Ah, Microsoft. Always late to the game. Maybe it's a part of their strategy: wait until Google (Picasa Web Albums) and Yahoo (Flickr) establish solid market positions, and then develop or buy an (usually inferior) product of their own and try to corner those remaining 10% of users. This time, they've acquired WebFives (previously Vizrea), a photo/video/audio sharing site primarily aimed at mobiles, specifically Nokia devices.
It was announced on Friday that AOL, formerly America Online, has stopped selling online videos, and, instead, have teamed up with Amazon's Unbox service. Just over a year old, it seems that AOL wants to shift all of its focus to the advertising business model, so has decided to remove its self from the competitive online video sales game all together.
A report from the New York Times implies that Facebook misled advertisers who signed on to be “Landmark Partners” when the company announced its Beacon platform on November 6th. According to Coca-Cola’s vice president of global interactive marketing: “I … certainly understood that it would be opt-in.
The staff of the new Silverlight-powered media site, t5m, is off in Johannesburg, South Africa to cover the World AIDS Day concert. Sadly, they didn't think to put any effort in to their site before leaving. While it's commendable that any site brings attention to the plight of AIDS in South Africa, t5m itself seems to lack focus. Looking over the site one can't get a sense of the direction or purpose of the project, and it honestly feels like a collection of random thoughts.
This afternoon one of our readers alerted us to some plagiarism of Mashable content. While seeing Mashable stories re-printed word-for-word on splogs is nothing new, the source here was somewhat surprising: Associated Content. The company has raised $10 million in funding, and counts industry heavyweights like Google VP of Sales Tim Armstrong and investor Ron Conway on its board. The content in question is under the account of roemverda.
Second Life users need to be cautious with Quicktime embedded videos in the game as it may be used to pick your pocket of Linden Dollars. Charles Miller and Dino Dai Zovi, of Independent Security Evaluators, have found that by using a flaw in Quicktime, they can not only pick the pocket of any user within 100 virtual feet of the player, they can take complete control of the avatar.
As we discussed the other day, Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, was going after 02138mag.com for publishing documents from his time at Harvard. The social network founder was requesting the documents be pulled due to them violating his privacy. According to the judge, the documents were part of the "core journalism", and that they were made available by the magazine as a way for readers to further evaluate the story.
Six Apart, the blogging software and services company, has sold its network of topic-based blogging communities LiveJournal, Inc. to SUP, an international media company based in Russia. The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.
The United Nations is going green in an appropriate manner for its Climate Summit, which is being nicknamed the Virtual Bali Conference due to its green efforts--the organization will be streaming the Climate Summit live, beginning tomorrow and through December 14th. This is part of the United Nations' efforts to emphasize the importance of the global plight by encouraging participants to view the conference online instead of flying in for the events.
All you Wikipedia users out there will be happy to know that you can now legally mix your Wikipedia content with Creative Commons content. The two have penned a deal with the Free Software Foundation in order to extend a common manner in which the three can offer compatibility amongst the three entities.
NASA is the latest to take on additional social networking tools for the purpose of attracting more users. With about 1 million unique views per month, NASA is catering directly towards the Facebook crowd, in so many words--the 18 to 25 year olds. This marks the first major overhaul for NASA's website in nearly five years, with a new MyNASA tool at the helm of the makeover. It acts as a start page of sorts, full of NASA content that you can keep track of through a set of feeds.
Universal Music is going to test out the concept of DRM-free music, but not with their big gun artists... yet. Now available through the DG Web Shop, Universal is using their classical music division Deutsche Grammophon to test out how sales of a DRM-free music will work out for them. Notice this is being down through their own web shop as opposed to going the usual route of iTunes, Amazon, or Wal-Mart.
RockYou has pushed ahead with a top Facebook App yet again with a 112% increase in the last three months, coming out on top, over Slide and all the others. Thanks to its chart-topping Super Wall application, RockYou has maintained its reign over Facebook applications since their inception. The company has been keen to point out its stats on Alexa and Facebook, which you can take for what they're worth, showing RockYou's winnings over Slide.
Gaia, the avatar-filled virtual world, has received an undisclosed amount of funding from Sony Pictures. You may be wondering why. It appears to be, in part, for building out Gaia theaters, where users can congregate in virtual rooms for the purpose of viewing video clips. This was really brought to the forefront of Gaia's feature set when it launched a VJ tool for users to create their own theaters and feature video clips from around the web.
The Web 2.0 Marketplace is a place to list Web 2.0 and “New Media” websites for sale, job offers, consulting services, Facebook development services and more. New Listings SXP.com Website and Domain for Sale SXP.com, also SocialXperience.com, is a new take on the web 2.0/Social Networking Blog. We partner ... XWiki is looking for sales partners. XWiki is pleased to announce that we are opening up a comprehensive partner program to select consul...
Yes, there are tons of email options out there beyond Gmail; some are even bigger in terms of user numbers, but let's be honest: Gmail is the leader here, and everyone else just follows suit. This is our coverage of some important Gmail milestones, as well as a selection of Gmail-related toolboxes. News GMail Attachments Double to 20MB - Google upped your attachment limit, but sadly most other email services wouldn't allow recipients to receive 20MB worth.
Digg Explorer is not a completely new tool - it's recently reached version 1.1 - but it has somehow slipped under the radar. It offers a visual representation of various Digg-related statistics: most popular Digg sections and subsections, often used words, most popular submitted domains and the like. It even has a tiny version of the infamous Digg top user list, which is not officially provided by Digg for quite some time now.
Asterpix is officially launching its site to the public today. Though already live, the site has been operating in public beta for the past three months. We first checked out Asterpix's video hyperlinking tools back in September, and immediately noticed its unique approach to this emerging hypervideo concept. With the official launch, Asterpix has flushed out it's core competencies and incorporated some recommendations and tweaks based on user activity.
Despite the recent Beacon controversy, Federated Media Publishing has joined the Facebook bandwagon. They have signed partnership with the owners of Facebook app Graffiti and Watercooler Inc., a company that's responsible for all those Addicted To The (insert TV series name here) applications. Two initial sponsors are Hewlett-Packard and Wacom.
TiVo is really aiming to become more web integrated, this time bringing photo-sharing tools to its DVR service. Photobucket and Google's Picasa can now be accessed and shared through TiVo, in HD. Access to these photo-sharing tools are available at no additional charge for TiVo subscribers. This looks to further build on TiVo's existing partnership with OneTrueMedia for media-sharing tools from the web.
Have you ever said to yourself “I’m in the mood for a chicken souvlaki sandwich but not sure where I can get one”? That’s the problem FoodieBytes tries to solve through a new restaurant search engine launching a public beta today in 5 different metro areas. The site has indexed more than 16,000 menus, allowing you to search on very specific dishes and see the restaurants in your area that serve them.
NBC and Apple have officially broken up. The single largest partner for digital video, with more than 1,500 hours of programming making up nearly 40% of iTunes video content, has officially pulled all of its content from the iTunes store. The contract between NBC and Apple, which could not be renegotiated because of NBC's desire to increase the price beyond the flat fee of $1.99 per episode, expired over the weekend.
MoveOn.org made quite a fuss about Facebook's Project Beacon, and Facebook seemed to listen.
In an odd turn of events, Universal artist Colbie Calliat has sent an email to her fans explaining why MySpace users can no longer post full versions of her songs to their social networking profile pages. This is apparently a new rule being instituted by Universal for all of its artists, as full length songs are being swapped out for 90 second song samples. An excerpt from the email below: Hey everyone...bad news.
As a reminder, the nomination phase of the Open Web Awards ends tomorrow night at 11:59pm PST. Here on Mashable there are 13 different categories for which you can make nominations, while there are dozens of additional posts on our blog partners. A couple notes: (1) Anyone can make a nomination; even if it’s your own company or one you represent (2) The number of *unique* nominations will be taken into account in determining who makes the voting round.
What a day for Apple. After officially losing the contract with Universal for television and film content, the company is closing in on a deal with News Corp's Twentieth Century Fox for offering new releases and other movie titles on iTunes. The movies should be available early next year, after Fox can feel out the holiday season's impact on DVD sales.
TVWeek downplays the ability for independent producers to come online and make money with their independent online ventures. That's understandable. I won't ascribe to them an unspoken bias against New Media, since only the absolutely most informed Web 2.0 denizen is probably aware of exactly all the monetization opportunities out there.
GoLark is an upcoming event promotions tool that follows two distinct measures for organizing its site: posting and searching events. In order to better find events in your city, GoLark has instituted a voting feature that lets popular events rise to the top. This is very similar to Digg. For each event and venue, users have the opportunity to vote things up or down.
Another milestone for Facebook applications. Inigral, the company that created the Courses app that lets you find others in your college classes to share notes and thoughts, has raised a round from The Founders Fund totaling $500,000. Angel investors also participated in this round. Founders Fund Associate Justin Fishner-Wolfson will join Inigral's board. When Facebook removed its own feature that let you find others in your classes, it hoped that developers would create better versions on this concept.
