internet

REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--What is the best way to make money with ads tied to online video? And how can traditional advertising models benefit from new methods pioneered online?

Those were major topics of discussion during the morning keynote today at the Dow Jones Consumer Technology Innovations conference here. And while panelists--representatives from Google, Verizon and Polaris Venture Partners--made some interesting points, they also made it quite clear that there are not yet obvious answers to the questions.

To Michael Hirshland, a general partner at Polaris, one encouraging developing trend is the continued emergence of what he termed "prosumer&… Read more

Earlier this month I spotlighted Nexus Radio, a free Internet radio app that streams music from 38 genres and also lets you capture, edit, and save tunes.

Not being able to drag and drop music files from the desktop to the playlist was one quibble I had with a previous version of Nexus Radio, reviewed in a First Look video. Instead, users had to waste clicks going though the app interface to add songs.

This version hops the hurtle, and playlist-building is easy-peasy once again. It's a little upgrade that makes a big difference in user-friendliness, and it's … Read more

I love the feedback on my position on P2P traffic. The well thought out "You Suck", " Or "the internet isnt that way", or "The ISP is selling me 10mbs, I can use it anyway I want."

Guess what, business models do evolve over time. You may want your ISP to be exactly how you want it to be. You may read into your experience with them anything you want. But it can and will change if the economics don't work for them. No amount of whining about "what the internet is … Read more

I caught CNET Editor at Large Brian Cooley on the CBS Evening News report last night, "The Secret Lives of Teens." In the second installment of this three-parter, which featured a tug-of-war between a daughter and her mother concerned about her risky online behavior, Cooley observed that, "This is just the return of the Cold War, with different players. Instead of the U.S. and Russia, it's Mom and Dad versus Joey and Bill." Cooley talked about parental control technology but added that, "In the end, this points back to the parenting relationship, and it moves away from technology when you really have to make a difference in their lives...you cannot rely on software."

I agree with Cooley's conclusion. Online safety for teens is a complex issue that cannot be covered in one blog post, but the CBS Evening News series gave me a lot of food for thought. They posed the question, is parental spying on teen Internet use an "invasion of privacy or smart parenting?" and I wish the CBS series had given more consideration to the possibility that digital spying is a misguided parenting practice.… Read more

Pandora has added classical music to the Music Genome Project, the extensive music database and engine that powers its DIY Internet radio site.

If you were addicted to Pandora before, just wait until you can actually figure out what kind of classical music you like.

The addition is significant as more than any other DIY Internet radio site, Pandora is known for its ability to figure out what listeners like based on a musical genetic code for each song. Nowhere is a song's musical genetic code more relevant to figuring out what you like than in the complexities of … Read more

I'm not a Comcast customer. I happen to get service from Verizon, ATT and Time Warner at various locations where I pay for internet service.

If I was a Comcast customer, I would tell them, as I am now telling all the services I am a customer of:

BLOCK P2P TRAFFIC , PLEASE

As a consumer, I want my internet experience to be as fast as possible. The last thing I want slowing my internet service down are P2P freeloaders. Thats right, P2P content distributors are nothing more than freeloaders. The only person/organization that benefits from P2P usage are … Read more

One thing continues to be a certainty in the technology world, NEVER challenge a sacred cow. If you do, the punches start flying. Of course the punches have to fly because the there isn't a real response otherwise.

I'm obviously not a huge P2P fan. Gordon Haff did a far better job than I explaining some reasons why. I think there. are valid applications for P2P on private networks, but nothing on the Internet that I think is worth surviving.

My position has nothing to do with Piracy. I think the MPAA and RIAA efforts towards piracy are … Read more

The New York Times reported last week that led by robots, roaches abandon [their] instincts. Specifically, when left to their own devices, groups of cockroaches followed their instincts and natually preferred a darker hiding place to a lighter hiding place virtually all the time. And when a minority group of robotic cockroaches replaced some of the bugs in the cohort and followed natual cockroach rules, again virtually all cockroaches sought the darker hiding place. But when the robots were programmed to seek the lighter, rather than a darker hiding place, fully 60 percent of the wild cockroaches teamed with the robots rather than obeying their instincts, thus demonstrating that even cockroaches are susceptible to bug peer pressure.… Read more

MP3 players are great if you know what you like, own it, and want to listen to it exclusively. But what happens when you're sick of your music collection? Or when you're simply feeling lazy and want somebody else to do the programming for you?

Slacker has the answer: portable Internet radio. The company's been demonstrating its devices since the South by Southwest music conference in March, but it looks like the company's finally taking pre-orders.

You can get the basic idea just by visiting the Slacker home page, which has an embedded version of the … Read more