Consumer content

At Sundance, Web pioneers see 'on-demand revolution'

PARK CITY, Utah--As Hollywood stars drew crowds to the screening rooms here at the Sundance Film Festival, several Web media pioneers--celebrities in their own right-- also got the spotlight Saturday at a panel focused on the future of entertainment in the Digital Age.

Moderated by All Things D's Kara Swisher in her fourth such Sundance engagement, the panelists were Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings, YouTube CEO and co-founder Chad Hurley; and Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu, which is NBC Universal and News Corp.'s joint online video venture.

Each had a somewhat different take on how they imagine … Read more

Pope Benedict the next YouTube star?

The Vatican--which recently endorsed an iPhone prayer app and gave its blessing to gadget evangelism--is displaying further receptivity to technology with Saturday's announcement that Pope Benedict XVI will get his own YouTube channel.

According to the Associated Press, the Vatican TV Center and Vatican Radio are collaborating with Google on the project, and texts and video of the Pope's speeches, as well as news about the pontiff, will be posted directly to the channel. More details on the project will be released next week, the Vatican press office said.

Given past tech-friendly moves by the Vatican, the … Read more

IT venture investing posts worst Q4 in a decade

Venture capital investments in IT companies plunged 40 percent to $2.18 billion in the fourth quarter, their worst level in a decade, according to figures released late Friday by VentureSource.

The data further confirms concerns entrepreneurs have already been raising about a funding pullback by VCs over the second half of the year and dire warnings by the VCs themselves, such as Sequoia Capital's infamous R.I.P. PowerPoint presentation.

IT Venture capital dropped to $11.64 billion for all of 2008, down 14.5 percent from the previous year, according to VentureSource. During the past year, IT … Read more

MySpace CEO talks Sundance, celebrity

reporter's notebook PARK CITY, Utah--Maybe I'm just easily impressed or I need to get out of the newsroom more often, but I was pretty excited about getting some face-to-face time with MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe Friday at the Sundance Film Festival here. After all, he's a relative celebrity in the technology realm, and I had tons of questions to ask him in the 20 minutes I was allotted.

Then, however, Christie Brinkley--following the launch of her third "Got Milk" ad campaign--walked by outside the MySpace Cafe where DeWolfe and I had been sitting. Brinkley, surrounded … Read more

Get your Obama pix published in inaugural book

Amateur photographers are being offered a chance to get their work published in an official presidential inaugural photography book.

Publisher Epicenter Communications announced Friday that for the first time it will allow anyone to submit photos to be considered for the large-format book it produces for each new president. The photos will appear alongside those from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists and professional photographers of past presidents.

Photos can be submitted to the Web site of The Official Barack Obama Inaugural Book, hosted by Photobucket, or directly on the Photobucket site. Photos can be uploaded from a computer or cell phone. The … Read more

Germany to order ISPs to censor child porn

In a move to stop the spread of child pornography on the Internet, German officials will soon be asking ISPs to filter out Web sites they deem offensive, according to news magazine Der Spiegel.

German regulatory officials have been working with Google and other search engines, providing them with a blacklist of sites to block, according to the article, which was reported on Google Blogoscoped on Friday. Google already excludes from its German and French search results content that is pro-Nazi.

There have been other censorship efforts recently related to images of children. Internet service providers in the U.K. … Read more

Net usage spikes after U.S. Airways plane crash

Web usage spiked on Thursday as people looked for news of the U.S. Airways jet that went down in New York's Hudson River.

Shortly before 5 p.m. EST, Akamai, which has assembled a content delivery network used by many global news organizations such as CNN, CBS, NBC, Reuters, and the BBC, reported a huge spike in Internet usage as people looked for news and video of the event.

The crash now ranks as the seventh biggest Internet news event since Akamai started tracking spikes in traffic in 2005. The plane crash, which miraculously resulted in no fatalities … Read more

Report: TweetDeck raising angel round

TweetDeck is all atwitter.

According to a report in AllThingsD, the software application maker is in the process of closing a round of angel funding, led by Betaworks.

TweetDeck is looking to land angel funding somewhere under the $500,000 mark, according to the report.

The company's desktop app, currently in public beta, splits stream of tweets into specific columns based on groups or topics.

Here is Webware's take on the app:

TweetDeck: This is yet another AIR-based Twitter client, but it has one very useful feature for the polite Twitter user: you can put a collection of … Read more

ISPs can profit from busting file sharers

Jerry Scroggin, the owner of a Louisiana Internet Service Provider, says he's skeptical of a service that proposes to pay ISPs to police their networks for pirated music and movies.

I wrote about Scroggin last month following the music industry's announcement that it would scale back a longtime strategy of suing individuals suspected of music piracy, and instead enlist the help of ISPs to thwart copyright violations.

Scroggin argued that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) should help pay the costs incurred when they ask ISPs to chase down suspected music pirates. Days after the story was … Read more