Verizon is opening its Widget Bazaar up to third-party developers to create a richer application store for its Fios TV service.
(Credit: Verizon Communications)Verizon Communications is about to open up its new Widget Bazaar to third-party developers to create an "app store" for its Fios TV service in a move that could forever change how people watch TV.
Verizon first announced the Widget Bazaar just a couple of weeks ago. Initially, the company described it as a storefront for new widgets or applications developed by Verizon partners for its Fios TV customers. At the time, Verizon executives downplayed the possibility of a sprawling Widget Bazaar teeming with thousands of applications developed by third parties.
Twitter widget for Fios TV.
(Credit: Verizon Communications)But now Verizon is making it clear that the company has much bigger ambitions for the Fios TV app store, which includes opening its APIs and software development kit to third-party software developers. It also plans to create a process for approving those applications. And like the VCast app store, which was announced last week for new wireless applications, Verizon plans to allow developers to charge for their applications, and it will provide hooks into the company's billing systems so that developers can charge for their applications.
"From the beginning we said we wanted Fios to be a platform for innovation," Verizon CIO Shaygan Kheradpir said. "So we are not limiting innovation to any particular circle of developers. But we are taking things one step at a time. And we will start with applications from our partners, and then we'll move toward opening it up to third-party developers."
Details of how applications will be approved haven't been revealed, but it's likely the business arrangement for the Widget Bazaar will be similar to that of the newly announced VCast app store, which means that developers will likely keep 70 percent of revenue from their applications, while giving 30 percent to Verizon. This is the same ratio Apple uses in divvying up revenue for its popular iTunes App Store.
Kheradpir said Verizon will provide more details in the fourth quarter when it makes the Widget Bazaar developer SDK available.
Enhancing TV viewing
The first two applications created for the new Widget Bazaar were for the social-networking applications, Twitter and Facebook. Kheradpir wouldn't share usage numbers, but he said he has been surprised by the quick uptake in usage over the past couple of weeks. And already the company is evolving the applications based on subscriber feedback. For example, when the widgets launched, Fios TV subscribers were only able to read and access only basic information through the Twitter and Facebook services. But as of this past weekend, users are now able to post updates both on Twitter and Facebook.
Even as the company adds more functionality to the existing Widget services, Kheradpir said the company is being careful not to re-create the Web experience on the TV. This is a lesson that Verizon and others marching down the IPTV path have learned from Microsoft's early WebTV efforts in the late 1990s.
WebTV, which came with a keyboard, allowed people to surf the Net on their TVs. But Kheradpir argued that "surfing" isn't exactly what people want to do when they're sitting in front of their TVs.
"People don't necessarily want a full browser on their TV," he explained. "TV viewing is still very much a sitting back experience. And what people really want is a service that is relevant to the TV viewing experience and also provides a simple interface with one click access."
Kheradpir said that Verizon is not trying to completely change the act of watching TV, but instead the company is looking to enhance the TV viewing experience. He thinks that Verizon can do this by providing interactive applications that are contextually relevant to users and the media they are consuming.
This means allowing Twitter subscribes to view in real time Tweets about the TV shows or live events they're watching. The way it works is that the screen is split into two sections. And on one side a small window plays the video, while on the other side of the screen, the tweets fill up the screen.
On a personal note, Kheradpir said he found that linking Twitter to his Fios TV service actually improved his experience of watching the Academy Awards. The new Fios TV Twitter widget was being beta tested when the live awards ceremony aired in February.
"Awards shows like the Oscars can be really boring," he said. "But when I could watch it with the live Twitter feed, it was really funny. When Danny Boyle (director of the award winning movie "Slumdog Millionaire") took the stage, everyone started Tweeting, "Why is Rudy Guiliani up there?' I hadn't thought about it, but then I realized he does look a lot like Guiliani. It was really funny."
Kheradpir, who says he now relies on Twitter for breaking news updates, also said that Twitter on Fios allows people to be engaged in the discussion right from their couch. Instead of viewers being talked at by newscasters and others on TV, they can now contribute to the dialogue and discussion. And if their views are insightful, the Twitter community rewards them by re-tweeting their comments.
It shouldn't come as a big surprise that people would want to be more engaged while watching TV. Over the past decade since the Microsoft WebTV experiment came and went, the Internet itself has turned into a much more interactive medium. News stories posted on the Web encourage reader feedback with "Talk Back" sections. People have created their own blogs to share their views. User-generated video sites like YouTube have exploded. And now social-networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter allow people to easily link to other items on the Web and share their views on various topics.
And as people become increasingly more mobile, these tools have moved to cell phones, allowing people to remain engaged and interact with one another on the go.
But Kheradpir also believes that creating new applications for the TV is also about leveraging the big, expensive flat-screen HDTVs that people have in their living rooms. And he believes that for many people, sharing their digital content on the biggest screen they own makes sense.
"I've been shocked at the number of Fios TV subscribers who are streaming pictures from their Facebook pages onto their TVs in the past two weeks," he said. "But it's obvious when you think about why people want to look at pictures from Facebook on the living room screen. It is the biggest and best screen in the house."
Kheradpir added that these screens are the most underutilized technology in the home today. And he is probably right. With many digital cameras offering picture quality of 10 megapixels or more, it makes sense to view those photos on the largest screen possible.
For more than a year, Verizon has been offering Fios TV subscribers the ability to access their digital pictures and music stored on home PCs on TVs anywhere in the house. But now the company is allowing subscribers to also view their home videos on TVs throughout the home. And they will soon be able to attach any device with an SD memory card, like a digital camera or a cell phone, to also view and share pictures, video, and music throughout the home.
Verizon will offer an online simulator to allow developers to test their Widget Bazaar applications.
(Credit: Verizon Communications)Using these basic capabilities in the Fios TV platform, Kheradpir said he envisions developers creating all kinds of new applications. For example, he said a new application could be created that allows people to stream Internet radio while syncing a picture slide show from a laptop or BlackBerry phone.
Kheradpir said the opportunity for developers to create new applications that take advantage of these capabilities is huge. As of the end of the second quarter of 2009, Verizon reported it had more than 2.5 million Verizon Fios TV subscribers. And because most people have multiple TVs in their home, this translates to about 8 million TV screens that developers can access through their applications, he said.
While he couldn't provide too many details since the SDK won't be available until later this year, he did say that Verizon has already created a Web site, code.verizon.com, where developers can go to share ideas and offer suggestions. It will be through this Web site that the SDK will be released, and it will also be the place where developers can submit their applications for approval on the Widget Bazaar.
He also said that the company plans to offer an online simulator to allow developers unable to access the Fios service because they're not located in Verizon's Fios territory to test their applications.
While Verizon's cable competitors are also leveraging their IP networks to offer new services to their subscribers, so far, no one else has opened its network to third party software developers. Still, Verizon is by no means the only company dabbling in widgets for the TV.
The most well-known competitor in this areas is Yahoo with its TV Widgets platform. Yahoo has partnered with HDTV and Blu-ray player manufactures to get its widget technology embedded in the hardware. Some of the manufacturers it's working with include LG, Samsung, Sony and Vizio. Using these TVs or Blu-ray players, users can get access to content from Netflix, Twitter, and Flickr through the Yahoo TV Widgets.
But Kheradpir doesn't seem worried about Yahoo or others who embed technology into consumer electronics products. He said that Verizon's value is in offering its subscribers a total solution.
"Our job is to make it as easy as possible for consumers to consume the applications or services they want to use," he said. "We make it simple."
Asurion Mobile AddressBook lets Android users add new context to their traditional contacts list. The application was one of several for mobile devices on display at Demo 09.
(Credit: Asurion Mobile Applications)PALM DESERT, Calif.--Last September, at DemoFall, I wrote that the most obvious trend in evidence at the technology showcase confab was the prevalence of iPhone apps. It seemed that at least a couple of dozen of the 72 companies at that show were putting at least part of their product offering on Apple's hit device.
Here at Demo 09, I figured that that ratio would jump, or at least stay about the same. But everything is smaller this time around--just 39 companies are presenting, for example, and there are hundreds fewer attendees--and as far as I can tell, the iPhone is hardly the hot platform.
Still, there are a number of companies who have turned to the iPhone--or other mobile devices--as the basis of their offerings. And in fact, a number of them have been grouped together into an afternoon session called "iLove my iPhone." But despite that title, only a few of them actually had dedicated iPhone apps.
Nevertheless, the companies grouped into this session--Coveroo, Promptu Systems, HAM-IT, Asurion Mobile Applications, bluBuzz and Skout--have some pretty interesting technology and services going on. How many of them will last is certainly unknown, but that's no different than any other product category at Demo or elsewhere in the tech business.
Maybe the most interesting of these applications, Asurion Mobile AddressBook, isn't actually available (yet) for the iPhone. For now, it's only on Android. As an iPhone user, though, I can still appreciate Android apps, especially ones that are smart and provide some all-new functionality.
The Mobile AddressBook is a cool app that brings a lot of fresh context to the staid list of names and phone numbers with which all of us are so familiar. Now, Android users will be able to link directly to the Flickr photo sets, Facebook pages, and Twitter feeds of those in their contact lists.
That's pretty cool--being able to go directly from the address book to, say, a friend's Flickr photos. But what's even better is that Asurion is making available an open API that will allow third-party developers to link other social tools to the contact list. That can be almost anything you can imagine. In addition, there will be what are called "smart contacts" for companies like airlines. So, you could have Southwest Airlines in your contact list, and click straight through from there to see upcoming itineraries or your account information.
Of course, Palm's Pre is built around much the same functionality--but as an Android app, and perhaps for iPhone later, this allows someone to get these features without having to dedicate themselves to Palm's new phone.
Another very interesting app on display is Skout, a social-dating service for a multitude of platforms, including the iPhone.
Skout requires users to sign up, but once they do, anyone using a compatible phone--the service requires GPS--will be able to see other members who are somewhere nearby. And for each person that pops up, you can see how far away they are and their profile and add them to a friends list.
Skout has an iPhone app that lets people flirt with any other user of the service that are nearby. It utilizes GPS to determine who is nearby, and has social networking features that combine well with more traditional dating service tools.
(Credit: Skout)Whether this will actually help anyone find love is unknown, but the idea is interesting. There have certainly been plenty of mobile social applications in the past--remember Dodgeball? But by making this an opt-in system and combining GPS, this quickly becomes perhaps the most advanced such app I've ever heard of.
The next notable iPhone app was Promptu Systems' ShoutOut, a voice-to SMS system for the platform. This is pretty simple--it does just what it sounds like: it converts spoken phrases to text, which can then be sent out as a text message.
You might ask why you'd want to use such a system, but then think about how often you might want to send someone a text message while driving, and how unsafe doing that can be. In this case, you could simply hold the iPhone up to your mouth, say what you want to say, and then have the ShoutOut technology convert your words to text, which you can edit if necessary, and then send off.
I wonder how popular this will be, but given how dangerous it is to text and drive, I'm hopeful that something like this will become popular, since there's very little chance that drivers are going to stop trying to communicate just because they're behind the wheel.
And, ShoutOut does the same voice to text translation for Twitter, meaning that you can send a tweet from your iPhone without having to type it in.
A much more physical modification of your mobile device is Coveroo's laser-etching service.
This is just what it sounds like: A system that allows you to have an image etched on to the back of your device, be it an iPhone, a BlackBerry, an iPod or one of dozens of others. The company has a collection of more than 200 licensed images--from, say, "The Simpsons"--and it can also work with any custom image sent to it.
I've written about laser-etching services before; as a consumer-facing business, this started with Adafruit Laser Services, a New York company that would etch any laptop, iPod, or cell phone. And in many ways, what Coveroo is doing is not that much different.
In addition to selling personalized cell phone covers, Coveroo will soon offer custom-engraved laptops, as well.
(Credit: Coveroo)But in some ways, it is. In particular, the licensed images gives Coveroo the ability to attract customers with very popular movie or TV show characters. In addition, the company is also hoping to license its technology to retailers in the hopes that places like Best Buy or mobile phone retailers will offer etching services to customers right when they're buying their devices.
Further, Coveroo is serving as a reseller of some devices, in the sense that customers can order a new phone, have it etched, and then sent to them.
At $10 to $50, this seems like an inexpensive (especially at the lower end) way to personalize a mobile device, or even protect it against theft.
A couple of mobile applications on display here at Demo I'm not so sure about are bluBuzz's Bluetooth advertising platform and HAM-IT's own customer and service provider matching service.
BluBuzz has built a system that allows companies to reach out to mobile device owners with instant offers--via Bluetooth. The idea is that for anyone who has signed up with the service, a special offer from a business is just a ping away. The location-aware technology can put out a signal that travels up to 1,000 feet. So, if, say, an ice-cream shop has a special flavor today, it can push out an ad to anyone in the area who has signed up for BluBuzz--who will then have the offer appear on their device.
It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how many people will sign up. Further, I can imagine it being somewhat annoying to have offers popping up on my phone from time to time, though the company promises that it will be unintrusive. Still, I remain skeptical.
Lastly, HAM-IT has built a system that matches service providers with customers looking for specific kinds of services. It's mainly not a mobile application, but does have a mobile component that will allow someone on, say, an iPhone, to say they're looking for an accountant in Boston, and any accountants in that city who use HAM-IT will offer up their business.
This seems like a service that few people will use on their devices, and I can't really see it being successful. It may be better on the Web, but in focusing on the mobile side of things, this looks less than essential to me.
Updated 2:56 p.m. PST with further details.
SAN FRANCISCO--After months of preamble, Yahoo on Monday flipped the on switch for a massive project to increase activity--and advertising--on its Internet sites through social connections and online applications.
The company has been working mostly behind the scenes to build what it calls the Yahoo Open Strategy, but now the strategy's changes will become evident to U.S. users of some of Yahoo's main properties such as Yahoo Mail, My Yahoo, and Yahoo's music and TV sites. In addition, the company will begin previewing a new Yahoo Toolbar later this week.
John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)"We wanted to establish a social dimension," Ash Patel, executive vice president of Yahoo's audience products division, said of the Yahoo Open Strategy goals. And to attract programmers who can build applications on Yahoo properties, "We wanted to engage with the developer community and to open up the power of Yahoo's products and platforms."
Yahoo Mail, which according to ComScore has about 275 million active users each month, gets some significant changes, with more to come. First is a new welcome page that now spotlights messages from people in a person's Yahoo social network and invitations from others to join their networks. And the in-box page now includes a new "from connections" button that shows e-mail only from those social connections.
Second is the arrival of online applications tied to Yahoo Mail. One inaugural program from Xoopit lets you view all the photos in your e-mail archive, even expanding links to online galleries. Another lets you convert an e-mail message into a WordPress blog post in two clicks.
"The opening of the mail platform is a huge benefit to users in terms of the additional forms of sharing and communication we can build in and to the developers who can build applications," said John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail, speaking to reporters at a launch event here.
More mail changes are coming, he said. Among them will be birthday reminders and the ability to exchange large files, Kremer said.
The new mail abilities require a the cooperation of Yahoo users' contacts: they must agree to be listed as your contact before they can become a part of Yahoo social activities. That's because of privacy considerations, Kremer said. For example, the right-hand side of the new Yahoo Mail welcome page also shows contacts' activity such as photos posted, movies recommended, or applications added, and that's information those people might not want to share with just anyone.
Yahoo Mail's new welcome page spotlights activity from a person's social connections. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: Yahoo)
Leapfrogging the Joneses
It's not all fun and games. Building use of Yahoo into members' social lives and letting them use applications housed on Yahoo sites means more advertising for Yahoo. That was important earlier this year when the company was stagnating financially, but it's even more important now that the recession has put extreme pressure on the ad market. And Patel believes the ads that can be delivered with the social context--for example clicking on the Yahoo Music page for an album a friend just rated highly--will provide valuable context for advertisers.
"Targeted (ad) inventory sells better than untargeted inventory," Patel said.
The Yahoo Open Strategy theoretically could help Yahoo not just keep up with the Joneses, but leapfrog them. Although Yahoo capitalized on the first generation of online social activity, e-mail and instant messaging, it lagged rivals such as Facebook when it comes to letting people build online communities of friends and business contacts. Yahoo's new strategy, though, is tuned to its own assets.
Google has got a powerful search engine, but its online community is nascent compared to Yahoo's. Facebook and MySpace have got social ties, but not Yahoo's breadth of finance, sports, entertainment, news, and communications. Yahoo Open Strategy is a recipe not easily reproduced in full by Yahoo competitors.
The hard part will be bringing the transformation to fruition fast enough.
For the Yahoo Open Strategy to pay off, the company must encourage its members to register new profiles and to link their friends into their social network. And it will have to coax a lot of programmers to build good applications then coax Yahoo members to activate them. All this takes time, and Yahoo, with Microsoft and Google breathing down its neck, doesn't have the luxury of time.
Getting people to sign up for yet another social service--Yahoo strenuously objects to calling its work just another social network--is another hurdle.
"There is going to be some fatigue on that process," Kremer said of people getting inundated with a new round of online service invitations. "It may slow down the virality of what we're doing."
But the company believes it will spread because people will find it useful. And unlike some services, Yahoo hopes people only set up their service with a small number of important contacts rather than compete for the biggest networks.
"I don't want my users to sign up for 500 connections," Kremer said. "I want this to be for the tight inner circle--those five or ten or fifteen people they scan for" when checking their in-box.
Yahoo Mail is getting a Flickr application that lets people upload photos from the e-mail application. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: Yahoo)
Other changes
The Yahoo Mail change is one of a host announced Monday. Among others:
• Yahoo also announced changes to its customizable home page, My Yahoo, that lets people add applications and customize the page's appearance. For example, Yahoo showed a wine-themed page with its own background and content.
• A new toolbar for Web browsers also gets drop-down interactivity that can show what a person's contacts are doing, what e-mail has been received, and other information. A preview version of the toolbar will be available later this week for download.
• Yahoo's media properties can spotlight contacts' activities, such as when they assign a five-star ranking to a particular song. "Our media properties monetize really well," Patel said.
Shares of SAP and Google continued their downward trek, as Wall Street weighed in Tuesday with earnings cuts.
Google's shares dropped as low as 5.6 percent in intra-day trading to $350.26 a share, following a 2008 and 2009 estimated earnings cut and lowered price target offered by Stifel Nicolaus analysts. And SAP, which saw its shares pummeled Monday after issuing a warning its third quarter was not shaping up as anticipated, suffered a further decline as analysts cut their earnings estimates.
SAP, an enterprise software behemoth, had its price target reduced to $35 a share from $45 a share by Patrick Walravens, a JMP Securities analyst. He also reduced his SAP earnings estimates to 1.81 euros ($2.47) per share from 1.90 euros ($2.59) per share for 2008, and his 2009 forecast to 2.14 euros ($2.92) from 2.18 euros ($2.97) per share.
Walravens noted in his SAP research note:
While the valuation is getting interesting, we still have several concerns. First, one industry source suggested to us that 4Q could see "a big drop" in orders compared to prior fourth quarters. We think it is important to get a read on how the 4Q business is building and how 2009 might look. Second, our due diligence suggests that 2Q and 3Q may have each included license revenue in the tens of millions from a deal with a major food company--possibly setting up a more difficult sequential comp in 4Q. Third, as we discussed last week, another industry source suggested that one of SAP's customers may have stalled a deal as it saw its own customers beginning to delay payments. This behavior may well intensify in 4Q. Last, we note that it may be more difficult for SAP to reduce expenses than might be the case for Oracle given the high concentration of SAP employees in German and Europe.
On the Google front, analyst George Askew and Reed Meyer of Stifel Nicolaus lowered their Google price target to $525 a share from $600 a share, as well as cut the earnings estimates for 2008 and 2009.
The analysts cut Google's earnings estimates to $19.37 a share from $20.20 a share for 2008, while also trimming back 2009 to $23.51 a share from $26.01 a share.
Askew and Meyer noted in their research note:
We are reducing our financial projections for Google to reflect a more cautious global economic outlook. Our belief is based on 1) the apparent sharp slowdown in business activity late in 3Q08 for companies globally as the ongoing credit crisis depressed business and consumer confidence, and 2) the negative revenue impact of foreign currency moves relative to the stronger U.S. dollar. We conservatively project the economic slowdown to continue through 2009.
Google is scheduled to report its third quarter financial results on October 16, while SAP is scheduled to report its earnings on October 28.
Click here for ongoing coverage from CNET News, 'Tough times for tech'
Yahoo is testing a new home page. The new site is more personalized and customizable. This version is a 'baseline' for user testing; Yahoo will add more features later. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: Yahoo)Yahoo has begun offering some users a more personalized home page that the company hopes will increase the usage and utility of a Web site that's widely used but elderly in Internet years.
The new home page features a dashboard on the left edge that reports activity with a variety of applications. For example, it can be set so users see e-mail from Yahoo Mail, AOL, and Gmail, and other applications notify users of comment on photos posted at Flickr, events on the calendar, and bids active on eBay.
The new page will be revamped later with more dramatic changes, such as the ability to house user-selected Web applications, but the company is starting with a relatively modest redesign to get baseline testing data for later comparisons.
The new page is being tested with a small subset of users in the United States, United Kingdom, India, and France. About 314 million people used the site in July, according to ComScore's estimates.
Yahoo already offers a customized home page, My Yahoo. It won't be phased out, the company said, but the regular Yahoo home page will look more like it.
"These two starting points are definitely converging," the company said in a statement. "To help people make sense of what's happening in their world, we're redefining the concept of a 'start page' away from either a broadcast view (Yahoo.com) or a personal view only (My Yahoo), and creating a homepage that blends the best of both approaches to deliver relevance for a mass market."
Clicking the mail tab on the dashboard reveals a miniature inbox. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: Yahoo)Although the Yahoo home page remains a major force on the Internet, much new activity has shifted to social networks, search engines, and other sites. Yahoo's ultimate hope is that Yahoo.com will become a more active part of people's online lives, not users will use Yahoo.com not just to check the latest headlines but also to check up on others in their social orbits.
People can't sign up for the test page, because Yahoo wants a random selection of users, the company said. The timing for broad release of the final version depends on how the tests go.
One major upcoming phase will be hand-picking the online applications at the site. "People will be able to customize the applications area in the coming months during future rounds of our ongoing testing process," Yahoo said. With its Yahoo Open Strategy, the company is trying to attract programmers to build applications on Yahoo properties, offering the promise of a large audience.
Google's Photostream application is for viewing Flickr photos on Android phones.
(Credit: Google)Google released on Thursday a new sample application called Photostream that will let phones running its Android phone operating system view photos stored at Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing site.
Although Photostream is intended to be a tool to illustrate the use of various Android features, it also looks like a potentially useful application for when the phones start shipping later this year. The open-source program lets people browse a particular user's photos, in groups or individually, and create separate shortcuts to different Flickr accounts, according to a description at the Android developers blog.
Google is trying to attract developers to Android so the project has a rich set of applications. Part of the promise of the effort is to build an "open" foundation, not unlike personal computers, where people can install new software.
Users will be able to find new applications at the Android Market, though that online service likely will launch only with free applications, so developers hoping to profit from the site will probably have to wait.
Google is also moving technology from its Chrome browser to Android.
In conjunction with the App Store that launched earlier this morning, there's an upgrade available for iPhone users to bring their devices up to speed with the compatible iPhone 2.0 software.
News.com Poll
There's not an easy path to it yet, but the firmware is on Apple's servers, MacRumors.com reported Thursday.
Twitter users reported that the software is 225 megabytes in size. The download is free for iPhone users and $9.95 for iPod Touch users.
The iPhone 2.0 software allows existing iPhone and iPod Touch owners to have access to the software features that will be available on the new iPhone 3G that hits stores Friday morning (but not to the hardware upgrades, which include 3G Internet access and GPS). This means not only the 500+ third-party applications already in the iPhone App Store, but also support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync.
Third-party applications range from games and electronic books to iPhone versions of big social networks like MySpace and Facebook. Facebook and MySpace's iPhone applications will let users seamlessly upload photos to albums on the social networks, and Facebook's will let members with location-aware iPhone 3G devices see which of their friends are nearby.
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