Until now, the software development tool has worked only on Macs. However, its creator plans to announce on Tuesday that Corona work can now be done on Windows machines as well.

Corona has been used to create games such as Doodle Dash (now called Tilt Monster) and Bubble Ball–a physics game created by a 14-year-old Utah boy that has risen to the top of free games in the App Store.

Moving Corona to Windows should open it up to more developers, according to its maker, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Ansca Mobile.

“We’re excited to finally bring the power of Corona SDK to the Windows operating system,” CEO Walter Luh said in a statement. “Windows’ vast number of users will clearly mean a larger Corona SDK community and ecosystem, but more importantly, we think Corona SDK will play a big role in making mobile development much more popular and accessible.”

However, although the Windows program can be used to finalize Android games, iOS games still have to be compiled on a Mac because Apple requires the use of its Mac-only Xcode tool. Also, the new Windows version is still classified as a beta.

Ansca Mobile is also changing the pricing for Corona. It will remain free while programs are in development. Programmers who want to use the tool for only Android or iOS development can now do so for $199 per year, while the pro account for publishing to both platforms will remain priced at $349 a year.

Which is why this qualifies as news: Financial commentary site Seeking Alpha is going to start paying some of its writers.

The seven-year-old site, which relies on a pool of several thousand contributors to stock it with chatter about stocks and anything else you can trade, will now offer them a chance to get paid for their work. It’s a one-size-fits-all rate: $10 for every 1,000 page views a story generates, as long as the story doesn’t appear anywhere else on the free Web.

That’s not going to make any of the site’s writers rich. Seeking Alpha CEO David Jackson says “it’s possible” that his most popular writers could generate a couple of thousand dollars per month, but most are going to make much less.

Jackson, on the other hand, is potentially on the hook for a decent-size bill.

Quantcast pegs his site’s daily page views at around two million. Not all of those views come from contributors–Seeking Alpha’s free transcript service, for instance, is popular and useful, and I assume the site gets a decent chunk of direct traffic. But if, say, half its page views were from volunteers who now want to get paid, that’s an outlay of $1,000 a day.

But why pay anything at all? Jackson’s longtime strategy has been to get people like newsletter publishers and money managers to give him free stuff, and offer them exposure/leads in return. Why change now?

You can read Jackson’s explanation of the move, along with some other details, in a letter he’s distributing to his writers today. But maybe he’s just following this sound advice from the Joker:

Dear Seeking Alpha contributor,

I wanted to let you know personally about three new initiatives that have rolled out on SeekingAlpha.com this morning:

1. Sharing revenue with contributors

I’ve always viewed Seeking Alpha as a partnership with our contributors: you provide us with outstanding articles, and we invest heavily (we now have over 70 employees) in technology, web design, editors and traffic partnerships to get your ideas in front of a large and valuable audience and drive customer leads to your business. But we’ve always known that some of our contributors don’t have businesses we can drive leads to, and that many contributors would appreciate additional direct income from their articles.

We’ve spent over a year building a direct sales team, and our readership has hit an all-time high and continues to grow (see: http://www.quantcast.com/seekingalpha.com). As a result, we can now share meaningful revenue with contributors: you’ll earn $10 for every thousand page views to articles which are published by Seeking Alpha and given to us exclusively (i.e. they don’t appear for free elsewhere on the Web). We call payment for exclusive articles our “Premium Partnership Program”. It’s on an article by article basis, so there are no contracts or forward commitments, and if for any reason you don’t want to receive payment yourself, you can pick a charity to receive your earnings instead. And if you don’t want to give us exclusivity for articles, nothing will change from the way we publish your articles now.

2. Upgrade to our leaderboards and reputation system

We’ve introduced a new reputation system and set of leaderboards, called “SA Opinion Leaders”. You’re now ranked by page views (trailing 90 days) to your articles according to the themes you write about. For example, if some of your articles are tagged “Media”, you automatically appear in the Media Sector leaderboard and are ranked by the number of page views you received to those articles. You can appear in multiple leaderboards, determined by the themes your articles are tagged with. Additionally, if you’re ranked in the top 5 for any theme, that information is displayed on your articles and also on your profile page.

We think this new reputation system has strong advantages. First, we’ve discovered that the number of followers a person has on Seeking Alpha (and, parenthetically, Twitter also,) doesn’t necessarily equate to reader engagement or influence. In contrast, the number of people who read your articles is a direct measure of reader engagement and thus your influence. Second, reputation is far more meaningful when measured in specific areas of expertise. So if you focus on media stocks, it’s far more valuable to know (and tell people) that you’re the number one on Seeking Alpha in the Media Sector than that you’re number 33 in some general ranking. We think that measuring real engagement and ranking contributors in categories will be valuable for contributors and — critically — valuable for readers.

3. Access to stats

You can now view detailed stats on Seeking Alpha, including total page views, page views by article, and page views by category. Additionally, you can track your page views and earnings for exclusive articles.

The future

Any major change carries risk, so why are we doing this? After all, churn in our contributor base is remarkably low, we’re about to add our 4,000th contributor, traffic is at an all time high, we recently crossed our 600,000th registered user, we have over 40,000 comments on the site per month, and our audience is of outstandingly high quality.

The answer is: this is about a vision. Investment research has been dominated by the sell side, but there’s a world out there of other people who have considerable knowledge and insight about stocks, options, bonds, ETFs and investment strategy. Whether you’re a fund manager, financial advisor, industry expert or a smart individual investor, we want to be the partner that brings that insight to light and unlocks value for contributors by offering exposure, reputation, customer leads and direct income. If this is successful, it should transform the investment research industry.

Thank you for your partnership with us, and wishing you a happy and prosperous 2011,
David

ThePlatform, a subsidiary of the cable giant, plans this week to launch a program that will allow workers whose job it is to post video content to use their iPhone to manage certain functions.

Workers will still have to use a PC or Mac to do the main work, but the iPhone app will allow basic tasks such as publishing a previously hidden piece of content (or taking down a piece that got published inadvertently).

“With the iPhone being a fairly ubiquitous device for media consumption, we felt it was also the perfect platform for media management,” said Ian Blaine, the CEO of thePlatform, which Comcast acquired in 2006. “It’s usually along with people wherever they are.”

Though clearly a niche product, it is the kind of application that many expect to see more of as businesses find ways of incorporating mobile devices into their office worfklow.

“I think what we are doing is a harbinger for others if they are not doing it already,” Blaine said.

Mpx, the main program developed by thePlatform, is used by Comcast itself and also sold to other cable providers such as Time Warner Cable, Cablevision and Cox, as well as by individual content producers such as NBC, PBS and Canada’s CBC. Mpx is used to edit and prepare video for sending to various devices, including phones, computers and set-top boxes.

“We’ve always been in the game of publishing to mobile devices, but being able to take advantage of the platform for actually publishing is pretty great and we are excited about it,” Blaine said.

The company has been testing the product with a few of its customers. Among those excited about the new mobile version of mpx are the folks at Time Warner Cable who use thePlatform to publish their content.

“We have been working with thePlatform to create a solution that supports our producers or editors responsible for ensuring that shows or clips are ready for publication, 24 hours a day,” said Eric Manchester, a member of Time Warner Cable’s technical staff. “Having a solution we can carry on us at all times allows us to solve many time sensitive issues without being tied to our desks.”

For now, those using the iPhone app will see only thumbnails of the videos in question, but Blaine said adding full-video previews is tops on the company’s list of features to add. It will also see if there is a way to achieve similar capabilities on the BlackBerry, given that many companies also use those devices.

With Android, Blaine said the company may not even need to do a separate app because the desktop version of mpx runs using Flash, which Android supports.

Yahoo is debuting a new offering for its hundreds of million of users, which takes the Demand Media model and notches up the volume by presumably allowing a thousand flowers to bloom.

Or, more to the point, blab.

The Internet giant is “inviting people to contribute to many of its most popular sites with the launch of the Yahoo Contributor Network, a new platform for people to publish their creative content on Yahoo!.”

This all comes out of its recent acquisition of Associated Content.

It’s an interesting gambit, since everyone is already yammering away like mad on Facebook.

But Yahoo is trying to put a spin on it by using its copious content assets as inspiration for consumers, and which the Silicon Valley social networking giant does not have.

Yet!

(By the way, Mao Tse-Tung’s whole phrase in his famous speech was: “Let a thousand flowers bloom, a hundred schools of thought contend.” After that happened all over the place, a brutal crackdown was then initiated.)

Let’s hope Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz does not do that, but here is the company’s official press release:

Yahoo! Adds the Voice of the People With the Launch of the Yahoo! Contributor Network

Yahoo! Invites You to Reach Millions of People by Contributing to Its Popular Content Sites, Including the Yahoo! Homepage

SUNNYVALE, Calif., November 15, 2010– Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO) today is inviting people to contribute to many of its most popular sites with the launch of the Yahoo! Contributor Network, a new platform for people to publish their creative content on Yahoo!. The Yahoo! Contributor Network is an evolution of the Associated Content platform and will bring contributions from more than 400,000 writers, photographers, and videographers to the Internet’s largest media destinations, including Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Sports, and even the Yahoo! homepage, among many others.

“The launch of the Yahoo! Contributor Network is a great example of how Yahoo! is executing against its content strategy. In less than six months since the acquisition of Associated Content, we’ve completely retooled the platform in order to bring the people’s voice to Yahoo!,” said Carol Bartz, CEO, Yahoo!. “Bringing this authentic perspective to Yahoo!’s most popular sites will deepen our engagement with the millions of people who visit us every day and provide new opportunities for creative contributors who participate in the Yahoo! experience.”

The Yahoo! Contributor Network extends Yahoo!’s position as the leading provider of high-quality, personally relevant content by bringing the diverse perspectives of more than 400,000 contributors to Yahoo!’s existing media portfolio. The new platform invites all Yahoo! users to become a part of the Yahoo! experience by sharing their perspectives and expertise, and also lets Yahoo! editors quickly and efficiently assign and select crowdsourced contributions for all of Yahoo!’s media properties. These contributions–which span topics from niche to mainstream–complement the programming already provided by Yahoo!’s award-winning editorial team and content partners.

“With the launch of the Yahoo! Contributor Network, our contributors now have an unprecedented opportunity for exposure and distribution across Yahoo!’s portfolio,” said Luke Beatty, vice president and general manager, Yahoo!. “Associated Content has been known for maintaining the industry’s largest contributor base, and with the launch of the Yahoo! Contributor Network, we’ve added scale and reach that sets us apart from any other crowdsourced media platform.”

The Yahoo! Contributor Network is the culmination of a months-long effort to merge the strengths of Associated Content and Yahoo!, following the announcement of Yahoo!’s acquisition of Associated Content in May 2010. The Associated Content From Yahoo! library will continue to serve as the official digital library for all content generated by the Yahoo! Contributor Network. It remains one of the world’s largest sources of community-created content, with over two million contributions spanning text, images, video, and audio.

The Yahoo! Contributor Network also sets performance payment guidelines for content featured on Yahoo! sites, and has a dashboard that provides full transparency into how each contributor’s content performs. For more information, visit: http://contributor.yahoo.com.

Which means that corner of Deadspin is going to be very, very popular today.

As well as unprofitable, says Gawker Media owner Nick Denton.

“These things are always money-losers,” Denton says via IM, before referring me to Gawker Media marketing director Erin Pettigrew for more.

But while I wait for her to get back to me, I can make some educated guesses to explain why lots of traffic won’t mean lots of money for Denton today.

• It’s hard to serve ads into traffic spikes. Or at least that’s what Denton always says about his most popular posts, like the iPhone 4 prototype that Gizmodo showed off to Apple’s dismay, or a sorta-sex tape featuring “McSteamy” from “Grey’s Anatomy,” etc.
• In this case, Gawker is very likely to serve up the Favre post without any advertising, anyway. When I interviewed Denton onstage at an Advertising Week event last week, I asked him specifically about how advertisers feel about “athlete dong” photos, which his readers love. His answer, in short, was that advertisers are understandably squeamish about this stuff, and can opt out of posts that contain it in advance. Have to assume this is one of those cases.

Requisite to-be-sure: Denton runs a for-profit business, and he won’t run athlete dong photos or anything else unless he can make money doing it.

So while those individual pageviews that the post generates won’t make him money, those visitors may well end up visiting other, dong-free posts on Gawker sites today, which will have ads.

And of course, the post will give Gawker and Deadspin that much more publicity, as mainstream media outlets that would never stoop to running athlete dong photos find time to talk about the site that did. (Cough.)

UPDATE: Sure enough, both the Favre post and the rest of Deadspin are currently ad-free. Via e-mail, Erin Pettigrew explains why that’s so:

In the case of major ad/edit adjacency issues such as this, we have a cadre of tech tools to handle the display conflict. Usually the decision is made to prevent ads from showing next to NSFW or similarly questionable content and then the tech solution is put into place to effect that immediately after. The tech tools range from removing ads on a per-post basis to scanning post content for particular topics against which we can negatively target ads.

If the adjacency affects takeovers and sponsorships where ad inventory cannot be otherwise rerouted, we communicate the scenario upfront to the client and involve them in the decision-making. The same tech solutions then apply.

It’s the classic airplane ad next to an airliner crash scenario for which publishers need to develop contingencies. For this particular scoop, the decision was indeed to clean the Favre post pages of ads.

I saw your note about spikes — you are correct that we aren’t able to instantly match ad demand to the surge of inventory supply caused by traffic spikes. This is because our inventory is 100% directly sold versus hawked by real time auction marketplaces. More pageviews does not directly equal more dollars! Also, note that our ad bookings close weeks to months before creative hits the websites. So, unless a spike is ‘scheduled,’ it can’t really be sold.

Yahoo has been trying of late to double down on its digital content hegemony–from buying social media maker Associated Content to a range of new initiatives such as Upshot, an effort to delve deeper into the new push to determine content selections based on search.

And now, it’s also trying to take over the old-dead-trees part of the equation with the publication of a massive style guide about new media publishing, which came out earlier this month, titled “The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, And Creating Content For The Digital World.”

The hefty tome was edited by Chris Barr, Yahoo’s senior editorial director, who told me in an interview last week that the company was trying to create the Associated Press Stylebook–which has been the classic standard for traditional media–of the next era.

“Things in editorial have changed so much in how content is created and published, so we felt the digital space had to have a definitive guide to deal with a whole new set of issues,” said Barr. “And we felt, given how big a role we play in online content, that we really were in a position to do that.”

Indeed, and here is a little video tribute I did using the book:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100723/video-boomtown-gets-blogging-tips-from-yahoo-actually-from-its-new-style-guide-that-is/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100119/a-sneak-peek-at-ted-leonsis-new-book-the-business-of-happiness/ http://allthingsd.com/20100119/a-sneak-peek-at-ted-leonsis-new-book-the-business-of-happiness/#comments Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:24:25 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=23198

This weekend, BoomTown got hold of a new book by former AOL exec and longtime entrepreneur Ted Leonsis, which it set to be released on Feb. 8 by Regnery Publishing.

Titled “The Business of Happiness: 6 Secrets to Extraordinary Success in Life and Work,” Leonsis penned the book with former AOL PR head John Buckley.

And like the ebullient Leonsis, its entertaining fulcrum is a list he often talks about, one he made after a scary plane experience 25 years ago of the 101 things he wanted to achieve before he died.

“At the time, I thought that ticking items off my list would make me happy,” he writes in the book’s introduction.

It seems to have worked, he notes. “I’ve found that actively pursuing happiness seems to be a driver of success.”

In the second part of the book, Leonsis offers advice to others on how to get to happiness and success the Ted way.

But I especially enjoyed the first part, in which Leonsis tells his story–from humbling beginnings to college at Georgetown University to his start in the tech industry at Wang to his first successful forays into entrepreneurship.

Eventually, one of his start-ups–Redgate Communications–was bought by Steve Case of AOL.

Leonsis writes about this roller-coaster ride at AOL, which had as many downs as ups–with one of its down-est downs being its moment of glory: The merger with Time Warner (TWX).

“Let me state for the record: I was passionately opposed to the merger with Time Warner,” he writes. And he was.

For the most part in the book, Leonsis is probably kinder to the principals on all sides than is warranted.

But–for those who know him well–this is due more his glass-full nature than trying to be willfully opaque about what is now widely considered the worst U.S. business alliance in history.

And Leonsis does correctly point out one of the merger’s main screw-ups–the inability, due to internal politics, to sell AOL broadband over Time Warner’s powerful cable system.

It is also no surprise that Leonsis takes the AOL side, painting a picture of obstructive Time Warner execs more obsessed with Wall Street than creating great products.

Writes Leonsis:

“It was no longer, ‘What great product did we release this week?’ Everything–everything–was about whether we were going to send enough money to New York to help our new corporate parent meet its $11 billion EBITDA number and generate cash flow to pay off Time Warner’s debts. I remember coming out of meetings and saying to people, ‘We could be making nuclear power plants, for all you could tell from that meeting.’”

In the end, the Time Warner forces won out over those from AOL and Leonsis found that he was the last man standing, this time with new CEO Jon Miller.

With Miller, Leonsis slogged on at AOL, trying to move its prospects forward, but that also ended in tears.

Miller–who is now digital head at News Corp. (NWS)–got unfairly canned by Time Warner.

Unhappy with the new exec team–which was later tossed out too–Leonsis left in 2007.

AOL (AOL) has recently been spun out of Time Warner, with former Google (GOOG) exec Tim Armstrong at the helm.

And Leonsis has also moved on–becoming even more involved with his sports teams, forays into filmmaking and investing in new start-ups (sometimes with Case)–and carving out what seems to be a pretty happy life.

At the end of his book, Leonsis publishes his list and shows what he has checked off and what he has not.

He seems to have made a big dent in it, although he still needs to win a world championship and go into outer space. Also get a hole-in-one.

Not that I am keeping track, Ted, but you better get cracking.

And, to get a taste of Ted’s infectious style, here’s an interview with him I did in Silicon Valley in 2008, in which he mentions happiness a lot:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100119/a-sneak-peek-at-ted-leonsis-new-book-the-business-of-happiness/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20090716/twittergate-out-damned-spot/ http://allthingsd.com/20090716/twittergate-out-damned-spot/#comments Thu, 16 Jul 2009 10:10:16 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=15836

For all the noisy hubbub over should-we-or-shouldn’t-we-publish confidential documents hacked from password-protected accounts of Twitter employees, as well as a Twitter spouse, it is actually pretty simple.

Stolen equals stolen.

But, because this is a “hot” issue and it concerns an even hotter Web 2.0 company–Holy traffic-gooser, Batman!–the debate will surely go on and on, even as the stolen information inevitably leaks its way out.

Still, let’s not pretend what it is and is not.

It is most definitely not, for example, one of those great dramatic moments in journalism.

Thus, comparing the ruminations over whether to publish egregiously obtained information–however true–to the debate over a major event like the New York Times publishing the Pentagon Papers is pathetic.

It is, though, a tempest in a Silicon Valley teapot.

In point of fact, my colleague Peter Kafka, who works from New York, wrote me tonight:

“Was at a fancy schmooze tonight packed with digital media bigwigs: Viacom, NBC, News Corp, plus lots of start-up guys. TwitterGate was on *no one’s* lips. I talked to one guy who has a stake in the company and he pretty much shrugged about it–several people had no idea about it at all. Total non-news.”

It is not, however self-righteously (and pompously) put forth, much of a dilemma.

As the very clever John Gruber of Daring Fireball put it: “What you may ask, is the dilemma, since it is clear that any decent human being would simply refuse to have anything to do with something so lurid?”

Indeed, it is unequivocally wrong to publish documents you know or think were stolen or hacked, because it is aiding and abetting that theft.

In this regard, then, there should be no difference between “Web” journalism and the old-fashioned journalism–acting as if the former gets a “process journalism” (what a crock!) pass at standards and ethics that should be eternal and unwavering, no matter the medium.

And it is a little like pitting “gay” marriage against marriage, in order to create a false dichotomy, designed only to obfuscate the issues.

So, it also isn’t kosher to try to take focus of your own wrongdoing by pointing to other practices, which is almost always an obnoxious reach by the willfully immature.

While comparisons to leaked company documents have been made–and BoomTown knows from leaked corporate memos–this is a lazy-man’s argument, since it simply does not track.

The Twitter docs were stolen from personal accounts, an obvious pilfer, which immediately changes the equation completely.

While you certainly can have a lively debate about whether Yahoos should pass along some widely distributed memo that CEO Carol Bartz penned to the company, it is not even close to the same thing.

And, more to the point, if someone sent me emails jacked from Bartz’s own email account, I would not need even a second to know I would never use such information.

As I tweeted earlier today: A credible source a reporter knows giving accurate info is clearly different from a thief rifling through someone’s sock drawer.

That is especially true when you use material from a person you do not know. For the record: When I post a company memo, for example, I know and check out exactly who’s giving it to me and I don’t publish stuff just because it happens to land in my email box.

And, a minor beef, blaming victims for the theft by saying they have weak or inadequate passwords is also pathetic. It’s kind of like blaming people for being robbed because they had crappy locks.

I suppose there is a point in there, but the real finger of blame should always be firmly pointed at the burglar and those who fence his nicked goods.

That brings me to my final point–thinking you can handle dirty material and then act as if your hands are clean.

How hands get dirty is a concept even my children understand.

And if my kids ever said: “Hey, this stolen stuff is going to get out anyway, so let me be the one to ladle it out as I see fit”–I’d ground them for life.

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