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More often than not, an entrepreneur with a great idea looking for funding will pitch his or her startup dozens, if not hundreds of times to potential investors. There is an endless amount of resources out there for entrepreneurs looking to learn the best practices for their pitch, including what to include in their decks, how long to speak, and what pitfalls to avoid. By the time an entrepreneur actually gets funding, they've probably mastered their pitch to a point where they could recite it in their sleep and provide advice of their own to newcomers. The problem with this is they can get stuck in their pitch mentality and it can creep into areas of their business that need the ole straight talk express.

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Michael Hirshland of Polaris Venture Partners, who blogs under the name VCMike, wrote today about a problem he often sees when in board meetings with startups. The issue is that entrepreneurs are so used to speaking a certain way to VCs that they sometimes have a pitch-like tone that gets in the way of board room progress. As Hirshland points out, don't try to beat around the bush when it comes to bad news.

"VCs hear bad news all the time -- it is part of the startup process and part of the VC job description," says Hirshland. "Any VC worth his or her salt should respond to bad news, provided it is shared in a timely fashion, by helping the entrepreneur figure out the best way to respond rather than dwelling on what went wrong."

He advises CEOs to stear clear of attempts to placate their board members by spouting off excuses for whatever their bad news is, or by claiming that they are already fixing the problem in hopes of avoiding any impending wrath. From what Hirshland says, board members are not schoolmasters there to punish you and whip you into shape; they are there to help, so don't isolate yourself, he says. If you speak openly and honestly about your issues with your board, chances are you will preserve your most valued asset as an entrepreneur and as a startup: credibility.

"Early stage ventures are filled with ambiguity. Entrepreneurs and their investors need to make quick decisions based on information that is far from complete," says Hirshland. "This necessitates relying to a very substantial degree on the entrepreneurs' interpretation of the situation and prospects."

In other words, you are the eyes and ears for your board, and if you aren't being open and honest with them, bad things will happen. Worst of all, speaking with fluff and rounding out the rough edges of your company will destroy your credibility, which Hirshland calls "toxic" to your partnership and "not a happy place for either the entrepreneur or the investor."

As we mentioned earlier this week, credibility is your best friend when trying to get funded, so make sure you carry it with you and preserve it in your board meetings and into your company's future. Save the pitching for future rounds of fundraising, and when it comes to your board members, don't try to win them over, simply treat them like equal members of your team.

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I am one of those people who has a tough time trying to schedule meetings. What’s worse is that times change, mostly because of the ever shifting nature of deadlines that come with blogging. That is one of the main reasons why my calendar constantly would descend in chaos. I got help, but if you are like me and are a Google Calendar user, now it could all be as simple as turning on a feature inside Google Calendar. The new gadget, available in Google Calendar Labs is called Smart Rescheduler. Once turned on, you have select an event and clock: find a new time.. David Marmaros, creator of the gadget writes on the GMail Blog:

…we decided to apply some of Google’s search experience to the problem of scheduling. We experimented with using ranking algorithms to return the most relevant meeting times based on specified criteria like attendees, schedule complexity, conference rooms, and time zones. Just like Google search ranks the web, our scheduling search algorithm returns a ranked set of the best candidate dates and times…. You’ll see ranked list of possible times for your meeting. By investigating the calendars others have shared with you, Google Calendar can make some educated guesses about how easy it might be to reschedule a conflicting meeting and even find you a replacement conference room nearby. This process is 100% automated

I just tried it out, rescheduled a meeting and yes, it works as advertised. For once I am not going to complain :-)

Blippy is always fun to write about because so many people are enraged by its very existence. But all that rage apparently hasn’t stopped the company from getting lots of investor attention. In addition to landing a bevy of top tier angels and venture capitalists in their first round of financing, we’ve now heard that Blippy is preparing to close on a new round.

August Capital partner David Hornik is leading the round. And the valuation is “totally absurd” says one source. Another puts it at $50 million, although that may be a little on the high side. Regardless, that’s not bad for a site which only launched publicly two months ago.

Blippy wouldn’t comment on this story. I reached David Hornik (he seemed to regret having answered the phone). All that he’d say is that he loves Blippy, but he would neither confirm nor deny an investment.

If your not already familiar with it, Blippy is a Twitter-like service where users post everything they purchase. You can hook up your credit cards and various online services (Amazon, iTunes, Zappos, etc.), and details about everything you buy are posted. You can see my account here – I’ve linked it to my iTunes. See our Blippy launch post for more details.

Lots of people love posting and discussing their purchases on Blippy. But lots of other people just hate the idea of the service as an insane invasion of privacy (albeit one that people voluntarily enter into). Read the comments on any of our Blippy posts to see examples of that indignation.

Putting all that aside, though, if enough people start using Blippy they are going to be able to monetize the heck out of it. Advertisers will see exactly what users are buying and be able to target them with ridiculous precision. In fact, the data is so deep and rich that Amazon is already threatened by the young startup.

CrunchBase InformationBlippyAugust CapitalDavid HornikInformation provided by CrunchBase

Having gone toe-to-toe with Macmillan Publishing over e-book prices last month, only to retreat in the face of a consumer backlash, Amazon is once again talking tough with publishers. This time, however, the stakes are even higher for the Kindle-maker.

According to a New York Times report, Amazon is threatening to remove the “buy” button from major publishers’ e-books if they don’t accede to a detailed list of its demands, including that it not be undersold by other e-book retailers. Although Amazon agreed in principle following the Macmillan dust-up to let publishers set retail prices for their Kindle books while it collects a 30 percent commission, the retailer is apparently keen to maintain its most-favored nation status vs. other e-book sellers, including Apple.

The immediate bone of contention, according to the Times, is Amazon’s demand that publishers sign three-year contracts guaranteeing that no other competitor get lower prices or better terms than it does. Publishers are said to be reluctant to commit to three-year deals when prices and consumer behavior are still in flux.

Amazon’s demand also puts publishers in a tight spot with Apple, which is insisting on most-favored nation status for its iBookstore.

While Amazon may have picked the wrong fight with Macmillan, and then overplayed its hand, the outcome of the  latest battle really could be critical to the Kindle-maker’s long-term strategy, not because of what it could mean for retail e-book prices but for what it could mean for the Kindle platform.

Both Amazon and Apple share the same long-term e-book strategy. Each wants its device, the Kindle and iPad, respectively, to emerge as the dominant e-reading platform. As Apple itself demonstrated with the iPod and iTunes — a strategy deliberately aped by Amazon — controlling the distribution platform gives you control of the value chain. By locking both iPod users and the record companies into the iTunes platform, Apple was able to capture the lion’s share of the value from online music (mostly by selling expensive iPods).

The key to Apple’s success in music wasn’t just the relatively low 99-cent price of individual tracks but that the value in using an iPod for music was competitive against other consumer options, including illegal downloads and other MP3 players.

For both Amazon and Apple, then, it’s critical that the value of using a Kindle or an iPad for reading remains competitive against all other options, especially at this early stage of the market’s development when consumer habits are still up for grabs.

That means not just keeping a lid on e-book prices but making sure you’re the lowest-cost provider of e-books in the market. In this case, most-favored nation means most likely to succeed.

As for how publishers should respond to Amazon and Apple’s mutually exclusive demands for favor, the situation presents a paradox. Normally, supplying both sides in a war is an enviable position for a vendor. In this case, however, the battle is over driving down prices, which is not a fight most vendors want to find themselves in.

Their best strategy is to hold the line with both and hope that no clear winner emerges quickly.

Paul Sweeting is analyst with GigaOM Pro and the author of The Evolution of the e-Book Market (sub. required).

MindTouch has developed a top 20 list of the most powerful voices in open-source, compiled using Twitter and other sources. It's a good example of how a research project can be transparent and in the process, help garner thought leadership for both the individual and the company.

MindTouch Vice President of Sales Mark Fidelman wrote a blog post yesterday, discussing the project and how they came to their findings.

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Our interest is in much the process as the results. This is the kind of approach that has a number of uses. It answers questions for the organization. It creates a center of intelligence for the open source community. And it serves as a useful resource for sales and marketing. It also helps show that real research can be done using a few simple tools.

Most of the people on the list will be of no surprise to veterans of the open-source world. Notables include Tim O'Reilly, Chris Messina and Jonathan Schwartz.

The results show the degree of amplification than the average active user. This is where you have to consider the "nuance" factor by defining what it means to be classified in such a manner. Fidelman explained the process in this way:

"We first set out to determine reach by examining the number of followers and buzz an individual has on sites like Twitter and Google. We then needed to determine how much impact an individual had with their followers and subscribers. We asked questions like: How often were they retweeted? How much buzz is created around their blog posts, tweets, and other messages? How often is the individual referenced in the blogosphere? Were they cited by influential people?"

To create the list, Fidelman used Twitalyzer, KloutTwittercounter, ReTweetRank and Twitter.

They also used Google, Google Blog Search, and Google Trends.

That's a take on the process but what about the larger meaning for MindTouch. Fidelman had this to say in response to our questions:

Question:How does this project fit into your approach for building a company?
Answer:"We actually view it as building an industry. The Open source industry has a lot of innovative, influential leaders but until now decision makers haven't had a guide to know where to tune in.

Question:How is the process of doing the research useful?
Answer:It helps mindtouch and the industry learn where to find the open source broadcasters. If the industry needs to get the word out, these individuals should be targeted first.

Question: Can you provide 3 tips for people in the enterprise looking to develop information that positions the company as a thought leader?
Answer: It's about building a community around your personal brand. Matt Asay excels at this. He provides useful, relevant content that's actionable. If I were to characterize it Into three dimensions:

1. Actively participate in the open source dialogue on Twitter, Google Buzz and niche open source networks.

2. Build a community around your personal brand by reaching out and networking with other bloggers, industry analysts and consumers of open source software and hardware.

3 Develop and create useful content on a personal blog or third party blog. The more actionable and useful the better. This is a big area to cover and I'm probably not doing it justice in two sentences. He adds...Perhaps a guest post on this topic will help? :-)

Out of the information, Fidelman looked at the larger group and created a Twitter list. MindTouch, also did a little inclusive marketing by adding a badge that people can put on their site if they are on the list.

Thought leadership provides a host of important dimensions. Enterprise companies that approach the market with intelligence are usually the smartest of the group. Luckily, the tools have never been easier to use in helping filter out the information that matters most.

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Despite criticism, and an overall frustrating experience, Google is definitely not ready to give up on Buzz. The latest indication comes today by way of a new Android widget that makes it easier than ever to post updates to the service.

The new Google Buzz widget for Android allows you to post text or photos to the service without having to launch any app on the device. And, if you choose, you can easily tag your location to your buzz, as well as determine if it should be public or private. This widgets extends the already solid support the Android platform is offering the young service. For example, Buzz is built into Google Maps on Android, as well.

This new widget looks very slick — easily one of the best widgets for Android yet. And it furthers my opinion that Buzz should have been launched as a location-based service first. Of course, this simple functionality wouldn’t be possible on the iPhone, which doesn’t allow for widgets (and who knows if they’d even accept a Buzz native app at this point — or if Google would even create one for them).

Google talked about Buzz quite a bit this past week during a panel at SXSW. They apparently are thinking about letting users pre-test new features now.

This new widget works on Android 1.6 and later.

Google just introduced an interesting new feature for Google Calendar: Smart Rescheduler. This new feature, which will be available in Google Calendar Labs today, will automatically find the best time to reschedule a meeting. If you have ever tried to reschedule a meeting that includes more than two people, a conference room, equipment and a team that is distributed across multiple time zones, you know how hard this can be. With Smart Rescheduler, Google Calendar will give you a set of alternative dates based on a ranking algorithm that keeps everybody's availability and other criteria in mind.

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Rescheduling Meetings Doesn't Have to be Hard

As Ken Norton, Google's product manager for Google Calendar, told us yesterday, the Calendar team decided to tackle this problem after realizing how much time administrative assistants spend on trying to reschedule meetings every day. Starting today, Smart Rescheduler will be available as a Calender Labs product for all Google Calender users (including all Google Apps users with access to Calendar Labs).

Now, assuming your team uses Google Calendar, you can simply click on "Find a new time" and Google will present you with a list of the most appropriate times for a new meeting. The algorithm will rank alternative times based on criteria like attendees, schedule complexity, conference rooms and time zones. As Norton told us, the algorithm is actually quite complex and will also suggest a new meeting time when two participants in a larger meetings are scheduled for a one-on-one meeting at the same time or when there is a scheduling conflict but a meeting participant hasn't RSVPed to this other meeting yet.

Users can also refine the search criteria by changing the meeting duration, ignoring certain conflicts and by setting the earliest and latest date for the rescheduled meeting.

It's interesting that Google is only using this algorithm to reschedule meetings for now. It would also be interesting to see how well this system would work for scheduling meetings in the first place.

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Here's an idea for you: instead of slowly amassing followers, like on Twitter, or carefully culling your friends list over time on Facebook, making sure everyone is in their appropriate list and category, collect and dispose of friends like you ask for the time or a spare cigarette on a busy city street.

That's what Lokast, the self-described "disposable" social network lets you do - carry your throw-away lifestyle over into the digital world.

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The LoKast iPhone app was released earlier this week at the South By South West festival in Austin and is the perfect app for finding yourself among throbbing masses of the technologically inclined. But what is this disposable thing? From the email we received this week on the app's release:

Disposable? Yes. That means unlike Facebook which is friends and family, this app is about finding random people in close range and being able to share and see parts of their public digital profile including downloading their public-share videos, music and pictures. The best part, is that after you're in that close range, you may never see them again. IE: Disposable.

According to the press release, the name is short for "local casting", as opposed to broadcasting, and "aims to eliminate the need for physical media sharing, thereby eradicating physical CDs, plastic cases, video DVDs or waiting to get back to a PC computer to share and experience content."

We have to agree that SXSW seems like the perfect venue for this type of app and we'd say why not give it a shot? We haven't made it all the way downtown yet to be close enough to give it a full whirl, but it looks more than capable from toying with it.

Now, the thing is, we can't see a lot of people using this outside of big, hi-tech cities or conferences. Where does this fit into our day to day life? Are we really going to run around town staring at my screen trying to see if someone else with the same app is nearby? We don't think so. For now, though, we'd say give it an install and run around collecting some demos and see what people are listening to.

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Miami, Florida-based Labotec has landed a round of funding from Kima Ventures, a European early-stage investment fund founded by entrepreneurs and angel investors Jeremie Berrebi (Zlio, Net2One) and Square backer Xavier Niel (Free, Iliad).

The VC firm thus joins Kipost and FS Ventures as investors of the crowd-sourced mobile app development venture. The size of the round remains undisclosed, but we hear the amount of financing totaled just south of a seven-figure sum, so we’ll peg it at in between $800,000 and $999,999.

Labotec offers a relatively unique way of mobile app publishing, based on crowd-sourcing ideas from third parties. Basically, people who have ideas for mobile applications on any of the major platforms but lack the time, development skills or resources to actually build them can submit their ideas through the Labotec website.

The ideas are subsequently evaluated by Labotec, and if one gets thumbs up from a committee of unnamed field experts associated with the company, Labotec funds the entire development, distribution and marketing of the app. The IP is co-owned by whoever submitted the idea – targeted are carriers and handset manufacturers – and Labotec.

The ‘Inspirer’ (the person or organization that brought forward the idea for the app) doesn’t pay a cent, but if the app ends up generating revenue, the first $25,000 that it makes goes to Labotec – no matter how long it took to get to that point. After that, the Inspirer gets 50% of any revenue that may follow. Labotec notes that they’re still testing this model and that it is subject to change in the future.

Labotec says that it has received hundreds of new project ideas from 27 countries since its inception in May 2009. A total of 3 applications out of those ideas have launched (iSOS for Android, iMove2Music and FakeSMS for iPhone) and 20 are slated for release by the end of this year – which basically means a lot of the submitted ideas are junk.

The company says it plans to use part of the just-raised capital to hire 10 more developers of mobile apps for platforms such as iPhone, Android, iPad and BlackBerry.

CrunchBase InformationLabotecInformation provided by CrunchBase

The only thing worse than company meetings is trying to schedule one. The more people who need to be at that meeting, the harder it is to find a time slot that works with everyone’s schedule. A new Google Calendar Labs feature called the Smart Rescheduler brings some search smarts to the problem. “Overnight, all the Google apps customers will get this,” says Google Calendar product manager Cyrus Mistry. “It is like we are giving every employee their own administrative assistant.”

The person scheduling the meeting enters the names of the participants, how long the meeting will be, and a date by when the meeting must take place. The Smart Rescheduler then goes out and looks at everyone’s calendar to see when everyone is free, taking into account different time zones and other commitments on their calendars (in order for this to work, all the meeting attendees must share their calendars with Google Calendar).

All too often at this point in the process, someone has a conflict. What the Rescheduler does is look at all the soft constraints and actually ranks the best meeting times. Different attendees can be prioritized so the meeting is set around their schedule. Soft constraints are taken into account like partial schedule overlaps, times blocked with no other attendees, meetings where someone’s been invited but hasn’t yet accepted, or meetings organized by that person. These factors often indicate a schedule that can be altered.

Google Calendar throws all of these factors together and comes up with a ranking for the best possible meeting time. “We did look at algorithms for search to see how they solved which doc should come to the top,” says Mistry. “We discover what meeting should come out on top.” The Rescheduler can even book new conference rooms based on which one is closest to the original one and the same size.

CrunchBase InformationGoogle CalendarInformation provided by CrunchBase

You can learn all sorts of interesting tidbits from legal documents. For instance, in one of the legal briefs unsealed today in the YouTube-Viacom dispute, such as the amount of money YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley made from the $1.65 billion sale of the company to Google in 2006. His take: $334 million (based on the November, 13, 2006 closing price of Google’s stock). In other words, the young CEO owned about 20 percent of YouTube at the time of the sale.

YouTube’s other co-founder Steve Chen’s stake was worth $301 million at the time of the sale, and the third co-founder Jawed Karim walked away with $66 million. Even YouTube interface designer Christina Brodbeck “received Google shares worth $9.09 million.”

The VCs did even better. Sequoia Capital, YouTube’s venture backer, turned a $9 million investment into $516 million (or about 31 percent). And Artis Capital turned a $3 million investment into $85 million.

Another notable stat from the legal docs: in the past five years, more than 500 million videos have been uploaded to YouTube overall.

CrunchBase InformationChad HurleySteve ChenJawed KarimSequoia CapitalInformation provided by CrunchBase

Based on a patent filing that was published by the USPTO today, Apple could soon enter the location-based social networking market. The patent, which was filed in September 2008, describes a scenario where a group of users with mobile devices like the iPhone come together at an event like a concert, wedding, political rally or trade show. Normally, you would have to collect personal information from all the attendees you meet and then transfer this data manually into your existing social network if you want to stay in touch with them. Apple's patent, however, describes a system where all of the devices in a specific location can automatically become part of a new social network based on their location. The patent filing refers to this service as iGroups.

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This could, for example, allow event organizers to provide attendees with additional content and services during the event and after it is over. The exchange of this information would be brokered by trusted devices at the event and information about the social network can be stored in the cloud and exchanged with other services.

Turning Ad Hoc Networks into Permanent Social Networks

As Apple notes in the patent ("Group Formation Using Anonymous Broadcast Information "), technologies like Bluetooth personal area networks allow modern cell phones to easily create ad hoc networks, but it is virtually impossible to recreate this network at a later time for users to continue their discussions or exchange additional content.

In a very detailed example, Apple's patent describes how iGroups could automatically detect that a group of users is in or around a specific location (in the example, this event is Apple WWDC 2008). The iGroups service could then invite all the attendees to join this group and create a permanent social network for everybody who was in attendance and opts in to the group.

Will Apple Actually Do Anything With This Patent?

This, of course, isn't Apple's first patent for a location-based service. As with all of Apple's patents, it remains to be seen if the company will actually release any product based on this filing. Given Apple's position in the mobile market, however, it wouldn't come as a surprise if the company decided to turn some of these patents into actual product.

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December 1, 2008. That was the last day I got a Qwitter notification. I don’t recall qwitting Qwitter, it simply stopped working for me. Until today. When it just puked in my email inbox.

For those unaware, Qwitter is a service that emails you every time someone unfollows you on Twitter. It tells you their name, and the last tweet you sent that may have caused the unfollow. Naturally, when I saw the huge influx of emails today, I decided to visit the site again — and guess what, it does appear that they’re back. As they note, “We’re Back! How could we possibly quit catching QWITTERS?!? Fear not… notification emails have returned, giving us all something to look forward to during the day!“

Not only that, the service promises that “premium services” are coming soon. Agora Technology, the group behind the app, promises faster email notifications without ads, and the ability to become a featured Qwitter user if you sign up (more details are coming soon).

There’s just a few problems with the new Qwitter. First, they’re sending all of these emails with a completely broken link. The “Visit Qwitter Therapy” link takes you to the following URL: http://root_url/therapy. Clearly, that’s the result of some bad coding. And I have about 60 emails today all with the same broken link. More importantly, I’m not sure the all-important unsubscribe button is working. I clicked on it to unsubscribe earlier, and I’m still getting the notifications. Others are noting that they qwit Qwitter a long time ago, and have started getting the notifications today.

These Qwitter emails are also now promoting TweepML, a Twitter grouping service, which we’ve covered in the past. And interestingly, it appears that Qwitter may be under new management. Previously it was a group called Contrast that ran the service (here’s an interview we did with them), now it’s listed as being run by this Agora Technology group — which is the same group behind TweepML (which just sold).

I’ve never been thrilled by the idea of Qwitter because it adds social pressure to Twitter. Without it, if you unfollow someone, they’re unlikely to notice (as Twitter won’t notify them). But with it, they’ll get an email and things may get, well, awkward. Likewise, getting an email letting you know that you’ve been unfollowed probably makes you feel a bit uneasy inside. Well, okay, unless it’s one of the thousands of spammy accounts on Twitter. Still, at one point they cared, and now they don’t.

[photo: Paramount Pictures]

In what’s looking like a standard operating procedure, Google just released its free Gesture Search software for Android 1.6 devices and expanded availability outside of the U.S. The application launched two weeks ago on Android 2.x devices. With it, you can simply draw letters on your handset — Android will interpret them and return search results for contacts, applications, bookmarks and music. It works fairly well, although I personally prefer the voice search functionality on my phone. But the big story isn’t one single new feature — it’s how Google is managing the Android fragmentation issue — and it just hit me as I noticed the pattern.

Google knows that it has a problem in that there are four different shipping versions of Android right now. There was talk of Google trying to get all the different handsets on one base version this year, but I don’t see such a de-frag happening. It’s not Google’s call because the carriers typically make the decision to push firmware updates, not Google. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Google working aggressively with any handset makers that offer an Android 1.5 device on a 1.6 upgrade, however. That move is just a baby step and the current hardware running 1.5 can surely run 1.6 without any performance degradation.

So what’s the pattern I see? Since Google can’t control the versioning issue, they can at least control core functions and apps among the operating system variances. So when Android 2.x learns a new trick, there’s a good chance Android 1.6 will learn it too. Need a few examples?

• Google Navigation — this stock-dropping navigation tool debuted on the Motorola Droid with Android 2.0. The date? October 28. On November 23, Google Nav landed on Android 1.6 devices.
• Google Maps Enhancements – On December 7th, the what’s nearby on Google Maps was added for Android 1.6 or better. In this case, Android 1.6 received new functionality simultaneously with Android 2.x phones.
• Google Buzz — launched on February 9th, the web client and shortcuts works only on Android 2.x devices, but an update to the official post says “For Android users, buzz.google.com and shortcuts are currently available only for phones with Android 2.0+ and we’re working to support other versions soon.” By “other versions” I take that to mean Android 1.6. And current 1.6 devices can use some Buzz features in the latest Google Maps client.

I see two things going on here. One is an effort to follow up as many Android 2.x features on Android 1.6 devices if possible. And where it is possible, Google releases a feature, function or application for both 1.6 and 2.x devices at the same time. If the feature isn’t ready for the older platform, Google releases it for 2.x and follows up relatively quickly with a 1.6 update. It fits the iterate early and often pattern found in Google approach to pretty much everything. The feature-parity approach diminishes the fragmentation issue by attempting to level the functionality playing field across devices.

My second observation? I’m starting to think that Google is passively trying to reduce fragmentation by steering towards two main OS versions as opposed to four: Android 1.6 and a common Android 2.x version. Again, it can’t force an Android 2.0 handset to 2.1, but we’re starting to see some phones getting upgraded — the Motorola Droid is on tap for Android 2.1 as early as tomorrow, for example. And we have direct word that the HTC Eris will gain Android 2.x as well.

Without exercising direct control like Apple does, Google has little choice in how to deal with the fragmentation. But they are dealing it with in a unique and quiet manner, likely due to some lessons learned with four platform versions to support. It’s a clever move from where I stand and makes me wonder if this won’t be problem a problem with Android 3.0 — I expect Google will greatly reduced the fragmentation issue by then.

Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Google’s Mobile Strategy: Understanding the Nexus One

This morning, the Open Video Alliance is launching a campaign to bring video to Wikipedia. The project encourages Wikipedia users to add videos using the "100% free and open source video stack powered by HTML5 and Theora" that is the standard for the site.

Our contention, however, is that while technical issues in adding media have certainly had a limiting role, is this all that has kept multimedia from dotting the pages of our favorite collaborative encyclopedia? Can video be collaborative?

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While we wonder about the collaborative nature of the site versus the more fixed nature of video, others have already been hard at work making collaborative video a (potential) reality.

We spoke today with Michael Dale, a self-professed "open-video evangelist" for Kaltura, who said that "we haven't really seen yet the collaborative sequencing aspects of the software," but that these tools are currently in development. Kaltura is the online video editing company that is working with Wikimedia to enable video on Wikipedia. Through meta data and other tools, the company is trying to make video a more collaborative media.

The "Let's Get Video on Wikipedia" page offers a simple five-step how-to on how to add video to the site, but the only thing we're thinking it's missing is the "wash, rinse, repeat" aspect of adding any content to Wikipedia. While it is rather simple to go in and edit a sentence here and a paragraph there in a text format, editing a video is not nearly as simple.

Now videos can be easily uploaded, how will Wikipedia's users contend with the medium? If a three-minute long video is added to an article, but 30 seconds of it contain somewhat disputed ideas, interspersed through out, will these parts simply be cut? Will the whole video be scrapped or will another user take the video, slice those parts out and insert their own? And in the end, if this is the case, what sort of mish-mash multimedia will we end up with in the end? This is the next step, it would seem.

"Once there are more tools available," said Dale, "I think we'll see more experimentation."

It's not as if these questions are new to the Wikipedia community, as you can read in its proposed guidelines, which suggest that videos will should likely be limited to "snapshot-type", "performance-type" and "tour-type" videos. Even with these limitations, if you've ever looked through the history of changes on Wikipedia articles, then you know how even the finest points of an idea can be discussed and dissected.

According to a video interview with Kaltura co-founder Michal Tsur on Beet.TV, "users should be able to use video just the same way they're using text", but a word is a word is a word. A video, even a tiny bit of video, can differ in lighting, sound, angle and any number of other variables.

"The actual fact is that we're just getting started," Dale pointed out. "There's not a clear idea of how video will work and be used."

In the end, we think video sounds like a great idea, but wonder how widespread it can really become on a platform that holds collaboration in such high esteem. Whether or not video collaboration takes off on Wikipedia, we would love to see what could be created within other contexts (i.e. not encyclopedic) with the collaborative video tools that Dale says are currently in development.

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Earlier today, several previously sealed legal documents in the longstanding copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube by Viacom were made public. In conjunction with the public release of those documents, YouTube’s chief counsel Zahavah Levine wrote a blog post which reads more like a summary of a legal brief.

In it, Levine outlines YouTube’s main defense against Viacom’s allegations, including the fact that Viacom “secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there.” Levine also notes that “Viacom tried repeatedly to buy YouTube,” suggesting that the current $1 billion lawsuit is its attempt to cash in on YouTube years after the fact.

Here is the key passage from the blog post:

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt “very strongly” that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.

Viacom’s efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.

In other words, while Viacom’s lawyers were issuing takedown notices, its marketers were putting clips up on YouTube to promote Viacom movies and TV shows. You’ve got to wonder what the judge will make of that evidence.

CrunchBase InformationYouTubeViacomInformation provided by CrunchBase

Today, YouTube and Viacom unsealed many of the documents related to their longstanding copyright litigation, in which Viacom has sued Google for $1 billion. Viacom alleges that YouTube willingly facilitated the distribution of copyrighted material, and used it to boost its own traffic (while hurting Viacom’s bottom line in the process). We’re embedding the documents, which were released minutes ago, below (it may take a few minutes to get them all posted). We’ll be posting throughout the morning on what these documents reveal.

YouTube’s Brief

20100318_google_viacom_youtube_memorandum

Viacom Summary Judgement Motion

Viacom Summary Judgment Motion

Viacom Statement of Undisputed Facts

Viacom Statement of Undisputed Facts

Photo Credit/Flickr/ifindkarma

Facebook may be denying any wrongdoing, but a California judge is disagreeing with the social networks' disagreement to the tune of a $9.5 million dollar settlement today.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the settlement comes in response to a class-action lawsuit over Facebook's Beacon program that published what users were buying.

Sponsor

The decision allocates $6 million of the settlement to a "digital trust fund" that will go to organizations that study online privacy, says the Times article. The Times explains the bit of controversy hovering around this final decision:

Over the objections of privacy advocates, Facebook will have a seat on the fund's three-member board. It consists of Chris Jay Hoofnagle, who heads the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology; Tim Sparapani, Facebook's public policy director; and writer Larry Magid.

While some people are saying that the settlement is unfair in a few ways, Justin Brookman, a senior resident fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology, seemed to disagree. The general contention has been that Facebook will have one seat on the three-member board for the "digital trust fund" and that it was already required to pay money out to promote online privacy, as our own Sarah Perez discussed when the settlement was first announced last October.

Brookman said that today's decision is "a really good settlement for consumers", explaining that "there are really very few settlements that come up with that type of monetary figure."

He also contended that, while Facebook will have a seat on the board, it will be a minority member, as a majority vote requires two out of the three parties to agree. He said that the other two members, Hoofnagle and Magid, were both good choices who will act in the public's interest.

"We have a lot of confidence they'll make wise awards of the money," he said. "They both criticized Facebook when Beacon came out."

According to the Times, however, this may not be the end of the appeal process.

One privacy advocate said he was exploring whether he could appeal the decision. "This sweetheart deal for Facebook is outrageous and another indication they don't really want to ensure privacy online," said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy.

Brookman noted, however, that a settlement like this for privacy issues was relatively unprecedented.

Discuss

I had the chance to sit down with Craigslist Founder Craig Newmark recently at his favorite breakfast spot in San Francisco, just a block or two from the house where Craigslist was launched 15 years ago this month. We talked about a number of his favorite topics, including the bird feeders he keeps having to replace (because the squirrels he likes to post about on Twitter destroy some 10-15 of them every year), his love of dogs (he doesn’t own one himself, but keeps dog treats with him to feed the various neighborhood pets he runs into during the day, most of whom he knows by name) and — last but not least — what he thinks is the next big problem the web has to solve.

And what is that? The question of who to trust online, according to Newmark. To solve it, he believes that what the web needs is a “distributed trust network” that allows us to manage our online relationships and reputations. I just happened to have a Flip video camera with me, so I convinced him to let me capture a few minutes of him discussing this concept; I’ve embedded the clip below.

Newmark called some form of distributed trust system “the killingest of killer apps” for the web over the next decade (he said he wasn’t sure that was the best way to describe it, but was trying out to see how it sounded). He talked about “reputation and trust ruling the web, just the way it does in real life,” and how he was looking to big players such as Google, Facebook and Amazon as the kinds of entities that would have the scale to handle such a distributed trust or reputation management network. And he said that despite some occasional missteps by both Google and Facebook when it came to privacy (Google Buzz and Facebook Beacon, respectively), he believed that both were acting in good faith and had a policy of “not being evil.”

The Craigslist founder also said that he saw a place for government to be involved in this process — something he hoped he would be able to help with — but that there would need to be a private-public partnership to provide checks and balances. And he hoped that the major players such as Google and Facebook would co-operate to create some kind of universal standard or platform to support such a trust or reputation network, rather than fighting with each other. Newmark said that as a society we needed to “get our act together and make this happen,” adding with a wink that the idea for the distributed trust network was all part of his “hidden agenda to move ahead on the web to try and save the world.”

For years, network operators happily called all the shots when it came to developers, effectively saying, You want to be on our network? Then jump through all these hoops to get approved, and be happy with whatever margins we pay you.

You can’t get away treating people like that for too long. Indeed, these days, developers are calling the shots, requiring more open development platforms and a 70-30 split with mobile providers. Carriers such as O2 (Litmus) and SK Telecom have both agreed to the new arrangements, while others are reluctantly cutting their revenue streams just to stay on par with the marketplace.

But carriers want innovation, and in order to get it they either have to look to the web for successful business models, social interaction and portable applications, or innovate their own. Wouldn’t it be great if the marketplace for mobile could truly be as flexible and open as that of the Internet? To avoid fragmentation, partnerships are key.

Already we’re seeing such initiatives like the Joint Innovation Labs program, which was founded by Verizon Wireless, Vodafone, China Mobile and Softbank. And then there’s the Rich Communication Suite (RCS), which enables mobile phones to have many of the standardized communications features as Internet users, such as instant messaging, video chat and buddy lists.

Get involved. Join Alcatel-Lucent in support of such efforts as mobile’s open web-friendly API, GSMA OneAPI, and RCS.

For more, read “New Rules of Engagement to Create an Attractive Mobile Application Marketplace (PDF).”