Tech

Apparently, Britney Spears took a stroll on the streets of New York last night while her newsless, yet somehow touching documentary For the Record aired on MTV.

She updated her Twitter just a few minutes ago:

britneyspears I enjoyed a relaxing walk last night around NYC. Even though it was raining, it was a lot of fun! ~Britney

This might actually be the real Britney too. Her assistant Lauren, usually signs off on posts she writes, and Brit has been updating as herself for awhile now.

Last week, Scott Heiferman, C.E.O. of Meetup, announced when and where candidates could announce their interest in replacing him as organizer of the New York Tech Meetup. So far, several candidates have stepped forward, including Greg Magarshak, founder of social media company Lucky Apps; Joe DiPasquale, founder of CollegeWikis.com and self-described Meetup fanatic; Rich Hecker, an organizer of Bootstrapper.com and co-founder of The Connectors Group, a new angel investment group, and Groupable.com, a site that works a lot like Meetup; Joshua Sherman, an organizer of Personal Democracy Forum and founder of BuycottForChange.org; among others.

What does the tech community think so far? The blogs are abuzz.  read more »

Twitter stepped into the spotlight this week, not only as a charity organizer and possible advertising goldmine during the holidays, but as a legitimate news aggregator.

Lots of tech blogs have been touting Twitter's potential since its inception, but on-the-ground reports from the Mumbai terror attacks put the idea in motion. In some cases, Twitterers were able to be on the scene long before TV and newspaper reporters could get there.

CNN reports that an estimated 80 messages, or "tweets," were being sent to Twitter.com via SMS every five seconds, providing eyewitness accounts and updates.

Many Twitter users also sent pleas for blood donors to make their way to specific hospitals in Mumbai where doctors were faced with low stocks and rising casualties.

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Scott Heiferman, C.E.O. of Meetup, released information today on how people can declare their candidacy to replace him as leader of the New York Tech Meetup. Mr. Heiferman stepped down in November.

According to Mr. Heiferman, a new organizer will be elected on Dec. 11th, after candidates give a five minute presentation at the Dec. 9th Meetup. "Then, with the new Organizer, Dawn [Barber] and I will establish a Board for the NYTM made mostly of other NY tech-related group Organizers," Mr. Heiferman wrote on the New York Tech Meetup's message board. "If the new Organizer wants to make it a full-time paid gig, it's up to her and the Board to figure out how to do so. Self-organized, baby!"

Interested candidates to take over the chair need to state their candidacy here by Dec. 2.

Full memo after the jump:  read more »

Apple:

Apple TV, Steve Jobs' digital media device, went on the market in March 2007. But sales have been lackluster and, in an Oct. 21 earnings call, Mr. Jobs said "the whole category is still a hobby right now. I don't think anybody has succeeded at it and actually the experimentation has slowed down. A lot of the early companies that were trying things have faded away, so I'd have to say that given the economic conditions, given the venture capital outlooks and stuff, I continue to believe it will be a hobby in 2009." But Mr. Jobs is a clever guy.  read more »

Will you be spending Thanksgiving online? Maybe you prefer some social-networking to spending so-called quality time with your crazy family. Or perhaps you're just too much of an Internet addict to give it up for a few days.

Here are some resources for you to give thanks on the Web this Turkey Day.

Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade site - Get all of your info. about the most famous Thanksgiving Day parade. Here you can find a preview of the balloons and floats. You can download a widget and get up-to-the-minute updates on parade happenings and events. You can even get a Facebook application and upload all your videos and photos from the big day.  read more »

Shaquille "Kobe, Tell Me How My Ass Taste" O’Neal wasn't going to let some troll front as his 7-foot-1 basketball behemoth on Twitter. So he started his own account. First tweet: "This is the real SHAQUILLE O’NEAL," came from The_Real_Shaq, early Tuesday morning. It has been a "shaqalicious" romp ever since.

The New York Times' Howard Beck spoke with Mr. O'Neal yesterday to make sure it was him.

“Somebody out there was trying to use my language and trying to speak for me,” he told The Times in a telephone interview. “Rather than have that happen, I thought I’d do it myself.  read more »

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Following Jerry Yang's departure from C.E.O. of Yahoo!, The Wall Street Journal's Jessica E. Vascellaro and Joann S. Lublin are reporting this morning that Yahoo!'s board is searching for the "anti-Jerry" to fill his roll. Sources say Yahoo!'s co-founder just couldn't make the tough decisions.

Per Ms. Vascellaro and Ms. Lublin:

"This company has shown a failure to execute," said a person familiar with the situation. Yahoo's next CEO "can't be just a thinker."

Will Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg meet his fate? The kid has big ideas about mapping our emotions and making the world a better place. Despite recent moves to make profit, his employees seems frustrated with his inability to find (and accept) financial opportunities.  read more »

Organizers announced today that Internet Week New York will take place from June 1 to June 8 next year. This will be the second year for the event and, in 2009, the Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea will serve as the official headquarters. Hey, geeks, rejoice (and feel the hangover)! Internet Week New York is presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences in cooperation with City of New York and The Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre & Broadcasting. This year, they are partnering with Time Warner, Tumblr, Google, the New Museum, Columbia Business School, NY Tech Meetup and The Webby Awards for various events.

Maybe this year Mr. Bloomberg will mention more New York-based Internet companies (you know, besides "Facebook" and "Google") in his kickoff speech...

More from the press release:  read more »

GQ names Facebook's 24-year-old Mark Zuckerberg "Boy Genius of the Year" in this month's issue. (Some guy named President-elect Barack Obama is on the cover.) In the article, writer Alex French examines his current dilemma: How will Facebook make money off all that private information we share with him every day?

Most of Mr. Zuckerberg's plans have blown up in his face (remember Beacon and the infamous engagement ring incident?). But since July, he's been simmering a new feature, Facebook Connect, which will allow Facebookers to share their information with other sites. But that would involve Facebook users giving up even more of their privacy and letting other websites make money off their web browsing.  read more »

Okay, so now it's a YouTube Presidency, too. In Chicago today, President-elect Barack Obama will video record his weekly Democratic address and post it on YouTube and his transition website, Change.gov, once the original radio address airs this Saturday morning.

"This is just one of many ways that he will communicate directly with the American people and make the White House and the political process more transparent," spokeswoman Jen Psaki told The Washington Post.

More from the Post:

In addition to regularly videotaping the radio address, officials at the transition office say the Obama White House will also conduct online Q&As and video interviews. The goal, officials say, is to put a face on government. In the following weeks, for example, senior members of the transition team, various policy experts and choices for the Cabinet, among others, will record videos for Change.gov.  read more »

Drop.io, which provides un-Googleable, private online storage space, has a new member of the team: Scott Schwanbeck, the former vice president of business development at Fox Interactive Media. According to drop.io's release, Mr. Schwanbeck was responsible for developing strategic partnerships, non-ad-based monetization, content and data licensing, audience development and international expansion for the Fox's IGN Entertainment network of sites, which includes Rotten Tomatoes and AskMen.com. He'll help drop.io lure more partnerships with businesses willing to pay big bucks for online, private sharing "drops."

Sam Lessin, C.E.O. of drop.io, said, “Drop.io is building a new vocabulary for simple private sharing on the web, and Scott’s deep expertise and leadership will be instrumental in the development of key relationships and in distributing our solution within specific verticals.  read more »

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Seems like Mark Zuckerberg is playing cupid on Facebook. AllFacebook.com (link via Silicon Alley Insider) found a screenshot of a personal-ad type ad on the Facebook interface. The ad is called a "Friend Profile Preview," with updates on their recent status updates below their name and picture.

Seems innocent enough but why would they replace prime retail space for a friends' status update? Probably because Facebook is already a kind of dating tool for young'uns and maybe they're banking on becoming a Match.com killer. As AllFacebook.com points out, the New York Times's personal ad rates of $48 per week, $72 for two weeks and $96 for four weeks.  read more »

Fast Company recently named Arianna Huffington one of the most influential women in Web 2.0. But might she be hogging the spotlight from other opinionated ladies?

That's what Jessica Wakeman, a former associate blog editor at the Huffington Post, claims in the national media watchgroup FAIR's November/December issue of Extra!. In her article, "Huffington Post Mutes Women's Voices," she noted an Extra! study that found out of the 13 featured blog posts on the Huffington Post home page, only one-fourth of them are usually written by women. Ms. Wakeman hasn't written about "women's political, societal and cultural issues" for the Huffington Post since April. Hmm ...  read more »

We were sad to hear that vile MTV couple Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag will be ruining one of our favorite shows by making an appearance on How I Met Your Mother in January. But, while doing some research, we came across a website that cheered us up.

On last night's episode of How I Met Your Mother, Barney worried that he accidentally made one of his recent hook-ups into a mom. Barney, our favorite bro played with brilliance by Neil Patrick Harris, learns that he won't be a father, leading him to declare to his friend, Marshall, played by Jason Segel, "This is the happiest moment of my life, Marshall! The way I feel about not having kids, I never knew I could love something this much."

Inspired, he creates a new holiday: Not a Father's Day. According to his reasoning, "Why can't there be a day for people who are single and like it that way?" (Hey, Festivus started out as a joke once, too.) Barney then went on to plug notafathersday.com.  read more »

Fast Company has a feature on the The Most Influential Women in Web 2.0 in their November issue. Out of 13 women, two are New Yorkers: Blip.tv's co-founder and C.O.O. Dina Kaplan (who recently co-hosted the Silicon Alley 100 party), and Arianna Huffington, of course. It's common knowledge that tech is a boys' club and most of the women who get on the cover of Wired get there because they are "Internet famous" and have nice boobs. So (finally!) here's a shout-out to real innovators with vision for the Web.

This is what Fast Company says we can learn from Ms. Huffington:

What to learn from her: Don't always take a medium's so-called limitations at face value.  read more »

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YouTube has courted its first studio to offer feature-length films on the site. It's MGM, the 84-year-old film empire with financial troubles. They're looking to pick up hundreds of millions of viewers on YouTube's site, especially the young ones.

More from The New York Times' Brad Stone and Brooks Barnes:

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios will kick off the partnership by posting episodes of its decade-old 'American Gladiators' program to YouTube, along with full-length action films like 'Bulletproof Monk' and 'The Magnificent Seven' and clips from popular movies like 'Legally Blonde.' These will be free to watch, with ads running alongside the video.

The initial lineup may not be all that compelling, but for YouTube, which is owned by Google, the relationship with MGM is a crucial step in an essential reinvention. YouTube had its debut in 2005 and quickly became famous for the democratic sharing of bite-size video clips. Users love the site — 81 million people visited in September alone, according to Nielsen.

The best part of the article is this quote, from James L. McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research: "YouTube is essentially saying to media companies, 'We are sorry for our past copyright stance; we weren't thinking big enough. Let's see how we can make some money together.'"

YouTube is trying to make nice with major studios so they can offer feature films on their site. CNet announced the news yesterday that the Google-owned company is in negotiations to launch an ad-supported, streaming movie service (perhaps expanding their Screening Room section?).

"It's not imminent," one of the executives told CNet. "But it's going to happen. I would say you can expect to see it, if all goes well, sometime within the next 30 to 90 days."

You know what this means? YouTube vs. Hulu fight to the digital death!

Here's more from CNet:  read more »

Not to be a party pooper but those CNN holograms weren't actually holograms, according to the geeks.

You see (adjusts glasses), real holograms are composited from a pattern of light reflection and interference. Laser beams are involved. CNN's technology was simply a matter of shooting political reporter Jessica Yellin with a bunch of different cameras and mashing them all together on a TV screen.

CNN used 35 HD video cameras set up around a circular room. The video cameras were spaced six inches apart, 220 degrees around their subject (including will.i.am) and shooting him/her simultaneously. In CNN's own gleeful story about their "holograms," Chuck Hurley, the Washington bureau's senior producer of video, called it simple chroma-key technology that's been taken "to the Nth degree.  read more »

"Don't Stop Believin'," Journey's power ballad originally released in 1981, has just become the first "catalog" song in history to sell 2 million times, according to SoundScan. Titling it a "catalog" track means it was released before mp3s were invented and available for sale online through venues like the iTunes store.

It was placed in iTunes Store catalog on April 28, 2003, and has been a top-seller ever since, especially in June 2007, when it served as the background for The Soprano family's final goodbye. It's also a pretty sweet driving song and good for gym soundtracks, too.  read more »

Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV was scheduled to give one of his signature, profanity-filled pep talks to New York startups last night at The Volstead bar at 54th Street and Park Avenue. But the owners were peeved that the sponsor's superstar, Mashable's Pete Cashmore, didn't show up for the event* and "therefore wouldn't lower the music so Gary could speak," according to Allen Stern at his CenterNetworks blog. So he moved the party outside and had attendees huddle around him. Mr. Stern posted the video (available above).

Mashable posted some of the highlights of the speech:

1. “Hustle” - improvise, be resourceful, do whatever it takes to care for your community.  read more »

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Twitter Vote Report, a site that is aggregating voter experiences and problems at polling stations across the country, has been collecting voter tweets on Twitter, call-ins and text messages this morning and afternoon. And, surprise! New York is ranking some of the top wait times in the country.

Results are changing in real time (and the site is having high-volume traffic issues) but some tweets from New York are logging in wait times up to 180 minutes in the Downtown Brooklyn area.

Check out these dispatches:

Billy: The space was extremely confining. I went at 6am when the polls first opened and machines were broken and people had trouble moving around the room to find there district.

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In 2006, MTV requested that Weird Al Yankovic censor the names of the sites Morpheus, Grokster, Limewire and Kazaa from the video of "Don't Download This Song." Al was pissed about it, but he complied. All was (probably) forgotten until Techdirt noticed the video on MTV's new music video site and were perplexed by the bleeps. So The New York Times decided to do some digging.

In an e-mail message on Sunday, Mr. Yankovic wrote that he had bleeped out the names to the file-sharing sites in his song two years ago, after MTV “told me that they would refuse to air my video” otherwise. “Instead of subtly removing or obscuring the words in the track,” he wrote, “I made the creative decision to bleep them out as obnoxiously as possible, so that there would be no mistake I was being censored.”

MTV is often known for censoring advertising and brand names in their videos (like blurring Coca-Cola ads). So maybe that was the reason why they had Weird Al insert the bleeps. But we're guessing it might've also been because those online file-sharing sites were slowly choking the music industry to death at the time.  read more »

The Web is revving its engine for tomorrow's big night. Here's where you can tune in on your computer and your iPhone:

ABC News is offering live streams of its own TV broadcast and they'll have Web cams at the McCain and Obama campaign headquarters. CBS News will be offering county-by-county, up-to-the-minute results with live blogging, and a simulcast of its TV coverage, starting at 6:30 p.m. Around 2 a.m, Katie Couric will live chat with viewers on CBSNews.com and CNET.com. MSNBC has a neat results widget, which posts real-time results to your blog or Facebook profile. CNN YourRaces allows you to customize your own tracking tool (with local races too), and then watch the results in real time through CNN's site or on your  read more »

Silicon Alley Insider announced their list of the top 100 most influential New Yorkers in the digital business community.

Last year, Mayor Bloomberg was at the top. This year, it's Fred Wilson, co-founder of venture capital firm Union Square Ventures. Why?

But investments alone aren't what makes Fred so influential in the New York digital business community: It's the unique way in which USV makes them. Fred's blog on VC financing and technology has become a Silicon Alley Bible of sorts, a candid take on gadgets and technology trends that generates between 20 and 200 comments per post. A third of USV's investments grow from these comments.

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David Lynch is developing a Web series based on his most recent book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity (published in December 2006 by Tarcher) for On Networks. Reel Pop has the news and they say that On Networks chief content office Jen Gregono let the goods "slip" during a panel discussion at the OMMA Video conference in Los Angeles, but she didn't give too many details. It's not all that surprising that one of the weirdest directors in movies is starting to experiment with wacky ideas online.

On Networks may be the rigth place for him. The Austin-based company bills itself as a "digital media innovator leading the change in how digital TV programs are created, distributed, consumed and sponsored.  read more »

The tech blogs have been buzzing about MTV's launch earlier this week of its own Hulu-like video site at MTVMusic.com. The network will never be a "music channel" again (they switched to 24-hour coverage of vapid people making out in a hot tub long ago). But they redeemed their dignity online by uploading 16,000 videos, with MTV concert footage and Unplugged performances, too. There is a vintage videos section with a trove of gems (Bowie's "Space Oddity"! Gang of Four's "Is It Love"! Dinosaur Jr!), but we're kind of bummed that we can't find some our '90s favorites in the search engine (no Psychedelic Furs, no Swervedriver, no Green Day videos from the Dookie album).  read more »

We received Gwyneth Paltrow's most recent GOOP newsletter this morning (on time!) and now we (almost) feel bad for being so snippy in our study of paltrow.com. She begins with this scene:

In 1998, I was filming The Talented Mr. Ripley in Ischia, a little island off the coast of Naples in Italy. I got a call that changed my life. My father had been diagnosed with throat cancer, and it was stage four.

Gwynnie finally gets personal! Way to pull on our guilty heart strings...  read more »

Are you ready for this? Next Tuesday, at CNN's Election Center in New York, an Obama campaign strategist will be in the studio to comment on the incoming voting results. Only he'll be … (wait for it) in 3-D! As a hologram!

Instead of the normal flat-screen version of talking heads, the Obama spokesperson's image will be projected from Chicago and into the New York studio -- in a 360 view. CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer will essentially be talking to the strategist just like when Princess Leia sent Obi-Wan Kenobi a hologram message that he was her only hope. Only there will be talk about Ohio, rather than Alderaan.  read more »

Cheers to you! Most people hate ya, but apparently you saved the Internet! 

That's according to Wired. President Clinton signed the DMCA into law exactly a decade ago today. Under the DMCA, an internet service provider (like YouTube, Digg or WordPress) has limited copyright infringement liability for simply transmitting information over the Internet. But they are only immune from copyright infringement suits if they immediately remove material after receiving a violation notice, and keep it off the Web for at least ten days following the receipt of a properly notarized counter-claim. 

Wired claims that the "misunderstood" act sparked the Web 2.0 explosion and the success of Google.  read more »

Thanks, Guitar Hero, for arranging this riff-raff supergroup starring Kobe Bryant, Michael Phelps and Tony Hawk to channel Tom Cruise in Risky Business and shill plastic instruments in their underwear. We now know the truth! Alex Rodriguez is a boxer-briefs man! Pink seems to be his color too. You go boys!

Every charity and awareness campaign has a color. There's pink for breast cancer. Yellow to support the troops. Red for HIV/AIDS. White for peace. People wear color wristbands, ribbons and clothes to display their support for victims and raise awareness. Since late summer, Yahoo! has claimed the color purple (usually used to represent domestic violence awareness and Alzheimer's disease, among other causes) as their own, urging their users to "Start Wearing Purple" to show their support for the search engine/mail service/Google-wannabe.

Purple has long been the company's color, but the campaign is pretty tasteless even for our taste. They created purple-themed products,  read more »

Roger Ehrenberg, a self-proclaimed "super angel" investor in tech start-ups, has seen it all. He joined Wall Street in 1987 and worked as an investment banker and managing director at Citibank. He has watched the Dow dive and skyrocket over the past two decades. He was there for the tech bubble's first bust in early 2000. But today's economic crisis? "This is way off the hook relative to any of those other events," Mr. Ehrenberg said on the 24th floor of a Park Avenue business building overlooking Grand Central on Oct. 21.

Mr. Ehrenberg, slim, in square frame-spectacles, was speaking at a discussion titled "Going to the Mattresses: Navigating Your Startup Through Uncertain Times," organized by  read more »

A little creeped out by that Facebook stalker? Was she really in your Harvard class or just a community college drop-out?  BeenVerified, a New York-based company, can help you out. They call themselves the "evolution of background screening" by offering updated background checks in the Web 2.0 world. The company has just ditched the beta status and gone mainstream with their services. Their client base is mostly comprised of businesses and employers who want to check on the accuracy of applicants' resumes. But they can also help you figure out what employers can find out about you online with their StandOut service.  read more »

Yup, the "real" Britney Spears has joined the Twitter movement. The page includes posts from her publicist "Laura," but Ms. Spears will (allegedly) take over the keyboard sometime soon. "Updates will be on status news music life fans by her team and Brit herself," Lauren "tweeted" recently. Also, this little tidnit: "Hey paparazzi... Rolling Stone cover rumors? Too bad you weren't inside the shoot. Brit had a great time and was dancing around the set."

This Twitter account won't be too interesting until Ms. Spears takes over, but if anything, it allows regular Twitter-user fans to ask questions and get answers directly from Ms. Spears' staff. It's a brave, new Twitter world of PR.

Speaking of MySpace Music and Facebook applications, Seattle's iLike, the "social music" service with a popular Facebook application, has partnered with Brooklyn-based TuneCore, a music distribution start-up, to help musicians promote and sell their music. 

iLike's free Facebook application lets users put a little sidebar on their page to play clips of music, display upcoming concerts they are attending and play a music trivia quiz. TuneCore helps artists distribute their work through online music stores including Rhapsody, Amazon MP3, and iTunes. Bands and musicians pay a flat fee, with prices varying based on the number of stores they want to get into and how much they want to sell (a single or a whole album).  read more »

Mark Zuckerberg, the face of Facebook, wants to get in on the digital-music downloading action. Although Facebook already has a bunch of widgets and song-streaming services pumping jams into the site, the young Harvard grad is considering his own version of his arch rival's recently launched MySpace Music.

Sources told the New York Post that Mr. Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives have been taking meetings with major record companies to consider an outsourcing deal. Facebook declined to comment on the situation specifically, but a company spokesman said in a statement that "music sharing plays a part" in the site's mission and that it is "always talking with potential partners."

The New York Post reports:  read more »

It's always been a huge bummer to find your favorite TV show episode on YouTube only to have the content police take it down within minutes. But now,  in their scramble to increase ad revenues, YouTubehas the daggers out for sites like Hulu, NBC.com and ABC.com by offering full-length episodes of TV shows on the site.

They'll start with shows from CBS, including The Young and the Restless, and the original 90210 and Showtime's Dexter and Californication. YouTube said it is in discussions with other media partners, but declined to elaborate. According to the Wall Street Journal, they will sell commercial slots for advertisements sewn into the full-length shows.  read more »