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YouTube Wins $1 Billion Copyright Case Against Viacom

cgseo — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 22:05:15 +0000

Google just announced that a U.S. district court has granted the company’s motion for summary judgment in Viacom’s $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube. The court argued that YouTube is protected by the so-called ” safe harbor ” provision . Viacom first sued Google in 2007 and the court case continued to simmer ever since. Viacom accused YouTube of deliberately withholding filtering technologies and knowingly infringing on the company’s copyright. Sponsor Today’s judgment once again reaffirms the importance of the DMCA’s safe harbor provision, which protects Google and other media companies from lawsuits that are based on content that their users upload to their services. According to the DMCA, these companies are protected, as long as they delete infringing copyrighted material if they receive a notification from the copyright holder. Viacom Plans to Appeal According to CNET , Viacom intents to appeal this judgement as soon as possible: “We believe that this ruling by the lower court is fundamentally flawed and contrary to the language of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The intent of Congress, and the views of the Supreme Court as expressed in its most recent decisions. We intend to seek to have these issues before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as soon as possible. Viacom Didn’t Help Its Own Case It is worth noting that – in the end – Viacom probably did not help its own case by secretly uploading its own videos to YouTube while still complaining about the face that YouTube hosted these videos. Often, Viacom even “roughed up” these videos to make them look stolen, which YouTube’s chief counsel Zahavah Levine noted earlier this year. Discuss

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YouTube Wins $1 Billion Copyright Case Against Viacom

Weekly Poll: Apple Makes No Cloud-Based Music Streaming Service Announcement Today, What Are Your Plans Now?

cgseo — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 00:30:52 +0000

When Apple purchased the cloud-based music streaming service Lala in December of 2009 and then announced a few months later that it was planning to shut it down, many hoped that this signaled Apple’s intentions to launch its own cloud-based version under the iTunes label. And so, a replacement for Lala was on many people’s wishlist for announcements they hoped to hear Steve Jobs make today at WWDC. But unfortunately , Jobs had no such news. Sponsor Lala was a favorite tool for many music fans as it had an unlimited music locker, the ability to purchase web-accessible-only music, and a social sharing element. The cloud is ideal for music storage, syncing, and sharing, and competition – with or without an Apple-based service – has been heating up recently. Many companies, including MP3tunes and Grooveshark , have sought to woo displaced Lala users with special deals. With no announcement from Apple today and with the popular European streaming service Spotify rumored to launch stateside in Q3, it seems like the market for a cloud-based music service is still wide open. So, following today’s lack of announcement from Apple, what are your plans to store and stream your music? Why do you think Apple had nothing to say about a cloud-based music service today? What are your thoughts on why Apple did not announce a cloud-based music service at WWDC? online survey Discuss

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Weekly Poll: Apple Makes No Cloud-Based Music Streaming Service Announcement Today, What Are Your Plans Now?

Poll: Is AT&T Strangling the Future or Is Everything Going to Be OK?

cgseo — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 18:24:28 +0000

AT&T’s announcement that it will begin offering mobile tethering to additional devices for a fee but will stop offering unlimited data plans to new customers is being called cynical and anti-consumer. But the cap is 2 GB a month, with extra GB available for an extra $10 if you go over. Are you concerned this will be a problem? “The announcement comes at a time,” media watchdog Free Press said in a statement today, “when the company’s investments as a percentage of its revenues are steadily declining, indicating that AT&T is choosing to manage scarcity and ration its network, rather than build to meet users’ needs.” But do users need more than 2 GB a month? Sponsor Are You Concerned About AT&T’s New Data Plans & Limits? online survey You can see how much data you use by going into your AT&T account and looking at “past activity.” I’m willing to bet you fall far below 2 GB of monthly data usage. But what about a future of live video streaming to and from mobile devices, video chat and unforeseeable data-intensive innovations? All video delivered all over the web? If it’s going to be a data-intensive, mobile and real-time future – it may be time to crank up our expectations and capacity – not limit data available to consumers. Free Press Policy Counsel M. Chris Riley issued the following statement, which intuitively sounds pretty compelling: “While AT&T asserts that its high-end 2 GB cap will only impact the heaviest users, the fact is that today’s heavy user is tomorrow’s average user. Internet overcharging schemes like the one AT&T proposes will discourage innovative new uses and stifle healthy growth in the mobile broadband economy. It is price gouging for AT&T to charge the low-end users $15 per 200 MB, and to charge $20 for tethering capability even if no additional capacity is used. This pricing system is clearly divorced from the actual underlying cost of service. “If there was true competition in the U.S. mobile market, providers would invest in their networks to keep pace with consumer demand, removing the need to implement usage-based pricing plans. The fact that AT&T can introduce an Internet overcharging scheme that bears no resemblance to the cost of operating the network, despite constant complaints about the network’s quality, further demonstrates that our wireless markets are not competitive. Unfortunately, until the FCC takes seriously the need to promote meaningful competition in the wireless industry, Americans will continue to face a market of high prices and poor service. “This pricing ploy further illustrates why we need the FCC to put an end to the anti-consumer practice of handset exclusivity. For the wireless market to be competitive, consumers must be free to choose both devices and services, and take their devices to any compatible network.” What do you think? Do you think this is an anti-competitive blow against the future, or do you think a 2 GB limit is just fine for now? Please share your thoughts. Photo by Flickr user magerleagues . Discuss

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Poll: Is AT&T Strangling the Future or Is Everything Going to Be OK?

A Future GeoCity in the Cloud: Washington D.C.

cgseo — Sat, 29 May 2010 04:14:01 +0000

Washington, D.C. CTO Bryan Sivak is creating the infrastructure for a city that makes everyone a map maker in the cloud. His plan? Give citizens easy tools to create their own mapping applications that can be augmented with additional data. Sivak spoke at the Gov 2.0 conference this past week where he outlined projects now underway in the city. According to Information Week , these include his plans to create a private cloud that acts as a shopping experience for the IT manager. After adding a server to an online shopping cart, the order is completed and a server automatically spools up into the private cloud. Sponsor That’s not the map part but it shows the level of sophistication and the modern focus the city is adopting in order to develop an infrastructure that leverages the cloud for city operations and the community. As for his geospatial goals, Sivak’s plan is to crowdsource the process of creating geodata that is layered on to map locations. The city is now developing a series of templates and best practices to spark the development of mapping applications. For example, this might include support to create apps that provide pointers to city services or polling place locations. Information Week: “The city is already a heavy supplier of mapping applications, having 26 apps that mash maps up with data on crimes, evacuation routes, school data, emergency facilities, addresses of notaries public, leaf collection, and much more.” Sivak also wants to provide ways for citizens to update city maps or augment maps with additional information such as the location of park benches and traffic lights. The idea is to take crowdsourcing to a higher level of detail by offering the capability to use this geospatial data to mark not just locations but documents and data relevant to the place. This is ambitious but the challenge, as always, is to provide the tools that will make it easy for people to add information. That means simple ways to create their own online maps or those provided by the city. The reality of an augmented geospatial municipality will emerge if there truly is interaction with the community. Our poor economy creates constraints that force local, state and federal governments to look at new ways cloud-based services may be provided. To save money, municipalities are adopting online email services such as GMail. But the forward looking leaders are looking beyond email. They are providing tools so people may create information networks that span the geographies and the cultures of their rich communities. Discuss

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A Future GeoCity in the Cloud: Washington D.C.

Wolfram Alpha Turns 1: An Interview with Stephen Wolfram

cgseo — Wed, 19 May 2010 05:00:00 +0000

The launch of the “computational knowledge engine” Wolfram Alpha was one of the most anticipated product launches of early 2009. Since then, it’s been rather quiet around Wolfram Alpha, even though the company continues to add new features and data on a regular basis. Today, we had a chance to talk to Wolfram Research’s founder Stephen Wolfram about the first year and the company’s plans for the future. Sponsor Looking Back As Wolfram told us, the most basic question he tried to answer when the company started development was simply to see if it was even possible to take all this data and make it computable. Now, a year later, his answer to that question is an emphatic “yes.” Wolfram, however, also acknowledged that right after the launch the user experience for first-time users wasn’t necessarily ideal, as Wolfram Alpha didn’t yet have data for a lot of knowledge domains. The choice at that point, he said, was to either delay the launch and get more data, or to release Wolfram Alpha and be able to learn how its users would use it, and then enhance the experience over time. Wolfram says that today, most users are aware of the difference between a search engine and Wolfram Alpha, and the experience for first-time users has become far better. He stressed that the team (which consists of about 200 employees and 500 volunteers) is currently adding new data at an increasing pace. That’s gotten easier as the team has learned how to import information from a large variety of knowledge domains and sub-specialties. Getting the Data is Just 5% of the Work Unlike Google , Wolfram thinks that the Web “isn’t useful for getting raw data.” Indeed, whenever the Wolfram Alpha team experimented with this, the data simply wasn’t up to par. Instead, the company will continue to mostly work with data from primary sources. Getting this data, however, is only 5% of the work. The real difficulty is to understand how to compute this data and to understand how people talk about this data: What kind of questions do they ask? What are the alternate names for a specific chemical element? In addition, the Wolfram Alpha team and volunteers also check for anomalies in the data they receive. If there are major outliers, the team will track down more information to verify the original source. Sadly, though, not all data is free and Wolfram Alpha has to pay if it wants to include some databases. To make Wolfram a viable business and still offer this data, the team is considering a subscription plan that will give paying users access to deeper datasets from subscription databases. Challenge: Bringing Wolfram Alpha to More Users The question now, however, is how to get more users and how to bring Wolfram Alpha to more users through more channels. As we noted earlier this year, the company’s newly minted managing director Barak Berkowitz thinks that the team’s “number-one priority is to get Wolfram|Alpha in the hands of everyone.” To get to this point, they will soon release more and better tools for third-party developers who want to use the company’s APIs to integrate Wolfram Alpha’s functionality in their own sites and services. It’s also worth noting that Wolfram Alpha now offers an appliance that companies can install behind their firewall to curate and compute their own data. Looking Ahead: Analyzing Your Own Data, More Knowledge Domains, Programming with Natural Language Queries Besides looking back, we also asked Wolfram about his plans for the future. In answering this question, he stressed that this new approach to computing is just getting started and it usually takes him about 10 years to develop his projects before he fully understands what’s possible once this new paradigm has arrived. For the near future, however, Wolfram hopes that Wolfram Alpha’s users will be able to upload their own data and perform complex computations on this data and use Wolfram Alpha to find correlations within Alpha’s vast database. The usage scenarios for this could include anything from analyzing sales data to doing personal analytics on data from devices like the Fitbit . In addition to uploading data, Wolfram Alpha will soon make it easier for users to download data to use in presentations. Wolfram also wants to bring Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica closer together. One development that Wolfram is especially excited about is using Wolfram Alpha’s ability to understand and compute natural language queries in order to create Mathematica programs. By building on this capability, Mathematica users may soon be able to write and manipulate their code using natural language queries just like in Wolfram Alpha. Obviously, the team behind Wolfram Alpha will also continue to add more data across an every-growing number of knowledge domains. Today, for example, the team is launching real-time space weather data, 12 complete genomes and local maps, as well as numerous other knowledge domains related to math, biology, physics and geography. Discuss

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Wolfram Alpha Turns 1: An Interview with Stephen Wolfram

The Augmented Reality Industry’s Jan Brady Complex

cgseo — Fri, 07 May 2010 21:00:00 +0000

I’m starting to think that the Augmented Reality industry is very close to developing a Jan Brady complex. If you know what a “Jan Brady complex” is, then skip to the next paragraph. For those who didn’t grown up with the 1970s-era television show The Brady Bunch, a Jan Brady complex refers to the middle sister Jan Brady who constantly complained that her older sister Marcia received all the attention. Still with me? Good. Sponsor Guest author Matthew Szymczyk is the CEO and founder of Zugara , an interactive marketing agency that consults Fortune 500 brands – including Lexus, Sony PlayStation, Reebok and Toyota – on their strategic utilization of emerging media and technology. Zugara also develops its own proprietary Augmented Reality solutions and technologies. Video demos can be found here . This idea came about through conversations with people in the AR industry, and also watching presentations and discussions from just about every high profile name in the biz. Some of the thought leadership and insight into AR and its future is just mind blowing. But therein (partially) lies the problem. People in the AR industry (ourselves included at Zugara) tend to talk more about the what ifs than the how and when. How can AR be monetized right now? If not now, when? When will AR start showcasing true utility and practicality over endless gimmicks? How and when will AR become integrated into our daily lives? Most of these questions are discussed from the what-if end, which results in a lack of investment into the AR industry. Despite the hype for AR, social gaming services like Zynga, location-based-services like Foursquare, and a host of other emerging media and technologies are garnering all the VC and startup capital. So why does AR still have so little respect from the investment community while these other emerging technologies get all the monetary love? Why is Marcia getting all the attention while Jan isn’t? Having met with a few VCs, here are my thoughts: AR overall is cool but also seems very gimmicky. This hasn’t been helped by the recent onslaught of marketing-based AR initiatives that have no long term value and are really just quick PR grabs by brands. Though there is value in owning the proprietary tech – and, in turn, licensing revenue – it’s not sustained revenue that will attract major investment. Despite AR being a hot technology for almost two years now, there’s very little in regards to stats, analytics or other measures to show that AR itself is a technology that helps to increase purchase intent and decision-making, raise brand awareness and so on. Where are all the AR leaders with case studies on past campaigns and general AR stats? In VCs’ eyes AR is still struggling to break from the academic and research realm and into bona fide businesses. As a result, you’ll commonly hear this from VC’s: “AR is still too early stage.” Really? More early stage than Foursquare? To break out of the Jan Brady complex, the AR industry must be able to define, from a investor point of view, what Augmented Reality is. Is it a technology that will be integrated into location-based-services platforms like Foursquare, or is it a platform that will incorporate location-based services and real-time ads? Or will it be a hybrid of the two? That is a key question since there’s quite a big difference between a technology that’s cool and a technology that can be monetized. Searching for other emerging technologies and efforts to monetize them garners the following results: Microblogging Monetization: Twitter Plans To Monetize Search, Google Adwords-Style , 432,000 results Social Games Monetization: Social Gaming Execs Discuss Growth, Monetization, And The Future Of Facebook Games , 181,000 results Location-Based Services Monetization: Foursquare Sets Sights On Monetization, Launches Local Business Dashboard , 34,000 results Do the same search on Google for “Augmented Reality Monetization” and you get 28,000 results – most of which direct you to general mobile marketing-based monetization efforts. The only recent article of note is around Layar and its plan to monetize its technology through a store. I’ve never seen more passionate people at conferences than those who are 100% behind AR (and I’ve been to a lot of conferences over the years for new and emerging technologies). But what we as an industry need to do is to start connecting the dots better for not only investors, but for companies that are looking for more than a spinning 3D model off a marker. Once companies start seeing the true value and utility in AR then there will be kind of long term investment that will connect the dots for VC and jump-start investment capital. Until the AR industry can start proving that it’s an emerging technology of the future that can be monetized in the present, every time someone complains about the lack of respect all I’m going to hear is “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!” Discuss

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The Augmented Reality Industry’s Jan Brady Complex

Plancast iPhone App is Live & It is Good

cgseo — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:25:13 +0000

Plancast , the plan-sharing startup with big-name angel investors and ” future as platform ” aspirations, has just had its iPhone app accepted into the iTunes store. The app was built by contracted star developer Leah Culver. It’s simple, functional, attractive and useful. It’s going to be very good for SXSW and probably beyond, if the service continues to stick with users as it has so far. Here’s the iTunes link and below you can see some screenshots. Sponsor I’m posting my plans at Plancast.com/marshallk . You can see who’s coming to our SXSW party Sunday night with NPR, PBS and more here on Plancast . See also: Hot Potato also has a new iPhone app just released today ( iTunes link ) which may come in handy for discussing the events that you attend via Plancast and otherwise. Discuss

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Plancast iPhone App is Live & It is Good

Hulu on the iPad? Not as Easy as it Sounds

cgseo — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:04:54 +0000

In a recent interview, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar told technology reporter Om Malik that his company was “very bullish” on mobile, even going so far as to say “we will embrace every device.” That’s a funny statement, considering that the company has been touting that same sentiment for years but has yet to launch anything for mobile, be it an app or simply a mobile-ready streaming site. Now, with the launch of the iPad just around the corner, the rumors of an iPhone/iPad Hulu app are rising up again. But there’s a bigger mobile web than just the one accessible via Apple products, and that may be what Hulu has its eye on now. “We don’t think about one device only,” Kilar said. However, going mobile is going to be a challenge for Hulu. And it’s not as simple as re-encoding a few videos, no matter what you may have heard. Sponsor Problem A: Hulu’s Business Model Needs Work The fact that Hulu exists at all is somewhat of an amazement. Through tenuous connections with major studios, the collaborative, experimental effort to bring streaming TV to web (and make it profitable) has managed to attract a number of users in the U.S. Although the audience size varies widely depending on who’s counting, the company has managed to become a household name thanks to eye-catching commercials on NBC featuring actors from the network’s top shows. But there’s a problem facing Hulu: in-video advertising is, apparently, not as profitable as once hoped. In fact, it’s just too expensive , says Marc Ruxin, the Chief Innovation Officer for ad agency network McCann Worldgroup. Hulu has been aware of this problem, though, and has been hinting towards the launch of a subscription service , with News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch telling an investor conference last fall that the company, was looking at “adding subscription services and pay per view” options. Through the subscription model, Hulu could potentially generate enough revenue to keep the studios happy and maybe even encourage them to offer up more programming. Unfortunately, the subscription model has yet to launch and the profits from video ads have been far too lean for some Hulu participants. Recently, for example, Viacom pulled two of the top shows – The Daily Show and the Colbert Report – from the site, claiming that they simply weren’t earning enough money via the advertising model currently in place. Viacom Inc. Chief Executive Officer Philippe Dauman said that “on the current economic model for Hulu, there’s just not much in it for us to continue at this time.” And so the situation degrades. So what is Hulu doing now? It’s trying to attract more viewers to its site with the launch of ” If I Can Dream ,” an original series that premiered earlier this month. The fact that they’re now making the foray into this sort of online programming is somewhat worrying. After all, if hit video webisodes alone made for a profitable service, then YouTube would have achieved profitability ages ago, instead of (maybe) getting there this year , five years post-launch. Let’s face it, original programming is a bonus for Hulu users, but it’s not going to take the place of hot shows like the now-departed Comedy Central fare. Problem B: Will Apple Allow a Hulu App on the iPhone/iPad? Another problem? Hulu has been planning to delay its iPhone app launch until a subscription model was in place, according to earlier reports . But with the biggest names pulling out, subscriptions could be a harder sell. Still, even if Hulu was able to make subscriptions happen, there are no guarantees that Apple would ever allow them into the iTunes store, especially considering they’re offering a competing product. (See: Google Voice banishment from the iPhone , for example). Meanwhile, Hulu’s online site doesn’t work in the iPhone’s web browser because it was built in Flash. If Apple rejects the Hulu app from iTunes, the company’s other option is encoding all their site’s content in H.264 and make that available via HTML5, the new web language that offers streaming video sans plugin. Since this has already been done, a Hulu app could launch a player on the iPhone or iPad, if, of course, Apple allowed them to do so. If not, then a mobile site would have to be built in HTML5 – video controls, overall UI, advertisements and all. That’s no simple process. What’s Hulu Doing Now? So is this the plan Hulu has decided on now? It’s hard to know for sure. Like Apple, the company is incredibly secretive about their plans and product roadmap, often refusing to respond to calls and emails entirely, even to say “no comment.” And yet, the Hulu iPhone app exists. We’ve spoken to someone who’s seen it…but that was ages ago. For all we know, iPhone/iPad app plans have since been scrapped to work on a new solution that works around any potential Apple restrictions. But sources inside Hulu have clammed up lately, meaning they’re either building something top, top secret…or perhaps nothing at all. We hope it’s the former, because frankly, an iPad without Hulu is a sad, sad affair. But will we ever see a real app? At this point, we’re not holding our breath. Discuss

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Hulu on the iPad? Not as Easy as it Sounds

The Future as Platform: Mark Hendrickson’s Vision for Plancast

cgseo — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:34:26 +0000

Mark Hedrickson is 24 years old. He grew up in Menlo Park, California, down the street from Stanford, raised by a high-tech marketer Dad and a Mom in banking. Then he went to college and studied Nietzsche. He has now set out to build The Future – specifically your future, your intentions, your plans as a platform for analysis and software development. The story became particularly interesting today: Hendrickson’s new company Plancast is submitting its much-anticipated iPhone app to Apple days before SXSW and announced on Hendrickson’s alma matter tech blog TechCrunch that it has raised just short of $1m from a list of industry stars. We offer below some perspective on what Plancast aims to do: nothing less than “to be the platform for all ‘intent’ data,” Mark Hendrickson says. Sponsor Plancast is a website where people post their plans. Plans to attend a conference, plans to go to a party, perhaps plans to get a haircut. “We have the same ‘who wants to share that?’ issue as Twitter,” Hendrickson told us today, “the standard ‘I dont use Twitter because i don’t care you’re eating a sandwich.’ What we’ve learned though is that semi-mundane stuff is actually interesting. So, perhaps we wont have a lot of the ‘getting a haircut’ stuff because that’s indeed quite mundane, but we will get ‘getting drinks tonight downtown’ or ‘heading to Palo Alto for the day’ type stuff. Which actually leads to very cool serendipity.” Now that Twitter is such an unqualified success in all but monetization, it’s cool to say you’ve got the same problems Twitter had. Mash up all those plans from friends and you get an interesting stream of forthcoming events. The site is simple, if smart, today. The little company has big plans for the future, though. “We want to host and distribute all content that pertains to what individuals, organizations and businesses have planned for the future,” Hendrickson says. “If you break the idea of an ‘event’ down into its basic units (what’s going to happen, when, and where), there’s a ton of relevant social content through the long tail. We’re designed to host a superset of all this event data.” Leveraging the Future If the web first enabled people to publish diaries of their past actions, then moved on to status updates and check-ins about current thoughts and locations, then Plancast aims to be focused on the Future. “I think [the future has] been a neglected area in geo-location discussions,” Hendrickson says. “Check-ins have dominated the conversation over the past year, and check-ins are great for what they are – but they have a certain limited value. If someone checks in somewhere across town, what are the chances you’re going to get up and hustle over there to join? You also have limited data — often you dont know why they’re there. From an advertiser’s point of view, you have to grab their attention immediately. Whereas if you have intent, you have more time to give them an offer and have them consider that offer and act on it. The scope of planning data is larger than check-in data in other ways too. Check-ins are really specific to particular venues — bars, retaurants, parks etc. so the scope of content/ads you can serve up is quite local.” This conversation about the future needed to move on to something other than advertising. “It’s absolutely a platform,” Hendrickson told us. “It’s not just a consumer destination. We’re building our API early [expect to see it launch very soon] because we want to be the plumbing for future intent data. We want to power third party website calendar systems, third party apps, mash ups, etc. We want to do analysis on big data sets that compile intent data from all over. Once we start pulling from lots of sources — Facebook, Meetup, Linkedin, Twitter, Dopplr, Tripit, etc etc — we can then match intents and figure out really cool stuff. 50% more people are planning to see Avatar this weekend vs Hurt Locker. And we can pump this data back out to other companies that have special needs for it. “Let’s say one day you can search ‘movies’ on Plancast and it knows A) your location, B) your past behavior, C) your friends’ activity, and D) aggregate activity. The top result could be a movie showing that 2 of your friends have already planned to see and which is very popular in aggregate in your city.” Hendrickson says he’s hard at work building out privacy settings that will help more people feel more comfortable sharing more plans. That’s easier said than done, of course. This young, philosophically-trained startup co-founder from Palo Alto would be well-served by reaching out and bringing close to the company some advisors who specialize in understanding the privacy concerns of everyday people online, if he’s going to build a platform for the future of our communication around intent. Location based social networks in general face a big challenge in making people comfortable using them and demonstrating their utility before they can become mainstream phenomena. For now Plancast is hiring engineers with its new money, which was just announced today. Investors include SoftTech VC, True Ventures, Founders Fund Angel, and Zelkova Ventures. Angels Aydin Senkut, Saul Klein, David Cohen, Joshua Schachter, Dave McClure, Dan Martell, Ron Bouganim and Paige Craig put in money as well, bringing the total to $800,000. Things have come along quickly since Hendrickson was writing blog posts at TechCrunch, he left the staff there one year ago this Wednesday, and bought the domain Plancast.com for $500 last summer. (“I thought about buying Plancaster,” he says, “but some guy named Paul Lancaster had it.”) Can this young man and his team build “the platform for all ‘intent’ data?” Marketing analyst Jeremiah Owyang has been bullish on Plancast for months. He described it as a leading example of the forthcoming “intention web” in December. Expect the real-time web to quickly evolve into the intention web. People will work together to share their information about what they plan to do, and improve how they work or organize. Expect Social CRM systems (Salesforce, SAP), Brand Monitoring vendors (Radian6, Visible Technologies), and Search Engines (Bing and Google) to quickly try to make predictive models on what could happen, and what are the chances. Businesses that have a physical location like retail, events, or packaged goods can use this data to anticipate consumer demand. They may offer contextualized marketing, or increase or decrease inventory or store hours to accommodate. Don’t be surprised in the future and you walk into a store with your preferred items, meal, or drink already nicely packaged for you. Plancast may or may not play a big role in transforming visions like that into reality, but it’s definitely a startup worth watching either way. Look for the company’s iPhone app later this week (built by high-profile developer Leah Culver ) and check out the many listings of SXSW events on the site already, including our very own ReadWriteWeb event on Saturday night . We’d like to know if you plan on joining us. Discuss

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The Future as Platform: Mark Hendrickson’s Vision for Plancast

The Future of Firefox Personas: Dynamically Changing and Filled with Ambient Info

cgseo — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:50:27 +0000

Firefox Personas , the designer skins that let web surfers dress up their browser, are now being rebranded “Personas Plus” and are being moved over to Mozilla’s add-on gallery to join the other plugins. With the move, Mozilla has also announced that development work on this popular personalization program is continuing with the addition of new features that will transform Personas from static background images to dynamically updating themes that could even include ambient information. Sponsor Personas , if you’re unaware, are special web browser skins designed for Firefox that let you style your browser with colorful backgrounds and imagery. Slightly different than Firefox themes, which typically change browser buttons and toolbars too, Personas just let you update the browser’s background without making dramatic changes to other Firefox features. Also, unlike themes, Personas don’t require a browser restart to apply. Until now, Firefox Personas have been a sort of cute, but somewhat unnecessary feature, and one that seems to appeal more to the “junior” set of web surfers. With Personas for things like Lady Gaga, Twilight, Avatar, musicians, popular TV shows and celebs, older web surfers may have felt a little out-of-place when visiting the Gallery’s homepage . However, the future of Personas may have have all Firefox users taking a second look. Future Plans for Personas On the development roadmap, Mozilla is considering a number of new ideas for these add-on skins, including dynamic Personas, window and/or tab-specific Personas, page specific Personas and self hosted Personas, among other things. There are definitely some intriguing ideas here, although, on the other hand, Personas that changed too often during web surfing could end up being more distracting than useful. One of the more interesting ideas under consideration is the addition of ambient information into a Persona. Years ago, we looked at an ambient news reader plugin for Firefox which displayed headlines from articles you would be interested in reading. These headlines, determined by an analysis of your web surfing habits, appeared in a beautifully fading list every time you opened a new tab in Firefox. That sort of low-impact information delivery mechanism is a perfect example of what it means to provide “ambient information.” So what sort of ambient information could be embedded into a Persona, we wonder? Could Personas provide statistics on tweets, Diggs and other social actions the way Feedly’s toolbar does ? Or could they, too, offer up links to related web pages or news stories? What would you want to see? With Personas, the Focus is on the Browser, not the Web Another thing to consider is whether or not this planned development means Mozilla is charting a different course for Firefox than rival Google is with their new Chrome browser. Where Chrome makes the browser “go away” with an emphasis on the web and not the tabs, buttons or toolbars, Personas do just the opposite: they return the focus to the browser itself. This would contradict other plans Mozilla was supposedly considering for Firefox’s future not too long ago, most notably a design that would put tabs at the top of the browser just like in Chrome. Last summer, Mozilla requested user feedback about this potential revamp, but feedback was mixed. What do you think about the plans for Personas? Are they interesting enough that you would give them a try? Or do you like a more minimal look for your browser? Discuss