Vint Cerf, who led a team in the 1970s that created the TCP/IP protocols and is commonly thought of as one of the founding fathers of the Internet, has been on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) for the past 7 years. Next month, when his term as chairman of ICANN is up, Cerf plans to leave the organization.
Since it was founded in 1998 to oversee the distribution of domain names and IP addresses, ICANN has weathered a number of storms, including calls by some world leaders in 2003 to remove the organization's control over how domain names are assigned. In part due to Cerf's leadership, the group remained intact and has even managed to grow its budget. Approximately 100 people now work at ICANN.
Hulu, the online video project from Newscorp and NBC/Universal, with participation by Sony, MGM and others, has begun its highly controlled opening to the public this week. The Hollywood-content-only, wildly over funded project is opening up a private beta to a few thousand users it told reporters before a midnight EST embargo this morning.
Amazingly, none of those reporters appear to have been included among those few thousands with actual access to the site - all reporting I've seen has been based on a WebEx demo at most. It can be awfully messy to let industry experts actually touch your technology months before it's opened to the general public. When I say general public, I mean in the United States - it appears that people outside the US cannot view the videos. This is the future? If you live in the US you can watch old episodes of TV on the internet?
You won't likely be able to interact with the Hulu site for months but much of the content is available on other sites, in their video players, now. An embedded example is available below the fold - US residents only please!
Pet adoption matching web site Petfinder will reportedly be making the move to the small screen. The Animal Planet TV network, which acquired the site last year, has begun work on a television series based around the web site. The site matches families with pets in need of homes from local animal shelters, and the show will presumably do the same.
The television series is currently being filmed in the Los Angeles-area and will be hosted by zoologist and minor TV personality Jarod Miller, and by dog trainer to the stars Dina Zaphiris. It is set to debut in Q1 2008 and run for 13 episodes. According to Reuters, each hour-long episode will be centered around figuring out which type of pet works best for families by letting them try out "teacher pets" that have already been adopted in their homes.
We've seen Hollywood put a lot of effort into making web movies, putting content online, and sourcing talent from web video, but to our knowledge this is the first example of a web site being made into a television show for offline consumption.
ActionThis, a Wellington, New Zealand based startup, today launched a "Get Things Done" task management app. It enables people to create and track project management items and tasks, either using a browser interface (free) or within Microsoft Outlook (premium, subscription-based). Note that at the bottom of this post, there is a special offer for R/WW readers - 1,000 free Premium accounts.
Seeing as we live in the same city, last week I caught up with ActionThis CEO Ed Robinson and Chief Marketing Officer Tim Howell, to get a demo of the product and see where it's headed. As a side note, it's worth noting that ActionThis isn't the only web-based task management app in town - PlanHQ is another Wellington-based startup offering a similar product (I met both startups on the same day). However the two products tackle different niches - I'll explore PlanHQ in an upcoming post.
ActionThis is going after a global market - and it's very crowded. 37Signals for example offers Basecamp, which tracks tasks online too. But everyone has their favorite. In August, Josh Catone wrote that his favorite is The Online CEO. You can take your pick of online To Do list products - SolutionWatch listed 25 of them last year. So what differentiates ActionThis? It actually has a very good one - it neatly integrates with Microsoft Outlook, which millions of people already use for task management. What's more, integration with Microsoft Project and Windows Mobile are coming soon.
We all know the term 'Software as a Service (SaaS). The term SaaS was coined in a conference in 2005 and then popularized by Salesforce with its "No Software"
motto. Today Google is one of the strongest backers of this approach, with such products as Gmail,
Google Reader and
Google Docs. And ever since Bill Gates' famous Internet services memo in November 2005, Microsoft has been promoting the concept too.
But today we can coin have a new, similar term: HaaS, for 'Hardware as a Service'. [Update: As several commenters have pointed out, in fact we didn't coin the term HaaS. It seems that Nick Carr was the first, in March 2006.] Hardware has always been
available as a service through dedicated hosting providers, but it was never so
well abstracted until Amazon introduced
S3 and EC2. With dedicated hosting, you
still had to deal with dirty hardware issues like scalability; but Amazon makes
it a totally painless experience. In other words, the relationship between
EC2-S3 and dedicated/virtual hosting is similar to the one between SaaS and
ASP
(Application Service Providers) - EC2-S3 is an evolved version of dedicated or virtual hosting services.
We are about to witness the loud noise and mess that happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object.
The irresistible force is personalization. This is the key to productivity. Personalization technology cuts through the clutter and saves time. The firm that delivers personalized content sits at the top of the attention economy food chain; all other content is “drive-by commodity”. Personalization leads to relevancy in advertising; and loyal customers.
The immovable force is privacy. You cannot do personalization effectively without knowing an awful lot of information about an enormous number of people. The privacy backlash is building. Today it is only techies who are aware of the issue and where it is headed, but when mainstream users get spooked by a few more high profile cases, we will see consumer backlash and then, with politicians on the bandwagon, more regulation.
This will make a loud noise and will be messy; and in that mess will be big opportunities for entrepreneurs. VRM (Vendor relationship Management) may be a key part of this, which we'll explore in this post.
It's conference season for the Web and below are some upcoming events that may interest you:
Defrag - 1 free ticket available to R/WW reader; discounts too
Defrag has been sponsoring our Weekly Wrapups for the last few weeks; and we are a Media Sponsor for the event. The focus of Defrag is 'The Implicit Web', a topic we've explored a lot on R/WW - see for example The Attention Economy: An Overview.
Defrag is a two-day event being held in Denver, Colorado, from November 5 - 6, 2007. To register with a $100 discount, click here.
Also Read/WriteWeb has one free ticket to give away. To enter, simply leave a comment on this post giving us a 1-sentence definition of The Implicit Web. The best definition, as chosen by myself, will receive a free ticket to the event - valued at $1,495. (Note: if you purchase a ticket using the discount link above, that will be refunded if you win the free ticket)
Sponsor:
Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. For those of you reading this via our website, note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups - either via the special RSS feed or by email.
Microsoft Invests in Facebook
The week was dominated by the news that Microsoft beat Google to an investment in Facebook. There was initially a rumor that Google had won the much hyped deal. But then the news hit that Microsoft had invested $240 million for a minority stake in Facebook, at a valuation of $15 billion. As part of the deal, and probably driving it, Microsoft expanded their advertising agreement with Facebook to international markets (they already had responsibility for US banner ads). Note however that this deal leaves room for Facebook to run its own advertising network, which we have been discussing on Read/WriteWeb. Facebook's ad system will likely use social profiling to target ads, given the wealth of such data that Facebook has.
There was a lot of follow-up discussion on the deal, including from our Read/WriteWeb writers. Alex Iskold wrote an intriguing article entitled Should Google Be Afraid Of Facebook?. He concluded however that Facebook isn't in the same league as Google, so the Mountain View company doesn't have a lot to fear. Josh Catone offered a contrarian view, in light of the massive influx of cash that Facebook received earlier in the week - and more importantly, who it came from.
Let us know, in the comments to the Wrapup, whose view you agreed with more - Alex's or Josh's?
This week Read/WriteWeb upgraded its server and also moved to Movable Type 4. The upgrade process resulted in issues with commenting yesterday and the first half of today. So my apologies to anyone who left a comment over the past couple of days for the bad user experience. Commenting is now back working - and what's more it is much faster than previously on this site.
The server upgrade (on Media Temple) and move to Movable Type 4 (Six Apart) are part of a major overhaul to Read/WriteWeb. We also have a re-design in the works.
It's interesting to see how the techniques and technologies of amateur, citizen journalists are adopted, co-opted, and integrated by the mainstream media. Take blogs, for example, which earlier in this decade seemed like just an outlet for amateur web publishers. Fast forward a few years and you'll be hard pressed to find any mainstream news source that doesn't embrace blogging in some way -- CyberJournalist.net lists 245 blogs run by mainstream news sites.
Earlier this week Nokia and Reteurs announced that they had partnered to create the 'Mobile Journalism Toolkit,' which teams a Nokia N95 cell phone with a keyboard, small tripod, and solar charger -- technologies often used by amateurs to capture local news. The toolkit has been deployed to select Reuters journalists to help them file stories from the field and use the cell phone's camera to take photos and videos of news events. "By running on handheld devices, rather than on bulkier laptop computers, the mobile journalism application enables us to create complete stories and file them for distribution, without leaving the scene," said Nic Fulton, Chief Scientist at Reuters.
For now, the toolkit is aimed at professional journalists, however Nokia acknowledged that citizen journalists themselves, not just their techniques, are being more often relied upon by mainstream news outlets. "'Citizen journalism' is beginning to embrace a wide range of public engagement with the media," said Timo Koskinen, project manager with Nokia Research Center, "from groups of contributors organized around subject or geographic areas to the casual participation of observers who are lucky - or unlucky - enough to be at the scene of a newsworthy event."
