If you're a "Family Guy" fan like me, you might remember the episode where Peter finds a genie in a lamp and wishes for his own theme music. Well, a new website backed by the legendary frontman of the rock group "The Who", Pete Townshend, aims to instantly compose original music for users based on their input -- or more or less, make you your own theme music.
Method Music is a piece of online software developed by mathematician/composer Lawrence Ball and software developer Dave Snowdon, under the direction of Townshend. Users sit for what they call "musical portraits" in which the software "paints" a music picture based on user input. It may not be as polished as the music Ron Jones and Walter Murphy compose for "Family Guy," but the results the software spits out are suprisingly, well, musical (one of my portraits is at the end of this post).
Yesterday, a lot of people thought Microsoft had missed out on 24/7 Real Media, a display ad network that was purchased by communications group WPP for $649 million, just a month after DoubleClick reportedly passed on Microsoft to accept a $3.1 billion acquisition from Google. Always a bridesmaid, never a bride, was the sentiment. But today, Microsoft announced the purchase of aQuantive, a 10-year-old, publicly traded digital marketing company in an all cash deal worth approximately $6 billion -- the biggest acquisition in Microsoft history.
The acquisition has continued a hot month of consolidation across ad networks. Starting with Google's acquisition of Doubleclick for $3.1B on April 13. Yahoo! spent $680M to purchase Right Media on April 30 and AOL acquired a controlling stake of German ad-serving company ADTECH AG on Wednesday, before WPP's purchase of 24/7 yesterday, and Microsoft's move today. Mike Arrington has more on today's announcement as well as good notes from the conference call. Anyone who wants to listen to a recording of the call, dial 800-774-9248 (international: 402-220-0372).
Back in September of last year we wrote about the rise of vertical search engines here. In that article we emphasized the superiority of vertical search over generic search, in terms of search results. We argued that knowing the semantics of the underlying domain allows a vertical search engine to excel both in filtering the result, as well as the presentation.
In a follow up post at the beginning of this year we explored the The Race to Beat Google, by dissecting the different approaches Google's competitors are taking to unseat the search king. We discussed three major categories: a better technology, a better user interface, and vertical search as a domain-focused blend of the first two. We concluded that Google is still the search king and even if there is a technology out there that has promise, Google is not going to miss it.
This week, when Google rolled out Universal Search, our expectations were confirmed. The morning after questions are: who is hurt? who is wounded? and who is dead? The big question is: does Google Universal search mean the end of Vertical Search era?
On Monday, the US Department of Defense announced that a number of social networking and media sites would be blocked on its network, citing bandwidth concerns. "This is a bandwidth and network management issue. We’ve got to have the networks open to do our mission. They have to be reliable, timely and secure," a US Strategic Command spokeswoman told Stars & Stripes. (Marshall Kirkpatrick has a good blog post summing up the reaction across the blogosphere.)
For their part, YouTube isn't accepting the ban without a fight. Today, YouTube told the Associated Press they would challenge the US Defense Department's decision. "Watching or uploading online video does use bandwidth and can slow or tie up a network, but [CEO Chad] Hurley expressed doubt that soldiers' use of YouTube could have any real effect on the military's massive network," reported the AP.
This morning Google unveiled minor tweaks to their search UI and expanded results. The ultimate goal of Google's revamp is to unify search results across their properties to include web search, news, blogs, images, videos, etc. all in the main Google search offering. Google is calling this Universal Search and Danny Sullivan has an excellent overview here.
The changes to the search UI are, for the most part, inconspicuous. Google's new search attempts to unify its different offerings by including links, where appropriate, to additional results. For example, a query for "ruby" will offer additional results from its blogs and code search engines, a search for "puppies" will not -- but will offer results from the image search, which the "ruby" query does not do. A search for "Hillary Clinton," meanwhile, will include results from Google News as well as things like video from YouTube (as below screenshot shows).
Over the past few years, web usability guru Jakob Nielsen's star has been waning. Ever since the web 2.0 trend started to become popular (around 2004 till now), Nielsen's 'keep it simple' design philosophy has failed to ignite the new generation of designers. But it's not the 'keep it simple' philosophy in general that is the cause of this decline in Nielsen's influence - you only need to look at the enormously popular 37Signals to see that the 'simple' design approach is alive and well. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that 37Signals frontman Jason Fried is the new Jakob Nielsen. But instead of acknowledging that he has fallen behind the times, Nielsen insists on continuing to blame web 2.0 itself - with broad attacks and little in the way of specific examples.
Nielsen's latest tirade has been broadcast by the BBC, in a piece entitled Web 2.0 'neglecting good design'. I came across this via Hitesh Mehta, a Communication Designer who sent a passionate email to tips@readwriteweb.com, upset at Mr Nielsen's views on web 2.0 design.
Stanford University, the birth place of Yahoo! and Google, has come up with a lucrative way to deal with DMCA complaints from the MPAA and RIAA against its students: terminate their Internet service and charge a reconnection fee. First time offenders will be charged $100, a second offense will cost $500, and a third DMCA means paying $1000 and signing a letter idemnifying the school.
The school claims they get so many complaints that it takes three full time employees to sort through them all, and the fees will help pay for those resources. Schools fingered by the RIAA and MPAA as top havens of piracy have taken divergent approaches toward dealing with the problem. Some have banned P2P traffic outright, some have simply ignored the complaints from the industry associations, and others, like the University of Wisconsin-Madison, are demanding a formal subpoena before handing over any student information. But Stanford might be the only school that has tried to turn a profit out of it.
WordPerfect Lightning, the beta Web/desktop hybrid "content aggregator" launched by Corel in late February, will announce tomorrow morning an integration with popular blog platform Wordpress. There will also be new features added to the product itself.
Corel is best known for its set of budget office applications, such as WordPerfect, Paint Shop Pro and CorelDraw. Earlier this year it branched into web-connected apps, with the release of WordPerfect Lightning - a desktop word processor/notes tool (20MB download) that allows for content collaboration over the Web. Essentially WordPerfect Lightning consists of four components: the Navigator, the Viewer, Lightning Notes, and the Connector. As explained in a press release in February:
Back in January, Alex Iskold reviewed a number of 'web previews' tools - including Browster, Cooliris, Snap and Sphere. A couple of others are iReader and Blogrovr, although the latter is more about delivering content than previewing it. We've reviewed several of these web previews products before - e.g. see our post about iReader. Essentially all of these apps aim to save you clicks, by providing a preview of the web page behind a link. Sometimes this type of technology is intrusive, but a lot of times it is useful - because it allows you to check out a preview of the content without clicking through. Indeed a month or so ago we implemented Snap previews on Read/WriteWeb, and I myself regularly use it to preview the blogs of commenters (for example).
So now Interclue has joined what is a reasonably crowded market - and as yet a market where there is little evidence of profitablity. Browster has already bitten the dust. So what makes Interclue different? Like iReader it is a browser add-on that provides more information about a link, including a text summary of the content. Here is an example:
Duncan Riley at TechCrunch recently wrote a series of posts on video advertising. Also our own Sean Ammirati wrote a very interesting post yesterday, calling for an open ad network to compete with Google. Duncan's most recent post profiles a new service called ScanScout, which claims to work similar to Google's AdWords but for video. Google itself was recently profiled too, because it rolled out the first advertising solution for YouTube. If video is indeed the most important type of user generated content today, and we have entered the monetization phase of the new web, then the gold rush fever surrounding video ads is not a surprise. But what is the right way of doing this?
The right way is going to be whoever manages to deliver ads in a format that does not annoy consumers. A repeat of what Google did with text ads, but in video, is going unlock huge advertising spending and shift even more of it online. Will this be Google or some other company? We do not know yet, but Google has already spent a whooping $1.65B on YouTube, so it will fight this battle hard. In this post we look at what different companies are doing today and consider the ingredients of a successful solution, using AdWords as a model.
