What will Conde Nast magazines look like once they show up on tablet computers made by Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and others?
Conde has a demo video it has been showing to advertisers, employees, and plenty of other people, including me. It gives you a pretty good overview of what the publisher and Adobe, who is building the software to produce and view the magazines, have in mind. But it's turned down my request to show the clip to my readers.
That doesn't mean you can't see it, though. If you're in New York City, you can troop down to the promotional "store" that Wired magazine sponsors each year, located this time in the Meatpacking District (keep an eye peeled for the Betaworks guys). The publisher is showing off at least part of the clip there, and you can see some of it in this YouTube clip below (thanks to Brian Chen for spotting):
Obviously, it's a much better experience if you can watch the video directly, instead of through someone else's video camera. Also, I think you'd prefer to see it outside of the store, where you're not subjected to slit-your-wrists techno music. So perhaps this will prompt the Conde folks to put the entire clip out in public.
In the meantime, here's a gallery of Saturday Night Live cast members and other sort-of-famous people checking out the store.
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You know this is serious because they've already talked about it on SportsCenter.
Wednesday saw one of the most painful pieces of cheating that soccer has enjoyed since, oh, since pretty much any other World Cup qualifying game.
However, this occurred in the dying minutes, featured one of the most famous players in the world (yes, he's been on the front of an EA FIFA game box), affected the result of the game, and was so crudely obvious that the world has decided to fight back by socially networking.
In case you were only recently released after being abducted by recalcitrant performance artists, France was playing Ireland for the privilege of going to the World Cup finals in South Africa. Ireland was winning.
Thierry Henry, contemplating moral philosophy, when he played for London's Arsenal.
(Credit: Cc BobbyMond/Flickr)A ball was hopefully pumped into the Irish penalty area. The French captain, Thierry Henry, reached out his left hand to control the ball, enjoyed the feeling so much he actually handled it twice, then crossed the ball for an embarrassed teammate, Willam Gallas, to score and eliminate the plucky Irish. (It is compulsory to use the term "plucky" when referring to the Irish soccer team.)
Henry, perhaps sensing his precious image evaporating, admitted Friday that the game should be replayed.
Even though the sport's governing body, FIFA, has declared no replay will happen, it now has to deal with perhaps the fastest-growing Facebook group on earth.
Petition to have IRELAND VS FRANCE REPLAYED!!!!! already has secured more than 250,000 members since its inception, as well as an increasing amount of media coverage.
What is clear from the group is that people from all over the world are incensed that FIFA has haughtily dismissed the power of the people, the socially networking people. The group has organized a protest in Dublin, 2 p.m. local time Saturday.
If I were one of the fine-dining, bouncy-bellied officials at FIFA, I would pay a little more attention to this Facebook group. The last time someone so blatantly ignored the will of the socially-networking people--who, in the Facebook group's case, include many from France itself--it was a lady who guffawed: "Let them eat cake."
Yes, she was Queen of France and it did not end well for her. I feel sure Marie Antoinette would have wished for a little replay in her own life. And I feel equally sure that, were she alive today, she would be joining the Facebook group "Petition to have IRELAND VS FRANCE REPLAYED!!!!!" in demanding a rerun of this most important game.
Popular tech news aggregator Techmeme has launched a new mobile version of the site built for the Apple iPhone, Palm Pre, and Motorola Droid. The new version, which can be found at http://techmeme.com/m, is a lot easier to read on your phone than the regular site. It even includes individual pages for each Techmeme headline, which show all of the relevant discussion links. Separate pages for each story is something that even the full Techmeme site doesn't currently provide.
New mobile versions are also available for Gabe Rivera's other sites, Memeorandum, Ballbug, and WeSmirch. Techmeme has been ramping up its efforts lately, hiring three additional editors for the site. That brings its headcount to six employees.
I tend to check Techmeme throughout the day as I'm sure many of you do. A lot of the time, I am looking at the site from my phone. This new mobile update makes browsing Techmeme on the go a far more pleasant experience. Since this is not a native app for any platform, the new mobile site is viewable from a variety of phones, widening the potential audience. I can say with almost certainty that the release of Techmeme Mobile will increase the site's mobile readership.
Sony is planning a new online store a la Apple's iTunes, but with a few twists.
Announced at a strategy meeting in Tokyo on Thursday, the new service will hawk music, movies, books, and other downloadable content geared for its various electronics, including TVs, mobile phones, music players, and computers.
The service, which Sony aims to launch next year, will link the company's devices and digital content that it produces--setting it apart from other online stores.
"That's the kind of combination that I think is not seen anywhere else," Kazuo Hirai, Sony executive vice president for networked products and services, said in an interview with the Associated Press. "That I think is where our core competence lies, and that's a differentiator for Sony."
Hirai also spoke about the new service with BusinessWeek, saying that it won't just sell products but also tap into social networking by letting people upload their own photos or videos and connect with each other.
"It's not just access content, stream it, and enjoy," Hirai told BusinessWeek. "What are your friends watching right now? There's a screen that says all the programming that's available. It highlights all the things that your friends are watching, for example. It's a community experience."
Called the Sony Online Service for now, it will model itself after the company's successful PlayStation Network, a free service that has captured 33 million registered users who download movies, access social networks, and grab games for the PS3 and portable PSP console. Hirai said that gamers will be able to access the new online service directly through their PlayStation Network accounts.
Of course, Sony has been down this road before in 2005 with its late Sony Connect music service. The aborted iTunes clone was done in by internal politics and a failure to connect with consumers, forcing the company to shut it down in 2007.
But with a new, more cohesive management team put in place by CEO and president Howard Stringer, Sony is hoping to avoid the in-fighting that helped kill Connect.
Sony needs a shot in the arm at this point. Though the company pioneered the portable music concept 30 years ago with its Walkman, it has struggled to compete in the Digital Age. Continuing a string of quarterly losses, Sony took a $292 million net loss in its recent second quarter. Despite cost cuts and layoffs, the company is projecting a total loss of $1.3 billion for the full fiscal year.
The new labels for different versions of HDMI cables.
(Credit: HDMI Licensing)If you've caught yourself scratching your head trying to figure out what type of HDMI cable to buy, you're probably not alone. With so many versions, it's hard to know which does what. However, very soon, you won't have that trouble anymore.
In an effort to make it easier for customers to identify the right products for their needs, HDMI Licensing released Thursday, on behalf of the HDMI Founders, an updated version of the HDMI Adopted Trademark and Logo Usage Guidelines. HDMI Licensing is the agent responsible for licensing the high-definition multimedia interface specification.
The most notable changes in the guidelines are significant restrictions on the use of version numbers and new marketing requirements for cables. These new requirements are designed to simplify the product selection process for consumers, enabling them to purchase an appropriate product based on features, instead of having to do research on what each version does.
According to the new guidelines, adopters will no longer be allowed to use HDMI specification version numbers in the labeling, packaging, or promotion of their HDMI-compliant products. These restrictions go into effect immediately for cable products. Noncable products, however, have until January 1, 2012, to fully comply.
The new guidelines designate all HDMI cable products into five types:
... Read more
Sold!
Auction site eBay has, as long anticipated, sold off the Skype telephony service to a group of investors that includes Marc Andreessen's new Andreessen Horowitz group, Silver Lake, and the Skype co-founders' Joltid Ltd. The investor group now holds about 70 percent of the company; eBay retains the rest in a minority stake. Joltid was brought into the investor group as part of the settlement of a copyright suit that the Skype co-founders, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, filed against eBay over Skype's technology. At one point, that dispute was looking so ugly that eBay was reportedly considering rebuilding Skype's technology altogether.
The sale amounted to approximately $1.9 billion in cash and a note from the buyer in the principal amount of $125 million, for a total of $2.025 billion.
eBay's plans to get rid of Skype, a purchase that had never fit quite well into its auction business, had been well-publicized. Last spring, the company formally announced that it planned to spin off Skype as a publicly traded company in the first half of 2010.
The final $2.75 billion valuation is only slightly higher than the $2.6 billion that eBay originally acquired Skype for in 2005.
YouTube might still reign supreme in online video, but the big surprise coming out of Nielsen's VideoCensus release on Thursday is that Facebook is now the world's third most popular place to view video online.
According to Nielsen's latest VideoCensus numbers, which look at the number of video views in October, YouTube serviced over 6.6 billion streams. In a distant second, Hulu offered up over 632 million video streams. But it was Facebook with over 217 million streams in October that easily beat out Bing, Yahoo, and several other online sites. In September, Facebook was ranked tenth in total streams.
In October, Facebook placed second in total number of unique viewers: over 31.5 million. YouTube had almost 106 million unique viewers during October. Hulu placed fifth with 13.4 million viewers.
According to Nielsen, the amount of time Web users spent viewing videos on social-networking sites increased 98 percent year over year. In October 2008, users watched 503.8 million minutes of video; they watched 999.4 million video minutes in October this year. That growth far outpaced growth in number of online video streams as a whole, which grew 26 percent year over year.
Facebook has moved its way up to third place.
(Credit: Nielsen)"During the past year, online video viewing has become central to the Web experience," Nielsen Vice President of Media Analytics Jon Gibs said in a statement. "In conjunction with this increase, we are seeing remarkable growth in video viewing on social networking sites and it is only natural that these two trends would converge in consumers' minds, making sites like Facebook and Myspace.com, increasingly important distribution points for both consumer and professionally generated video."
But it was Facebook, not MySpace, that led the way in video streams on social-networking sites, nearly tripling MySpace's 85.2 million streams during October.
According to Nielsen, the "total time spent viewing video on Facebook" grew by 1,840 percent year over year. The number of unique viewers grew 548 percent over the same period. Total streams increased by 987 percent year over year.
"Facebook's rapid growth in online video during the last year illustrates the site's evolution from simply a communications focused tool to a media portal," Gibs said. "Social networking sites are evolving from a venue for catching up with friends to a platform for personal expression, allowing consumers to share their experiences in the full variety of content formats available online."
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announced on Thursday that the familiar, "What are you doing?" tag line that has sat atop the service's status update box since its launch has been replaced with "What's happening?"
"Twitter was originally conceived as a mobile status update service," Stone explained on the company's blog. Therefore, Stone continued, it made sense for Twitter to make it easy for users to receive "short, frequent answers to one question, 'What are you doing?'"
But as Twitter grew, that question's importance waned. As Stone pointed out, "people, organizations, and businesses quickly began...ignoring the original question, seemingly on a quest to both ask and answer a different, more immediate question, 'What's happening?'"
Realizing that, Stone said that Twitter has decided to ask users what's happening to reflect the real nature of tweets. It makes sense. While there might be those who still answer questions related to what they're doing, the vast majority of users are, as Stone pointed out, "witnessing accidents, organizing events, sharing links, breaking news, reporting stuff their dad says, and so much more."
By changing Twitter's question to "What's Happening?", Stone doesn't expect anyone to use the site differently. But it is a major step for the company.
For years, "What are you doing?" has been a staple on Twitter as it grew from a niche community to a major social network. At the same time, Twitter's users have largely ignored it. And so, if Twitter insists on asking a question for users to answer in their status update box, maybe it really is appropriate for it to ask "What's happening?"
What do you think? Are you happy with Twitter's modification? Let us know in the comments below.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Yesterday, BoomTown wrote about AOL's efforts--including hiring investment bankers--to sell its ICQ instant-messaging unit.
But that's probably not going to be the end of the shedding of assets at the online site.
In fact, according to sources inside and outside AOL, one of the next candidates for sale could be its MapQuest online map service.
Purchasers of the service that provides mapping and directions, sources said, are likely to be other mapping giants, especially Microsoft.
But it is not clear if the software giant or anyone would fork over a huge sum of money for MapQuest.
That would include the $1.1 billion in stock that AOL paid for MapQuest in 1999.
AOL is set to spin itself off in less than a month from corporate owner Time Warner, and sources said selling off peripheral properties is part of becoming a smaller, more focused company.
MapQuest, like AOL's Bebo social-networking site, fits this description.
While it does have widespread distribution across the Web, reaching over 40 million users monthly, MapQuest lags well behind aggressive efforts being pushed by both Microsoft and Google.
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AOL, which has already told investors that it will spend up to $200 million firing a good chunk of its staff, has now told its employees. It is looking for "up to 2,500 volunteers," CEO Tim Armstrong told his staff Thursday. That's a third of the company's payroll.
The voluntary layoff program begins December 4, a few days before the company spins off from Time Warner. If AOL doesn't get enough volunteers, it will ax people on its own.
This is lousy news for employees, who are faced with a "jump now or wait to be pushed" decision, but it is designed to cheer investors: AOL says the cuts will drop its annual operating expenses by $300 million. Through the first nine months of this year, AOL's operating expenses ran around $1.8 billion.
Meanwhile, AOL is looking to shed some parts of its business altogether. It has hired bankers to sell off its ICQ messaging service and is considering dumping MapQuest, among other assets.
Armstrong's (expensive) goodwill gesture: He is giving up his 2009 bonus, which was to be at least $1.5 million. His explanation to employees: "As a member of our team and the person who takes accountability for the results of the company, I am making the decision to forgo my 2009 bonus. That decision is a personal one and is not a sign for the future payout of the overall bonus plan for employees."
Here's the text of the company's filing with the SEC:
On November 19, 2009, AOL Inc. (the "Company") informed its employees of proposed restructuring activities as part of its continuing cost reduction initiatives aimed at aligning the Company's organizational structure and costs with its strategy (the "Restructuring"). The Restructuring is conditioned upon the successful completion of the Company's previously announced spin-off from Time Warner Inc. (the "Spin-off"), as well as the approval of the Company's new Board of Directors that will begin service in connection with the Spin-off. It is anticipated that, if approved, the Restructuring will include the reduction of approximately a third of the Company's current employee base, which will be conducted on a voluntary and involuntary basis. The goal of the Restructuring is to reduce ongoing annual operating costs by approximately $300 million. If the Restructuring is approved, the Company expects to incur restructuring charges of up to $200 million, substantially all of which is expected to be incurred from the date of the Spin-off through the first half of 2010.
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