China cracks down on ‘vulgar’ internet content
January 5, 2009
China has launched a crackdown against major websites that officials accused of threatening morals by spreading pornography and vulgarity, including the dominant search engines Google and Baidu.com
From: http://www.ft.com/rss/companies/media
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America’s first CTO to be named
January 5, 2009
Following the American election, a favourite parlour games in the living rooms of Silicon Valley has been asking: Just who will land the job of America’s first ever chief technology officer? Well, the wait will soon be over because an announcement is expected on Wednesday.
There has been some concern that the person who will take up the post has not yet been named, given the president-elect’s penchant for using technology to get his message out on the campaign trail and now as he waits in the wings at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
With just over two weeks to go, the role of CTO is one of the few senior appointments that remains unfilled. Many expected an announcement around the same time Mr Obama named his science and technology team just before Christmas. But it was not to be.
Whoever lands the job, they will have no shortage of help in working out what they should tackle first. As I have written previously, there is a specific website that has been set up where ordinary citizens can vote on the CTO’s main priorities. And of course there is the transition team’s own site which has been encouraging people to do the same.
On obamacto.uservoice.com, the number one priority with nearly 13,000 votes is “ensuring the interent is widely accessible and network neutral.” That is followed by nearly 10,000 people voting for the future CTO to “ensure privacy and repeal the patriot act.”
While the appointee will undoubtedly have to be someone who can straddle over the worlds of Washington’s political power brokering and Silicon Valley’s high geekdom, a range of names has already been doing the rounds. They include Google’s Eric Schmidt, who helped advise Mr Obama and has himself said several times that he wasn’t interested in the job and Vint Cerf, the so-called “father of the internet” (who’s also a Google exec and Chief Internet Evangelist”).
Other names that have been talked up include Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and even, believe it or not, Apple boss Steve Jobs who will not be appearing at this year’s Macworld in his usual capacity as chief Mac cheerleader, be that for health reasons or not.
Amid all the names, I note few women mentioned. And that’s despite some strong contenders like Anne Mulcahy, the boss at Xerox, her CTO Sophie Vandebroek, Cisco’s CTO Padma Warrior, Meg Whitman formerly of eBay, Anne Livermore of HP or Safra Catz who is president and former CFO at Oracle.
There, now: that wasn’t so hard.
All of course is set to be revealed this Wednesday. Place your bets now, please.
From: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/rss.xml
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Scribd and Zinio Offer Full-Length Books in a Browser
January 5, 2009
Two digital publishing sites have quietly started rolling out electronic books that can be viewed just using a web browser.
Random House is now offering several full length books for free on Scribd. The choices include The Surgeon, a 2002 novel by bestselling author Tess Gerritsen. What’s also significant here is that Gerritsen is making the book available as a DRM-free PDF download.
Meanwhile Zinio, a site that offers digital magazines and textbooks, is expanding into mass-market books. Zinio has opened a digital bookstore that features a handful of titles. These include technology tomes like Social Media Marketing in an Hour a Day.
It’s great to see the publishing industry experimenting with new formats. I personally think that book publishing is primed to see the same kind of disruption that the music business saw earlier the decade. This is why I am a fan of sites like Safari Books Online.
As mobile devices become more sophisticated, many consumers will aspire to do more in their browsers. This includes, for some, reading books. I think this will lead to a lot of experimentation with different business models. Two that come to mind are a-la-carte pricing for specific chapters and/or books that are free and supported through advertising.
Scribd, which has seen strong growth this year, and Zinio won’t be alone. Google could start monetizing out of print books or even current bestsellers in a manner similar to what it has done with magazines. In addition, I would be highly surprised if by year’s end the Amazon Kindle wasn’t just a gadget but a platform that operates on many devices, including most mobile phones. They will increasingly face pressure from the iPhone.
It’s early going and electronic reading is not for everyone. However, millennials and their younger sibings expect all media to be searchable and available in chunks. So this is why I am bullish about ebooks and think they will have a breakout year in 2009.
From: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MicroPersuasion
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WhosTalkin Launches Social Media Search Aggregator
January 5, 2009
One of my hopes for 2009 is that we’ll see greater innovation in the social media search space - both free and premium. I have a bunch that I am trying out now: SM2, Zuula, Blogscope.net and Wikio and others. What follows is a first look at a new site called WhosTalkin that launched its public beta yesterday after seven months of development. (Hat tip to adthinktank.com)
WhosTalking is a metasearch engine that in one place aggregates results from the major free tools for scanning blogs and blog comments, news sites, social networks, video hubs, image, forum and tag sites. It rolls up results from over 60 sites, such as BackType, Technorati, IceRocket, Google Blog Search, Friendfeed, LinkedIn, Twitter, Board Reader and many more.
The site has a nice interface that displays results using frames. Just click on the navigational links on the left hand side and they show up on the right. The quality of the results, I find, is hit or miss depending on the source. For example, Bloglines and Backtype results feel very fresh. However, Twitter search results are lacking compared to what you get from search.twitter.com.
In addition, there are two other major limitations. First, you can’t view all results in a single view, even by channel (e.g. blogs, social networks, etc.). The other is that you can’t save searches or generate RSS feeds - at least yet. These and other services are forthcoming for paid subscribers. There is also a URL API for developers.
At first glance, I am excited about WhosTalkin. There was a ton of innovation in the social media search space in the middle part of the decade. Then it seems like a lot of people talk their eye off the ball once Google Blog Search launched and when Twitter bought Summize.
Given that WhosTalking is pulling results from other sites, I expect they can improve the quality of results rather quickly. Although you have to wonder how the other sites will feel about having their data scraped.
Still, given the way the landscape continues to expand, I think an aggregated approach like this one is the right way to go. And this is a good first effort. If WhosTalkin can improve the timeliness and relevance across all the engines they crawl, then it could become a serious player since they leverage everyone else’s databases.
From: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MicroPersuasion
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3D games and films to launch in living rooms
January 5, 2009
Three-dimensional technology is spreading from the cinema to the home with media companies and consumer electronics manufacturers gearing up for living-room launches of the viewing technology
From: http://www.ft.com/rss/companies/media
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Kyriakou plans to amass £2bn for acquisitions
January 4, 2009
Theodore Kyriakou, the Greek millionaire, intends to amass a war chest of £2bn to target UK media acquisitions
From: http://www.ft.com/rss/companies/media
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links for 2009-01-04
January 4, 2009
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Moms who Twitter, federated and ready for ads.
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Great list.
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A Friendfeed Room managed by reporters in the Financial Times San Francisco bureau. It welcomes comments and conversation.
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Reddit starts integrating sponsored links next to the content.
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The top 100 world’s youngest bloggers - by one count.
From: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MicroPersuasion
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Gadget Week - what shall we cover?
January 3, 2009
I’m off to San Francisco and Las Vegas this weekend to attend Macworld and the Consumer Electronic Show for a series of reports on TV, on radio and on this blog. We’re calling it Gadget Week.
When you sign up to cover events like these, and hand over your e-mail address, you are bombarded for weeks with press releases urging you to cover the products of thousands of companies. Each of them issues what seems like a compelling invitation to come to their stand and see something truly innovative.
So one says I should “Come and Meet the New HeatShift by ThermaPAK Technologies. New must-have laptop accessory”. Another insists I should “Please try to make an appointment or drop by to see our award-winning eco-friendly packaging products.” Should I rush to film “the world’s first multi-user, multi-touch interactive learning center designed specifically for early education?” Or maybe “a fully interactive online music and dance website that links directly to people’s iPods” is worth a look? What about “the first ever internet-connected gardening device?”
It becomes impossible to see the wood for the trees and after a while, I’m afraid, just about all of these e-mails get deleted unread. We could just get to the shows, see what takes our fancy, and busk it. But television, at least, does need a little advance planning - so here is what we are thinking of featuring right now.
Macworld
The only other time I’ve attended this event was when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone - which provided us with one big story. This time, of course, Mr Jobs is not attending - and that means we are not betting on any major product launches. But there are some fascinating questions to be answered. Will there be a cheap “netbook”? Probably not - why would Apple want to get into a product category where profit margins are so slim? Will there be a new device - or perhaps an updated Apple TV - to give the firm a bigger role in online video? Will iTunes begin to offer a subscription service? Could we see an iPhone nano? Inevitably, though, a lot of the coverage is likely to focus not on products, but on the future direction of the company. Will Apple just bunker down for the hard economic times ahead - or will it use its huge cash pile to snap up some smaller businesses? And of course the really big question - what happens to Apple if and when its charismatic leader decides it is time to hand over the reins to someone else?
CES
Right now, we’re planning two big themes for our television reports from Las Vegas - the future of television, and recession tech, by which we mean smaller, leaner less power-hungry gadgets for these difficult times.
So we hope to look at how far OLED has got on delivering on the promise of the thinnest screens with the sharpest pictures, at somewhat more realistic prices than we’ve seen to date. We will be filming 3-D televisions(in 2-D, sadly), tiny projectors that can throw a video from your MP3 player onto the bedroom wall, and those glasses that project a movie onto the lenses.
If 2008 saw the rise of the netbook, we expect to see dozens more small, savvy devices on show at CES. In halls packed with enough kit to drain several local power plants, there will be plenty of companies claiming that their products are planet-friendly - or can even cut your energy bills.
We will also be keeping an eye on the development of touchscreen in all sorts of devices, trying to work out whether we’re any closer to building a “digital home” that can be worked without a computer science degree, and looking at just how much progress Blu-Ray has made since it won the high-definition format battle last year.
So those are our early plans - but we expect to have them derailed by the unexpected. And if you’ve some thoughts on what we should be chasing down in San Francisco and Las Vegas, do let us know.
From: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/rss.xml
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Kyriakou lines up £2bn for UK buys
January 2, 2009
Greek millionaire Theodore Kyriakou intends to amass a war chest of more than £2bn to target UK media acquisitions
From: http://www.ft.com/rss/companies/media
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Google in push to gain e-mail market share
January 2, 2009
Google, the clear leader in internet search, has been zeroing in on user’s inboxes in a push to win market share in e-mail, an area where its rivals Microsoft and Yahoo still dominate
From: http://www.ft.com/rss/companies/media
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