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When Media Giants Attack! Cease-and-Desist Letter to News Reader Zite Claims All Kinds of Copyright Damage

Kara Swisher — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 22:24:14 +0000

A panoply of big media giants sent a cease-and-desist letter today to Zite, the Apple iPad news reader app.

The Washington Post, AP, Gannett, Getty Images, Time, Dow Jones and many other media organizations were part of the action, which you can read all about below.

Zite bills itself as a “personalized iPad magazine that gets smarter as you use it.”

Not smart enough, it seems, to avoid copyright complaints from the content creators the app sucks in.

“The Zite application is plainly unlawful,” said the letter to Zite CEO Ali Davar, noting all kinds of copyright violations.

In a phone interview with BoomTown this afternoon, Davar said Zite would comply with the letter by shifting the content from its “reading” mode to a Web one, which points to publisher sites.

“It’s a bummer that they did this, but we expected it,” he said.

In a comment he posted below, Davar also wrote:

“Zite’s goal is to work with publishers, not to be antagonistic. The few publishers that have contacted us regarding the reading mode view we have complied with their requests and simply switched over to web view. We’re talking to publishers right now to find a win-win for them monetarily and to at the same time preserve the great user experience.”

For now, it’s lose-lose, and the letter is a dramatic shot across the bow of all the many news readers now hitting the market in the wake of the popularity of the Apple iPad tablet.

The social media-focused Flipboard and the news-oriented Pulse are two others, both of which have claimed they are working with publishers.

But Pulse wrangled with the New York Times over misuse of its RSS feeds and copyright issues, which has since been settled.

Zite showed up earlier this month, a product of a machine-learning technology start-up called Worio, which is based in Vancouver, Canada.

The aggregator of personalized content, which has $4 million in angel funding, gets its cues from a user’s interests.

Zite’s technology originated at research at the University of British Columbia several years ago.

In an interview with NetworkEffect’s Liz Gannes a few weeks ago, Davar seemed sanguine about publishers.

Wrote Gannes:

The free Zite app imports a user’s Twitter tweets, follows and Google Reader subscriptions, offers lists of pre-made categories, and then solicits feedback and refines over time a list of topics and sources the user is interested in. It features articles based on their popularity, number of shares from a user’s network and topic relevance. (Davar said he thinks a person’s Facebook network data is too heterogeneous to reliably recommend articles, so it’s not included as an option.)

Flipboard itself is likely to add more personalization features; the company bought real-time social discovery technology from Ellerdale and has yet to implement much of it.

Vancouver-based Zite is well-funded, with $4 million from angels and Canadian grants, but it doesn’t have business relationships with publishers. The app lays out pictures and articles, stripping out everything else, including ads. Davar said he doubted this would be a problem. “It would be shortsighted for publishers to think of Zite as us versus them,” he said.

Short-sighted maybe, but legally lethal definitely, as you can see by this cease-and-desist letter, as well as a video from Zite on how its app works:

Letter to Zite _03 30 11_ –

Zite: Personalized Magazine for iPad from zite.com on Vimeo.

(Full disclosure: New Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

Appolicious Signs Partnership to Integrate With Yahoo

Kara Swisher — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 10:23:56 +0000

Although serial entrepreneur Al Warms sold his start-up to Yahoo and ultimately left the Internet giant to launch a new one, he is coming back a bit via an interesting partnership.

Warms’s Appolicious is aimed at encouraging discovery and social networking in the mobile apps market.

Now Appolicious will carry Yahoo’s brand at the top of its site and be surfaced throughout Yahoo’s News, Sports and other powerful media properties.

Everything will be co-branded. The words, “In association with Yahoo,” for example, will appear on the Appolicious site.

“I think it is a pretty huge deal in what it means to where apps have gotten in such a short period of time,” said Warms in an interview with BoomTown. “We want to make these apps relevant for Yahoo users.”

Yahoo’s VP for Media, Jimmy Pitaro, said that the deal was struck to make the increasingly complex world of mobile apps simpler.

“We’re focused on making people’s online lives easier,” he said. “Apps are huge, but also confusing to many, so we want them to be in the relevant place they belong and in context for our users.”

A baseball story, for example, might surface various related baseball apps, while a celebrity post would offer very different ones.

The partnership will be a big boost for Warms and Appolicious, given the huge traffic generated by Yahoo’s content offerings.

Warms sold his Participate Media, along with its BuzzTracker content aggregator, to Yahoo in late 2007.

Warms left Yahoo (YHOO) in late 2008 and started Appolicious in May 2009 with about $500,000 in seed funding.

The start-up has since raised another $1.5 million.

Appolicious is kind of a combination of Twitter, Facebook and Yahoo, with some Yelp sprinkled in, but devoted solely to organizing and making sense of the exploding app galaxy in the universe of smartphones.

Right now, the innovative site focuses on iPhone and iPad apps, as well as other mobile platforms such as Android from Google (GOOG). Appolicious plans to add apps for the BlackBerry from Research in Motion (RIMM).

Using premium content, recommendations of friends and people like you–as well as a variety of lists, feeds, popularity rankings, images and videos–the idea is to do what the iTunes Store does not.

Namely, make sense of the plenitude of apps out there, most of which are on the iPhone.

To make that happen, users of the service also can list all the apps they have in an App Library, so others can see them.

Warms’s business plan is largely advertising, including a focus on attracting brands that want to be in front of apps consumers.

Here is a video interview I did with Warms when he launched Appolicious, as well as screenshots of the new Yahoo-branded site:

[ See post to watch video ]

The iPhone Lost Market Share in Q4? Who Cares?

John Paczkowski — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 20:30:43 +0000

In its fourth quarter, Apple shipped some 8.7 million iPhones–nearly double the number shipped in the same quarter a year earlier and 18 percent more than it shipped in the previous quarter. Impressive gains by any measure. Interesting to learn, then, that the device actually lost market share.

According to ABI Research, the iPhone’s share of the worldwide smartphone market in Q4 2009 slipped to 16.6 percent from 18.1 percent in the previous quarter.

Now, while it’s certainly ironic to lose market share in a record quarter, it’s important to keep a few things in mind.

First, counting units sold is just one measure of a device’s success at market. Another measure worth considering is profits relative to revenue. And according to some analysis we’ve discussed here before, Apple (AAPL) claims an inordinate share of the handset industry’s profits.

Second, iPhone sales typically spike in the third quarter–the first full quarter after the latest iPhone launch (in this case, the 3G S), and then taper off slightly after that. They did so after the 3G debuted, and they’ll almost certainly do so again when the company launches the device’s next iteration.

Finally, the fact that Apple has managed to claim 16.6 percent of a market in which it had no presence whatsoever three years ago and that it did so with a single device is astonishing.

So, does loss of market share signify the beginning of a decline in the iPhone’s popularity or the profits it generates for Apple? Not likely.

A Clicker To Watch TV Online

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 01:43:07 +0000

Finding TV shows online can be a major hassle. If you can remember which network hosts the show, you then must hunt through a maze of listings of several other television shows on that network’s Web site to find it. The show you want to watch might not even be available since many networks rotate only a handful of recent episodes online at a time. And if you do finally find the correct episode, you may be required to download a special media player to watch it.

Some services make this process a little easier. Hulu holds episodes from 1,200 television shows, but is still missing many. Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes Store offers over 50,000 episodes, but unlike network sites or Hulu, it requires viewers to pay to download and watch them (though they are commercial-free). Video search engines like Truveo browse the entire Web, returning an often-overwhelming number of results. And while YouTube is the king of Web video, it can too easily return a search result that isn’t a complete and genuine episode of the show you’re seeking.

[ See post to watch video ]

This week, I’ve been testing Clicker, a free Web site that aims to be the TV Guide for all full episodes available to watch on the Web. It searches over 1,200 sources, so it can index some 400,000 episodes from 7,000 shows. Results include television programs as well as “Web originals,” or shows that are native to the Internet and are of broadcast quality. Clicker either plays the video on its site or links you to where this content is shown on another hosting site—like NBC or Hulu. If a show isn’t available online, Clicker tells you so you don’t have to keep hunting all over for it.

I like Clicker and found it to be a quick resource for finding all sorts of shows online. In many cases, it directed me to find the episodes I wanted to watch and saved me the hassle of less efficient searching. It also suggested shows I might like and offered a playlist where I could subscribe to receive episodes as they became available or save available videos to watch later.

Clicker makes descriptive pages about each show

Though it has a search box, Clicker feels more like a directory than purely a robotic search engine that relies mainly on algorithms. In fact, Clicker created a descriptive page for almost every show, and these pages can be edited or created via user submissions, which Clicker will review before posting them to the site. And because it’s focused on TV shows or Web originals, it won’t clutter your results with kids’ birthday parties or cats on skateboards.

The site is still rather new, so it has some kinks to work out—like links to videos that didn’t actually play if, for example, they were pulled by the network. But these were rare, and for the most part, if a video wasn’t available, a clear, brief explanation was displayed at the top of the page. Also, if Clicker sends you back out to a network’s site and that network uses a special player for videos, you’ll still have to download that player.

Filtering Results

Clicker’s program pages contain a description of the show, and a way to filter results by season, airdate or popularity. And the site shows the actual airdate of each video—something that not many other sites do. A column on the right side of each page displays several related shows, like the suggestion of “Modern Family” for fans of “How I Met Your Mother”; and “Roswell” and “Dead Like Me” suggested for people who like “Heroes.” In December, these recommendations will become even more personalized.

Some of Clicker’s sources include NBC, Fox, ABC, PBS, the Food Network and Web original content (i.e. “The Onion”). It also can search movies and music videos; the movies can be watched free in some cases, or paid for via Amazon’s (AMZN) Video on Demand or Netflix (NFLX) Instant Streaming. In January, Clicker plans to incorporate shows and movies from iTunes, using Apple’s pay-and-download method.

Clicker is especially handy when you’re looking for a show that isn’t where you think it should be. “Seinfeld,” for example, is on TBS rather than NBC, where it originally aired, and only nine episodes are available at once before they rotate out and are replaced by nine more. “Friends” is found on theWB.com, rather than on NBC’s site. “Damages” isn’t available on its network site, FX; instead, it can be found at Crackle.com, another video-hosting site. It’s easy to understand why people settle for missing an episode rather than trying to find a show online.

Clicker finds over 400,000 television and Web-original episodes so you can search less and watch more.

Clicker also comes in handy when you’re querying something or someone you need to learn about. By typing in a term like “Thanksgiving travel,” I get news results from NBC’s “Nightly News with Brian Williams,” the “CBS Evening News” and the Associated Press. I also get tips for traveling during this busy time of year from an AOL Travel online video, as well as a 1968 episode of “The Beverly Hillbillies” called “The Thanksgiving Spirit.”

Clicker isn’t the site to use if you want to find the hot video clip that everyone is watching. When I searched for “Whitney Houston” the morning after the American Music Awards, the most recent video I found was the singer performing on “Good Morning America” in September—not the one showing her singing during the awards show the night before.

But the fact that Clicker can find Whitney Houston on “Good Morning America” is useful in itself. A search for Warren Buffett’s most recent appearance on the “Charlie Rose” show can be conducted in a similar manner—either by typing his name into the box at the top of the page or by opening the show’s page and searching within that show for anyone who has appeared as a guest. Performing a search within a show like this anywhere else is nowhere near as easy as on Clicker.

Playlist of Your Shows

Clicker can be used as a TiVo (TIVO) of sorts if you create a username on the site or simply sign in using Facebook Connect, which I did.

Users can make playlists where they can add just one episode, all episodes, or new episodes to this list—subscribing to receive all new episodes in the playlist as they become available. I added episodes of “The Amazing Race” and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” to my playlist. This list can be accessed anytime, and it’s helpful for people who don’t have enough time to watch a show that they found. In December, email and Facebook notifications will be added to tell users that new episodes are in their playlists.

If you spend a lot of time in front of your computer and find yourself searching all over the Web for the TV shows you’d like to watch, Clicker will be a huge help. And even if your show isn’t available, you might find something similar—or better—in Clicker’s recommendations.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg. Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Serial Entrepreneur Al Warms Debuts Appolicious, Hoping iPhone Apps Fans Will Find It Delicious

Kara Swisher — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 07:01:53 +0000

Longtime Internet entrepreneur Al Warms paid a visit to BoomTown HQ today to show off a new company he has founded called Appolicious.

That is the unusual name Warms–who sold his Participate Media, along with its BuzzTracker content aggregator, to Yahoo in late 2007–has given to a start-up aimed at encouraging discovery and social networking in the Apple (AAPL) iPhone mobile apps market.

Warms left Yahoo (YHOO) last fall and started Appolicious in May of this year with about $500,000 in seed funding.

The site is kind of a combination of Twitter, Facebook and Yahoo, with some Yelp sprinkled in, but devoted solely to organizing and making sense of the app galaxy in the universe of smart phones.

Right now, the innovative site just focuses on iPhone apps–are there any others?–but Warms said he will soon include other mobile platforms, such as the BlackBerry from Research in Motion (RIMM).

Using premium content, recommendations of friends and also people like you–as well as a variety of lists, feeds, popularity rankings, images and videos–the idea is to do what the iTunes store does not.

Namely, make sense of the plenitude of apps out there, most of which are on the iPhone.

To make that happen, users of the service also can list all the iPhone apps they have in an App Library so others can see if they too own the iFart app (message to self: Hide that app deep in the library).

Warms hopes to make money on the site from advertising, including focusing on attracting brands that want to be in front of apps consumers.

Here is a video interview I did with Warms, where we discuss all this and more:

[ See post to watch video ]

And, here are three screenshots of the site below (click on the images to make them larger):

iTunes 69-Cent Bargain Bin to Debut April 7

John Paczkowski — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 19:00:30 +0000

April 7. That’s when the 99-cent-per-song rate that iTunes first set in 2003 will finally end, says the LA Times. On that day–and not April 1 as Apple originally claimed–the company will introduce a new tiered-pricing plan that will see it peddling songs for 69 cents, 99 cents, and $1.29, according to popularity.

In the past, Apple (AAPL) has said that many more songs will be priced at 69 cents than at $1.29. But that 69-cent bargain bin is viewed as little consolation to some who question the wisdom of introducing what amounts to a 30 percent price increase with the economy in recession and online piracy an easy option.

Said Nine Inch Nails manager Jim Guerinot, “Wouldn’t it make sense to try to price it cheaper instead of squeezing the handful of people who are still willing to pay for music?”

Perhaps. But when has the recording industry ever done anything that made sense?