AllThingsD » videos

With a New Design, Vevo Asks Music Video Fans to Stick Around

Peter Kafka — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 10:00:25 +0000

People who visit Vevo to check out a music video end up sticking around, on average, to watch one more. Vevo CEO Rio Caraeff would like them to watch 10 or 12, so he’s redesigned his site to make it stickier.

It’s a pretty slick overhaul, or at least it seemed to be when I took a preview spin. But it’s up now, so you can see for yourself, which also means I don’t need to spend much time describing it.

I do want to point out one feature. Like every other Web site in the world, Vevo wants to make itself more social, by making it easier to tell your pals what you’re watching, and easier to see what your friends are watching. No surprise there. What’s interesting to me is that when you log in to the site using your Facebook credentials, Vevo will have already “socialized” you — even if you’ve never used the site and none of your friends have, either.

Vevo can do that by tapping into the music data that Facebook has already compiled about you, based on songs and bands you’ve “Liked,” and any music you’ve played via Facebook-connected services like Spotify.

I know that Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” mechanics — where every action you take on the site is broadcast/spammed out to all your friends — built up an important data warehouse for Mark Zuckerberg.

But I hadn’t quite processed that he was willing to share it with outside developers. Who will, of course, be that much more interested in working with Facebook, for that very reason.

Speaking of Facebook: One reason it’s so important for Caraeff to make his site stickier is that his joint venture, which is co-owned by Sony, Universal Music, and other investors, is dependent on Google’s YouTube for the majority of its traffic. In the U.S., YouTube generates about two-thirds of Vevo’s views.

Caraeff is starting to renegotiate a deal with YouTube that expires at the end of the year, and it makes sense for both sides to make it work. But Caraeff also wants options, which is why he is talking to Facebook, among other suitors.

Those would-be partners would have to offer Caraeff traffic and revenue guarantees to make a deal work. But even with those in place, it would be even more crucial for Vevo to have a standalone site that users really cared about.

Caraeff would be overhauling Vevo, in any case. But if the new look makes his site that much more attractive to partners, even better.

From Kik to Clik: A Video-Sharing App That Works Without Wi-Fi

Lauren Goode — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 17:47:08 +0000

Consumers are increasingly using multiple screens to view content, and more technology is coming to market that enables users to share or control that media between screens.

Now, Kik Interactive, the company that introduced super-simple mobile messaging (and became the target of a lawsuit filed by RIM), is joining the multiscreen video party.

Kik’s new app, called Clik, allows you to view video that’s on your smartphone on a bigger connected screen.

Unlike Apple’s AirPlay, which requires users to be on a Wi-Fi network, or Movl’s apps for Samsung TVs, which in some cases require Wi-Fi, Clik uses the 3G capabilities of your phone and doesn’t require access to a special device on the receiving end — just any screen that is connected to the Internet and can run a browser.

For users concerned about the app burning up your phone data, Clik explains this by saying the app doesn’t stream the content to your TV or computer; it just instructs the browser to play video.

Once a user has downloaded the free Clik app to an iOS or Android device, he or she can navigate to ClikThis.com through a Web browser and scan the giant QR code that appears on the home page. The Web page then becomes a video viewing platform for the videos that appear on the smartphone. The interactivity between the two is pretty seamless, with the videos starting, stopping and switching as soon as a command is received from the smartphone.

One of the initially apparent drawbacks is that ClikThis.com is just a bare-bones host page of the video, with no command buttons on it, so you can’t start and stop the video from the browser — it has to be done through the phone.

In terms of video quality, it’s determined by the quality of the Web video and not the video as it appears on the phone.

Kik is launching Clik today, along with a software kit for developers to get cracking on different applications for the Clik platform. For now, it’s rolling out with a YouTube app. Creator Ted Livingston sees the potential for multi-user, multiscreen sharing: You’re at a party, say, and everyone’s using Clik on their phones, so they can all share and control the game, video or music playlists.

Kik’s battle with RIM over the messaging app is still continuing, though last fall Kik said it was working on a new version of its messenger that would work on RIM BlackBerry devices. Despite the legal fracas, Kik managed to nab $8 million in Series A funding last year from RRE Ventures, Spark Capital and Fred Wilson’s Union Square Ventures. Wilson and Adam Ludwin from RRE also joined Kik’s board.

Samsung Smart TVs Get Sweeter With SugarSync

Lauren Goode — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 15:05:44 +0000

At CES last week, Samsung Electronics showed off its AllShare Play technology for sharing content across multiple electronic devices through the cloud. As Forbes points out, AllShare actually isn’t new — Samsung has supported the service for about six years now.

What is new, though, is that start-up cloud service SugarSync is now available on Samsung’s new “smart” TVs.

For Samsung TV owners, having SugarSync as part of AllShare Play means that they can upload media from any device — not just a Samsung PC or Samsung smartphone — and then wirelessly access it through the TV. And they can access uncompressed media, so if they’re storing high-resolution or HD media through SugarSync, that’s what they’ll get on the TV. It’s not clear which specific models of Samsung’s smart TVs will have SugarSync as part of AllShare, but Samsung has stated before that the service will be available on TVs, PCs, smartphones, tablets and digital cameras.

For SugarSync, it’s a first step into the TV market, as well as a leg up on its direct competitor, Dropbox, which currently doesn’t have a presence in TVs. Dropbox, which claims 50 million users, declined to comment on whether it is working with manufacturers to get its app on smart TVs. The Dropbox app can be accessed through browsers on smart TVs, but it seems like some Dropbox fans have been itching for a dedicated app on television sets.

One of the features that sets SugarSync apart from Dropbox is the five gigabytes of free storage space offered to new customers (though Dropbox does offer 5GB of free storage to HTC mobile phone owners). Keep in mind that a single two-hour HD movie can take up approximately 10GB. But SugarSync CEO Laura Yecies says its cloud-sharing service on TVs is meant more for short home movies and photos, rather than feature-length movies or other file types, like work documents.

Still, if you’re storing lots of home movies in your account — think of all those videos you shoot on your smartphone — that 5GB of space will fill up pretty quickly, which means you’ll be prompted to upgrade to a premium SugarSync account.

It’s not the first partnership SugarSync has forged with hardware makers, and Yecies said the company is exploring more. Last year, Lenovo said its Think-branded laptops would ship with SugarSync on them, and Fujitsu began including SugarSync on its ScanSnap scanners. SanDisk has also created an app for Android smartphones that automatically dumps media from the phone’s memory card to SugarSync, in order to free up space on the device.

Overseas, the company has also partnered with carriers Korea Telecom and France Telecom Orange, as a cloud service offered with mobile or broadband Internet service.

SugarSync launched under Yecies in 2008, after having previously operated under the name Sharpcast. While the start-up says its customer base grew sixfold last year, it declined to say how many total users it has, except to say it’s in the millions.

“TVs are a big step for us, in terms of convergence,” Yecies said. “All the devices are coming together, people are starting to understand the cloud, and the reality is it’s really becoming mainstream.”

In case you’ve missed the sky-high predictions for the cloud market, research firm IDC sized the cloud sharing and sync market at $724 million in 2009, and projects that it will grow at a compound annual rate of 28.2 percent, to over $2.5 billion in 2014.

PlayStation Network Still Down After Sustaining Injuries Last Week

Tricia Duryee — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 16:43:54 +0000

That’s some serious collateral damage. The PlayStation Network, which was attacked by hackers, has now been offline for five days, with no end in sight. A spokesperson on its blog wrote today: “I know you are waiting for additional information on when PlayStation Network and Qriocity services will be online. Unfortunately, I don’t have an update or timeframe to share at this point in time.” The network, which provides PlayStation 3 users with downloadable games, movies and TV shows, originally thought it would be operational again over the weekend.

A Digital "Magazine" With One Subscriber

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 05:05:42 +0000

Each morning, the President of the United States gets briefed on the day’s news by some of the smartest advisers around. The rest of us aren’t so lucky. We have to sift through newspapers, magazines and websites to find out what’s going on around us. Now, thanks to a free iPad app called Zite, the news-gathering process may get a lot easier for those of us who aren’t leaders of the free world.

[ See post to watch video ]

Zite, by a Vancouver company of the same name, crawls over half a million Web domains to find specific reading material that would be of interest to you, according to your social network and/or online reading behavior. It evaluates this potential content by tracking signals (like tweets, comments, tags and sharing) from stories that indicate a certain level of social interest and momentum in the story. The result is a personalized magazine that gets more accurately targeted toward its reader the more it’s used.

Wednesday, Zite launched in Apple’s App Store, and for the past week I’ve been testing an early version of it. As someone who is regularly overwhelmed by information overload, just on technology news alone, I found Zite to be a huge help. I realized every time I grabbed my iPad, I anxiously checked this app to see what new content it gathered for me. And I found myself reading stories from sources I don’t usually read.

Zite joins the ranks of other personalized digital magazines, like Silicon Valley-based Flipboard, which came out last July. Flipboard differs in that it takes data from your Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as other topics or people you can manually choose to set up, and builds a personalized digital magazine with this content.

Zite isn’t just a mirror of your social-networking account. It figures out what you consider interesting according to your Twitter or Google Reader accounts, then fills your magazine with stories about similar topics.

It also tracks and learns from user behavior as people open stories (or don’t), so if users just read a story on Zite, its personalization still works. With each story a user reads, he or she can opt to indicate they like a story, want to see more of one or all of the individual topics covered in that story, or want to see more from the source of that story. Zite then makes suggestions according to that knowledge. So your Zite magazine will never be exactly like mine.

By now, you’re probably wondering what Zite does with this knowledge about your reading preferences. Zite CEO Ali Davar says the company won’t sell user data to third parties, but may use it internally on an anonymous basis for advertising purposes. The company will share aggregate data with publishers (like number of clicks on a story), for ad-placement purposes, but this won’t include a user’s individual data.

Flipboard is more polished than Zite, including images that take up the entire iPad screen and clever animations that mimic real pages turning. Zite’s animations are limited to more straightforward gestures like swiping from right to left to turn to a new page of content, though there is a cool animation on Zite’s home screen that swings several images from stories onto the magazine’s first page. Both Zite and Flipboard pull text and images from sources, but Flipboard usually just displays a portion of a story on its digital magazine pages with the original website on which content was found displayed below it.

Above, ‘Top Stories’ compiles stories Zite thinks a user wants to read. Top, a Customize option lets users add favorite sections.

Zite displays entire stories on its own formatted reading-mode pages, though some stories, like one I read from the New York Times, appeared in the article’s original Web-page format. Mr. Davar said this is because roughly 3% to 5% of articles are tagged in a way that doesn’t allow for reformatting in Zite.

There are currently no ads in Zite, but Mr. Davar said the company will begin to put ads from publishers in the reading-mode pages of the magazine in a few months. He said the site may have ads that aren’t from publishers, but publishers have control regarding ads that appear on their content.

Setting up Zite was a cinch. I entered my Twitter username (not the password) and Zite took a minute to churn and grab content that interested me, setting up sections of my magazine according to topics I follow in Twitter. I didn’t enter my Google Reader account. Users who don’t have Twitter or Google Reader accounts can skip those steps and still use Zite by selecting sections of the magazine that interest them.

Upon opening Zite, a section called “Top Stories” appears first. This is a compilation of the stories Zite thinks I’ll find most interesting, and its content refreshes about every 30 minutes depending how often I use Zite.

My auto-generated magazine had a list of topics including Gadgets, Mobile, iPhone, Google, Mac, Social Media and Technology. I tapped a Customize icon to pick some additional sections for my magazine. I could choose from over 2,000 topics ranging from Wedding Photography to Gardening, from Wine & Mixology to Celebrity Gossip & Industry Rumors. A search box lets users look for even more topics, like “Martha Stewart,” which I added to my Zite. Topics can’t be manually added.

I ran into a couple bugs while using my early version of Zite, which Mr. Davar said are being fixed. A Mashable.com article crashed the app four times in a row when I tried to read it. And though videos from major providers like YouTube and Vimeo are watchable in Zite, I had trouble playing a video that used HTML-5 playback.

For now, Zite is limited to Apple’s iPad, just like Flipboard. Mr. Davar said he plans to get Zite on other tablets by this summer and on mobile devices and Web browsers before the end of this year.

If you’d like a smarter way to handle information overload, Zite can do the dirty work of amassing relevant content for you. It’s designed to get more personalized over time and I certainly plan to keep using it to see what it uncovers for me.

Watch a video with Katherine Boehret on Zite at WSJ.com/PersonalTech. Email her at katie.boehret@wsj.com.

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Atrix 4G: Faux Laptop With a Phone For Brains

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 22:37:55 +0000

Today’s best smartphones are really hand-held computers. They run a vast variety of applications, from productivity programs to games, that mimic what laptops do. Their biggest limitations for serious work, gaming, Web surfing and multimedia are their small screens, cramped keyboards and tinny speakers.

[ See post to watch video ]

So, what if you could use the brains and connectivity of such a hand-held computer to drive a laptop-size screen, keyboard and speakers, thus overcoming these limitations? Well, Motorola Mobility has devised a new phone and accessory that aim to do just that: to make the phone the only computer you need.

I’ve been testing this new phone, the Atrix 4G, an Android device that will cost $200 with a two-year contract and will run on AT&T’s network. It’s slated to be available by March 6. I’ve also been testing its unusual and clever accessory called the laptop dock, which looks like a large netbook, with an 11.6-inch screen, full keyboard, touch pad, and stereo speakers. This dock, the price of which depends on when you buy it, has no processor, no file storage and no connectivity of its own. It’s dormant until you plug the Atrix into a slot behind the screen.

When you dock the phone, the faux laptop comes alive. It duplicates the phone’s screen on its larger display and lets you use its connectivity and apps. It also contains a battery that charges the phone. The image of the phone’s screen, and any of its apps you run, can be actual size or blown up to use the dock’s larger screen.

With Motorola’s Atrix 4G smartphone, the laptop is the accessory. The phone shown docked to the laptop dock.

Full-Screen Firefox

Even more interestingly, the dock gives you access to a full, and full-screen, PC version of the Firefox Web browser. Firefox is tucked away inside the Atrix but is available only when the phone is plugged into the laptop dock or a second, smaller dock that’s meant to connect to a TV or desktop monitor. The smaller dock lacks a built-in keyboard, battery or screen.

The laptop dock costs $500, but AT&T will knock the price down to $300, after rebates, if you buy it at the same time you buy the phone. That brings the combined price of both devices to $500—the same as the separate price for the dock. The smaller dock, called the multimedia dock, costs $190.

In my tests, the Atrix and the laptop dock performed mostly as advertised. The phone had no trouble driving the larger screen or the full Firefox browser.

I was even able to insert a flash drive into one of the dock’s two USB ports and copy songs, photos, videos and documents into the phone’s internal memory using the keyboard and touch pad. I edited and wrote text in an app called Quickoffice on the phone using the laptop dock’s keyboard, and ran various other apps, including the popular game Angry Birds, on the larger screen.

The Firefox browser worked as normal, using either the phone’s cellular or Wi-Fi connections to access the Internet. And both the phone itself and Firefox can run Flash videos, which mostly played fine.

But the combination of the phone and dock wasn’t as fast, smooth or versatile as having a real laptop, even though to use them you’re essentially carrying around a light laptop (the dock weighs 2.4 pounds). Many apps on the phone aren’t as polished or powerful as typical PC apps, and I found them clumsier to use with the keyboard and touch pad, as opposed to the touch screen for which they were designed.

Installation Issue

Also, other than Firefox, you can’t install PC programs. You can use Web apps inside Firefox, such as Google Docs or the stripped-down Web versions of Microsoft’s Office apps. For email, you can either use the program based in the phone or any Web-based program via the Firefox browser, such as Gmail or Yahoo Mail. But you can’t, say, install iTunes, or PC-based games, or the full versions of Outlook or Microsoft Word.

And there is only a primitive file system, limited to the capacity of the phone, which is just 16 gigabytes, with an option to expand to 48 gigabytes.

The dock’s screen required a lot of scrolling when using Firefox, partly because the browser has a lot of menus and toolbars. To address this, Motorola lets you convert Web pages to versions with the Firefox controls stripped out, so you just see the content.

There’s another problem with the laptop dock. When you make or receive a voice call while the phone is docked, you must rely on the phone’s microphone and speakers, hidden behind the screen of the dock. As a result, calls sounded muffled on both ends, even though the phone automatically switches into speakerphone mode. Motorola says it is working on this issue.

Despite the drawbacks, some folks will surely be attracted to this innovative combination.

If you mostly do your computing tasks on a phone or a PC Web browser, storing files in the cloud and using phone or Web-based apps, Motorola has you covered. And the fact that the dock can charge the phone is a big plus.

Motorola’s Atrix 4G

The Phone Side

What about the phone itself?

Well, it’s one of the nicest smartphones I’ve tested. Its processor makes it fast, and it has a 4-inch, high-resolution screen—almost as high as the iPhone 4′s, though not quite as sharp to my eye. It runs an older version of Android, but Motorola is promising an upgrade.

The phone also has good battery life. It lasted a full day while I was testing it and Motorola claims up to nine hours of talk time. Photos and videos I took with the phone were sharp, and it has a front camera for video calls.

The Atrix also has two other notable features. First, it can take advantage of AT&T’s souped-up 3G network, which the carrier calls 4G because it can supposedly achieve 4G data speeds.

In my tests, in the D.C. and New York areas, the speed wasn’t especially impressive, averaging just a bit better than 3G speeds on other AT&T phones I’d tested.

There is also a fingerprint sensor built into the phone, which you can use instead of a pass code to secure the phone. It worked fine for me.

Overall, this is a very nice Android phone that can imitate a limited version of a laptop. That may be enough for some folks, but fall short for others.

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

Ready for Its Video Close-Up? SlideShare Adds Live Web Conferencing.

Liz Gannes — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 16:00:01 +0000

Today SlideShare, the presentation-sharing site with 45 million monthly uniques, is launching its take on improving Web conferencing.

In general, this arena has been prone to complicated setups and frequent glitches for users.

The two possible highlights of SlideShare’s offering, called Zipcasts: They happen within a browser without additional software, and there are no limits on the number of meetings or the number of participants in meetings.

There are also some tweaks like allowing watchers to flip through slides at their own pace.

While users will still need to call each other on the phone to have a two-way conversation about the slides, presenters can also include live Flash video–powered by TokBox–of themselves to give a more personal connection.

Users who want to create something like a public Webinar can use Zipcast for free with advertising, but those who want to make their meetings private need to pay $19 or more per month. premium users can also get two-way audio through a partnership with FreeConferenceCall.com.

In other SlideShare news, Ross Mayfield, the co-founder of Socialtext, recently joined the company as VP of business development.

Cooliris Raises $9.6M, Gets Social With Mobile Photo-Sharing App

Liz Gannes — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 10:00:10 +0000

Cooliris, which makes tools to help people consume media on the Web and various devices, is changing focus with a new flagship product that’s about sharing photos rather than browsing through them.

The company has a not-too-shabby 35 million downloads to date of its Wall product, and is the default media gallery for Google’s Android. But now it’s venturing out into the oh-so-hot mobile media-sharing space (see: Instagram, Path, Picplz) with a photo app called LiveShare–for iPhone, Android, Windows Phone 7 and the Web–that’s focused on groups.

Cooliris is also announcing today that it’s raised $9.6 million in Series C funding from investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (which also recently backed Path), Deutsche Telekom’s T-Venture, DAG Ventures and the Westly Group. The five-year-old Palo Alto-based company has now raised a total of $28.6 million and employs 45 people.

Cooliris’s new LiveShare app helps users create photo streams for a particular event or group of people. Everyone who is invited to a stream can share photos, taken on a phone or elsewhere. Cooliris CEO Soujanya Bhumkar said that he thinks this “hyperpersonalized” approach fits with how people think about sharing: With respect to the four aspects of space, time, interests and relationships.

What does that actually mean? While Path pushes users to identify their closest 50 friends for intimate sharing of personal photos and videos, LiveShare gives users the option of sharing with whoever is appropriate for any context.

There are many alternatives to LiveShare, especially for Apple’s iOS platform. Will users want to install yet another app because of its particular set of nifty features and the flexibility of its sharing options? Perhaps not, but people seem to increasingly utilize tools to segment their online identities, so LiveShare could become part of that trend.

There’s also competition from the social Web giant Facebook, which provides a similar way to filter its Web site based on designated friend groups (though it has not disclosed how popular the product is with users). LiveShare, like many social apps, gets its friend network information from users plugging into Facebook.

But Cooliris isn’t starting from scratch with this product. For instance, the company is making use of its existing relationship with Google, so LiveShare will be incorporated into Android’s Gallery. But with nearly $30 million raised, expectations for LiveShare will be very, very high.

Yes We Khan: BitTorrent Adds an Educational App

Voices — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 22:00:02 +0000

BitTorrent has been working hard to counter the image that it’s solely a vehicle for swapping pirated movies and music, in part by adding an App Studio featuring content from selected publishers and developers. The latest addition should help the cause: An app providing access to the 2,000 or so instructional videos of the Khan Academy, the widely praised online education site created by Salman Khan.

HP Oldsmobiles the Palm Brand

John Paczkowski — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 11:30:29 +0000

Hewlett-Packard bought Palm for its technology and talent, not for its brand. So it’s hardly surprising that the Palm logo and name were nowhere to be found at HP’s big webOS event Wednesday. Not in the signage. Not in the videos or slides included in the onstage presentation and not on any of the new hardware on display. The TouchPad, Veer and Pre3 all sport silver HP logos and “HP” as a prefix, not Palm.

In fact, the only place to really find the Palm brand these days is at the Palm.com domain, which, while festooned with HP branding, still includes “Palm USA” in its page titles. Evidently this is what HP meant when it said the Palm brand would “move into the background.”

Judging from Wednesday’s event, the storied Palm brand isn’t even a sub-brand of HP. It’s just a handle for a particular division of the company, though HP insists it’s keeping it around.

“Our future strategy is to continue to build the HP brand in the marketplace,” a company spokesman told me. “Palm is a great brand that is synonymous with mobile innovation and we are delighted to have it in our portfolio of brands allowing us future options.”

That’s a nice enough thought, though it’s hard to see HP ever reviving the Palm brand in the future–not after it’s rebranded the company’s products as its own and announced plans to use them to build “the largest installed base of connected users in the world.” If it succeeds at that, will Palm really be a future branding option? Doubtful.

In that sense, Wednesday’s event wasn’t just a showcase for some slick new webOS hardware, but a eulogy to the pioneering company that made it possible, the company that created the market for handheld devices and shaped that first early vision of mobile computing….

Eh, Oldsmobile was a great brand too, I suppose.

Winklevii Keep the Dream Alive With Media Blitz

Liz Gannes — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 08:00:08 +0000

Though Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss no-commented me and other reporters in a San Francisco court last month, they can’t seem to stay away from bashing Mark Zuckerberg for long. The twins, who are waiting to hear if appeals judges will invalidate a previous settlement with Facebook, offered videos and TV interviews to multiple outlets, which posted them online Tuesday. It’s still the same old Mark-Zuckerberg-stole-our-idea stuff, plus some creative camera work. And hey, at least they’re not outright stalking Zuckerberg like some other people.

Here’s one from CNN. The Winklevii tell Piers Morgan that it’s not ironic that they are now active Facebook users, despite their ongoing legal and moral crusades against the company. “Technically we’re using our idea….It’s really our product and we’re the originators.” (The two grown men, somewhat oddly, make little effort to differentiate from each other, so I’ll just attribute those comments to both of them.)

And here’s one from the Daily, which shot crazy amounts of creative B-roll of the Winklevosses’ rippling muscles and chiseled jaws (they are Olympic rowers, after all). This is part one of a three-part series by the Daily’s Erin Ade, who discloses she’s a childhood friend of the Winklevii. Cameron and Tyler say they want to tell Zuckerberg to “grow up and admit to the world and yourself what you already know is true…because the moment you do that the chapter will be closed and you can move on as an individual.”

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

What's Better Than One Screen? Two! Sprint Unveils Kyocera Echo.

Tricia Duryee — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 23:57:40 +0000

Ahead of Apple’s iPhone launch on Verizon later this week, Sprint unveiled the Kyocera Echo, a dual-touchscreen smartphone. The Android phone, which looks a lot like a Nintendo DS, is being positioned against tablets because of better multitasking capabilities. It allows people to watch videos on one display while browsing on another. The Echo will be available this spring for $200 with a new contract. Monthly plans start at $80 for unlimited text, talk and data.

Former Apple Designer Launches Digital Book Start-Up Push Pop Press

Liz Gannes — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 03:21:19 +0000

Mike Matas, the designer known for joining Apple at age 19 after creating the media management tool Delicious Library, today launched a new start-up called Push Pop Press.

Push Pop Press will be a digital book maker, with its first titles coming to iPad and iPhone later this year, according to its Web site.

The San Francisco-based company intends to allow users to “explore photos, videos, music, maps, and interactive graphics, all through a new physics-based multi-touch user interface.”

Matas designed photo and map products at Apple, and left the company in 2009 after serving for four years. According to his LinkedIn profile, he has been working on Push Pop Press since Feb. 2010. His partners in the effort are Kimon Tsinteris, who was formerly a senior engineer on the Apple iPhone team, and Austin Sarner, formerly an independent Mac developer who created software such as AppZapper and Disco.

Push Pop Press appears to be partnered with the New York book publisher Melcher Media.

We contacted Matas for comment this evening but have not heard back yet.

Incidentally, exploring the new frontier of digital books has also attracted other Apple alumni. Another start-up in the space, Inkling, was founded by Matt MacInnis, who had spent eight years at Apple, where his duties included managing its international education efforts.

Path Raises $8.65M From Kleiner, Index

Liz Gannes — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 00:15:21 +0000

Path, the personal media-sharing app, has raised $8.65 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures and Digital Garage Japan. The company said today it had facilitated the sharing of “over 2 million moments,” a.k.a. iPhone photos and short videos. Path is expanding ever so slightly to allow users to email pictures from within its iOS app, which makes sense since many people’s close friends and family don’t all have iPhones.

Netflix Gets Social: "Extensive" Facebook Integration Is Coming

Liz Gannes — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 08:00:57 +0000

Netflix revealed it is in the process of implementing “an extensive Facebook integration” on Wednesday, marking a significant change from its previous absence from the social Web.

Netflix’s dramatic growth in user base and market cap have had a lot to do with the company anticipating market changes and making audacious bets, but it has been relatively plodding and hesitant about getting social.

Netflix explained in the shareholder letter (PDF) accompanying its quarterly earnings report that its Facebook integration will accompany an effort to split household accounts into multiple personal accounts.

In part because of the company’s history as a DVD mailing service, a Netflix account is affiliated with a particular address. That’s also the way traditional television providers measure their market: In terms of households.

But online video, Netflix notes, “is more naturally individual, since it is watched on personal screens like phones, tablets, and laptops, as well as on shared large screen televisions.”

In addition to helping identify discrete people within a household, Facebook integration would presumably allow Netflix to help users do things like share their personal viewing history in their newsfeed and recommend videos to friends. Understanding social networks could improve Netflix’s famously honed recommendation algorithm. It might also be an opportunity for Netflix to create social viewing experiences.

Currently, Netflix lacks much in the way of social features; it had yanked a previous effort to offer social sharing last year after saying that relatively few subscribers used it.

However, the company has recently staffed up for a renewed social effort.

Mike Hart, previously Netflix’s director of engineering for APIs, is now director of engineering for social. Hart told Fast Company in November that Netflix sees social as an international user acquisition strategy and an opportunity to avoid disruption by a competitor that is more social.

Netflix also appears to view personal accounts as an opportunity to charge more money. The company said in the shareholder letter that later this year it will start offering new account options that include multiple simultaneous streams. (So, for instance, you could stream TV episodes in the bedroom on your iPad while your spouse watches a movie in the living room through the Roku.) The streaming-only plan Netflix recently launched costs $7.99 (which some industry watchers say is too cheap) and allows just one stream at a time.

Netflix noted in the letter that its new grand internal vision is to target the number of active mobile phones in an area, rather than the number of households (though that might be a bit ambitious in places where it’s common for people to have more than one phone!).

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Sit Back, Relax and Do Some Research: Qwiki Opens Information Visualizations to the Public

Liz Gannes — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 19:54:49 +0000

Qwiki today will start letting the public into its site, which constructs narrated visualizations using photos, videos, maps and text for three million reference topics.

The idea is that instead of parsing through disjointed material, searchers can lean back and have a story told to them about what they’re looking for. The Qwiki results page experience feels like watching a low-budget TV documentary with panned-across stock footage and a robotic voice. (Side note: You probably don’t want to learn how to pronounce things by hearing them on Qwiki.) Eventually these presentations will be created for many more topics, and be playable on a variety of devices.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Qwiki, which just raised $8 million in Series A funding led by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, is hedging on the public release by calling it an “alpha.” But the company, which won the TechCrunch Disrupt start-up competition in 2010, says it has “hundreds of thousands” of potential users signed up, of which about 60 percent have been given access so far.

Qwiki CEO Doug Imbruce said in a phone interview that Qwiki has received acquisition offers already, and took funding from individual investors rather than venture capitalists so its founders could retain control of the company and focus on product rather than monetization.

Imbruce emphasized that Qwiki is not a search engine and does not seek to be comprehensive. He said Qwiki plans soon to build its index by letting third-parties input material for new topics, including profiles of individuals.

An example Qwiki for Mount Everest is embedded below:

Blockbuster Hangs "For Rent" Signs on 187 Stores

Tricia Duryee — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 23:57:05 +0000

Blockbuster plans to close 182 stores over the next few months as it tries to emerge from bankruptcy, reports Bloomberg. The once-dominant movie rental chain faces competition from Netflix and, increasingly, from alternative video-on-demand providers. The store closures are in addition to the 1,000 locations shut down during the past two years. Next year, the company expects to emerge from bankruptcy with the help of new owners, including shareholder activist Carl Icahn.

YouTube Adds Personalized Channels to Lengthen Living Room Sessions

Liz Gannes — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 01:30:01 +0000

YouTube today is launching a personalization update to its Leanback viewing mode, which is meant to be played on televisions. The new “Personalized Channels”–which is honestly a feature I assumed Leanback already had, given the Google-owned site has been experimenting in this area for a while–will queue up videos for any keyword to play continuously.

Leanback users can give feedback on whether or not they like recommendations, and the channel will refine future suggestions automatically. It seems very similar to streaming music on Pandora. The idea is to offer users a never-ending stream of videos they like, so they’ll watch YouTube longer.

Leanback is not a platform-specific app, but rather a full-screen version of YouTube accessible through any browser. It’s intended for Web-connected televisions.

The “user base [of such devices] is small by YouTube standards,” said YouTube Group Product Manager Shiva Rajaraman, but he added that YouTube users who watch through Leanback already spend 30 minutes per session on average, two times longer than sessions on the Web.

Of course, 30 minutes happens to be the length of many traditional television programs.

Leanback at present doesn’t have much in the way of social features, and it doesn’t include specialized ad formats for the living room. It is also not the default YouTube option on Google TV. Rajaraman said all these things are likely to be added in the future. YouTube has recently been doing all sorts of launches around Leanback, including adding overlay and pre-roll advertisements, showing more premium videos from partners and providing a remote control app for Android.

Apple Reaching for the Cloud With MacBook Air and N.C. Data Center

John Paczkowski — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 10:30:13 +0000

Steve Jobs says the MacBook Air is the future of the MacBook and the future of the notebook as well. But if that’s to be the case, the machine–and Apple’s ecosystem–needs to evolve a bit more to appeal to that strata of user tethered to the high-capacity hard drives that the Air has summarily dispatched.

This being Apple we’re talking about, that evolution is likely already well under way and perhaps–perhaps–being engineered at the company’s massive new North Carolina data center. With its 500,000 square feet of data center space (currently, sources tell me that Apple is considering doubling that) the facility has been built for something. And what better use to put it to than the cloud services that might completely eliminate the need for high-capacity hard drives and give the Air storage to match its performance characteristics.

Were Apple to create the cloud-based version of iTunes that’s long been rumored–one from which users’ entire iTunes libraries could be streamed–and were it to bolster MobileMe’s iDisk and Gallery services with more-robust storage, even the 64GB Air might seem an attractive option to the high-end user. And Apple’s new N.C. data center, which is nearly five times the size of the one it operates in Newark, Calif., may well make both those things possible.

“We believe it makes sense to have a cloud service linking Apple devices to personal photos, videos, games, music and other entertainment–eliminating the limitations and expenses of excess storage,” writes Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes. “We believe such a service would only enhance the loyalty toward Apple and the benefits of using devices in its vertically integrated model.”

Saving to disk is slowly becoming a fixture of the past and, as Apple’s recently rejiggered Apple TV business model demonstrates, streaming is the future. Which makes perfect sense, when you think of the MacBook Air as the future of the notebook.

Committing to Acts of Kindness on the Go

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 15:08:03 +0000

As marketers experiment with ways to get users to pay attention to mobile ads, insurance company Liberty Mutual is betting on something new–appealing to users’ charitable side.

The company’s new ad, which runs on the Apple iAd platform, takes a slightly different tack from rich-media ads that rely on the gee-whiz factor of full-screen videos and games. Liberty Mutual’s ad is plenty flashy, for an insurance advertisement, with buttons to push and screens to shake. But the company is really hoping to draw people in by getting them to evaluate whether they’ve been responsible citizens, commit to doing “acts of kindness” and spread the message on Twitter.

The efforts show how important it is for people making ads on mobile devices to get users to actually interact with the ad–something that would make them more likely to remember the message and brand. Mobile ads “work really well when you have content that people can share pass along and engage with,” said Baba Shetty, chief media officer at Hill Holiday, the ad agency behind the Liberty Mutual campaign.

The hope for many in the mobile-ad industry is that ads will automatically be more personalized and interactive because they’re on a device that people literally have in their hands. “You’re going from a passive audience to holding a mobile device in your hand and shaking it,” Mr. Shetty said.

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IPad vs. Kindle. Who Wins?

Sarmad Ali — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:00:22 +0000

Steve Jobs said Wednesday that while Amazon (AMZN) has gone a great job with the Kindle, Apple (AAPL) plans to “stand on their shoulders” with the iPad’s e-reader functionality.

Bloggers quickly began speculating as to which device is better, with many pro-Kindle reviewers calling the reader less distracting, while the Apple camp cites the iPad’s multi-purpose nature as a selling point.

An iPad “does so much more–games, photos, videos, email,” wrote Fred Vogelstein in Wired. “I might eventually ditch my laptop for it too.”

GigaOm also sees the Kindle as a defunct device. “The Amazon Kindle is dead thanks to the rich media capabilities of the iPad as well as the full software-based keyboard,” Stacey Higginbotham wrote.

But are those bells and whistles distracting to those who just want to curl up with an e-book? Brad Stone wrote on Bits that the Kindle “will continue to be the best device for lovers of long-form reading, period…when you read a book, you just don’t want to have email, Twitter and the ESPN Web site beckoning from the browser.”

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Vevo, Big Music's Hulu, Launches Dec. 8

Peter Kafka — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:05:50 +0000

Vevo, the music industry’s attempt to create a Hulu-like site for its music videos, will formally launch Dec. 8. The site, which is co-owned by Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, Sony’s (SNE) music label and Abu Dhabi Media, will host a New York kick-off event that day.

For those who haven’t been following along, here’s what we know about Vevo:

It will be powered by Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, which will share ad revenue with the joint venture.
It is being run by Rio Caraeff, Universal’s veteran digital guy.
In addition to its equity partnership, its distribution strategy is modeled after Hulu: Sony and Universal videos will appear exclusively on the site and/or YouTube, but the site plans on licensing its stream to other outlets, as Hulu does with portals like MySpace and Comcast’s (CMCSA) Fancast. One obvious place to license the stuff: Hulu itself.
Neither EMI nor Warner Music Group (WMG), which has created its own Vevo-like channel with YouTube, is participating in the venture, but they could.

Litl Introduces Its Web-Based Netbook

William M. Bulkeley — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:01:05 +0000

Is a computer with no disk drive and no applications software still a computer?

Litl LLC, a small Boston company, says its eponymous Litl device is the future of personal computing. Litl is a Web computer with a full keyboard and an operating system designed for people who use online software like Google Docs and store their photos on Flickr or Shutterfly.

On its screen, a viewer sees 12 business-card-sized Web pages. Clicking on the desired page expands it to full screen, and the user can read the page, buy shoes or build a spreadsheet. It doesn’t have icons, files or menus of its own.

The device can also be flipped up into an A-frame so the screen is visible to show photos, videos or text-news feeds that can be seen from across a room.

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Apple's iTunes 9 Makes it Easier to Share, Organize

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 01:04:03 +0000

Apple’s iTunes program is one of the most popular software products in the world. The company says hundreds of millions of copies of iTunes have been downloaded, far exceeding the 220 million iPod music players it has sold. That’s because many people use iTunes to organize, play and buy music and videos on their computers, or to burn music CDs, even if they don’t own iPods or iPhones. Ironically, the vast majority of iTunes copies are on Windows PCs, not Apple’s own Macintosh computers, because Windows machines are much more numerous.

[ See post to watch video ]

Last week, Apple released its ninth major version of iTunes — which first came out in January, 2001, before the iPod even existed — and I’ve been testing it. This release is the biggest overhaul of the familiar program in recent years, with improvements in the look and functionality of each of the software’s three main portions: the media jukebox, the built-in store and the synchronization features that move media and applications to and from iPods and iPhones.

In my tests, performed on multiple Windows PCs and Macs, iTunes 9 worked as advertised, and I found it to be less cluttered, more intelligent and easier to use than the prior version. It synced music and videos properly for me using both an iPod Nano and an iPhone. It’s available as a free download at apple.com/itunes.

To me, the two biggest new features in iTunes 9 are something called Home Sharing and a new, easier way to organize the apps on an iPhone or iPod Touch.

For years, iTunes users have been able to wirelessly stream music from nearby computers running iTunes whose owners chose to share their music. But Home Sharing takes this one step further, allowing users to actually copy the song files from one computer to another.

Right inside iTunes, you can simply peer into the shared library on another computer set up to allow this, and then select the song you want and drag it into your own library. It doesn’t delete the original from the other computer.

In my tests, this worked perfectly with music, as well as TV shows, movies and audiobooks, and it worked between any combination of my PCs and Macs. You can even configure Home Sharing to automatically transfer to your library new media purchased on another shared computer.

But Home Sharing has limitations. It only works with a maximum of five computers. These computers must be on the same local network, not connected over the Internet. And they must be the same computers authorized to play copy-protected media you buy from Apple.

With 75,000 apps available for the iPhone and iPod Touch, it has been easy to download so many that your device becomes cluttered, with numerous icons scattered among numerous screens in a manner that isn’t optimal. There’s a way to move them around, or delete them, right on the device, but it’s clumsy, partly because you can’t see all the screens at once, and partly because it’s difficult to move an icon from a location on one screen to another location several screens away.

The new iTunes lets you organize your iPhone's screen right on your computer

Now, in the new iTunes 9, when you plug in your device, the software displays an exact visual representation of your iPhone or Touch screens right on your computer, and allows you to rearrange them with your mouse. When you disconnect, the new arrangement is retained on the phone. It worked fine for me.

In iTunes 9, you also can create up to 12 automated “Genius Mixes” from your personal music library — essentially personal radio stations consisting of songs iTunes considers to be related, that play on and on. I enjoyed this feature, and found it generally made good choices.

There are also a number of small visual improvements throughout the program. In the jukebox, for instance, you can now locate all songs by a particular artist using a Column Browser — an optional left-hand column that lists the artists.

In the store, categories like music, movies and TV shows are now arrayed across the top, with drop-down menus for genres. The store also is generally better organized, with richer graphics, more white space and easier navigation.

A small touch of social networking, not exactly Apple’s historic strength, has been added to iTunes. From inside the store, you can post a link to a favorite title to either Facebook or Twitter, though this of course serves Apple by encouraging others to buy the title.

You can now buy special albums, called “iTunes LPs,” that attempt to replicate the experience of old vinyl albums by including lots of extra material. For instance, for one such title by the Doors, iTunes delivered to me liner notes, digital scans of old posters and set lists, plus photos and video interviews. Another, called Mayhem, by the singer/actor Tyrese Gibson, includes just one song, but also a vivid digital comic book with voiced dialogue.

However, these iTunes LPs take up a lot of space on your hard disk — about half a gigabyte each for the ones I tried.

Overall, iTunes 9 is a nice improvement on a much-used program.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

You Can Almost Hear the Shrieks of Outrage in Cupertino, Can't You?

John Paczkowski — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 01:15:59 +0000

“iTunes 8.2.1 disables devices falsely pretending to be iPods, including the Palm Pre. As we’ve said before, newer versions of Apple’s iTunes software may no longer provide syncing functionality with unsupported digital media players.”

– Apple, July 15, 2009

“Oh, and one more thing: Palm webOS 1.1 re-enables Palm media sync. That’s right–you once again can have seamless access to your music, photos and videos from the current version of iTunes (8.2.1).”

– Palm, July 23, 2009

Devices “falsely pretending to be iPods” can once again sync with iTunes, whether Apple (AAPL) likes it or not.

Palm (PALM) this evening released an update to the Pre’s webOS operating system that restores the iTunes syncing ability disabled by its Cupertino rival only last week.

“Palm has released webOS 1.1, which, along with offering more robust EAS support for business users, re-enables Palm media sync,” said company spokesperson Lynn Fox. “Palm believes that openness and interoperability offer better experiences for users by allowing them the freedom to use the content they own without interference across devices and services, so on behalf of consumers, we have notified the USB Implementers Forum of what we believe is improper use of the Vendor ID number by another member.”

The “oh, and one more thing” was a nice touch. But let’s face it, nothing can come of this but ugliness….