Industry news

Vimeo rolls out 'stats' feature for paying users

Since being acquired by Google, YouTube's had a target on its head. This has been true both from a legal perspective, as well as from competitors that have done as much as possible to put out more features, or simply do things better. Web video host Vimeo's latest feature--called stats, which rolls out to paying Vimeo Plus members Tuesday afternoon--is a mix of both.

Stats has been in the works since 2008, though the project got sidelined for more pressing matters like better categorization, a mobile interface, 1080p video, and an HTML5 video player. Though not as sexy as most of those things, stats is probably the most important feature in helping Vimeo's video creators know more about how well their content has been received, as well as who's watching it.

Stats gives users a visual and numerical breakdown of:

Referrers (where videos are being watched from--including the individual sub-domain pages) What country viewers are from A breakdown of user likes and comments How many times a video has been downloaded How many times a video has been played versus how many times the player was simply loaded. How many of users actually finished the video (both on the site and in embeds).

The tracking that goes into making these numbers available works even for non-paying Vimeo users. The feature simply turns on once you become a Plus member. It can also go as far back as to when you joined the site, which for me was in June 2007. Although in a phone call with CNET a few weeks ago, a Vimeo representative said the tracking has only been going for the past year.

Beyond these metrics, many of which can be found on other video hosts, Vimeo's secret sauce is that it can further break out each metric by the quality of the video. So if you want to get an idea of how many viewers watched a standard definition, versus a high-definition copy of your video, you can do that. It can also spit those numbers out on a spreadsheet-friendly .CSV file. 

The stats feature should be going live to Vimeo Plus users in the next few hours. Below, and after the break are some shots of what users will get. … Read more

When good game consoles go bad

It's times like this, as we dissect failures in digital entertainment technology, when we have to ask the question: Is it too soon to blame digital rights management?

Two console generations ago, problems like this would have been inconceivable, or at least wouldn't have had the kind of domino effect they do today. The current PlayStation bug (which is believed to be due to the inclusion of trophies in firmware v2.40) affected games, rented movies, and access to both Netflix streaming and the company's online storefront--all things that continue to work without issue for users of the newer PS3 Slim hardware. You'd simply never get this kind of problem back when the only thing you could use your system for was to play something off a disc or a cartridge.

Sony's PlayStation Network is on the fritz. Microsoft's Xbox Live network has had its problems. And there was that one Wii system software update that was turning consoles into pretty looking paperweights.

Though the main problem is less about progress and more about the security countermeasures put into place to keep consoles or users from doing something they shouldn't. Using digital rights management has become one of the easiest ways to do this, though it can also make things more difficult for the consumer.

And while DRM may not end up being the culprit in Sony's snafu, the situation is a startling reminder of how little control we have over these little boxes that are sitting in our living rooms. That's by design though. All three of the big console makers (Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo) use various types of security to make sure people do not run downloadable games or content that they have not purchased. Here's a brief rundown of how they work:… Read more

Read It Later turning bookmarks into news pages

Read It Later's new trick is one that long-time users with little time to waste are likely to enjoy. The bookmarking service, which was designed to help people organize and view bookmarks from multiple computers, is launching (in beta) a "digest" that will convert a person's bookmarks into a news page that's sorted by category.

A few years ago this could have been considered a simple exercise in machine tagging. Where Digest does things a bit differently is to automatically create these categories based on what people are saving, so say you never bookmarked stories … Read more

Live blog: Bloom box press conference

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Bloom Energy is holding a press event Wednesday morning where the company is expected to unveil further details on its Bloom box product. In case you're just joining us, these boxes promise to not only bring ample amounts of power in a small amount of space, but to change people's dependency on traditional power grids. All for less than $3,000 a unit.

A quick primer on the technology can be seen on this segment from CBS' "60 Minutes," which aired last week. We've also got an FAQ that explains more about what it does here.… Read more

Scribd goes mobile, adds sharing to iPhone, Kindle

Trip Adler, CEO of document-sharing service Scribd.com, could be commended for having an unorthodox presentation style. At a time when companies big and small have gone to great lengths in trying to channel Steve Jobs, Adler is the one thinking different.

On Tuesday, as I sat in Scribd's San Francisco offices getting a demo of the company's newest feature--which lets people send digital documents to a handful of portable reading devices with just two mouse clicks--Adler was inking the entire process for me on a whiteboard.

The disconnect of an analog pitch for a company founded entirely … Read more

DocStoc opens up its store to (almost) anyone

Online document host DocStoc launched its DocStore online marketplace a little less than a year ago, and since then it's grown to more than 1 million downloads a month. However, up until now it's only allowed a handful of hand-picked providers to sell their wares on its site. That's changing with a new service that will let just about anyone with what the company deems to be a "professional document" sell their stuff.

In order to be a part of it, people with documents to sell--such as templates for housing leases, business contracts, letters of … Read more

TextFlow partners with Box.net to solve its big weakness

Here's a useful partnership: take a company that lets people compare and selectively combine multiple versions of a Microsoft Word document (TextFlow), and put it together with a company that hosts documents and has built-in communication tools (Box.net).

That's the news from these two, which on Tuesday are taking the wraps off an OpenBox integration that lets Box users use Nordic River's TextFlow technology right inside their storage folders.

The partnership solves one big problem, and that's wrangling multiple versions of a file. Instead of the onus being on one editor to herd them together by e-mail, they can just have each user edit a single copy stored on Box. Those users can then save the file back as a version of the file, which an editor is able to compare--at up to seven versions at a time, from a TextFlow page within Box.

Another benefit of having Box handle the storage is that TextFlow can now save charts and images from within documents. Previously, these were stripped out in the TextFlow conversion. Users can even move them around within the document, just as if they were in Word.

This has one big effect on work flow, specifically the bit at the end, which is where TextFlow's system fell apart. Sure, it was great to speed up the edit process, but at the end, you were stuck adding these document elements back in from a previous copy.

According to Nordic River CEO Tomer Shalit, who spoke with CNET last week, this same kind of functionality, which includes the images and charts within documents, will eventually trickle down into TextFlow proper.

The only other road bump--and one Shalit anticipates will be fixed later on--is that Box's system does not allow users to select multiple files and compare them--only multiple versions of the same file. This is the exact opposite of how people use TextFlow on its own, which is where some confusion may initially crop up with long-term TextFlow users.

The new feature requires that users be paid Box business subscribers to use it, since it takes advantage of Box's file-versioning system, which is available only with the higher-end plans. It also requires being a paid user of TextFlow, which runs $9.95 a month, or $99 a year. To that end, this will be the first tool for Box users to compare different versions of the same file from within the service. Previously, users would have had to get local copies of each of these, then run them through TextFlow or CompareMyDocs.

Correction 10:26 a.m. PST: This article initially misstated the price of using the TextFlow service within Box.net. It costs $9.95 a month, or $99 a year.… Read more

ShadyURL makes URLs entertainingly suspicious

Link shortening has become a commonplace on services like Facebook and Twitter. Heck, even Google shortens URLs within its products now. People seem to be getting more used to the idea that shortened URLs, despite not showing you where they lead, are safe. Part of that, is that the companies that are doing the shortening keep blacklists of sites with malware or spyware, to keep people from accidentally visiting sites that will do harm.

Newcomer ShadyURL makes no such claims though. This wonderfully satirical service turns even legitimate URLs into something that even the least tech-savvy friend or family member … Read more

App Store network OpenFeint gains micropayments

The micropayment ecosystem on Apple's App Store is about to change. California-based Aurora Feint, makers of the OpenFeint iPhone developer platform--which is currently the most popular social-development network on the iPhone, is testing out a new version of OpenFeint, called OpenFeint X (ten) that brings its own microtransactions to the table.

This is notable, in that Apple has kept the bare minimum that users can spend on or within an application at 99 cents. OpenFeint is not trying to get around this policy for in-app payments, but it's giving developers a simple storefront architecture on which to … Read more