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Like more than a few people (as far as I can tell by reading through my blog and other feeds) I confess that I was more than a little gobsmacked to find out that Yammer had won the TechCrunch50 prize. It may well have been a tough field for the judges, given the number of lame Web 2.0 offerings I read about among the contestants, but I still find it hard to believe that a service that is ultimately a carbon copy of Twitter won the big prize. Before anyone signs in to the comment section to berate me, I understand that Yammer is for the enterprise, and that it has a kind of “we’re holding your employees hostage” business model, where companies have to pay a fee to “claim” the users that are chatting on Yammer using their corporate email addresses.

That said, all this sounds to me (as more than one person has pointed out) like something Twitter could roll over one morning and implement without even breaking a sweat (now that its server issues seem to be a thing of the past). Is that really a great business? On the one hand, I’m inclined to give David Sacks — the co-founder of genealogy site Geni, where Yammer was apparently created as an internal communications tool — some props for getting an idea and running with it. But it still feels a lot more like a feature that makes more sense as part of Twitter than it does as any kind of standalone business.

Continue reading “Yammer: This thing is a prize winner?”

A U.S. Federal Court has ruled in the case of J.K. Rowling vs. the Harry Potter Lexicon, in which the Potter author sued to prevent a former librarian from publishing a compendium of facts about the novels. The book was based on the Lexicon website, which Steven Vander Ark has run for years — a fan site so comprehensive that Rowling herself has praised it in the past. The court decided on Monday that the Lexicon was not protected by the fair use clause in U.S. copyright law and would therefore be illegal if published. The judge, in my view, was completely wrong, and so was Ms. Rowling for bringing the suit.

I, of course, am not a lawyer. I don’t even play one on television. But I know a little bit about writing, and I know (or think I know) what copyright law was originally intended to do — which is to protect a creator’s rights to their creation, but also to balance those rights with the rights of society to create new works based on that original work. In my view, the judge’s decision gave the first part of that equation a vast amount of weight, while giving the second part virtually no weight at all. If anything, he should have done the exact opposite.

Continue reading “J.K. Rowling: Totally wrong on copyright”

I know I’m not really saying anything new here, but every now and then when I look at Techmeme it fills me with despair. Well, maybe not despair exactly — but a definite sinking feeling. It’s bad enough when Apple news takes over the entire page of Techmeme headlines, but at least that occasionally involves something worth writing about, and some differing opinions. Then you have days like today, with the announcement by Research In Motion of the new BlackBerry Flip, formerly known as the Kickstart (way better name, by the way). Here’s a screenshot:

So what do we have here? A press release by RIM leading off — which I’m totally fine with, by the way — and then almost 20 sub-links from blogs and tech sites. At first I thought the problem was just a lack of smart or snappy headlines, since each one sounds exactly like the next (with a couple of exceptions). But then I went and read every single post and story, and guess what? They are almost exactly the same. Hey, RIM has introduced the Flip! Here are some pics! Here’s the press release! The end. Again, there are a few exceptions — Kevin Restivo tried to insert a bit of analysis, as did Wired and a couple of others. But the rest, nada. What exactly is the purpose of this? To grab as many cheap pageviews as possible? I know some of this stuff has to be done, like sports scores or the weather or whatever, but still. It’s sad.

Among the many announcements at the Apple event earlier today, including new Nanos and headphones and colours and the Genius auto-playlist feature — all of which was obsessively live-blogged and Twittered by legions of bloggers — came the news that NBC shows had returned to the iTunes store, many of them in high-definition. It was almost a year ago now that the network pulled its content out of Apple’s grip, saying the company was too inflexible on price and other things, and started putting it up at Amazon and its own Hulu site, while Apple spread the word that NBC had wanted to boost prices.

So who gave in? From the sounds of it, both sides got their punches in: NBC gets to charge more for HD shows, but will also sell some of its older shows for less than the $1.99 price that Apple applies to virtually everything. As a piece at CNET notes, Apple also gave in to the demands of the movie networks earlier this year, and allowed them to set multiple prices for movie downloads. Will the music labels try to use these signs of weakness to get Steve to bend on album and song pricing?

Continue reading “So did Apple cave, or did NBC bend?”

My friend Austin Hill — a Montreal-based entrepeneur and angel investor, and co-founder of Radialpoint — has been working feverishly for months now with a small team, putting together an ambitious startup venture called Akoha.com. Not much has been written so far about the company and what it has planned, in part because it is launching at TechCrunch50 tomorrow, and the founders of TC50 don’t like there to be too much noise about their star candidates before launch time.

That said, however, I think it’s safe to tell you at this point that it’s a Web-based social game played with trading cards and aimed at spreading good deeds around the world. Why do I think it’s safe to say that? Because that’s what Erick Schonfeld has written over at TechCrunch, so I figure if it’s okay for Erick to blab then it’s okay for me too. The rest of the details — and they are quite interesting, I think — will have to wait until th big launch takes place at TC50 tomorrow.

But for now, I have some invites available for the Akoha beta, which will allow you to sign up for a “mystery” starter kit and get started playing the game. The first 100 people to click on this link will get one.

Update:

Spore is apparently one of the most widely-pirated games in recent memory, according to a report at TorrentFreak, with many downloaders referring to the draconian DRM restrictions as a justification.

Original post:

One of the most hotly-awaited video games of the past decade, Spore — the new game from Will Wright, reportedly in development for 10 years — hit stores this week, and was promptly panned for what fans say is overly restrictive digital-rights management. The game checks with Electronic Arts headquarters after it’s activated online, and then again after a second or third activation. In order to activate the game a fourth time, owners have to phone the company and provide license codes, product details and other proof of purchase.

Electronic Arts says that such measures are required to fight rampant game piracy, while fans of the game say restricting them to only three installs amounts to making them rent the game, and they have responded by bombarding the review section of Amazon’s store with complaints. When I first came across reports of this activity, there were only a few hundred negative ratings, but when I checked today there were more than 1,600; the average rating for the game, with more than 1,550 contributions, was a single star.

Continue reading “Will anti-DRM protests hurt Spore?”

On Monday, shares of United Airlines lost more than 75 per cent of their value — erasing about $1.2-billion from the company’s market capitalization — after a story about the airline’s bankruptcy in 2002 somehow got pushed onto the website of a Florida newspaper, was picked up by Google’s news-aggregation service, then made its way onto the Bloomberg news wire and out to hundreds of thousands of stockbrokers and traders. But whose fault was it? By Tuesday morning, fingers were being pointed in multiple directions.

At first, it appeared that the Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper was responsible for the gaffe, but officials with the Chicago Tribune — which also publishes the Florida paper — said that no one in the organization had posted the old story, which came from the Tribune archives. Then, blame shifted to Bloomberg, which had picked up a headline from an investment news service called Income Securities Advisor.

Continue reading “United’s share slide: A comedy of errors”

Didn’t have time to blog this earlier today, for reasons that are too depressing to go into, but I still think Google’s announcement about an expanded newspaper archive search is one of the few things that have come out of TechCrunch50 and DEMO ’08 that I can genuinely get excited about. Most of the other news seems to involve companies whose vowel-deprived names (and in some cases business models) were either snatched out of the latest Web 2.0 hat — or in some cases copied directly from some other revenue-deprived startup.

Sure, Google’s archive search — which involves aggregating scans of old newspapers from around the country and the world (including a shout out to the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, the oldest newspaper in North America) — may be another revenue-free offering from the Web giant, as Silicon Alley Insider notes. But I guess I’m a sucker for Google’s motto about making all of the world’s information freely available. Or maybe I just have not-so-fond memories of scanning through reams of old microfiche slides from yellowing file folders in the newspaper library when I started in the news business. I would have given anything for a one-stop search that could find keywords in those files.

Continue reading “Google is the new microfiche archive”

Brad Stone over at The New York Times has a story about how Real Networks — which owns the Rhapsody music service, but is probably best known for distributing one of the most irritating media players ever — is launching DVD-copying software. It will allow users to make a copy of a movie, along with all of the features and artwork, but they will only be allowed to play the movie on the computer that runs the software. It also can’t be burned to a DVD and played in a DVD player, and in order to play it on another PC, users will have to pay $20 to buy another copy of the software for each device they want to play it on.

This is the kind of product announcement that makes you shake your head and wonder what the hell people at companies like Real are thinking. Not only is the product likely going to make Real a target for legal action by the movie industry, but as more than one commenter at Slashdot, Digg and other technology sites and forums have pointed out, copying DVDs isn’t exactly rocket surgery. There are dozens of easy-to-use programs such as DVD Decrypter, Handbrake (for Macs) and others that can accomplish the same thing, and also produce files that can be watched anywhere, burned, shared and so on.

Continue reading “Real launches DVD ripper — but why?”

Well, the day has finally come. A video on YouTube has finally topped 100 million views, and for better or worse it belongs to Canada’s pop princess, the pride of working-class Napanee, Ontario: Avril Lavigne. The video for her song “Girlfriend” is now at about 110 million views, well ahead of second-place holder Justin Laipply’s “Evolution of Dance.” The fans over at Avril’s BandAids forum are no doubt celebrating, since the record is the culmination of a viral marketing campaign cooked up by the site. First, BandAids came up with a YouTube “view-o-matic” page, which loaded the Avril video every 15 seconds. This cheat was picked up by dozens of media outlets — including yours truly, in a post at my Globe and Mail blog, which got linked to by Perez Hilton (watch those servers melt!).

Continue reading “Avril’s video tops 100 million views”

I’m not sure how many people noticed, but Clive Thompson — one of my favourite technology and science writers — returned to blogging this week. Clive writes regularly for the New York Times magazine, and his most recent piece was an excellent look at Twitter and the phenomenon of “ambient awareness” that such social-media tools allow, and why that’s a good thing. Clive’s blog Collision Detection used to be a treasure trove of those kinds of observations, drawn from scientific journals and various news articles, and after seven months of absence (which he says he will explain later), he is back to blogging.

In analyzing and describing complicated things, Clive has a great way of humanizing things as well, often with just a simple turn of phrase. Take one of his more recent blog posts, about a study of how flies avoid the fly swatter when you’re trying to kill them. First, Clive describes how he returned home from vacation to find his house full of flies and how frustrating it was to repeatedly miss them, and then he describes what the study says about how to avoid this problem:

Continue reading “Clive Thompson returns to blogging”

Even if you don’t spend a lot of time on FriendFeed, it becomes apparent after not too long that Andrew Baron — the co-founder of Rocketboom, the pioneering video-blog starring Joanne Colan (and formerly starring Amanda Congdon) — has a real hate on for Jason Calacanis, the diminutive and self-aggrandizing founder of Mahalo and former founder of Weblogs Inc. The latest eruption was a post from Baron noting that Mahalo’s traffic seems to have flattened out, according to a graph that he included from Compete.

Continue reading “Andrew Baron vs. Jason Calacanis”

This video more or less speaks for itself. Base jumper Hans Lange jumped off a mountain in Norway in a specially-designed winged suit, but towards the end of the freefall his parachute failed to open and he plunged down the mountain towards the rocks and lake below, until a tree broke his fall. He recorded the entire thing on a helmet-mounted camera.

Google’s birthday is coming up — although it’s not clear exactly which one, or when it will actually occur, for a whole pile of reasons — and it occurred to me that the company must have done an awful lot of searches by now. After all, the most recent estimates I’ve seen are that Google processes more than 2 billion searches a day, although I have no way of knowing whether that’s true. So I started looking around for numbers and did some back-of-the-envelope calculations.

Here’s what I came up with (please keep in mind that I am an English major). If anyone can shed any further light on this — or fix the math — I’d appreciate it. Obviously, I had to make assumptions about what the average number of searches was during a year, based in some cases on nothing but a single number for that year, and I’m sure there are numerous other gaps of logic as well. Feel free to let fly with the suggestions, but try and remain civil.

Continue reading “How many searches has Google done?”

Marc Andreessen, the guy who designed the very first Web browser, co-founded Netscape and helped take it public and now runs Ning, showed up for an interview at the Churchill Club, where he talked to Kevin Maney from Portfolio magazine about a number of things, including Google’s new browser (which he thinks is great, and a step towards the browser as OS model that he has been in favour of since his Netscape days). But the part that really struck me came from the bottom of a Valleywag recap of the talk, in which he described what his Netscape co-founder and former CEO Jim Clark is up to:

Continue reading “Jim Clark: In a hot tub in Italy somewhere”