Digital Media

Black and white and read all over

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The Amazon Kindle world just snuck up on me and removed $45.13 from my wallet. And the experience turned out to be a pleasant surprise.

I'm not technophobic, but I honestly was planning on sitting on the sidelines for this particular episode of the digitization of the world. I figured electronic books would arrive in good time as Net access expanded, devices grew more sophisticated, publishers and distributors hashed out the business issues, and legal complications of Google Books ground themselves through the courts.

I'm not opposed to reading text on a screen, though print is easier on the eyes. I just figured that--judging by the digital convulsions in the movie, TV, and music businesses--the San Francisco Public Library would be my safe haven for two or three more years.

During that time, e-book readers would get better displays, battery life, network access, and other features, and Amazon's Kindle book readers or some equivalent would grow up to become worthwhile.

What I hadn't counted on was a free Amazon iPhone application that converted me to the new order in a matter of minutes. E-books doubtless aren't for everybody, but one idle moment when I had time to kill showed they are for me.

So what, exactly, is Google planning to do with On2 Technologies' video software?

The search giant isn't saying. The planned $106.5 million transaction isn't going to make too much of a dent in Google's coffers, but the transaction comes during a hot debate about which future technologies will power Web video. CNET News' Stephen Shankland and Tom Krazit pondered the implications of the deal, and here's what they thought:

Shankland: When I heard about the acquisition, I immediately wondered if the move could tidy up the mess that is that Web video or clutter it up even more.

On2 offers video compression technology that's used, among other notable places, in Adobe's Flash software and the Hulu video site. The company licenses various "codecs"--the software used to encode video so it's compact enough to squeeze down a narrow Internet pipe, then to expand it at the other end. It's a major technical challenge--one that's getting more important people to spend more time watching online video and more companies to attempt to profit from that.

Krazit: Well, it all depends on what they do with it, right? Google's being coy about this particular acquisition, but there really are only two reasons to do this: open-source the codec and throw a third wrench into the HTML 5 video tag standards debate, or bake it into existing technologies like YouTube--in hopes of getting that business to start making money--or mobile software.

At the moment, my bet is on the YouTube-mobile option: does Google really want to risk holding up HTML 5 adoption any further, regardless of the hint they dropped in the press release that "video compression technology should be a part of the Web platform"?

Shankland: Those alternatives aren't mutually exclusive. Google might just be buying trying to lower its costs by sidestepping YouTube's current streaming technology, which uses Adobe Systems' Flash software. Dan Rayburn, executive vice president at StreamingMedia.com, says Google doesn't have to pay Adobe fees to use Flash at YouTube. But Laura Martin, an analyst with Soleil-Media Metrics, believes that using On2 technology could trim YouTube's network bandwidth costs.

In the long run, though, getting On2's technology accepted as a built-in Web video standard could help both YouTube and Google's grander ambitions for the Web.

Google controls Chrome, of course, but getting the other 97 percent of the browser world to move will be harder. When it comes to building support for Web video straight into the Web, rather than using a plug-in such as Flash or Microsoft's Silverlight, Apple's Safari uses H.264 while Mozilla and Opera use a license-free alternative called Ogg Theora. Chrome will support both, but Internet Explorer doesn't have any support at all.

Right now, that video variety has been a thorny issue for the effort to hammer out HTML 5, the next incarnation of the Hypertext Markup Language that's used to describe Web pages. Even though the video tag looks like a big part of HTML 5, specification author (and Google employee) Ian Hickson so far isn't naming a codec.

Krazit: "Thorny issue" seems like an understatement. Why would injecting a third standard (that not everyone believes is necessarily a superior option) make sense, at this point? I suppose that there's a Clintonian "third way" argument to be applied here, in that if Apple and Mozilla are lining up on opposite sides of the debate over H.264 versus Ogg Theora, a freely available version that has clear patent ownership collected in one place might solve some of the sticking points on either side. Still, we'd be once again dependent on Google's "Dude, you can totally trust us. We're Google!" argument that it won't later subvert the standard with patent claims.

Not to mention the fact that Microsoft and its Internet Explorer are still unlikely to play ball, no matter what Google proposes.

Shankland: Well, one way Google could win over Mozilla at least is by releasing the codec as open-source software. That may or may not be possible, depending on what On2 has had to license, but Google apparently isn't happy enough with Ogg Theora's quality to bring it to YouTube, according to Hickson.

But I wouldn't rule out Microsoft quite so fast, even though I'm sure that it would like to get as much royalty revenue as possible through Silverlight video streaming and its own video codecs. Google has an affinity for open-source licenses such as Apache that permit use of code in proprietary software. That could reduce the philosophical barriers to Microsoft. And if Google can offer a high-quality codec in the HTML 5 standardization effort, maybe making On2's codec into open-source software could help coax the Internet Explorer team on board.

Let's not forget that HTML 5 is under the auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and they don't like standards encumbered by royalty constraints.

Also, if I were writing standards, I'd favor codecs such as On2's that also work on mobile devices. The iPhone doesn't support Flash, and I'm sure that Google wants YouTube on as many handsets as possible.

Krazit: Google's trying to pull off a lot these days, when it comes to making the Web the future platform for developers. It's a huge proponent of the HTML 5 push, devoting an entire day of Google I/O in May to explaining why this move is so important, and preaching to developers about how open standards and browser-based development are the wave of the future.

But you'd think that at some point, the company would start thinking of ways to differentiate its own products against the rest. Chrome and the forthcoming Chrome OS are ostensibly being developed with the hope that they will gain traction in the market. How will they do that, however, if they are just cookie-cutter versions of the same standards-based technologies on which everybody else jumps?

One way would be through offering excellent video performance that isn't widely available to the rest of the world, i.e., keeping VP8 and future On2 codec derivatives either in-house or available for a fee. Is Google going to open-source everything it ever develops under the strategy that anything that gets people on the Web ultimately comes back to its bottom line? Surely, that can't scale.

Shankland: No, Google won't open-source everything--and stop calling me Shirley. The company loves improving the Web as a foundation for applications, an effort that needles companies such as Microsoft or Apple that have their own developer ecosystems to nuture. But when it comes to the applications themselves--Gmail and Google Docs, for example--Google isn't so into sharing.

So I guess that some of this On2 situation comes down to the extent to which the video codec work is an end or merely a means to an end, like Chrome.

Krazit: Google isn't saying, at least for now. There's little doubt that online video is a crucial component of the future Web (CBS' David Poltrack is telling television critics this week that big money is coming to online video), and something will need to assume a role as the future technology enabler of Web video.

In the end, however, it must be nice to be able to make $100 million bets with relative ease. Nothing could come of On2's technology, and Google would hardly be worse off than it was a day ago.

Updated 1:24 p.m. PDT with new information about Flash licensing and YouTube expenses.

PayPal suffered a global outage and slow performance Monday, but eBay said its online payment system is mostly back in working order.

"About an hour ago, PayPal started experiencing site issues that affected the ability to send and receive money. We have all hands on deck to get this fixed," said PayPal spokesman Anuj Nayar in a blog post about noon PDT. "We're really sorry for the inconvenience."

An update at 12:40 p.m. said the site was working again for most users.

Nayar said in an interview the outage was global and the worst of the outage lasted about an hour total, though the site wasn't fully recovered just before 2 p.m. PDT.

$2,000 per second in transactions
The outage could be costly for those who rely on PayPal to handle e-commerce transactions. PayPal says about $2,000 in payments per second flows through the system, meaning that a one-hour outage would cut out about $7.2 million in commerce.

Nayar declined to comment immediately about whether sellers would be compensated in any way or how eBay handled such decisions in the past.

As a key driver of growth for eBay, PayPal is becoming more important at the online commerce and auction site.

"PayPal is a business that will be bigger than eBay," eBay Chief Executive John Donahoe said in July. And through a developer release in July of a new PayPal payment system, eBay wants to refashion the service to enable a new generation of online commerce.

PayPal's developer site said the outage hit not just its Web page, but also through PayPal's application programming interface (API), which lets applications use the service without having to go through the Web site. It first noted the problem at 10:41 a.m. PDT.

Updated with more details at 2:04 p.m. PDT.

Investors panned Yahoo's search and advertising deal with Microsoft on Wednesday, sending Yahoo's stock down 12 percent. IDC's analysts called it a "strategic mistake."

But here's what's good about it: After a year and a half of public scrapping, behind-the-scenes drama, and dysfunctional communications through leaks to the press, Microsoft and Yahoo now can get back to business.

The Microhoo concept has been reduced from a giant cloud of uncertainty hanging over both companies to merely a complicated partnership between two rivals with Google as a common foe. The range of possibilities for Microsoft and Yahoo, which ran all the way from nothing to Yahoo disappearing altogether, has been pruned back to a much more manageable scope.

Nobody will notice any difference immediately from the outside. First comes regulatory scrutiny, with the companies hoping for approval in early 2010. But already, the deal provides a framework that should make it easier for the companies to establish their new identities.

With Microsoft acquiring license to Yahoo's search technology, applying its search-ad auction process to both companies' searches, and offering jobs to many Yahoo employees, it appears Redmond is carrying more of the Ph.D.-intensive fight to Google. Yahoo, keeping its display advertising business and focusing on its home page redesign, becomes more of a hub for people's online activity and platform for outside Web sites' developers.

Some awkwardness remains where those two visions overlap. One is the work Yahoo has done to augment search results through a program called SearchMonkey, which can interpret tags on others' Web sites so they can be spruced up with new information when those pages appear in search results. To work, it requires the cooperation of the Web crawlers that index the contents of Web pages and the servers that present the search results.

To me, that looks like the sort of chore that will require Microsoft and Yahoo to work together in search. Fortunately, Microsoft and Yahoo have a 100-page playbook that had better address such aspects, and Microsoft Senior Vice President Yusuf Mehdi declared Wednesday he likes the SearchMonkey approach.

The companies also gave themselves two full years to fully implement the deal, too, so there's time to work out such details. In the meantime, Yahoo can't afford to stand still. SearchMonkey is one element of a new hybrid search page that Yahoo said it will start testing with its users starting in August.

There's some important context for these changes and for the Microsoft-Yahoo deal: search results are growing beyond the plain list of 10 hyperlinks with accompanying snippets of text. Google, for example, blends in ever larger quantities of "universal" search results such as maps, YouTube videos, photos, and news.

Yahoo plans to make its search pages more like its main page.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Yahoo's new search results page include not only SearchMonkey, but also display advertising and the key element of its new home page, a customizable list of applications down the left side. The search results themselves become just part of a broader package, so Yahoo outsourcing the actual search engine duties to Microsoft isn't giving away as much of the core business.

Outsourcing search has a cost, of course. The partnership means Yahoo will get only 88 percent of search-ad revenue on its sites for the first five years, down from 100 percent today. Yahoo, though, also gets lower operational expenses and thus, it expects, greater profitability over the long term. Yahoo expects $275 million more each year in operating cash flow.

Carol Bartz, Yahoo's new chief executive, has shown herself to be a pragmatist who prefers picking her battles. With the Microsoft deal, she's chosen to sit a big one out, freeing the company from having to out-Google Google. What the company sacrifices in ambition it gets back in goals that are actually attainable.

For Microsoft, though, the struggle against Google becomes more intense. The combined search market share of Yahoo and Microsoft still is half what Google has, and the fact that Wednesday's Yahoo pact is smaller in scope than some earlier possible incarnations means Microsoft has that much more hard work before it.

The company clearly wants to make a third big business out of its online operations to complement its Windows and Office cash cows. Getting Yahoo's search technology and Web site traffic gives it a better stronghold but by no means a victory.

A significant redesign is finally coming to the Yahoo.com home page, one of the most well-traveled destinations on the Internet, and the company's search page will follow suit starting next month.

Yahoo plans to let people in the United States start selecting a new, more personalized version of the home page beginning Tuesday afternoon. The revamp lets people select basic applications to use not just Yahoo sites, but also others' such as eBay, Facebook, and Twitter, said Tapan Bhat, Yahoo's senior vice president for consumer experiences.

These applications are available on the left side of the page under a customizable section called My Favorites; hovering over them with the mouse pointer makes each application and its accompanying advertising pop up.

"We're pulling together everything about the user they care about, be it on Yahoo or off, to create a personally relevant experience," Bhat said. "In a world like this, Yahoo needs to make the user experience come first."

The effort is a centerpiece of Yahoo's effort to revitalize its core business: showing content and accompanying advertisements to a large, general audience on the Net. Yahoo's profitability for years has trailed that of its main rival, Google, which depends chiefly on search ads for revenue, and Yahoo faces increasing pressure from Microsoft's online business and new arrivals such as Facebook as well.

Yahoo's new home page permits applications from Yahoo or others. This shows use of Facebook.

(Credit: Yahoo)

The company also hopes for more success with advertisers. "We're creating great opportunities for advertisers to target content and context," he said, demonstrating a movie application that showed a prominent ad along with movie showtimes locally tailored for a particular user.

The My Favorites feature will arrive on Yahoo's search page, too, making the search site and results shown on it into more of a portal to access content. Yahoo faces search pressure from dominant Google and now to a certain extent from Microsoft's Bing, too. Even if it consummates a possible search and advertising deal with Microsoft, being able to show its own display ads in applications adjacent to search results could help the company extract more money from its search operation.

Long-coming changes
Newer Web sites change rapidly, but Yahoo proceeds at a relatively glacial pace to change its site, visited by a whopping 340 million people monthly.

Yahoo announced the new front page plan in October 2007, recognizing that people wanted to get to other destinations on the Net besides Yahoo's. It began "bucket testing" it a year afterward, trying variations of the new page on randomly selected users, some of whom squawked at the changes and their inability to revert.

New Chief Executive Carol Bartz has been trying to light a fire under the company's developers, but even this revamp is only is the beginning beta testing on Tuesday. The change will arrive in the U.K., France, and India later this week, in Spain and Mexico next month, and in Asia next year, Yahoo said. Users had no choice about earlier tests, but now they'll be able to select it as default on their own by visiting http://yahoo.com/trynew or clicking on Yahoo promotions for the change.

Yahoo's revamped front page.

(Credit: Yahoo)

"The home page was tested by thousands and thousands of people. We got tons of feedback--tens of thousands wrote about what they liked and didn't," Bhat said. "It was really key to helping us figure out what worked and didn't."

The new home page will become default for others when beta testing is done "in the coming months," Yahoo said. The revamped search pages will enter bucket testing in August, meaning that users can't choose to use or not use the new design.

More changes
Opening up Yahoo's content to other sites' operations--and letting other sites use Yahoo data can use such as Facebook-like status updates--is part of the Yahoo Open Strategy. That effort, under way for well over a year, is designed to increase users' activity on Yahoo, to draw more people to Yahoo, and to make the company a better partner for advertisers.

There are about 60 applications available now, and more are being added daily, Bhat said. Users can create their own, too.

Also coming in August will be the ability to select what type of news people can see, with a slider that moves on a spectrum between "fun" and "serious," he said.

In addition, Yahoo is revamping its mobile site. One big feature: when users customize Yahoo for use with regular computers, that customization will carry over to their mobile version.

Bhat wouldn't share details about whether the new home page fares better, either in terms of user engagement or revenue. However, because Yahoo plans to make its official home page announcement Tuesday while detailing second-quarter financial results, it's possible Bartz may be more forthcoming than Bhat.

Bhat did indicate, though, that things are moving in the right direction for the company.

"Our experience in our test indicates that people are excited about this home page. They feel this meets their needs and is fresh new look for Yahoo," Bhat said. "We are designing the page around users. What we do know when design page that users like, they tend to get more engaged."

Shortly after announcing a favorable new royalty payment deal with the music industry, the Internet music-streaming start-up Pandora confirmed that it has raised new funding from Greylock Partners.

The size of the round is $35 million, according to a Friday report at PE Hub, a forum for private equity discussion. Pandora confirmed that Greylock Partners led the investment and said David Sze from the venture capital firm has joined its board.

"Consistent with our past practice, the amount and valuation are not being disclosed," the company said in its statement. "New funds will be used toward the continued growth and development of Pandora."

Pandora is among Internet music-streaming sites that last week reached a music royalty deal with SoundExchange, the group that collects royalties on behalf of artists and labels.

For revenue, Pandora currently plays and shows advertisements and offers a $36-per-year premium service that offers higher sound quality and eliminates the ads. Because of the new royalty agreement the company will require those who want to listen to more than 40 hours of music per month to pay 99 cents for unlimited listening that month once they reach the threshold.

That new fee affects about 10 percent of Pandora's present listeners, founder Tim Westergren said in a blog posting, but he was still jubilant about the deal, declaring, "The royalty crisis is over!...Pandora is finally on safe ground with a long-term agreement for survivable royalty rates."

Existing investors include Crosslink Capital, Walden Venture Capital, Labrador Ventures, King Street Capital, Hearst Corporation, DBL Investors, and Selby Ventures, Pandora said.

Twitter has the starring role as opening up Net communications about Iran's turbulent politics, but Google and Facebook are jumping in with their its own hasty efforts.

Google is adding Farsi, or Persian, language support to its translation service, the company announced Thursday night. Google rushed out the support specifically because of events in Iran, said Principal Scientist Franz Och in a blog posting.

Google used its YouTube blog to spotlight often violent conflicts between Iranian police and protesters.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

"We feel that launching Persian is particularly important now, given ongoing events in Iran," Och said. "Like YouTube and other services, Google Translate is one more tool that Persian speakers can use to communicate directly to the world, and vice versa--increasing everyone's access to information."

And Facebook produced a beta version of its social-networking site in Persian, Facebook localization engineer Eric Kwan said in a blog posting.

"Since the Iranian election last week, people around the world have increasingly been sharing news and information on Facebook about the results and its aftermath. Much of the content created and shared has been in Persian--the native language of Iran--but people have had to navigate the site in English or other languages," Kwan said. "We could not have made this happen so quickly without the more than 400 Persian speakers who submitted thousands of individual translations of the site."

Google's translation service so far is optimized for translating between English and Farsi, but Google is working on expanding that to support other language combinations, Och said. A quick test for me showed it workable translating Persian to English.

The Internet lowers barriers between different cultures, countries, and languages, but censors can seriously curtail access to Internet services. Of course, there often are ways to sidestep censors for those with some technical know-how.

Google also has spotlighted citizen journalist efforts on YouTube to document the crackdown on Iranian protesters.

Google has struggled with censorship in China in particular, concluding that censorship cooperation is better than not participating in the market at all.

Google, the company best equipped and most motivated to digitize the world's books, wants to offer the world an online Library of Alexandria. The decisions of the Justice Department, authors, book publishers, a federal judge, and Google itself likely will determine whether the company actually does.

Nobody in recent years has accused Google of lacking ambition, but its Google Book Search project is certainly among the company's top projects when it comes to chutzpah. That's not just because of the technical and financial hurdles of scanning, indexing, and displaying online millions of books, it's also because of the tangled intellectual property and legal concerns involved in the controversial project.

After revealing the book-search project in 2003, Google drew copyright infringement lawsuits from the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers in 2005, but an October 2008 proposed settlement, now under review by Judge Denny Chin of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, has converted those groups from adversaries to allies.

The settlement, if approved, could neatly cut a Gordian knot of copyright entanglements though setting Google back $125 million. That's because it would enable Google not only to display books that are out of copyright and those that are in print by cooperating publishers, as it does today, but also those from the vast collection of in-copyright brooks that are out of print--even when those holding rights to those books didn't specifically agree to Google's plan.

The complicated proposed settlement invoked the wrath of some authors concerned it would grant Google monopolistic power over online publishing, and the court extended the deadline for authors to choose whether to opt out of the settlement from May to September. Then the other shoe dropped this month: the Justice Department signaled serious antitrust scrutiny by issuing subpoena-like civil investigative demands, or CIDs, to check into the matter.

AIG and General Motors apparently are too big to fail. But the way the opposition to Google Book Search is shaping up, it looks like some believe Google is too big to succeed.

Updated 10:57 a.m. PDT with comment from MLB.com.

When is 2 million people too small a group to get a good feel for the latest trends?

When you're trying to perform the deceptively difficult calculation of just how many people visited a Web site.

ComScore, by some accounts the leading analysis firm that supplies publishers and advertisers with figures about how many people visit various Web sites, announced Tuesday a switch to a new method geared to provide more accurate Web traffic numbers. Previously the company had judged traffic on the behavior of a panel of 2 million persons scattered across the globe, but the new service, Media Metrix 360, combines that data with statistics taken directly from the Web servers that can tally visitor totals.

The hybrid approach is a big departure for ComScore, which for years has staunchly defended the panel approach. ComScore Chief Executive Magid Abraham expects the move will put to rest most complaints by publishers that ComScore's statistics dramatically underestimated real popularity.

"There is a big gap that we will rectify," Abraham said. "My personal belief and hope is it will address 90 percent-plus of the issues...Unless there is a widely different method for measurement that a publisher is using on their own, we should not really see differences anymore."

Traffic discrepancy
The hybrid approach still is fundamentally panel-based, but uses server data from participating publishers to inform the totals. ComScore expects it will estimate traffic better from computers that panels miss today: mobile phones, larger companies, cybercafes in Asia and Latin America, and public terminals at schools and libraries, Abraham said.

Measuring traffic is a long-running point of contention between publishers and ComScore; MySpace and Major League Baseball's MLB.com are among those who've objected in the past to panel-based numbers.

Torstar Digital, a division of the parent company that owns the Toronto Star, is one company that's had trouble reconciling its newspaper sites' numbers with ComScore when it came to tallying how many times visitors viewed pages, said President Tomer Strolight.

"We regularly saw discrepancies between ComScore page views and unique visitors of 3 to 1 or greater when compared with our server-based tools on those sites," Strolight said. ComScore's panel-based approach posed problems when it came to extrapolating statistics from people at work and older audiences, he said, but the new service helps.

"The discrepancy, and that ratio in particular, are not present in all sites by any means, but it does happen to affect my largest site and it is therefore very important to me that we resolve that issue," Strolight said. "ComScore's new methodology can do this."

MLB.com CEO Bob Bowman gives credit to ComScore for moving beyond just panels, but he's still skeptical, in part because of what panels miss from work users. Instead, he'd prefer to share his server log files after they'd been vetted by a neutral party.

"For our site, 70 percent of day traffic comes during working hours. Missing that is comparable to saying we built a beautiful boat--it just doesn't have a bottom yet...I reject completely that panels can ever work when it comes to what people do at work," Bowman said. "I don't know why for top-250 sites, such as MLB.com, our files just can't be audited, and (the auditors) say yup, here's the traffic."

So why does the number matter beyond bragging rights in a press release?

Money, of course. Advertisers want to know if they're showing an ad to the same person multiple times or to different people. And of course Web publishers want to know how many people really do use their site.

"A media market develops on the basis of trusted information for all the participants. The sellers and buyers have to agree the numbers are something they can live with," Abraham said.

Not as easy as 1-2-3
One might think it a simple matter to measure how much traffic a Web site gets. Just keep a log of the Internet addresses of visitors, or perhaps deliver the "cookie" text file to their browser for easier identification of repeat visitors, right?

Wrong. There's often a discrepancy between independent panel-based statistics from companies such as ComScore or competitor Nielsen Online on the one hand and server-based statistics from a Web publisher's internal logs or third-party services such Google Analytics or Omniture on the other. Here are some factors that can inflate Web site visitor statistics based on server logs:

• The same person might visit the same site from work, home, and increasingly, from a mobile phone. That's not a problem when counting total traffic to a site, but it is when trying to tally unique users.

• Sometimes people delete cookies either manually or automatically through antispyware software, meaning that a cookie might be delivered to a person who seems to be a new user but who in fact has visited a site before.

• Someone might visit the same site with multiple Web browsers or open a tab in a browser without actually making it active.

• Computer servers such as search engine indexers can visit Web sites.

These issues are diminished when users must log into a site, making it easier to track individual use, but the panel approach attempts to address the issue more broadly, consistently, and independently. Panel-based information also answers a question that an individual site cannot: how often is a particular person exposed to the same ad while browsing multiple sites on the Web?

"Ultimately, we need to report unique people, not unique machines, unique cookies, or unique browsers," Abraham said. "There is a lot of energy that goes on trying to reconcile the numbers and trying to explain to people the ins and outs and the subtleties of why this number is not that number."

Panel shortcomings
However, panel-based measurements have their own shortcomings, in part because they rely on software installed on users' machines. Thus the difficulties with mobile phones, businesses, cybercafes, libraries, and schools, Abraham said.

Cybercafes are widely used in Asia and Latin America, he said. Mobile usage for typical sites accounts for less than 1 percent of traffic today, but it's much larger--potentially more than 20 percent--for sites that appeal to mobile users such as those handling weather, stock quotes, breaking news, sports scores, local information, and social networking. And today, ComScore largely just estimates traffic from big-business users.

"It's really difficult to recruit users to participate in panels in large corporations," Abraham said. "Large businesses are in essence voted for by the medium-sized businesses, by proxy. Sometime that works, sometimes that doesn't. That's one area of improvement this (Media Metrix 360) will create."

The company has begun offering panel software to some mobile users but doesn't yet publish resulting data. "We do have that developed for a number of smartphone platforms such as Windows, Palm, and (BlackBerry maker) Research In Motion. We are working on solutions for iPhone and Android," but it's difficult to deal with the plethora of models in the market, he said.

ComScore recruits panel members by offering them free software such as games and screensavers and through incentives including sweepstakes and, more recently, an offer to plant trees in third-world countries. The panel size of 2 million people spans 170 countries, enough for global estimates and for specific measurements in 40 countries. The company also uses technology that can distinguish different users on the same machine by identifying signature patterns in mouse and keyboard use, an important factor for shared computers.

The switch to the hybrid methodology will be gradual. Publishers must add a transparent pixel to their Web sites that ComScore uses to track visitors, Abraham said, and participating sites undergo a 60-day "incubation period" to make sure data collection is working and nobody is gaming the system, he added.

"We think we'll get widespread support. There is widespread hunger for this," Abraham said. "From many people we've heard, 'What took you so long?' It's a fair question. The answer to that is it's not as easy as it first appears."