In fact, it was once described to me as being made of “bubblegum and baling wire.”

Here’s an appalling stat, for example: There have been 117 different Myspace logos created for the service.

We’ll see how it goes, but here are videos Myspace did about the launch, including a logo-ganza:

And here are more screenshots than you ever would want (click on the images to make them larger):

Finally, here is the official press release:

MEET THE NEW MYSPACE

Myspace Debuts New Brand, Beta Website and Suite of Products That Focus on Social Entertainment for Gen Y

Beverly Hills, October 27, 2010 – Today Myspace announced a new brand, beta website and a suite of products that together redefine the company as a social entertainment destination for Gen Y. Myspace is creating a rich, highly personalized experience for people to discover content and connect with other fans who share similar interests. The entertainment experience will span music, celebrities, movies, television and games and will be available through multiple platforms, including online, mobile devices and offline events.

“This marks the beginning of an exciting turning point for Myspace. Our new strategy expands on Myspace’s existing strengths–a deep understanding of social, a wealth of entertainment content and the ability to surface emerging cultural trends in real time through our users,” said Mike Jones, CEO of Myspace. “Myspace is unique in that it is powered by the passions of our users, who program the site by expressing interests, sharing tastes and knowledge around particular topics, and scouting out up-and-coming subcultures. This is the just the first step and there will be many more features, programs and improvements to come.:

Specifically, Myspace will provide people with the ability to:

Discover and engage with Myspace’s broad array of programming, including originals, exclusives and content from around the Web.

Express, collect, and display their creations and interests on their profiles and through sharing tools.

Connect to other fans with similar tastes.

Myspace will also focus on promoting curators–a subset of its audience whose reputation and knowledge around particular entertainment topics and emerging cultural trends make them uniquely influential–by supporting them with the resources, tools and a platform to expand their reach within the Myspace community.

Newly Designed Beta Site

Myspace has completely rebuilt its website, with a new visual identity and product features that put content center stage. From the color palette to the way the site is organized to the improved navigation, everything has been redesigned to help people easily find relevant content.

The redesigned Myspace welcome page showcases fresh content as it bubbles up across the beta site in real time. Additionally, once a user logs in to Myspace, the page will instantly populate with content based on the individual’s interests, creating a unique, contextually relevant discovery experience.

Registered users can now also toggle between three different views of the homepage, each specifically designed to display their stream in the way that resonates most. These include:

List view: Traditional view

Grid view: A magazine-like format

Play view: A video format that allows users to watch, forward and resize their updates to full screen

To complement the online experience, Myspace will soon release a mobile version of the beta site, accessible on any mobile browser. A new Myspace app for iPhone and Android devices will follow later this year.

New Products

Myspace has released a suite of initial features that empower people to discover, collect and display entertainment content, while also offering tailored recommendations. These features include:

Topics–Myspace features more than 20,000 entertainment-focused, dynamic pages organized around topics. These pages provide a centralized location to view aggregated information about specific subject matter from a wide variety of news sites and blogs including MTV, Los Angeles Times, Access Hollywood, New York Times, Village Voice and Just Jared.

Content Hubs–These comprehensive entertainment destinations are specifically dedicated to movies, television and celebrities. The pages combine programmed editorial with trending articles that feature news, videos and photos from various content partners. Additionally, each individual article within the hubs recommends related content and topics. Hubs focused on games, comedy, sports and fashion will be revealed in the coming months.

Personalized Stream–The new stream automatically learns what to feature based on a user’s preferences and habits, so they see more of what they love and less of what they don’t.

Recommendations–This feature recommends relevant topics and other fans based on algorithms that learn the type of content a user views, listens to or watches and from whom or where they discovered it.

‘Right now on Myspace’–This feature shows trending content in real time on Myspace, helps fans find recently added music and videos, and lets them listen or watch right from the interactive chart. Myspace uses these trends to inform recommendations that promote discovery and engagement.

Discovery Tab–This always accessible tab combines videos that friends are watching with what’s trending in real time on Myspace. Scroll to the top of any page and the new Discovery Tab drops down as a horizontal film strip.

My Stuff TabMy Stuff is an easy way to see all that’s personal to a user – their profile, photos, videos and uploaded content, structured as a drop-down menu with different content areas.

Badges–This feature recognizes and rewards curators and fans for their social activity around entertainment topics on the beta site and promotes them with badges – graphic icons that appear in a user’s stream.

New Brand Identity

Myspace has also introduced a new logo that captures its revamped brand identity and values. The bracket in the logo represents a space where people can express themselves, enabling users to personalize the logo and make it their own–just as they can throughout Myspace.

The newly-designed Myspace begins rolling out today in beta and will be available to all users worldwide by the end of November. New users will have immediate access to the beta site. For more information, please visit www.myspace.com/newmyspace

Adobe Revamps Acrobat Software, Mobile Apps

Cari Tuna — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 07:00:05 +0000

Adobe Systems on Monday unveiled the latest version of its Acrobat suite of software for creating and viewing PDF files, the company’s latest move to bolster its influence over the popular document format and boost revenue from program sales and upgrades.

The suite–dubbed Acrobat X–builds on features introduced in 2008 in Acrobat 9, which allows users to embed and view video, Web pages and other dynamic content in PDF files. (The Adobe-originated technology stands for portable document format, for those thay may have forgotten).

By allowing users to include a wide variety of content in PDF files, Adobe hopes to capitalize on “the need that people have today to communicate with a lot more rich media” and eliminate the need for users to send different types of content in separate files, says Rob Tarkoff, senior vice president of Adobe’s Digital Enterprise Solutions unit.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

YouTube Leanback Freshens Up for Google TV's Debut

Peter Kafka — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 01:00:17 +0000

One of the things that Google thinks you’ll do with Google TV is watch a lot of Google video, via YouTube. That’s why the search giant introduced a “Leanback” version of the site, designed for couch-bound surfers, over the summer.

And that’s why Google has freshened up Leanback for this weekend: Saturday is the first chance consumers will have to get their hands on Google TV for themselves, via sets sold at Sony’s Style stores. (Regular humans can buy the sets at Best Buy in a week.)

You don’t have to use Google TV to use Leanback. It will work on any PC and any browser, and it’s worth playing around with. Also, that will save me the trouble of telling you what it’s like.

I will tell you about a few tweaks Google has made to the site since its July launch, though:

You should now be able to watch any video in the YouTube catalog in Leanback mode. Previously some clips, primarily music videos, had not been available for the new format, due to licensing issues.
But just because you can watch any clip doesn’t mean you’ll want to see it on a big screen. Or to put it another way–some YouTube stuff will work particularly well on your TV, and the Leanback team has tried to show that stuff off with preselected channels and playlists.
There’s always a catch: Leanback, which had previously been ad-free, will now start showing you the preroll and overlay ads that you’re used to seeing on regular YouTube.

YouTube managers say that they’re already happy with Leanback in its current form. They cite internal research that shows YouTube users watch twice as much video when they use Leanback.

Impressive! Though I assume those tests were done on PCs, and I wonder how the experience will translate when you’re sitting 10 feet away from your screen, on your sectional.

But that’s pretty much the core question about Google TV–do people really want to watch Web video in their living room? We’ll begin to find out this fall.

Meet Flipboard: Mike McCue Talks About Stealth "Social Magazine" Start-Up That Just Nabbed $10.5 Million in Funding

Kara Swisher — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 03:56:38 +0000

Today, BoomTown gassed up the MINI and headed down to see one of the more innovative new start-ups I have encountered of late.

That would be a new social magazine concept called Flipboard, which is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via a rich app on the Apple (AAPL) iPad.

In this social magazine, there are pull quotes, photos, videos, status updates and even the first paragraphs of content linked out to. There is also the ability to comment and share, as if one were on Twitter or Facebook.

Co-founded by longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mike McCue and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll in January, Flipboard decloaked itself tonight, announcing both a $10.5 million funding from top Silicon Valley power players and also the acquisition of Ellerdale, a relevancy search engine for the real-time Web.

The funders include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures and a spate of high-profile investors, such as Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moscovitz, angel investor Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. (NWS) exec Peter Chernin.

Flipboard currently has about 20 employees at its downtown Palo Alto, Calif., HQ.

“Flipboard is a social magazine filled with all the the things your friends are sharing,” said McCue, who co-founded Tellme, the speech recognition service acquired by Microsoft (MSFT). “We’re trying to bring the timeless principles of print to social media.”

(You can read The Mossberg Solution’s Katherine Boehret’s review of Flipboard here.)

McCue left Tellme a year ago and was casting about for a new start-up when he settled on creating a new way to digest and present the noisy flood of information being spewed 24/7 by social networks.

Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr, who backed Tellme, said he was immediately intrigued by the idea.

“It is at once intimate and alive and beautiful,” he said in an interview with me earlier today. “This is the next wave of social media and redefines what magazine is…and I think it will be one of the defining apps on the iPad.”

Right now, the Flipboard app is free and the business plan is advertising and some possible subscription scenarios.

Ellen Pao, also of Kleiner and a member of Flipboard’s board, said she hoped publishers, whose Web sites are reconfigured from tweets and other social links by the app, will welcome the new distribution format.

“Traditional publishing is facing a crossroads and this imagines it from the ground up,” she said. “I hope it paves the way.”

We’ll see about old media reactions, which has been decidedly mixed to aggregation apps like this.

The New York Times (NYT), for example, attacked rather than embraced another terrific news reading iPad app called Pulse, accusing it of misusing its content.

It was a stupid move against inexorable concepts such as Pulse and Flipboard, which are beginning to make sense of the changing digital information landscape.

Here’s the video interview with McCue, followed by the official press releases about Flipboard:

[ See post to watch video ]

FLIPBOARD LAUNCHES WORLD’S FIRST SOCIAL MAGAZINE

INSPIRED BY THE BEAUTY OF PRINT AND DESIGNED FOR iPAD, FLIPBOARD TRANSFORMS THE SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERIENCE

Raises $10.5MM From Legendary Investors KPCB and Index Ventures and Media Innovators Including Jack Dorsey, Dustin Moskovitz, Ashton Kutcher and The Chernin Group

Acquires Ellerdale, Names Arthur van Hoff CTO

FORTUNE BRAINSTORM TECH–ASPEN, COLORADO – JULY 21, 2010–Founded by Mike McCue, former CEO of Tellme, and Evan Doll, former senior iPhone engineer at Apple®, Flipboard™ began a quest today to transform how people discover and share content by combining the beauty and ease of print with the power of social media. Flipboard also announced the immediate availability of it’s Flipboard App for iPad™, a social magazine that brings to life the stories, photos, news and updates being shared across Twitter and Facebook. Flipboard’s first public demo will happen at the FORTUNE Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colorado at 4:40pm MDT tomorrow.

“With over 1 billion posts shared every day, social networks are quickly becoming the primary way people discover and share content on the Web. The result is a huge influx of incoming messages and links people must sort through across multiple web sites just to stay up to date,” said Mike McCue, Flipboard’s CEO. “We believe the timeless principles of print can make social media less noisy, more visually compelling and ultimately more mainstream.”

Designed from the ground up for iPad, Flipboard creates a magazine out of a user’s social content. Simply launch Flipboard and “flip” open the cover to get started. From the Table of Contents readers can view their sections and personalize the magazine.

The Facebook and Twitter sections let readers quickly flip through the latest stories, photos and updates from friends and trusted sources. Because Flipboard renders links and images right in the magazine, readers no longer have to scan long lists of posts and click on link after link – instead they instantly see all the stories, comments and images, making it faster and more entertaining to discover, view and share social content.

Flipboard also lets readers easily create sections around topics or people they care about. Choose from Flipboard’s suggested sections on topics such as sports, news, tech and style, with content hand-curated from popular and interesting Twitter feeds. Or, create an entirely new section by searching by topic, person or Twitter lists to make Flipboard even more personal.

The Flipboard App is available for free at www.flipboard.com or from the App Store on iPad or at www.itunes.com/appstore/.

ACQUISITION OF ELLERDALE
As part of it’s quest to fundamentally improve the social media experience, Flipboard also announced the acquisition of Ellerdale (see press release: “Flipboard Acquires Ellerdale”). Ellerdale’s advanced semantic analysis of large, real-time data streams will enable Flipboard to extract, categorize and feature highly relevant and hot trending content from across a variety of social networks. Flipboard will also retain the world-class engineering team at Ellerdale, including Arthur van Hoff, a leading Silicon Valley technologist who played a major role in the creation of Java. Arthur will become Flipboard’s Chief Technology Officer and spearhead the company’s technology strategy.

INVESTORS
Flipboard is backed by legendary investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures. Other key investors also include Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, The Chernin Group founded by Peter Chernin, Ron Conway, Alfred Lin, Peter Currie, Quincy Smith, and Ashton Kutcher. The company has raised $10.5 million in a Series A venture capital round.

FLIPBOARD ACQUIRES ELLERDALE TO BOOST CONTENT RELEVANCY IN NEW SOCIAL MAGAZINE

Arthur van Hoff Joins Flipboard as Chief Technology Officer

PALO ALTO, Calif.–July 21, 2010–Flipboard today announced it has acquired Ellerdale, the real-time Web intelligence company. The acquisition concurs with the launch of Flipboard, a social magazine designed for Apple’s iPad, which provides a faster and more engaging way to discover, view, and share what matters on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Ellerdale, founded in 2008, has developed a Web Intelligence technology that applies semantic analysis to large, real-time data streams to extract relevant and valuable information. To date, Ellerdale has indexed over 6 billion messages from around the social Web and currently processes nearly 70 million messages per day. This technology and data set will be become the relevancy engine for the next release of Flipboard, enhancing the reader’s experience by always surfacing the most important and personally interesting information from Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

Designed from the ground up for the iPad, Flipboard creates a magazine out of a user’s social content. With Ellerdale’s technology, future versions of Flipboard will be able to extract, categorize and feature highly relevant and hot trending content from across a variety of social networks.

“Ellerdale has developed an impressive solution for understanding the ever-increasing stream of social data coming at us every day,” said Mike McCue, CEO and co-founder of Flipboard. “This technology will add deep relevancy for our readers, enabling us to present social content in a way that is not only more beautiful, but also more meaningful. It’s a great combination.”

Arthur van Hoff, co-founder of Ellerdale, is joining Flipboard as the company’s new chief technology officer. Van Hoff, who played a major role in the development of the Java programming language at Sun Microsystems, and was founder of six high-tech companies, including Marimba, Strangeberry and Zing, will spearhead Flipboard’s technology strategy.

“Combining the two companies creates a situation in which one plus one equals three, bringing together Flipboard’s innovative front-end with Ellerdale’s powerful real-time relevancy engine on the back-end,” said Arthur van Hoff, co-founder of Ellerdale and Flipboard’s new chief technology officer. “Our technology will play a key role in providing readers with the content that matters most to them.”

Mike McCue and Evan Doll founded Flipboard earlier this year and received $10.5M in funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Index Ventures. The founding team members come from Apple, Netflix, Tellme/Microsoft, Aardvark and Adobe. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The Chapter And Verse on E-Bookstores

Geoffrey A. Fowler — Thu, 27 May 2010 01:14:49 +0000

As books go digital, much of the focus has been on which gadgets offer the best approximation of old-fashioned paper and ink on a screen. But there’s another choice that’s just as important for readers to weigh before they make the leap to e-books: which e-bookstore to frequent.

Reading devices like the iPad, Kindle and Nook will come and go, but you’ll likely want your e-book collection to stick around. Yet unlike music, commercial e-books from the leading online stores come with restrictions that complicate your ability to move your collection from one device to the next. It’s as if old-fashioned books were designed to fit on one particular style of bookshelves. What happens when you remodel?

[ See post to watch video ]

Much of this problem stems from the publishing industry, which has demanded that e-bookstores embed digital rights management software in most best sellers to keep them from being stolen and swapped, free, online. The music labels once asked the same from digital-music retailers, but eventually agreed to open up.

The e-bookstores share in the blame. Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), Apple Inc. (AAPL), Barnes & Noble Inc. (BKS) and Sony Corp. (SNE) all want you to buy their own gadgets and to continue buying e-books from their stores. For example, purchases from Apple’s new iBooks store can be read only on Apple’s own iPad (and soon the iPhone). Even though Apple said it would support an industry standard format called ePub for iBooks, in practice your iBooks purchases remain locked on Apple’s virtual bookshelf. (So I hope iBooks customers like Apple’s light-brown wood paneling.)

Browsing Amazon.com on the Kindle

Many of the biggest e-book providers fall short of putting readers fully in charge of their own digital-book collections, but they have begun to unveil their own solutions for moving your e-books around.

Amazon, which jump-started the shift to e-books with its Kindle, lets customers read its e-books through apps on at least six kinds of devices. Amazon custom-built the free apps for gadgets that include the iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, PC, Mac and (later this summer) devices running Google’s (GOOG) Android software. If a device has an Internet connection, the apps automatically load Amazon e-book purchases from the company’s website, saving you the fuss of keeping track of files and transferring them between gadgets with cables. In many ways, this is more convenient than the way we manage our digital-music collections by manually adding and deleting files from iPods through a computer.

Amazon’s apps are slick and work on many of the most popular devices today, but Amazon buyers should know that they’re likely stuck using the retailer’s software forever. While Amazon says it plans to keep making apps for more devices, the list of potential devices for reading grows longer every day. Moreover, Amazon sells its e-books in a proprietary format, so there’s no way to open those files on another device without an Amazon app or without resorting to cumbersome (and potentially illegal) third-party conversion software.

The Nook with Barnes & Noble store

Barnes & Noble, too, adopted an Internet-connected app approach, providing a seamless way to shift its e-books between the Nook, PC, Mac, BlackBerry, iPhone, WindowsMobile for the HTC HD2 and soon iPad. Barnes & Noble has been integrating its e-bookstore into niche e-reading devices, like those by Plastic Logic, Irex and Pandigital. It also, uniquely, offers you the chance to “loan” some e-book purchases to a friend for 14 days. But its bookstore requires a somewhat annoying step: Each time you download a book to a new device, you must enter your name and the credit-card number that was used to buy the book in order to unfasten the digital lock on the book.

Beyond the apps, Sony, Barnes & Noble and Apple and a few smaller e-bookstores all promised they’d put their weight behind the industry standard format ePub, which is the e-book version of music’s Mp3 and can be read by almost every reading device (except the Kindle). That sounds great in theory, but in practice, the ePub files either can’t be transferred or doing so is cumbersome.

The problem is each company adds digital rights management software to an ePub book. A copy of “Moby Dick” I bought from iBooks delivered just blank pages when I opened it on the Nook. A Barnes & Noble e-book produced an error message in Sony’s PC ePub reading software. Barnes & Noble says its books will be compatible with devices like the Sony Reader after a software upgrade.

An iPad showing Apple’s iBooks store.

There were two notable exceptions: Purchases from Sony’s e-bookstore and a Borders Group (BGP)-backed store called Kobo could open on the Nook and other ePub-reading devices if I used a free program from Adobe (ADBE) called Digital Editions to transfer it. That’s a nice insurance policy but the process is far more complicated than it should be.

There may yet be a third way. Google, which plans to launch an e-bookstore later this year, says customers will be able to access its books through apps on popular devices and through a Web browser on any device—including a phone or computer. Google’s argument is that we shouldn’t lock ourselves into one bookstore if it is going to offer titles that are dependent on special apps or devices. Google’s existing free out-of-copyright books service works under this same general premise, but it isn’t yet ready for prime time. It requires you to always be online to read a book and its pages aren’t well formatted for reading on small screens or mobile devices. Google executives say they will fix both issues when the commercial service launches.

For now, the e-bookstore choice comes down to which compromises readers are willing to accept. Anybody who just wants a simple way to carry digital books around might be happy with an app-based approach. But readers intent on building an e-library may want to either invest in an ePub-based collection, or hold off until the industry figures out a better solution.

Walter S. Mossberg will return June 10.

Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at geoffrey.fowler@wsj.com

Google's "Royalty-Free" WebM Video May Not Be Royalty-Free for Long

John Paczkowski — Thu, 20 May 2010 22:45:35 +0000

The announcement of Google’s new WebM video format and release of the VP8 video codec as an open standard have been hailed by some as the move that will free the Web from the proprietary H.264 codec widely used for online video today and favored by Apple (AAPL) and Microsoft (MSFT).

“The world would have a new free format unencumbered by software patents,” the Free Software Foundation enthused in an open letter to Google (GOOG) earlier this year. “Viewers, video creators, free software developers, hardware makers–everyone–would have another way to distribute video without patents, fees, and restrictions.”

A new era of Web video without the patent-encumbered formats that have defined the Internet to date. That seems ideal. But like many ideals, it may prove to be unattainable. As a number of observers have already noted VP8 isn’t free from patent liability. And now that Google has open-sourced it as part of WebM, that liability is likely to become an issue.

And quickly, too.

Indeed, Larry Horn, CEO of MPEG LA, the consortium that controls the AVC/H.264 video standard, tells me that the group is already looking at creating a patent pool license for VP8. Here’s an excerpt from my email exchange with him:

JP: Let me ask you this: Are you creating a patent pool license for VP8 and WebM? Have you been approached about creating one?

Larry Horn: Yes, in view of the marketplace uncertainties regarding patent licensing needs for such technologies, there have been expressions of interest from the market urging us to facilitate formation of licenses that would address the market’s need for a convenient one-stop marketplace alternative to negotiating separate licenses with individual patent holders in accessing essential patent rights for VP8 as well as other codecs, and we are looking into the prospects of doing so.

It would seem, then, that VP8 may end up subject to the same licensing issues as H.264. If MPEG LA does create a patent pool license for the standard, the free lunch Google promised yesterday may not be free after all.

Google certainly has the market muscle to guarantee broad acceptance of WebM and the VP8 codec–if it’s a royalty-free standard. But what if it’s not truly royalty free? Who’ll foot the bill? And is the company willing to indemnify its partners from patent litigation to push WebM?

For what it’s worth, Google seems to believe that it has done its due diligence here and has the necessary patent clearance for VP8. Said Google product manager Mike Jazayeri: “We have done a pretty thorough analysis of VP8 and On2 Technologies (VP8′s developer) prior to the acquisition and since then, and we are very confident with the technology and that’s why we’re open sourcing.”

Question is, was that analysis thorough enough?

I’ve asked Google for comment on Horn’s remarks and will update here if I’m given one.

Google Open Sources VP8 Video Codec. Will Apple, Microsoft and Intel Use It?

John Paczkowski — Wed, 19 May 2010 17:36:45 +0000

Google’s plan to open-source the VP8 video codec has been rumored ever since the company acquired its developer, On2, in August 2009. After all, in the press release detailing the acquisition, Google clearly stated that “video compression technology should be a part of the Web platform.”

So it’s no surprise that the company announced an open-source, royalty-free HTML5 video format based on VP8 at its I/O conference Wednesday. What is surprising is the level of industry support Google has already rounded up.

Dubbed WebM, the format uses the VP8 codec for video and Vorbis codec for audio and is offered under a pretty permissive BSD-style license that makes it quite a bit more attractive than H.264, a rival format with pretty steep licensing fees.

Google is pushing the format hard. The company has convinced Mozilla and Opera to add WebM support to their browsers (Chrome support is obviously a given) and it has begun encoding all YouTube videos 720p or larger in the format.

Google has also lined up some 40 software and hardware vendors to support WebM. Among them: Oracle (ORCL), AMD (AMD), ARM (ARM), Nvidia (NVDA), Qualcomm (QCOM) and Brightcove. Also on the list: Adobe (ADBE), which plans to use VP8 for Flash.

An impressive lineup of supporters, though there are three notable omissions: Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT) and Intel (INTC). Will those companies come around and back the standard as well? Given enough industry support for VP8 playback through HTML5, they may have to. I’ve asked them and will update here if I hear back.

UPDATE: Intel tells me it will support WebM and V8, not because it particularly favors them but because it plans to support most video formats.

“We’re supportive of multiple formats,” a company spokesman told me. “We don’t support one format to the exclusion of another format.”

UPDATE: Interesting. There’s speculation that WebM may violate some H.264 patents. “VP8 is simply way too similar to H.264,” developer Jason Garrett-Glaser concludes after an exhaustive analysis of the format. “[A] pithy, if slightly inaccurate, description of VP8 would be “H.264 Baseline Profile with a better entropy coder”. Though I am not a lawyer, I simply cannot believe that they will be able to get away with this, especially in today’s overly litigious day and age. Even VC-1 differed more from H.264 than VP8 does, and even VC-1 didn’t manage to escape the clutches of software patents. Until we get some hard evidence that VP8 is safe, I would be extremely cautious. Since Google is not indemnifying users of VP8 from patent lawsuits, this is even more of a potential problem.”

Adobe Co-Founder: We Never Abandoned Apple, but Apple Is Abandoning Us

John Paczkowski — Fri, 14 May 2010 10:00:55 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, Apple CEO Steve Jobs published “Thoughts on Flash,” a 1,671-word execration of Adobe’s Flash platform.

On Thursday, Adobe co-founders and co-chairmen Chuck Geschke and John Warnock followed suit with some thoughts of their own. Their eight-paragraph essay, “Our Thoughts On Open Markets,” mentions Apple only once, but when it does, it is to lambaste the company for its position on Flash, a position the two claim “could undermine this next chapter of the web–the chapter in which mobile devices outnumber computers, any individual can be a publisher, and content is accessed anywhere and at any time.”

I spoke to Geschke Thursday afternoon about the pair’s letter, Adobe’s (ADBE) new “We ? Apple” ad campaign and Apple’s (AAPL) stance on his company’s software. Below, a transcript of our conversation.

John Paczkowski: What is Adobe is hoping to get out of this new “We Love Apple/Freedom of Choice” campaign?

Chuck Geschke: We mostly are using it as a way to communicate with our customers and partners to assure them that we’re not going to change our strategy and to inform the rest of the community of what the pluses and minuses are of not supporting Flash on the iPhone and the iPad. Our customers, a large percentage of them, are the people who generate and distribute information and content, and for them they have one production stream that they use to do that and they’ve gotten used to the fact that we’ve worked very hard to open up the standards that we support so that we can offer them ubiquity of output on all kinds of platforms. So the fact that Apple is precluding that puts them in a tough position because it means that they’re going to have to create that content twice, and that’s not very productive. It’s certainly more expensive than what they do today. And as you know, the content industry is an industry under a lot of cost pressure these days.

JP: Both Apple and Microsoft have said publicly now that Flash has issues with reliability, security, and performance. Do you think those complaints are legitimate?

CG: I think they’re old news. Go to our Web site and read the actual facts about Flash. We enumerate the facts about Flash there as we see them. [Microsoft and Apple] may have a different set of facts that they believe are accurate. It’s up to you to decide. But I will tell you that the Flash version we’re coming out with now–where, for the first time with the Mac platform, we can actually get to the lower-level interfaces–is going to run like the wind. And the same is true on Windows.

JP: Shouldn’t Apple have the right to define the means by which apps for its own platform can be written?

CG: They absolutely have the right. No one says they don’t.

JP: Cross-platform mobile apps tend not to take advantage of native features unique to each device. What do you have to say about complaints that write-once-run-anywhere software results in subpar apps?

CG: Well, people don’t say that about Photoshop. They certainly don’t say it about Acrobat….I’m a little confused about what the real examples of that are. If there’s a problem with the performance of Flash as demonstrated on the iPhone, it’s because we haven’t been able to access the inner layers of hardware and software we need to to provide the kind of performance we can provide on other platforms. But that’s Apple’s choice, not ours. And now, of course, you can’t use it at all.

JP: So you don’t think write-once-run-anywhere is limiting at all?

CG: Not really. I mean there may be certain features in certain environments that you’ll want to do customization for, but the more you go down that road, the more you get the experience of HTML on the Web, where the kind of browser, hardware and OS you use determines what your experience. That’s because HTML is not well codified and standardized and people sort of roll their own.

JP: How much of Adobe’s revenue comes from Flash?

CG: I would share that number if we disclose it, but I’m not sure that we do. It isn’t a huge amount of revenue, but it is an extremely popular platform that all of our apps have the opportunity to exploit when it’s distributed everywhere. Flash tools aren’t the largest piece of our business, but it’s a significant one and obviously we feel it’s extremely important to our customers and partners who want to build third-party apps in an environment where they can, in fact, put them on a variety of devices without having to re-implement them.

JP: So could Apple’s exclusion of Flash hurt Adobe sales?

CG: I don’t think it will have a significant effect. As well as Apple is doing, if you look at the number of platforms out in the market and the number of release of new ones that will occur over the next six to 12 months, it’s going to be huge. That’s a much bigger population, and we’re just focusing on making our technology operate as effectively and efficiently as possible for it.

JP: In his “Thoughts on Flash” essay, Jobs accused Adobe of abandoning Apple. “Apple went through its near death experience, and Adobe was drawn to the corporate market with their Acrobat products,” he wrote. Is Job’s implication here a fair one?

CG: We never abandoned Apple. Apple now seems to be abandoning at least one aspect of our product line right now. No, we never abandoned them. We’ve always ported our apps simultaneously to both platforms. There have been times when Apple has changed its strategy on hardware or on operating systems that didn’t meet our product cycle, so there have been periods of maybe six months where we didn’t keep up with their latest release. But that’s our own business model; we can only afford to re-implement our products at a certain rate.

We have never, ever abandoned Apple and we don’t want to abandon them today. Everything you read in our new ad is true. I myself own probably between 8 and 10 Macintoshes — both laptops and work stations. I don’t buy PCs, I buy Macs.

JP: Why isn’t Flash an open standard?

CG: It is. What are you talking about?

JP: Flash is proprietary to Adobe. It’s not Open Source. Let me rephrase: Why isn’t Flash an open standard overseen by an open-standards body?

CG: As soon as Adobe acquired Macromedia, we openly published the SWF format and removed the requirement that you have a license to use it….No, we haven’t put Flash out to a standards body yet as we have with PDF and Postscript. But I wouldn’t be shocked if we do someday when it makes sense.

With the standards that we have built and made open to the entire world, we’ve tried our best to get them to the point where they’re mature enough so that we’re not doing design by committee. If you look at the amount of time it will take HTML5 to become a reasonably solid platform, it’s going to take a long time because there are an awful lot of vested interests trying to influence its development.

JP: Any thoughts on Steve Jobs’s claim that “Flash was created during the PC era–for PCs and mice”?

CG: What do you think an iPhone is? It’s a personal computer.

JP: One last question. What do you think of the iPad?

CG: I think it’s a neat thing. I personally have no particular interest in it; I’d much rather have a general-purpose computer. I think there’s definitely a market for that kind of product. We certainly know a lot of people that want to produce content for it and a large percentage of them are disappointed that they’re going to have to do that separately from the way they produce content for all the other devices they support.

PREVIOUSLY:

Adobe to Apple: You Wanna Hug It Out? Let’s Hug It Out!

Good Luck With That Alleged Antitrust Complaint Against Apple, Adobe…

Adobe CTO: Flash on iPhone Doesn’t Suck and Apple Knows It

A Possible Apple Antitrust Inquiry? Nothing to See Here…

Microsoft on Flash: What Steve Said

Adobe: We’re Done With You Too, Apple

Apple to Adobe: I Know You Are, but What Am I?

So Much for Flash on the iPhone

Adobe: Flash for Mac Is Getting Better–Really!

YouTube Steps Cautiously Into Mobile Ads

Peter Kafka — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:39:55 +0000

Another sign that Google is serious about wringing more money out of YouTube: It is adding ads to the video’s mobile site.

Another sign that mobile ads are still in their infancy: Google isn’t using its favorite video ad format on the YouTube ads.

Boot up your Apple (AAPL) iPhone or Android handset to m.youtube.com today and you’ll start seeing ads like these:

But while you may see banner ads on YouTube’s mobile home, search and browse pages, you won’t see ads on the clips themselves.

Those will come eventually, Shishir Mehrotra, YouTube’s director of monetization, told Advertising Age, but in the near term, it’s too difficult for the company to pull off. That’s because there are too many handsets, with different standards and requirements, to support.

That’s a bummer for the Google (GOOG) unit, since it is particularly fond of the “overlay” ads that run on the bottom third of many of its clips. Then again, mobile is still a tiny market opportunity for YouTube: The company says it serves “tens of millions of views per day,” which sounds like a lot until you consider that the main site is serving a billion views daily.

Note that YouTube doesn’t seem to be advertising yet on its specialized iPhone app. Wonder what to make of that…

Two Laptops Take Images to Another Dimension

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 22:37:58 +0000

If switching from standard to high-definition television wasn’t confusing enough, there’s another wave of TV technology on the horizon: 3D. But 3D TVs and much of the 3D content won’t be available until later this year, and even then most of these sets will be pricey and will require people to wear special glasses for viewing. If you can’t wait for a 3D TV to hit your living room, you can get a preview of what’s to come with the latest in 3D laptops.

[ See post to watch video ]

I feasted my eyes on 3D laptops this week, testing the $770 Acer Aspire 5738DG and checking out the $1,700 Asus G51J 3D. These two computers are aimed at different crowds and each uses different technology to display enhanced images. The Acer is designed as a laptop first and a 3D game player second, and it’s priced for mainstream consumers—only about $70 more than the model without 3D. The Asus laptop is meant for serious gamers who care about a high-quality 3D experience. Unfortunately, you still need to wear the 3D glasses with both.

The Acer Aspire laptop applies a slightly older 3D method known as micro-polarized display, often referred to as “micropol.” It combines software, a film layer on the computer screen and 3D glasses to make videos and photos pop out. This laptop can take 2D videos and photos and display them in 3D; it also plays about 150 3D games as well as 3D movies, of which there aren’t many.

Acer converts 2D content to 3D by using a third-party software program called TriDef 3D, which people must use to see their photos and videos in 3D. Using this program is a bit clumsy and I tested it by loading my own photos and videos onto the Acer. A faster way to see photos or videos in 3D is by right clicking on the file from anywhere else on the PC and selecting an option to see it in TriDef’s 3D player. It was fun to see old images and videos in this 3D simulation.

I looked through a friend’s photos from a trip to Petra, Jordan, and the 3D sight of him riding a camel through a rock valley was spectacular. Files that were in the Windows Media Video format played without issue, and I watched two such videos including one of a bear lumbering around in a stream. But when I had trouble playing QuickTime and MP4 video files, a spokeswoman for Acer checked and confirmed that the TriDef program won’t play all QuickTime or MP4 video files; TriDef is working on fixing the MP4 problem.

Another problem with the Acer’s technology is that the laptop screen must be tilted at just the right angle—about 120 degrees—to see 3D properly. Otherwise the image looks blurry.

Eight photos and nine short videos come loaded on the Acer Aspire. All of these looked really good to my eyes, which were covered by the included black 3D shades. A clip-on piece for prescription glasses also comes with the laptop.

The Acer Aspire can be loaded with an Intel (INTC) Core 2 Duo processor, discrete graphics, 4 gigabytes of memory and a 320-gigabyte hard drive. Its keyboard includes a 10-key number set on the right, like that found on most desktop keyboards. Its bright screen measures 15.6 inches diagonally and it weighs 6.2 pounds.

The pricier Asus G51J 3D laptop comes loaded with Nvidia’s (NVDA) 3D Vision, considered to be a much higher quality 3D experience. This technology was originally only available on a desktop PC with several different necessary components. Now on a laptop, it displays 3D images to people as long as they’re wearing special battery-powered glasses and are standing no more than 40 feet away. These Nvidia glasses deliver the highest resolution possible per eye and enable wide viewing angles. The screen also has a high refresh rate of 120 hertz compared to the Acer’s 60 hertz.

Unlike the Acer Aspire, 2D photos and videos can’t be viewed in 3D on the Asus. Instead, this laptop depends on originally produced 3D content, including photos or videos that are captured using special technology like that found on 3D cameras such as Fujifilm’s FinePix REAL 3D W1, which are rare. As is also true on the Acer Aspire, movies only play on the Asus if they were created in 3D.

Games are another story. Nvidia 3D Vision will convert 2D games to 3D in real time using the computer’s graphics processor. Nvidia has tested some 430 games that work with this technology today.

Asus couldn’t send a G51J 3D laptop to me in time for this column, but I got a look at it in January while wearing the battery-operated Nvidia glasses, which work for 40 hours before a recharge and can fit over prescription glasses. This laptop has an Intel Core i7 processor and can have a hard drive of up to 500 gigabytes. It comes with 4 gigabytes of memory and its screen measures 15.6 inches. But it weighs 7.3 pounds, or about a pound heavier than the Acer.

Later this year, Acer also plans to make a laptop with Nvidia’s technology. (Acer currently uses Nvidia’s technology in its monitors.) Nvidia has announced plans for using its 120-hertz 3D Vision capability with laptops from Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics.

It’s obvious that, right now, 3D technology isn’t necessarily something most mainstream consumers want or need. Gamers will see Asus’s G51J 3D as an exciting mobile alternative to what was once only available in a desktop. And the Acer Aspire will appeal to casual gamers and people who want a trusty laptop and/or the ability to view some photos and videos in 3D. One thing’s for sure: Wearing the special glasses—no matter how stylish—is still a wearisome part of seeing things in 3D.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg.

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Is Running Windows on a Mac Secure?

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 23:59:17 +0000

Thanks for your review of programs for running Windows on a Mac. But, if I use them, won’t I expose my Mac’s files to Windows viruses and spyware?

Yes, potentially, because both of the programs I reviewed, Parallels and Fusion, can access Mac folders and files—which means any malicious software that infects Windows can do so as well. That’s why both programs come with security software. You can choose to install the security products they provide, or obtain and install your own. But I strongly recommend you use security software on any computer running Windows, even if it’s a virtual PC operating inside a Mac.

Another protective step you can take is to set an option in these programs that prevents them from accessing your Mac’s files and folders. You’ll still need security software to protect your Windows installation, but, your Mac files and folders should be isolated.

I’m trying to replace my aging Palm PDA, but all I can find are smart phones with lots of bells and whistles and monthly fees. All I want is something that can hold appointments, contacts and notes, and sync with my PC. Is there anything like that out there?

The old-fashioned PDA is indeed fading fast. But there are still a few around. For instance, Hewlett-Packard still sells a $300 model called the iPAQ 111, which does have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, but isn’t a phone and thus doesn’t require a monthly cellphone contract.

Are any of the e-readers on the market compatible with the free e-books available at public libraries?

This depends on the format your library uses. Sony explicitly says its e-readers can handle public library e-books, and others may as well. I suggest asking at your library. One tipoff might be if the e-reader you’re considering can handle the EPUB format, which more libraries stock. In addition to the Sony devices, the Barnes & Noble Nook also handles this format.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online for free at the All Things Digital web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings: We'll Be Shipping DVDs Until 2030

John Paczkowski and Drake Martinet — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 23:34:32 +0000

The digital video revolution may be hastening the DVD toward its end, but there’s quite a bit of life left in the old format yet. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said as much today when he remarked that the company’s DVD-by-mail business will likely continue until 2030. During a wide-ranging on-stage interview with All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka, Hastings discussed the deal Netflix cut with Warner Bros. earlier this week that will delay rentals of the studio’s films until 28 days after their DVD release and Comcast’s proposal to acquire a controlling stake in NBC Universal, a move that could impact Netflix’s Watch Instantly streaming service.

“When we first started years ago, we were literally going down to Best Buy and buying a bunch of DVDs and renting them,” Hastings said, reflecting on the Warner Bros. deal. He noted that Netflix (NFLX) is getting a better deal on DVD prices and that customers are going to see more streaming content as a result of its pact with the studio.

[ See post to watch video ]

Video clip: Highlights from Reed Hasting’s interview

The future of the DVD was up for discussion as Netflix transitions into more on-demand, streaming content. “Pretty soon, we’re going to be a streaming business that rents some DVDs,” said Hastings.

He gave the DVD another 20 years though, projecting it will take that long for Netflix to get out of the disc-shipping business all together.

Hastings eschewed suggestions that Netflix might be looking to add a premium channel or sports to its services, but would instead focus on expanding the number of video game consoles on which you can currently steam Netflix content. Hastings said that streaming was the rocket Netflix wanted to ride.

Peter closed out the interview by asking Hastings about plans that go bump in the night, specifically wondering what Hulu or Comcast (CMCSA) might put together.

Hastings said, “Any time a competitor doubles in size, that’s capitalism, but not good for us. We’re movie-centric, and commercial-free. We license a lot of content. As we get more subscribers, we can write bigger checks to license more content.”

Subscribers = good, more subscribers = better.

What was better going to look like? Hastings laid it out in a closing remark.

“We’re about three things right now: Expanding the platform, expanding the content and expanding the user interface, making it better and better.”

Are You Ready for 3-D in Your Living Room? Hollywood Can't Wait.

Peter Kafka — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 11:30:09 +0000

3-D was a big buzzword at last year’s Consumer Electronics Show, and it’s even bigger this year.

It’s hard to find a TV manufacturer that isn’t showing off sets promising to let you replicate the “Avatar” experience at home. And programmers are promising to produce entertainment you’ll want to see in three dimensions. Sony (SNE), in particular, is making a big bet here.

But even if you believe there’s an audience for this stuff, the 3-D advocates have one big problem in front of them: Lousy timing. American consumers are finishing the end of a major TV replacement cycle, which means it will be some time before they’re ready to plunk down big money again for new screens.

If you want a reality check on 3-D’s impact on consumer electronics and the entertainment industry, check out this brief interview I conducted with DreamWorks Animation head Jeffrey Katzenberg yesterday (apologies for crypt lighting and distracted camerawork–you can at least hear him, though).

Katzenberg is definitely a believer–his studio just announced that all of its future releases will be available in 3-D–but even he thinks it will be “a ways down the line” before DreamWorks (DWA) sees a lift from the sale of 3-D DVDs.

Katzenberg, along with Disney’s (DIS) Bob Iger, can afford to wait a bit for the 3-D boom because both studios cater primarily to families who are still buying DVDs, even if those numbers are dipping.

The rest of Hollywood will be more impatient. The industry depends on home video for a large part of its revenue and an even bigger slice of its profits, and those sales have been dropping off dramatically.

The high-def Blu-ray format was supposed to spur consumers to buy more discs, but it took years for the industry to settle a costly format war, and Blu-ray is only now starting to get a little bit of traction. The studios can’t wait that long for 3-D to take off.

[ See post to watch video ]

Gadgets to Bring Holiday Cheer to Little Travelers

Nick Wingfield — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 02:05:21 +0000

Along with many other people, I’ll spend hours flying with young children this holiday season to visit family and, like many parents, I’d do anything within reason to keep my young children busy on a crowded airplane.

The iPod Touch offers the best options for young kids.

I’m a big fan of old-fashioned analog activities—books and crayons—but they’re not enough when you’re cooped up for six hours on a plane. In advance of a cross-country flight on Wednesday, my two kids and I spent several days trying out the most versatile and convenient gadget—offering movies, games and other electronic media—for keeping us entertained.

We looked at Apple’s iPod Touch, a Sony (SNE) PSPgo and a Nintendo DSi. Sony and Nintendo have updated their PlayStation Portable and DS game players with features aimed at going beyond traditional gaming. Apple (AAPL) is been promoting the iPod touch’s game capabilities.

Nintendo has done a lot to push the boundaries of gaming, with the Wii and other products. But the $169.99 DSi isn’t the entertainment Swiss army knife the iPod Touch and PSPgo are. It doesn’t play movies, for example—a big minus for my 2-year-old son, who is too young to be patient with most games.

It’s still a fun game-player, though, with popular titles for young kids, including two that are big with my 6-year-old daughter: the Nintendogs virtual pet and Pokemon adventure games, which run about $30 a title. One big change Nintendo made to the DSi is the addition of two cameras that are used in fun games, like the ones that put a player’s photo alongside other characters. One simple camera application lets you distort and doodle on images.

Nintendo and Sony also have followed the lead of the App Store—Apple’s online clearinghouse for iPhone and iPod Touch software—by letting users download software directly to the DSi and PSPgo over a Wi-Fi connection. It is more convenient than keeping track of a lot of external game cartridges and discs. Compared with the more than 100,000 titles in the App Store, however, Nintendo’s DSi Shop is sparsely stocked. It had only two free applications and about 90 titles, mostly costing $2 to $8.

One free DSi titles, Flipnote Studio, was a huge hit with my 6-year-old. It let her create an electronic version of an old-fashioned flip book, where you animate sketches by flipping pages. The DSi has only 256 megabytes of built-in storage, good for about a dozen games, though users can expand that with a storage card.

With the $249.99 PSPgo, Sony got rid of the old proprietary disc format for movies and games used in older PSP models, replacing it with 16 gigabytes of built-in flash storage onto which users can download games, movies and other content. The change allowed Sony to make a sleeker device with controls that slide away under its crisp color display.

The iPod Touch is still slimmer and easier to tuck into a pocket. A model with eight gigabytes sells for $199, while one with 32 gigabytes sells for $299.

The PSPgo’s display is slightly wider than that on the iPod Touch, but isn’t touch-sensitive. Still, the PSPgo and iPod Touch are fine for watching movies. They’re more convenient on airplanes than fumbling with a laptop and DVDs. And users can wirelessly download movies and games onto the PSPgo from Sony’s online PlayStation Store. I found it faster, though, to do the transaction on my PC over a wired Internet connection, and load the material onto the PSPgo over a USB cable with Sony’s version of Apple’s iTunes application, called Media Go. Media Go runs only on Windows.

Prices for movies on the iTunes and PlayStation Stores were mostly the same at $14.99 for new releases and $9.99 for older ones. Rentals are $3.99. Both stores had a similar selection of new releases, but the PlayStation Store lacked some kid titles that were on iTunes, such as “Toy Story.” There is also a directory of free podcasts on iTunes that makes it easy to download free videos to the iPod Touch, including kid-friendly material such as NASA space-shuttle landings and “Sesame Street” clips.

Games for PSPgo tend to be more intricate than those for iPod Touch, but that comes at a price. While Sony sells cheaper games, many are in the $19 to $30 range. I liked an adventure game called “Little Big Planet” starring a character called Sack Boy—for $39.99.

That price is steep compared with all the inexpensive and free content on the App Store for the iPod Touch. My kids liked a lot of it: a free dress-up game called “Dress Chica” and a $1.99 snowball-fight game called “Grinchmas.” My son particularly loved a free, beautifully illustrated short book called “Voodoo Doll’s Halloween Story.” My 6-year-old spent hours with a free math-drills program.

I found the iPod Touch offers the best entertainment options for young kids at bargain prices. And that is a gift for parents.

Email Nick.Wingfield@wsj.com. Walt Mossberg is on vacation.

Condé Nast, With Help From a Nearly Naked Rihanna, Takes Another Step Toward Digital Magazines

Peter Kafka — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 20:33:01 +0000

Condé Nast has taken another small step into the future of digital magazines: The publisher has put a second edition of its GQ magazine up for sale on Apple’s iTunes Store.

Plunk down $2.99 and you’ll get you the January issue of the magazine, featuring a nearly naked Rhianna, for your iPhone or iPod touch.

Aside from the almost nude pop star on the cover, this one mimics GQ’s first digital issue, which it described as an experiment, in every way. Same price, same treatment of ads and content, etc. The publisher says it’s going to start putting out every issue of the magazine on iTunes going forward, though some stuff could get tweaked down the road.

Starting with the March 2010 issue, for instance, you’ll be able to buy new copies of the magazine “in app,” meaning that you won’t have to download a new app from iTunes every time a new issue comes out. GQ may also tweak pricing and/or offer a subscription instead of one-offs.

Condé says it is gearing up to put out another title in the same format, though it won’t say which one (Do you know? Drop me a line, please.) I should note that Hearst’s Esquire rolled out its first iTunes issue/app today as well. No coincidence that both publishers are starting with aspirational dude-centric titles.

This stuff doesn’t seem as sexy as the plans the publishers have for much heralded but little seen tablets that Apple (AAPL) and others are supposed to be cooking up. That’s probably in part because it’s always more fun to think about things that could exist, as opposed to ones that are already extant.

But I think this is as important, in its own way, as the tablet demos we’ve seen from Condé, Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc., Bonnier, etc. And as relevant as the “Hulu for Magazines” consortium the publishers have finally announced.

Because Condé’s iPhone app is a pretty good proxy for the stuff the magazine guys want to eventually produce. And if people are buying this one (Condé won’t release numbers yet, but says it will eventually), then that’s a hopeful sign for the more advanced stuff we’re supposed to see one day.

Game On: Time Inc. Shows Off a Tabletized Sports Illustrated

Peter Kafka — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:24:55 +0000

Last month, Condé Nast played show-and-tell with its concept of a digitized magazine. Today it’s Time Inc.’s turn: The publisher is demoing a concept version of Sports Illustrated it says will be able to run on whatever tablet Apple (AAPL) or any else has up their sleeves. Eventually, the publisher imagines that it will port all its titles into the new format, which it says will be ready for primetime by the middle of next year or sooner.

The show part will work better than the tell, and the Time Warner (TWX) unit will be releasing some photos and videos that I can embed later in the day. But for what it’s worth, the demo looks as nifty as, and quite similar to, what Condé showed off. Except that in this case, I actually got to play with it for a couple minutes, and it was quite a bit of fun.

UPDATE Here it is:

Both publishers are thinking along the same lines. They imagine that their digital magazines will replicate the print version, including advertising, and will include add-ons like multimedia and links to the Web.

But they’re supposed to be distinct–and more valuable–than simple Web versions of magazines, and both publishers expect consumers to pay for them.

“Nobody reads the magazine on the Website,” says Sports Illustrated editor Terry McDonell. “That’s a firehose. This is the opposite of a firehose.”

One distinction between the publishers is that Condé has aligned itself with Adobe (ADBE), which is working on software to create e-editions and reader software to consume them. Time Inc.’s take is more conceptual: It worked with design shop The Wonder Factory to build a prototype, but isn’t committed to any particular platform.

This may mean Time Inc. will need more time to get the magazine ready for consumption next year or it may mean the publisher has more flexibility than Condé and Adobe. Given that magazine-friendly e-readers don’t exist yet, this is all sort of vaporware for now.

On a related note, the “Hulu for Magazines” joint venture I’ve been telling you about for a couple of months may finally be ready to step out in public next week. Though as I’ve noted, I’ve been hearing that for many weeks.

Still, the broad strokes seem set: Time Inc., Condé Nast, Meredith and Hearst–and perhaps News Corp. (NWS)–are creating a separate company designed to let them sell and distribute their digital editions, regardless of platform.

Backing Up, Lossless Audio and Genealogy Programs

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 21:28:02 +0000

My daughter left for college and I am worried about her backing up her computer. Is there a backup service that is offsite and automatic? What about campusbackup.org?

I haven’t tested campusbackup.org, whose Student Backup service copies an unlimited quantity of word-processing, spreadsheet, presentation and PDF files, once nightly, to a remote server for $50 a year. But there are other, more versatile options I have tested that, unlike Student Backup, copy photos and music and other types of files. These include MozyHome ($4.95 a month for unlimited storage, at mozy.com) and Carbonite ($55 a year for unlimited storage at carbonite.com). All three work with either Windows or Mac computers.

I read that importing the newly remastered Beatles CDs into iTunes and listening to them on a computer or portable player is like buying a masterpiece and staring at a photocopy of it. Any truth to this? Does importing really lose that much quality?

It depends on how sensitive an ear you have. In most cases, when you import a CD into iTunes or any other software jukebox program, you are converting the songs into a compressed file, such as an MP3 or AAC file. This saves a ton of space on your hard disk, but at least subtly diminishes quality. To an audiophile, that can make a big, negative difference, especially when you add the insult of listening to the music through iPod headphones or small computer speakers. To most of the rest of us, though—especially with rock, pop, urban or country music—it’s no big deal.

However, there is a compromise. If you don’t care about the songs taking up lots more space on your hard disk, iTunes will allow you to import them in a much less compressed format called Apple Lossless or an uncompressed format called WAV. You can choose which format to use in the iTunes Preferences settings. In the latest version of iTunes, called iTunes 9, this particular option is found under the General tab in Preferences, by clicking on the button called “Import Settings.”

Previously I had a Dell and Windows and used Family Tree Maker for genealogy records. Now that I’m an Apple owner, I find that Family Tree Maker does not work on an Apple, only Windows. What can I do about this?

It seems to me that you have three obvious options. If you still have your old Dell, you could crank it up again just for the purpose of running Family Tree Maker. Or, you could buy a boxed copy of Windows and install it on your Mac, which is fully capable of running Windows and Windows programs (assuming it’s an Intel-based Mac). Finally, you could switch to one of the native Mac-based genealogy programs and import your data from Family Tree Maker via the standard GEDCOM file format used in genealogy. One such program, called Reunion, includes specific instructions on importing data from Family Tree Maker on its “Top 10 Questions” page, at leisterpro.com.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online for free at the new All Things Digital web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

Not Dead Yet! The CD Still Rules Music (But iTunes Is Closing the Gap).

Peter Kafka — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:41:46 +0000

[CORRECTION: My assertion about NPD's unit sales data below is incorrect: The tracking service counts 12 digital download singles as the equivalent of one CD. That makes Apple's share of the market that much more impressive, since singles make up the majority of iTunes sales.]

Ready to toss dirt on the old, unloved CD? You’re going to have to wait a while. Compact discs are increasingly hard to find (at least in physical stores), but someone out there keeps buying them: The ancient format still makes up the majority of music sales in the U.S.

Here are the data for the first half of the year, via the NPD Group consumer-tracking outfit: CDs made up 65 percent of the music market, while paid digital downloads accounted for 35 percent. The digital share has increased from 20 percent two years ago, and Apple’s iTunes (AAPL) alone makes up 25 percent of overall sales*, so you’re going to hear lots of proclamations about Steve Jobs’s ascent to the to top of the music industry.

But hold off on that, just a bit. Because those numbers are skewed even more in favor of the CD than they appear at first glance: They’re measuring unit sales, not dollars. And given that the majority of digital sales are in the single format (i.e., a dollar or so a pop), that means CDs (at $10 or so a pop) still account for the vast majority of music revenue.

Which is why the industry is still tied to CDs, even though no one you know buys them anymore. And it explains why the industry is working on two separate digital formats (dubbed “Cocktail” when sold by Apple, and CMX when sold by anyone else) designed to induce buyers to pay for CD-like bundles.

It won’t work. At best, they’ll convince some digital album buyers to upgrade, but the music business is once again a singles business, and it’s going to remain that way. But you can’t blame the industry for trying.

By the way, there are decent odds you’ll hear about Cocktail at Apple’s September event, which Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski says is scheduled for Sept. 9. Mark your calendar.

*If you’re keeping track: Wal-Mart (WMT) and Target (TGT) trail Apple in the overall market. And iTunes still dominates the digital download market with a 69 percent share, while Amazon (AMZN) is a distant second with eight percent.

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More Posts and Articles from CES

Are You Ready for 3-D in Your Living Room? Hollywood Can't Wait.

Gadgets to Bring Holiday Cheer to Little Travelers

Condé Nast, With Help From a Nearly Naked Rihanna, Takes Another Step Toward Digital Magazines

Game On: Time Inc. Shows Off a Tabletized Sports Illustrated

Backing Up, Lossless Audio and Genealogy Programs

Not Dead Yet! The CD Still Rules Music (But iTunes Is Closing the Gap).