American Express, the company well known for overpriced charge cards, is buying Ted Leonsis and Steve Case’s Revolution Money for $300 million. Leonsis shared this information on his blog. Amex wants to use Revolution Money to build a next-generation offering. Revolution Money has some kind of a next-generation payments technology that brings together offline and online worlds; it’s part of the Revolution group of companies floated by Steve Case. No one I know has either seen it or actually uses it. If there is one company that is going to do offline-online payments, that will be PayPal.

Intel today said it’s invested an undisclosed amount in Joyent, the 6-year-old Sausalito, Calif.-based startup that started out as a web hosting company but eventually evolved into a cloud service provider. Neither Intel nor Joyent disclosed the amount of money invested, but Intel’s investment in the company is a strategic bet for the chipmaker, as it faces a smaller end user base for its silicon thanks to enterprises turning to computing delivered as a service to help limit the number of servers they buy. First the deal specifics.

Intel Capital has invested $8.5 million into the company, as per a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission.  Sources tell me that Dell has also invested an undisclosed amount of money in the company. Dell has not returned my request for comment, but the company has been supplying gear to Joyent for a long time. Joyent shifted vendors from Sun to Dell over two years ago, a move I wrote about. Previous investors in the company include Peter Thiel, former PayPal-executive-turned-hedge-fund-investor whose investments include Facebook.

Jason Hoffman, CTO Joyent @ Structure 09 Conference

I emailed Joyent CTO Jason Hoffman, who declined to comment on either the total funding raised or the other co-investor. He added that the company engaged with Intel Capital after meeting them at our Structure 09 conference, held in June in San Francisco. One thing led to another and eventually, the funding took place. Hoffman said that the company plans to use the money to make an aggressive push into China and other Asian economies where demand for IT infrastructure is growing at a rapid clip. (Related research note from GigaOM Pro, sub. req’d.: Why Bringing Cloud Computing to China Is Joyent’s Golden Opportunity.)

So why the Dell and Intel interest in Joyent? I’ve been talking to a lot of folks involved with the cloud computing industry, and there has been a growing concern with the Cisco-EMC-VMware joint venture company.

Joyent isn’t a mere service provider, but has actually built a software competency, which makes it one of the strong contenders in the cloud computing market, especially as large enterprises look to build private clouds. Joyent has been aggressively helping companies build private clouds based on its software delivered on Dell machines. There are several significant companies that are using Joyent’s offering. For Dell (or any server maker), that is the kind of push that is necessary as the bulk of enterprise customers beginning to buy their compute hardware as a service.

In an email to his partners, Joyent CEO David Young wrote:

Joyent plans to take cloud computing to a place where our  competitors, built on virtualization foundations such as VMware ESX, Microsoft HyperV, Xen, KVM, won’t be able to go. That made the decision to raise money a clear choice and one that translates into greater benefits for Joyent, its customers and the market-at-large. We see a clear opportunity, and we intend to race towards it.

Intel Capital agrees with our vision for the market, as said best by Lisa Lambert, Managing Director of Intel Capital:

“Cloud computing technologies play a crucial role in allowing companies to scale their data center infrastructure to meet performance and TCO requirements. Joyent’s approach to flexible and cost-effective cloud control and cloud development sets it apart and provides measureable performance advantages versus the competition in this fast growing sector.”

It’s no wonder that Dell and Intel want to get in on a piece of this market while they still can.

Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), one of the most respected funds in Silicon Valley, says that it’s closed NVP XI, a $1.2 billion fund that will invest in diverse sectors and geographies. NVP, which recently recorded a major hit with the $405 million sale of video conferencing equipment maker LifeSize, is one of the few venture funds to close a mega-fund. Khosla Ventures ($1 billion) and Greylock Partners ($575 million) are two other partnerships that have been able to raise mega-funds. At the same time, there have been numerous reports of many partnerships struggling to whip up interest in their second or third funds. “Track record is what that matters,” said Promod Haque, general partner with NVP, in a conversation earlier today.

Haque’s track record is a mile long. In the last bubble, he rose to prominence with the mega-billion-dollar sales of Cerent (to Cisco), Siara (to Redback) and several other telecom and chip companies. Norwest, which has been investing for about 48 years, has raised a total of $3.7 billion. Haque explained that NVP would continue to invest in companies of all shapes and sizes in the U.S., India, China and Israel. In addition, NVP is also going to focus on health care IT and medtech.

“Health care and medtech (and genomics) are increasingly becoming software-centric and we have expertise in software investments,” Haque said, explaining his rationale behind the investments. Norwest, which also was the largest investor in Rackspace is bullish about the prospects of cloud computing and broadband-focused startups, such as Cyan Optics. (Read my post about Cyan.)

I asked Haque how he reconciles investing in early-stage companies and his late-stage investments — after all, they do need completely different mindsets. He doesn’t think so, saying the only difference is in the number of checks he writes as an investor. “In growth-stage companies, we write one big check, but in early-stage companies you write multiple checks,” he said. “Startups that are on the right track and growing fast need a lot of cash.”

Photo source: Flickr user aresauburn.

This morning news broke that MySpace, the second-largest social network that’s currently reinventing itself as a music destination, was buying imeem, a free online music service that has been remixed (and remade) more times that ’90s dance anthem “Keep on Moving.” TechCrunch, which reported on the news, didn’t reveal what the deal terms were. I have been dialing sources for information, and have found an interesting backstory behind this sale.

First, it was essentially a fire sale. Imeem, which in the past has been threatened into submission by large music labels, was feeling the heat from second-tier music labels wanting to get their pieces of flesh. On Oct. 21, The Orchard Enterprises, one of the largest independent record labels, sued imeem in U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York. According to the suit, imeem had to pay $150,000 per infringement. On those terms, for multiple infringements, the total could have run into billions of dollars.

Remember the billion-dollar lawsuit filed by Viacom against YouTube? Imeem, I’m pretty sure, knows how painful it is to fight the record labels in the courts. The company fought Warner Brothers, but had to eventually settle by giving up equity in the company. A long, bruising battle is something imeem couldn’t quite afford since it was running low on cash. And it couldn’t pay these guys off. By selling to MySpace, which already has arrangements with The Orchard Enterprises, some of these legal threats might go away. Interestingly, with this deal, record labels that owned a nice chunk of imeem could see their equity in MySpace Music go up as well.

At the same time, founder & CEO Dalton Caldwell hadn’t been able to rustle up more cash. I bet the investors who have pumped in more than $35 million (including $10 million in debt) got tired of putting more cash into what seems like a bottomless pit. Back in September, news emerged that Sequoia Capital, one of the long-time backers of imeem, opted out of funding the company. Back in May, Warner Brothers wrote off a $16 million charge, but gave imeem new money and forgave future royalty payments in exchange for more equity. Fat lot of good that did them.

I have been fairly skeptical if imeem and their ilk, mostly because I felt that they cut bad deals and had painted themselves into a corner. Frankly, I am not that hot on MySpace Music, either. MySpace earlier bought iLike, another free music service, for $10 million — a firesale price – mostly to get hold of the talent. The bargain basement sales of iLike and imeem once again shows that the online music industry remains as risky as walking through a minefield punch-drunk.

Well, I guess when the company had a choice between locking the doors or teaming up with MySpace, it wasn’t a hard decision to make.

Motorola and Verizon, thanks to their $100 million marketing efforts, are going to sell some 600,000 Droids during the fourth quarter of 2009, according to Mark McKechnie of Broadpoint AmTech, a boutique research firm. He had initially expected about 200,000 device sales following the launch, but he has upped his forecast: Motorola should sell another 200,000 Droids by Black Friday and 150,000-200,000 during the remainder of the holiday season. This would bring the total to some 600,000 Droids for 2009.

We recently reported the findings of a study from Flurry that indicated Motorola might have sold close to 250,000 Droids in the first week of its availability. McKechnie’s forecast adds credence to Flurry’s findings. McKechnie expects that Motorola will sell about a million Android-based phones during the quarter. That works out to 400,000 CLIQ (also known as Dexter) sales on T-Mobile, Orange, Telefonica and America Movil.

According to Broadpoint AmTech estimates, Motorola should sell about 10 million Android units in 2010 with an average selling price of $286. The company is planning to have about 20 different smartphone models in 2010 and will be selling on most major carriers in the U.S. Each Android unit contributes four times the gross profit of a feature phone unit; those 10 million Android units will contribute nearly half of the gross profits in Motorola’s handset division.

Wow…I had completely forgotten about RockYou, a Redwood City, Calif.-based startup that started out as a widget maker but then turned social app developer and now is trying out hawking virtual goods. Sort of like the company it loves to imitate: Slide. RockYou made a splash today by raising a whopping $50 million in new funding from existing investor Softbank. That brings the total funding raised by the 4-year-old company to $119 million. My view is that if the first $69 million didn’t make RockYou into a real, profitable business, what are the odds that the new $50 million will? Not very high!

Evernote, a Mountain View, Calif.-based company that makes one of my favorite cross-platform apps, called (what else) Evernote, has raised $10 million in new funding. The new round was led by Morgenthaler Ventures, a respected Sand Hill Road firm with a deep history. Evernote had previously raised $6.5 million in VC funding. Phil Libin, Evernote’s CEO, tells The New York Times that he is going to be using the money to expand to new geographic markets and add new platforms. At present the app works on Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, Mac, PC and Palm’s WebOS. As you all know, I am a big fan of the application and its freemium business model. It probably is the single most useful app on my computer and my phones. (Related articles from WebWorkerDaily: Evernote Wants to Be Your Long-term Memory and How to Use Evernote for Collaboration.)

If you read the reviews, it becomes obvious that I am part of a small minority of folks who haven’t been blown away by the new Droid, a Google Android OS-based smartphone made by Motorola that Verizon Wireless launched Nov. 5 in the U.S. All the accolades are actually turning into smashing sales for the Droid, according to data collected by Flurry, a San Francisco-based mobile analytics company. How big are the sales? (Find out below the fold.)

We have been following the Droid pretty closely, and once we learned that the device had a solid (if not blockbuster) weekend, we decided to get a better grasp of the Droid-fever that seems to be spreading across the nation. Flurry, which tracks the usage of mobile applications across various platforms, ran a query at our behest to get us a clearer (if not totally accurate) picture of the Droid launch and its market penetration.

Flurry has come up with a stunning number: 250,000 Droids sold in the first week vs. 1.6 million iPhone 3GS devices sold in the first weekend. Apple said it sold over a million devices in the first weekend of the launch of iPhone 3GS, so 1.6 million is pretty close to the mark. There has been talk that nearly 200,000 units of Droid were on the shelves at the time its debut, so it is not far-fetched to peg the total sales for the week at 250,000. (Related post: “iPhone 3GS vs. Droid: How Do They Really Stack Up?”)

Flurry monitors about 10,000 apps across iPhone and Android and claims that it tracks apps on approximately two out of three unique iPhone and Android handsets. To estimate first week sales totals for the myTouch 3G, Droid and iPhone 3GS, Flurry detected new handsets within its system, and then made adjustments to account for varying levels of Flurry application penetration by handset. Flurry additionally cross-checked its estimates against Apple actual sales, released for the iPhone 3GS, which totaled 1 million units sold over the three days of sales, June 19-21. [Flurry statement]

If Flurry results are accurate, then Motorola and Verizon have a winner on their hands. This is the fastest-selling Android device to date. It also helps that Motorola and Verizon have budgeted $100 million to promote it. As the gadget makes it way across the world, one can expect sales of Droid to go higher. Motorola predicts it will sell a million units by the end of 2009. That works to about $100 per customer in acquisition costs for Motorola and Verizon. (Related posts: “What You Need to Know About the Droid” and “What Are the Downsides to Droid?”)

The average Android app session length is about four minutes vs. two minutes for iPhone apps, Flurry found. I believe that is because the Android apps are not as intuitive to use as the iPhone apps, but hey, that’s just me. What do I know — I don’t think Droid is that hot, and it sold a quarter million units in week one.

PS: Check out this great comment from one of our readers, Nicholas. “Currently, we are witnessing the evolution of mobile technologies past the computing paradigm of laptops, desktops and workstations, and Motorola needs a more cohesive idea of what can and will be accomplished in the mobile space,” he writes. Agreed — and that is why I find MotoBlur, the company’s communications-based interface, more interesting than its hardware. It could, with some work, become the new way of consuming large amounts of data.

Hulu, the online video joint venture of NBC, Fox and Disney that’s funded by Providence Equity Partners, seems to be having familial issues. No, it’s not YouTube or TV Everywhere giving the second-most popular online video service in the U.S. headaches. Instead, internal bickering is causing problems, MediaWeek reports. This is not the first time Hulu’s parents have undermined the service. But it comes as a surprise — traditional media companies have a long history of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Continue reading on NewTeeVee.

Hulu, the online video joint venture of NBC, Fox and Disney that’s funded by Providence Equity Partners, seems to be having familial issues. No, it’s not YouTube or TV Everywhere giving the second-most popular online video service in the U.S. headaches. Instead, internal bickering is causing problems, MediaWeek reports. This is not the first time Hulu’s parents have undermined the service. But it comes as a surprise — traditional media companies have a long history of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Network officials are complaining about Hulu’s sales staff selling against the network’s own sales teams, according to MediaWeek:

“It’s confusing and conflicting, and very muddled,” said Lisa Herdman, vp, director of national programming for RPA, who handles Honda’s online media. Most stop short of accusing Hulu of outright deception but report that its sellers are often not forthcoming about what they can and cannot sell…On the flip side, buyers say that broadcast networks are inconsistent when it comes to selling Hulu avails. “There are a lot of growing pains with the whole scenario,” said Jeff Ratner, digital director, North America, Mindshare Interaction/Maxus. “Hulu has created a legitimate marketplace for online video. Now you are seeing the downside.”

Hulu has succeeded beyond everyone’s expectations, including those of the networks, which three years ago panicked over the rise of YouTube (and Google.) Despite being a big critic of the joint venture — such ventures almost never work out — I eventually changed my mind and ate crow: Hulu is brilliant. In September, 583 million videos were watched on Hulu, making it the second-largest video destination behind YouTube.

The simplicity of its interface and ease of use have made it the darling of American TV fans. If YouTube became an obvious destination to watch video shorts online, Hulu set a standard for the quality of professionally produced video streams. Even Quincy Smith, outgoing CEO of CBS Interactive, who has in the past questioned Hulu’s business model, admits the “service is freakin’ bad-ass and [Hulu CEO] Jason [Kilar] is an extremely great product guy, GM and a guy who can sell.”

Agreed! Kilar has done a good job of delivering a killer product, despite the competing egos and agendas at various networks. But I wonder if Kilar can really keep this whole thing going. Smith, his bombastic views on Hulu aside, is not wrong in his skepticism of the joint venture. During his on-stage conversation with me at our third NewTeeVee Live conference last week, Smith said, “Hulu got extremely successful extremely early, and that might ultimately hurt them.”

“Before you go putting [your content online] in full episodes, you gotta take it to the audience and make sure they know that it’s on this screen,” he said, referring to the need to encourage viewers to watch broadcast television.

Hulu’s owners are pushing the service around “by imposing delayed windows on certain content and allowing just a limited number of episodes available at any given time” — or charging subscription fees. These are Band-Aids. (Related content from GigaOM Pro: “Hulu and the end of Free TV”)

The networks are fighting a losing battle. Why? Because Hulu is only a signpost of things to come. Like YouTube, Hulu is showing the media buyers that there is a smarter, targeted and metric-based approach to buying media on behalf of customers. This is a long-term cyclical shift, and the TV networks will continue to bleed, Hulu or not.

TV advertising has (and continues to be) successful for mass marketing efforts, but even the idea of mass market is going through a big shift. The TV audiences will continue to get divided and subdivided into various niches. Furthermore, the rise of “TV Everywhere,” a way for you to watch cable company-provided video content on the web, is going to eat into the mass market. If the mass market continues to shrivel, then networks will be fighting to get a piece of the shrinking pie. It is no surprise then that the media companies are bickering with their own spawn.

(Related Research: The Ultimate Guide to TV Everywhere, subscription required. Sign up for GigaOM Pro for $79 a year subscription which gives you access for unlimited research.)

“I don’t know, cricket lives in my heart and whenever I’m on a cricket field I enjoy it, and somewhere there’s still a 16-year-old hidden inside who wants to go out and express himself, so I do that and it comes naturally” (via )

Indian Cricketer, Sachin Tendulkar on completing 20 years in professional cricket. I guess, that is how I feel about writing.

If you’re a baseball fan like I am, then you know that it in order to win, teams need more than just marquee stars. The role players, pinch hitters and relievers — all have to contribute in order for a team to win. A weak link can blow a game. Same goes for companies — every member of the team has a role to play. Why do I bring this up? Apple’s iTunes App Store and its murky and muddled policies.

Apple’s designers and engineers have done a good job putting together what is an iconic product, the iPhone. Its software gurus have helped foster the app revolution. But it when it come to the App Store approval process, Apple is blowing it.

Let me put it in terms Apple and its management can understand: The foggy and opaque App Store approval process is as big a disaster as Dell’s DJ MP3 Player.

For months now, I have watched the twists and turns of the Apple App Store drama with a degree of bemusement. After all, the rejection (or approval) of quirky and pointless apps aimed at hormone-challenged post-pubescent boys weren’t of concern to me. I couldn’t get upset over Google Voice fiasco, but that was understandable (not acceptable) because it was coming in the way of the carrier voice service.  But lately, things have gotten a bit out of control.

The irrational approval process and reasons behind it given by the apparatchiks of Cupertino are driving developers to extreme frustration — especially those who have been Apple loyalists for years. Earlier this week, Joe Hewitt, a well-known programmer and a Facebook employee, threw up his hands in frustration over Apple’s App Store approval process and said he wants to work on a different project. (Check out my video interview with Joe Hewitt.)

No, Facebook isn’t killing its iPhone app — it is a corporation, after all, and will bend over backwards to appease Apple — but Hewitt is someone who’s made many vital contributions toward turning the iPhone into a major platform. He was carrying Apple’s water long before the rest of the 100,000 apps showed up, which is just one of the reasons why he was nominated to GigaOM’s Top 15 Mobile Influencers List earlier this year. When he speaks, I listen — plain and simple. And he expressed his anger in 140 characters.

Today, Rogue Amoeba, a company that is well-known within the Apple community for its audio-focused products, is publicly beating its head against the Great Wall of Cupertino.

Rogue Amoeba wanted to ship a bug fix for their app, Airfoil Speakers, but it took the better part of four months to get it approved. It was an arduous process, one that made the inner workings of the government bureaucracies look like a model of efficiency. The net-net, as described by company CEO Paul Kafasis in a blog post, is this:

First, be aware that Apple is acting as a gatekeeper, and preventing you from getting the software that developers such as ourselves are trying to provide you. We wanted to ship a simple bug fix, and it took almost four months of slow replies, delays, and dithering by Apple. All the while, our buggy, and supposedly infringing version, was still available. There’s no other word for that but “broken.” Right now, however, the platform is a mess. The chorus of disenchanted developers is growing and we’re adding our voices as well. Rogue Amoeba no longer has any plans for additional iPhone applications, and updates to our existing iPhone applications will likely be rare.

Others, such as programmer Jeff LaMarche, disagree with the disenchanted developers and have come to the defense of Apple. But I’m more inclined to side with Kafasis, as this is a problem that flares up more often than California wildfires.

John Gruber, who pens the Daring Fireball blog and is one of the most respected Mac-related writers out there, offers a very balanced view of the situation — and finds Apple at fault. “At a certain point good developers are just going to say, ‘I don’t need this,’” Gruber writes.

Gruber, as we’ve seen in the past, has the ear of the senior management at Apple. So perhaps his fair and balanced assessment is going to help Apple wake up from its stupor.

Apple has a very serious problem on its hands, one that can derail its grand plan. It needs to fix this as quickly as possible. Otherwise the company is going to blow the game in the bottom of the ninth — much like the Phillies in Game 4 of the 2009 World Series.

Google’s Android OS-based phones and Apple’s iPhone maybe get all the media love, but one analyst firm believes that it will be RIM’s BlackBerry that will be the smartphone king of the U.S. market in five years. Pyramid Research expects the device to be the biggest beneficiary of the move to smartphones.

According to their research, smartphones represented 31 percent of the new handsets sold in the U.S. in 2009, more than double from 15 percent in 2007. They expect 60 percent of the new handsets to be sold in 2014 to be smartphones. The BlackBerry, which currently has 50 percent of the total U.S. smartphone market, will see that share decline to 37 percent, but the increase in terms of total smartphone sales is going to keep it ahead.

Chris, Liz & I — hanging out after a full day of fun and great conversations at the NewTeeVee Live yesterday in San Francisco. We are tried, but happy. We generated some big news yesterday with the event. Liz and Chris have a cliffnotes version of the day.

PS: I really like my awesome boots!

Kevin Lynch, CTO of Adobe Systems one of our speakers. Photo by James Duncan Davidson

Unlike the spritely young team members of NewTeeVee, I am dragging my feet after what was an intense day yesterday. Well actually I was having too much fun at our third consecutive sold-out NewTeeVee Live conference in San Francisco. Great speakers, great attendees and great curators — that is our magic formula for our events. I wanted to take a moment and thank everyone who attended the event for making it a success.

I enjoyed meeting many of you in person, and those of you I missed, well I’m only an email away. Thank you to our sponsors and our media partners for helping us with the event. A big shout-out to Lindsay Campbell, former host of “WallStrip,” for being the gracious MC. I also want to thank our friends at LiveStream for making the video available over the web and on the iPhone. I’ve never regretted partnering with such a great streaming service — they are the gold standard for live event video. We served up nearly 30,000 unique streams yesterday and today. Total time spent watch the stream: 671,000 minutes. Thank you Engadget, Comcast and Hacking Netflix for embedding our video stream.

Liz & Chris have published a CliffNotes version of the day’s events and links to extensive media coverage generated by NewTeeVee Live, which has now become the must-attend gathering for the online video industry.

Qualcomm has just released a new chip family focused on smartphones, including one that breaks the gigahertz barrier. The chips’ capabilities make clear that the line between phones and low-end notebooks are blurring. They’re based on the Scorpion CPU that is at the heart of Snapdragon chipsets and uses an 800 MHz to 1 GHz custom ARM-based CPU.

This new chip family, the horribly named MSM7×30, can do 720p HD video (encode/decode), 2-D and 3-D graphics, and has surround sound, integrated GPS and a 12-Megapixel camera as well as all the usual trimmings like Bluetooth and Wi-fi and FM Radio 3G (both flavors). On the multimedia front, Qualcomm is playing catch-up Texas Instruments and Nvidia. The new chips work with all smartphone operating systems except Apple’s iPhone OS. They will be launched sometime next year and are optimized for the web experience.

First Cisco Systems decided to buy Norwegian video conferencing equipment maker Tandberg for about $3 billion. This week, Logitech, a Swiss computer peripherals maker, acquired LifeSize, an Austin, Texas-based private company, for about $405 million in cash. The two deals have brought the fast-growing but often-overlooked video conferencing market into sharp focus. And that is good news for Polycom, a Pleasanton, Calif.-based conferencing equipment maker, CEO Bob Hagerty boasts. Here is why:

Hagerty said he thinks his company’s independent status will make it a preferred partner for giants such as Microsoft, IBM, Avaya and Hewlett-Packard, as they duke it out with Cisco and Logitech. The stock market seems to agree with him: Polycom stock is up 9 percent this month and up 77 percent for the year to date. When I asked Hagerty if this makes him takeover bait, he predictably dodged my question.

The simultaneous growth of pervasive broadband, improved compression codecs, distributed work forces, and shrinking travel budgets are brewing a perfect storm for the video conferencing market. “Bandwidth today is adequate, and we will soon be able to make HD video calls on a 500kbps connection,” he said. Hagerty believes that is going to help the use of video conferencing explode.

For a company like Polycom, the future might involve offering cloud-based services that could handle video originating from multiple locations using a central service. From low-cost end points to high-end telepresence systems, video-based collaboration is going to be a standard, he argued. And this is good news, not just for him but also for his rivals.

Hagerty didn’t pull any punches in his comments about Cisco. “Cisco [uses] a lot of words, but [there] is not much clarity on what products they will focus on,” he said in an interview. While Tandberg’s offerings are more standards-based, Cisco’s flagship telepresence products are proprietary in nature, Hagerty said.

“In the collaboration space, we are a great brand,” he said. “Frankly, it is great to be us…We are the last standing independent company of scale.” He is betting his close relationships with Avaya, Microsoft and others such as IBM — all enemies of Cisco — are going to help his company. In addition, Polycom thinks working with service providers, including phone companies, is a good way to make video conferencing available as a service.

Despite his bravado, Hagerty needs to worry about both Cisco and Logitech. These are two companies with deep pockets and deeper sales forces. They are desperate to make a splash in this market and are going to aggressively compete with Polycom. As I am one of those folks who always expects the worst — it must be my age — I believe that when there are multiple parties competing for domination of the same market, someone is left bleeding. Polycom is betting that the company’s friends will prevent it from being laid out on the mat.

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com.

Much of Facebook’s success on the iPhone has come courtesy of Joe Hewitt, an ace programmer who joined the world’s largest social networking site when it acquired Parakey, a company he co-founded with Firefox kid Blake Ross. Hewitt has now decided to shift his focus away from the iPhone. In a tweet sent out earlier today he said, “Time for me to try something new. I’ve handed the Facebook iPhone app off to another engineer, and I’m onto a new project.”

Joe was named to GigaOM’s Top 15 Mobile Influencers list earlier this year for his contributions to the iPhone app ecosystem — in particular, for single-handedly turning Facebook into a major force on the iconic Apple device. I recently gave him a hard time over the delays in launching Facebook 3.0, which prompted Joe to stop by our office and take part in an impromptu video chat. Here are the excerpts from that conversation.

The Crunchies, after two successful years, are back to celebrate the entrepreneurs and startups that make technology such an exciting industry. As always, we will be co-hosting the awards — for which nominations are now being accepted — with VentureBeat and TechCrunch. (Check out the photos from last year.)

Details of the event can be found here. The awards ceremony will be held Friday, Jan. 8 at 7:30 pm at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco and will be followed by an after-party across the street in City Hall’s Grand Rotunda. The nominations for the third annual awards ceremony honoring the best technology achievements of 2009 will remain open through midnight PST on Friday, Dec. 4th. The Crunchies Committee will select five finalists for each of the 18 award categories; final votes will be cast between Dec. 12th and midnight PST on Jan. 6th.

Blake Krikorian, who left left Sling Media earlier this year, the place-shifting startup that he sold to Echostar for $380 million in September 2007, is going to join the board of directors of Clicker.com, a Los Angeles-based online-video content discovery company started by Jim Lanzone, the former CEO of Ask.com. Krikorian is also going to make an undisclosed amount of money in the company; a news announcement is likely to be made later this week.

Clicker is backed by veteran venture capitalists Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital and Geoff Yang of Redpoint Ventures, who have invested $8 million in the company. Clicker is going to be unveiling its service to the world at our NewTeeVee Live conference, which will be held on Nov. 12 in San Francisco. (To buy tickets for the conference, click here. ) Liz covered the company in The Best Guides to Watching TV Online. Continue reading at GigaOM.

Amazon HQ: Photo Snapped From Vulcan HQ in Seattle

It is playoff time and soon all teams – from young hustlers from Colorado to the Bronx Bombers are going to start competing for the championships. It is my favorite part of the year for I get to watch my beloved New York Yankees play for another few weeks. It is also the time of the year when Derek Jeter, the face of the New York Yankees takes on a whole new aura. Diving into stands, making unbelievable plays and coming up with hits when there are none.

About two years ago, I wrote a post DJ as a good role model for start-up guys. The comments to that post weren’t all that kind, but I have not changed my opinion. Earlier this week, I read an excellent profile of Jeter in the New York Magazine, which essentially said what I really wanted to say two years ago:

He has become the hero of the Bronx because he effortlessly exudes the qualities we wish we had ourselves: He is always confident, always composed, always in control. Baseball is an unpredictable game; failure is a constant. But Jeter doesn’t allow himself to absorb it, or even really acknowledge it. He just keeps cruising along, as if playing shortstop for the most scrutinized, glorified sports franchise in the world every day for the past fourteen years is the most natural thing on earth.

As a start-up founder, one lives with threat of failure. As a leader, one needs to stay confident confident, composed and in control. You just have to assume the hits are going to come, and the win is only around the corner.

Photo of Derek Jeter by Chris Ptacek via Flickr

“This is a brand-new segment for us,” said Sean Maloney, executive vice president at Intel, which also announced a new Microserver reference design that would allow hardware makers to cram as many as six low-power Xeons into a single 1u rack — which translates into about 228 servers per cabinet. The servers are targeted at providers of web services, Intel said.

Maloney pointed out that in a few years, power is going account for nearly 25 percent of a data center’s costs — a situation Intel, with these new chips, is looking to address. Intel has already started shipping these chips to its OEM partners, such as Silicon Graphics. (More details on Intel’s web site.)

* Lola’s Theme by The Shapeshifters
* Little Fluffy Clouds by The Orb
* Wish you were here by Bliss
* La Raza (con Juan Sativo) by Dj Bitman.
* Hip Hip, Chin Chin by Clus des Belugas (From album, Night over Rio)
* Signs by Badmarsh & Shri Feat UK Apache.
* Take 2 Blue by Bitter:Sweet
* Lazy Lover by Barzilian Girls
* Pa’ Bailar (Siempre Qioero Mas) by Bajofondo & Julieta Venegas
* The Big Score (Dropped mix) by Fort Knox FIve
* Lunatico by Gotan Project
* Keep Your Hird by Hird
* Jardin d’hiver by Karen Ann
* Koop Island Blues by Koop

Thanks Greg!

Yesterday, I wrote about Indian Premier League’s Twenty20 Cricket tournament. The big news was that the Indian professional cricket league championship (now in its second year) would be using Microsoft’s Silverlight multimedia technology. Given the wild popularity of this ultra short-form of the sport, it was a good comeback for Microsoft, which was unceremoniously dropped by MLB.com in favor of incumbent, Adobe Flash. Well, as luck would have it, the Microsoft-IPL partnership got off to a disastrous start. Continue reading on GigaOM

After Microsoft’s Silverlight multimedia technology was unceremoniously dropped by Major League Baseball’s MLB.com in favor of Adobe Flash, Microsoft is coming back with a different sport involving a ball and a bat. Silverlight will power online streaming of the Indian Premier League Championships, an ultra short-form cricket tourney that debuted last year, to much fanfare. This year’s tournament is being held in South Africa.

This new form of cricket game is called Twenty20 and involves two clubs consisting of 11 players competing against each other. The pitching side gets to throw 20 overs (six pitches constitute an over). As a result, a typical game lasts about two-and-a-half hours. The new series, which pays cricket players hundreds of thousands of dollars for a month’s worth of  work, combines colorful uniforms, cheerleaders and jock jams for a TV-friendly showing.

In 2008, the month-long championship was watched by many hundreds of millions on traditional TV. It was a big money-maker for global television broadcasters. In the U.S., the games were broadcast over the Internet by Willow.tv. This year, cricket fans can also watch the games on IPL’s official web site, where nearly 500 hours of cricket will be broadcast live.

The website will enable picture-in-picture controls and customizable player to offer a personalized experience. Iplt20.com will also provide a customized Internet Explorer 8 for IPL fans to stay connect with all the action. Using unique features of the browsers such as Web Slices and Accelerators, fans can speed up video & image search and get instant updates from the website.

Last year IPLT20.com recorded 50.2 million page views, 10 million visits, and 5 million unique visitors, over the course of the 6-week season. This year, the web site is expected to register some 400 million page views, 45 million visits and 10 million unique visitors

Since 2005, when Apple re-invented the music business by offering music downloads, much of the industry followed suit. Most attempts, if not all of them, failed. When it comes to mobile apps and digital movie downloads, history is repeating itself. But unlike music, there are no clear winners yet, though Netflix, Amazon and Apple are all vying for the top spot. Today, Variety reports, electronics retail chain Best Buy will join the pack with plans to launch its own digital download service.

Best Buy is said to be talking with companies such as CinemaNow to help run this service. My advice to them is to buy an existing player and get to the market fast — otherwise they’re likely to lose out to Netflix, which is currently the best-positioned to succeed with digital downloading. They’ve got lots of players from which to choose — Vudu and Jaman are the first to come to mind. And Best Buy does have a habit of buying distressed assets, most notably Napster, which it acquired in a move to get into the digital music download business.

Best Buy, like Blockbuster and other companies that have profited handsomely from the sale of DVDs, face a difficult future. Sales of the shiny discs have started to lose steam and the new Blu-ray ecosystem has been hampered by the global recession. But most importantly, consumer habits are starting to shift to consuming video online.

Grid Networks, a Seattle-based peer-to-peer content delivery technology startup that’s raised more than $10 million in funding from Comcast Interactive Capital, Cisco Systems and Panorama Capital has merged with Global Media Services (GMS), a New York-based digital media services company that counts nearly 100 large content producers such as MTV Networks, SpeedTV and Fox Sports among its clients. Rumors of a pending sale of Grid Networks emerged late last month.

“Grid’s technology will help us deliver HD content, especially to non-PC devices such a game consoles,” said Charles Picasso, former COO of Digital Island, who’s going to be running the new company, in a statement. “The challenge for content owners is to get video content to three screens and non-PC devices.” Grid’s core technology now works on X-Box, Sony PS3 and Windows-powered computers.

GMS does everything from providing content management tools to streaming video over the Internet, pushing almost a petabyte of data every month on behalf of its clients. The company was founded in 2003 by Jennifer Sultan and Adam Cohen, a 15-year digital media veteran who will serve as chief media officer of the combined firm.

Disclosure: Grid Networks is funded by Panorama Capital partner Allan Leinwand, who is a guest columnist for GigaOM.

Cablevision, the Bethpage, N.Y.-based cable operator, says it will only sell digital video services and say “sayonara” to analog television, so to speak. Existing analog cable customers will get analog simulcasts on television sets connected directly to Cablevision’s receivers. More than 91 percent of Cablevision’s 3.1 million television customers today receive digital service, and approximately 5 percent of the company’s cable television customers today receive analog expanded basic service. With the looming switch away from analog television over the airwaves, it looks like the bell is tolling for analog TV. Get ready for a future in which news anchors will be able to show their blemishes even more!

Cisco Systems, long known for routers and switches, is trying to increase its footprint by expanding into consumer markets. And it is doing so by acquiring a lot of companies. In the past, it snapped up Linksys and KISS, and now there are rumors that the company could buy Pure Digital, the company behind the hot-selling Flip video cameras, according to TechCrunch.

The report pegs the acquisition price at $500 million for the San Francisco-based startup that has raised about $68 million over its 7-year lifespan. The deal is almost done, a Silicon Valley insider told us. We are looking for more confirmations and additional details about the rumored transaction. As with most M&A deals, it isn’t over till ink dries on the paper.

In January this year, Cisco CEO John Chambers said that the San Jose, Calif.-based company was ready to start buying again. At the time, Chambers said that a good acquisition for Cisco would be company that has 100 people and a product consumers are lining up to buy. The company recently raised $4 billion from the debt market, which points to smaller, more focused acquisitions that might need cash. Pure Digital would certainly fit that description.

In November, Deloitte ranked Pure Digital fifth on its list of fastest-growing companies in North America. Earlier that same month, Pure released an HD version of its popular portable video camera (see it in action here).

For content delivery startups, partnering with large carriers is the only path to survival in a cut-throat business dominated by Akamai. Edgecast, a Los Angeles-based startup, today announced that it is teaming up with German giant Deutsche Telekom to offer a new service that will use DT’s backbone network. Edgecast is following the footsteps of its rival BitGravity, which had teamed up with Tata Communications to power a global CDN service for Tata.

Carriers like DT and Tata (and Level 3 and AT&T) have the advantage of owning their own infrastructure and thus not having to incur severe bandwidth costs. CDN industry analyst Dan Rayburn had recently reported that the prices at video CDNs had stabilized. Edgecast and BitGravity both specialize in video delivery.

Excerpted from GigaOM:

New Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz is a solid, proven manager who will bring some much-needed stability to the beleaguered Internet giant, but she has a big hole in the No. 2 spot. Bartz needs a president who is young and energetic, has engineering chops, clear vision, and — most importantly — expertise building great products that provide a compelling Internet user experience for a diverse group of consumers.

My candidate to be her consigliere: Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu. I’ve spoke to quite a few people who know Kilar well, and most of them described him as that rare content guy with technical chops. A good team builder, he is said to inspire. Others waxed eloquent about his sense of design and his passion for media. Remember, he ran the DVD store for Amazon. His defining quality is hyper-competitiveness — something that would be important to fire up the troops.

With his service growing by leaps and bounds, and advertisers lining up to get on board, Kilar’s only problem is that he doesn’t have enough traffic –- like, say, YouTube. This is where Yahoo can help. Or rather, where the two can help each other. Clearly search and search advertising isn’t quite working out for Yahoo; what Yahoo knows best is media and content. Which is why buying Hulu would be a strategically relevant acquisition for the company — it would play to Yahoo’s media strengths.

You’re probably thinking, why would Fox and GE sell their pet project to Yahoo? Well, why not? After all, they took a $100 million investment from Providence Equity Partners, which means they have an interest in making some sort of a return on this company. By selling to Yahoo for stock -– say, $2 billion worth — Rupert Murdoch would get a nice big chunk of Yahoo shares, which could come in handy if he wants to offload MySpace to Yahoo sometime in the future. NBC would get a significant Internet presence with Yahoo, which could only help its other digital efforts. And the Providence guys –- well, they’d get to make some money.

Read the full post on GigaOM.

UPDATED paidContent is reporting that Sling Media co-founders Blake and Jason Krikorian, as well as Sling Media Entertainment Group President Jason Hirschhorn and Chief Creative Officer Ben White, are all leaving the company, just a little over a year after its acquisition by Echostar for $380 million. More to come…

Here’s the video and live-blog from Blake Krikorian’s appearance at NewTeeVee Live in November, when he was still Sling’s CEO.

Update: The fact that Jason, Blake, Ben and Jason left together could lead to speculation that there was some sort of disagreement with the corporate masters at Echostar. Of course, there’s also the possibility that they are off to start a new company. “It was time for us to move on, ” Blake told me. He said that, after a very hectic year-and-a-half that saw SlingMedia launch six products, including the upcoming Sling for iPhone, it was time to just kick back. “I have not quite decided I will do next, except that I want to chill out and bounce some ideas around.”

It is a strange kind of feeling for me personally, as well. I have followed SlingMedia very closely from the time it was still a concept. Blake and Jason spent hours at length with me talking about “anywhere TV” and “place shifting.” I was enthralled by their product then, and I continue to be fascinated by their innovations. Blake, who was a frequent visitor to our events and a guest on The GigaOM Show, is leaving behind a pretty solid company, one that will keep coming up with some interesting products over next few years.

The way I see it, the Sling Media functionality will be built into EchoStar’s set-top boxes and in a few years there won’t be need for a standalone Sling box.

Liz Gannes also contributed to this story.

Related Stories:

1. Sling Media Goes Mobile, Finally
2. Sling Goes HD, Adds Blackberry Support
3. Echostar Buys SlingMedia for $380 Million
4. Sling.com: Almost Must-See TV
5. Slingbox Comes Out Slinging

Santa has been really nice to social networking websites this holiday season. Whether it was more broadband connections or simply bad weather, many popular web services saw a nice bump in their traffic this holiday season. In US, YouTube accounted for about 1.35% of total US traffic on December 24, though the traffic skidded there after to 1.16% on December 31. Nevertheless, on the new year’s eve, the traffic was up 33% from 2007.

YouTube in particular did well in the United Kingdom, according to Hitwise, a research firm that tracks traffic flows to various websites.

Video site YouTube received more UK Internet traffic than Microsoft Windows Live Mail (Hotmail) for the first time during Christmas week 2008. For the week ending 27/12/08, YouTube accounted for 2.13% of all UK Internet visits compared to 2.11% for Live Mail. During the same week, YouTube was the third most visited website in the UK behind Google UK and Facebook, while Live Mail ranked fourth.

Hitwise also sent us Hulu’s performance for December 2008. The site is up 18,000% compared to last December. Hulu officially launched in March 2008 and has grown in popularity, though it lags YouTube quite considerably.

Less than 48 hours after they started taking swipes at each other, Time Warner Cable and Viacom have kissed and made up. The two parties have reached a deal that would allow Time Warner Cable & Brighthouse Networks’ customers to keep getting Viacom-owned channels such as Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, MTV and VH1. These channels carry shows such as SpongeBob, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report.

The two parties struck a deal sometime after midnight, which means no disruptions for TWC customers. The two parties refused to give details of the new arrangement. Well as long as there are no new surprises at the end of the month for TWC, a couch-potato crisis has been averted. According to a report by the Associated Press:

“We are pleased that our customers will continue to be able to watch the customers will continue to be able to watch the programming they enjoy on MTV Networks,” said Glenn Britt, president and CEO of Time Warner Cable Inc. “We are sorry they had to endure a day of public disagreement as we worked through this negotiation.”

At the close of the year two parties had failed to reach an agreement where Viacom wanted Time Warner to pay it more per-subscriber fees for carrying its content. This would raised monthly bills for the TWC customers by about $3 a month. This would have amounted to about $39 million a year on top of $300 million Viacom already gets from TWC. The decision would have impacted about 13.3 million Time Warner Cable customers along with 2.4 million Brighthouse Networks customers.

TWC customers quickly shared their displeasure on the web and Twitter.

Of course, if you just want to say no to cable forever — I have been living cable free for over a year now — we have a cheat sheet to tell you where to watch your favorite Viacom-owned shows online.

Full Time Warner Cable statement:

Time Warner Cable (NYSE:TWC) and Viacom (NYSE: VIA and VIA.B) jointly announced this morning that they have reached an agreement in principle to renew carriage for Viacom’s MTV Networks. The companies expect to finalize the details of the agreement over the next several days. Glenn Britt, President and CEO of Time Warner Cable said, “We are pleased that our customers will continue to be able to watch the programming they enjoy on MTV Networks. We are sorry they had to endure a day of public disagreement as we worked through this negotiation.” Philippe Dauman, President and CEO of Viacom said, “We’ve been partners with Time Warner Cable for a long time, and we’re happy to be renewing that partnership for the benefit of their customers and our loyal viewers. It’s gratifying that we could reach an agreement that benefits not only our audiences but that is also in the best interest of both of our companies.”

What would happen to New York if The Daily Show went off the air? Where would hipsters get their daily Moment of Zen? No Spongebob Squarepants either – which means the Upper East side mommies would actually have to talk to their kids. A dispute between Time Warner Cable and Viacom over fees is going to impact Time Warner Cable customers in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas and several other cities on January 1. The channels likely to go off the air include Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, VH1 and MTV.

At the crux of the problem: Viacom wants to increase the rights fees to its 19 channels. Time Warner Cable says this is a bad time to be asking consumers to pay more money to watch television. Given the state of the economy, TWC seems to have a point. To this Viacom counters in a press release:

The renewal we are seeking is reasonable and modest relative to the profits TWC enjoys from our networks. We have asked for an increase of less than 25 cents per month, per subscriber, which adds up to less than a penny per day for all 19 of MTV Networks’ channels. We make this request because TWC has so greatly undervalued our channels for so long. Americans spend more than 20% of their TV viewing time watching our networks, yet our fees amount to less than 2.5% of what Time Warner generates from their average customer.

The increase is going to be about $3 a month for the subscribers. TWC says that Viacom is trying to get more money out of its pockets because the advertising market has tanked. “The root of this is that the advertising market has gone soft and Viacom is desperate,” Alexander Dudley, a spokesman for Time Warner Cable, told The New York Times.

Dudley wasn’t shy about spanking Viacom in public. He told The Los Angeles Times:

They are holding our customers hostage for a bunch of networks with sagging ratings and only one or two good channels. We have to hold the line for our customers.

Snap! There have been troubles between content owners and carriage providers recently. Echostar and Viacom got into each other’s faces in 2004. TWC and ABC have tussled over price issues. Except this time around, Viacom has Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on its side.

Time Warner Cable says it is going to respond by telling people where to watch these very channels online – using, of course, its broadband pipes.

“We will be telling our customers exactly where they can go to see these programs online,” Mr. Dudley said. “We’ll also be telling them how they can hook up their PCs to a television set.

Viacom Networks’ Full Statement:

The move by Time Warner Cable to force such channels as Nickelodeon, COMEDY CENTRAL and MTV off the air is another example of a cable company overreaching for profit at the expense of its viewers. The renewal we are seeking is reasonable and modest relative to the profits TWC enjoys from our networks. We have asked for an increase of less than 25 cents per month, per subscriber, which adds up to less than a penny per day for all 19 of MTV Networks’ channels. We make this request because TWC has so greatly undervalued our channels for so long. Americans spend more than 20% of their TV viewing time watching our networks, yet our fees amount to less than 2.5% of what Time Warner generates from their average customer. Throughout the country, we have negotiated equitable license agreement renewals, or are in the final stages of renewals, with virtually every cable and satellite carrier. Nevertheless, Time Warner Cable has dismissed our efforts at a fair compromise and has effectively chosen to deny its customers some of the most popular TV shows on the air. As a result, we are sorry to say that for Time Warner Cable customers our networks will go dark as of 12:01 on January 1st, denying Time Warner customers shows like Dora the Explorer, SpongeBob SquarePants, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, and The Hills. Ultimately, however, if Nickelodeon, COMEDY CENTRAL, MTV and the rest of our programming is discontinued — over less than a penny per day — we believe viewers will see this behavior by their cable company as outrageous. Time Warner Cable subscribers who are being handed a January 1st $3 monthly increase in Raleigh, Orange County, Los Angeles, and New York City are simultaneously facing the removal of beloved shows across 19 channels. We find it a shame that Time Warner Cable remains unreasonable at this time. We hope its leadership will have a change of heart and will seek to negotiate a fair renewal agreement. “

See our additional coverage:

Where to Get Your Daily Show Fix and More Online

Time Warner: No Colbert? Count me out

In response to an earlier story in The Wall Street Journal, Google offered a clarification and reaffirmed its stance on network neutrality and pointed out that they are not backing away from it. They have dismissed the WSJ story as confused. Instead, they explained that the OpenEdge effort (the subject of the WSJ story) was a plan to peer its edge caching devices directly with the network operators so that the users of those broadband carriers get faster access to Google and YouTube’s content. Read my full take on this situation and why it’s an important discussion over at GigaOM.

”The solar panel market will reach only 7.1 GWatts in 2009, equivalent to a global growth rate of 26 percent, down from a 48 percent growth in 2008…’Panel prices will likely fall between 20-to-30 percent in 2009 as global supply of polysilicon doubles.”

The demand for solar panels is going to keep increasing. As wireless networks spread to remote parts of the world, a large number of telecom equipment makers are using solar panels to power repeaters, cellular base stations and other parts of the telecom infrastructure.

Among other drivers, the incoming U.S. administration’s eco-centric policies are likely to help keep the demand for alternative energy technologies, such as solar panels, steady.

Related link: Our prior coverage of  solar panels

Video game consoles such as Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 (PS3) are going to evolve into "multimedia gateways" and will soon be receiving a lot of video, according to Dallas-based research firm The Diffusion Group (TDG). They argue that when it comes to on-demand video content, the consoles can go toe-to-toe with local cable or satellite TV operators. They are very bullish on the consoles, but not so much on standalone set-top boxes (and there are many) — precisely because such a stance doesn’t involve buying yet another set-top box.

According to TDG, by 2012, roughly 190 million households will use a next-generation game console — of them, some 80 percent will be connected to the Internet, and 75 percent of console-connected households will use video-based services at least a couple of times each week. Another report estimated that Microsoft will make $726 million from its Xbox Live Video Marketplace.

Having covered the technology industry for as long as I have, I take such bold predictions with a Mount Rushmore-sized pinch of salt. But I do agree with the overall thesis that consoles will serve as the center of your living room. We have numerous clues pointing to this.

For instance, Netflix’s service is being built into the Xbox. In addition to 12,000 movies available via Netflix, Microsoft Xbox Live has about 15,000 movies (1,000 of them HD); Microsoft Xbox has HD TV shows available for download as well. Sony has launched its own movie download service for the PS3 platform with over 1,000 movies, and Nintendo is working on its own version of the online video experience.

Despite all these positive signs for the consoles, in my opinion the big push for Internet video in the living room is going to come from embedded systems in the next generation of connected televisions and new Blu-ray DVD players. Where does that leave many of those standalone set-top boxes? Their investors aren’t going to be thrilled by my answer. Or TDG’s bold predictions.

Gizmo5, a service of VoIP service provider, SIPphone is offering free conference calling to its customers. I have been a big Gizmo user for a long time, but my usage has gone down mostly because their voice quality isn’t up to par. In fact, for all my VoIP calling, I had almost exclusively switched to using Skype. Over the weekend, however, I was reintroduced to the service when Gizmo5 emailed a free conference call offer. I wanted to talk to a few buddies and normally, I would call them on my cellular phone and then join the calls to create a conference call. However, I decided to try out the new offer.

I went to their website and got a conference room number. Those who wanted to join call in 1-605-475-8515 and punch the room number and join the conversation. It worked surprisingly smoothly and phone conversation with a couple of my buddies went without a hitch. Each conference room can handle between 2-to-10 people. Gizmo5 subscribers can call into the conference room and that doesn’t count a dime.

The whole thing went without a hitch, though given Gizmo5’s quality-record, I am going to try it out a couple of times before making a final decision. However, I can see the potential. I can use this service to interview folks and tape the conversation for easy archiving. If you are looking for an easy conference call option, you should try it out.

I had a heart attack on Dec. 28. I was able to walk into the hospital for treatment that night and have been recovering here ever since. With the support of my family and my team, I am on the road to a full recovery. I am going to be OK.

To read the rest of the letter, please click here.

How many times have you wished for a simple and easy way to create and export email lists by mining your email inbox?

Wait no more! Clear Context, a San Francisco-based start-up that makes an in-box management plug-in for Microsoft Outlook has come up with a new product called, Contact Exporter for Outlook. Of course you will need their inbox management plug-in, a for-pay product.

The Contact Exporter is a beta feature in ClearContext IMS v4 that lets you create and export groups of email addresses found in messages stored in the Outlook folders you select.

What it essentially does is create a list of email addresses found in messages from a set of folders users choose. And these can be used to create distribution lists. You can create say, an email list for a birthday invite and export the list in the CSV format. You can export files and import them into any application that will allow you to import CSV files. Facebook and Socialzr are two such web services. I think this export feature is quite handy. If you want to know more, check out their website.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Google is about to announce an online storage space. Some call it GDrive, and I see it as a vital component of Google Computing Cloud. Regardless, instead of obsessing over the minutiae, I want to know what you folks specifically think about it. Take this poll and let us know.

The UK-based incumbent telecom operator is going to invest close to half-a-billion dollars in wind farms, betting that they will help meet 25% of company’s power needs by 2016. It is one of the largest consumers of power in UK.

BT is one of Britain’s biggest consumers of electricity, with an annual requirement of around 0.7 per cent of the UK’s entire consumption. BT’s wind farms could generate a total of 250MW of electricity – enough to meet the power needs of 122,000 homes or a city the size of Coventry. This would prevent the release of 500,000 tonnes of CO2 each year compared with coal generation – equivalent to a quarter of a million return air trips to New York. [Press Release]

The BT investment is the largest investment in renewable power by a non-power company in the UK. The company hopes to have 50 turbines generating 100 megawatts by 2012 and the rest will follow by 2016.

Richard Tarboton, BT’s head of energy, told us many of the turbines would be installed on BT owned land. “We’ll be working in partnership with our neighbors to acquire the rights to build on their land. A turbine doesn’t take up much space, so on a farm, for instance, they could still work the land. It will be a question of working out a deal with the landowner on a case-by-case basis.”

The move has been greeted with enthusiasm by many cleantech experts.

Jonathon Porritt, programme director of Forum for the Future, said: “It’s a substantial investment, guaranteeing very low carbon energy for BT for the foreseeable future, and precisely the kind of decisive, ambitious intervention that more and more companies are going to have to come forward with.” [The Register]

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

Dimdim, a Burlington, MA.-based web meeting services startup, wants to take on Cisco Systems’ (CSCO) WebEx and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Placeware by emphasizing simplicity and ease of use. The company, which is backed by investors including Draper Richards, Index Ventures and Nexus Capital India, launches its service today at DEMOfall 2007. Co-founded by Computer Associates alumni DD Ganguly and Prakash Khot, Dimdim has so far raised $2.5 million. Continue Reading.

You know a web 2.0 application is hitting an upward inflection point when your inbox starts filling up with the likes of “Joe Doe wants to add you as a friend on VagueSter.” Over the last few months, it’s been Facebook’s turn.

The site’s rise in traffic is in no small part due to developers being enabled to deliver their apps using the Facebook API. Here is how you can use Amazon Web Services to scale your Facebook Apps. Continue Reading.

* FoundRead: Founders at VMWare and XenSource all hit paydirt this week — but whom would you rather be? Read more »
* Earth2Tech: How the Physical Distribution of Digital Goods Impacts the Environment. Read more »
* Future of Software: The Road Ahead for Browsing. Read more »
* NewTeeVee: Truveo relaunches. Its pretty good. Read more »
* GigaOM: And Broadband growth slows, and may lead to a price war and that’s a good thing for consumers. Read more »

Skype, one of the primary means of communication for web workers has been on the fritz for past few hours, possibly because of some software upgrades from Microsoft.

Let this be a reminder that Skype is not quite your phone company replacement. This must have impacted thousands (if not millions) of companies and web workers who lost money and productivity.

Are you being impacted by this outage? Is your business suffering as a result? Share your story with others.

Google, this morning spent $625 million in cash to buy Postini, a start-up that provides encryption and security as a hosted service. Google believes this deal is further testimony about its serious commitment to providing hosted apps to businesses, especially small and medium sized businesses.

Google Apps are being used by 1,000 small businesses, universities and also there is an interest from large companies. On their Google Apps blog, Rajen Sheth, Product Manager, Google Apps writes:

For organizations that are not yet ready to jump full force into hosted applications, Postini’s proven messaging security and corporate compliance management solutions are a great place to start.

That addresses at least some of my own personal concerns about the security of using these applications, but you think you are ready to take a chance on Google Apps for running your business.

Additional Reading: GigaOM: Google buys Postini, How High Can Google Go?

Are you sick and tired of getting SMS messages from your Twitter accounts – especially at odd times of the night, like when you are sleeping? Some of us are actually quite annoyed at getting stuck with big bills because of these SMS messages.

There are three easy ways to go mobile with Twitter:

1. Use the Twitter mobile: If your phone has a mobile browser, you can go to http://m.twitter.com and you are good to go. I am not sure if everyone will be happy with the experience, but I am not that thrilled with the UI. This option is especially not good for people who don’t own the so-called smart phones, and don’t want to pay for flat rate Internet data plans. (via)

2. Flurry+RSS=Twitter Magic: Sign-up for Flurry, a mobile mail client/service. You can download the Flurry client on your phone seconds after you sign-up. Flurry, which started out as a service that would let you check e-mail on your plain vanilla phone, has recently added a feature that allows you to add RSS feeds and read them on your mobile phone.

Add RSS feeds generated by the Twitter accounts of your friends. The best part – you don’t have to pay for anything – it’s free. And if you want to Twitter what’s on your mind, just use SMS… sparingly if you can.

3. FreeRSS Reader: Most high-end Nokia phones are now shipping with a built in RSS reader, and you can bypass using Flurry and add Twitter feeds of your friends to the built-in RSS reader. It is one easy way to keep up with what your pals are twittering about – only this time the SMS messages don’t interrupt you. Check the feeds when you feel like it.

Others can try similar RSS readers, though they are going to cost you some cash. Freerange offers one, so does Newsgator (as long as you use their online service.)

How time flies – it was on Labor Day 2006 we launched WebWorkerDaily, mostly because I believed that broadband was going to change the world, not just by bringing information to us faster but also how it was going to change the way we worked. Having reported on broadband for a lot longer than I care to admit, the direction we were heading in was pretty clear.

Six months later, it is becoming clear that we are not alone in this way of this thinking. The thriving community here on Web Worker Daily is testament to that. And today, The San Francisco Chronicle is writing about this trend, though focusing more on the “Bedouin” start-ups.

Dan Fost writes about the many different variations about the office-less start-ups, and has been kind enough to include WWD and GigaOM in his Sunday Feature.

“There is nothing more free than being a Web worker,” Malik says. “There is no boss. You work for yourself. This is the new Wild West. The individual is more important. That’s the American way. It’s about doing things your own way. Web workers represent that. … It’s the future, my friend.”

The context of the quote is that there are going to be more Web Workers in the near future as the very nature of the work force changes, and we have discussed that on many different occasions over here.

I do want to take this opportunity and thank the team of writers – Chris, Judi, Mike, Matt, Liz, and of course Anne who have helped turn my wild idea into reality. It is their efforts and you the readers who are the true reasons WWD exists. (So forgive me for being a bit pompous by bringing up the quote!)

Interestingly, Fost points out that this SF bedouin culture is not something new.

Venerable insurance firm Lloyd’s of London was actually started in a coffee house… Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote some of their best work in Parisian cafes. And in San Francisco, writers and poets of the Beat generation, such as Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, wrote in the cafes of North Beach.

Another reminder that what’s old is new again!

Bonus link: Jeff Nolan shares his thoughts  and reminds us that phrase Going Bedouin came from Greg Olsen.

Growing up in India, my first taste of caffeine came via a cup of steaming tea – sweet, milky and well tasting like tea. This was not the sophisticated Darjeeling or Earl Gray, but more like tea for the masses. After immigrating to the US, I discovered coffee and joys that go with it. The Starbucks became a habit, and then an addiction.

On my recent trip to India, I was reminded of the joys of tea, especially when sprinkled with a little love from mom. Upon my return, I have been running a little experiment – I start the day with a cup of tea one day, and a freshly pressed coffee the next. (Comparison of the two beverages is here.)

Given the variance in their caffeine content, the start is different on the alternating days, and productivity is different as well. With tea, I find the day starts gradually picks up pace and then you smoothly glide through it, though it does require more frequent trips to the kitchen or the cashier’s counter.

Coffee, on the other hand takes effect right from the first sip, and as long as you have two or three more “Tall” cups, you can go through the day supercharged, working at a furious pace. But then comes the inevitable crash and there goes the productivity.

This has me wondering… what is a better drink for web workers? Tea or coffee? What do you drink and why? Does one work better than the others? I would love to hear your feedback.

Earlier this evening, AOL announced a new beta (codename – Cayman) for AOL Mail, which is an ajaxy-version of its current webmail product. It is a rather slick looking product and works admirably fast. In order to try the beta, I had to sign-up for the beta even though I already have an account with AOL.

After spending a few minutes with the product, you realize that it is a pretty good attempt by AOL to catch up with current AJAX-based mail offerings such as Yahoo Mail (aka Oddpost 2.0.) It is nothing earth shattering but definitely an improvement over the current AOL offering. It has many of the basic features we have come to expect from most modern webmail programs. It lets you read messages inline, for example. It works on Mac and Windows machine quite well. AOL Mail Beta worked quite nicely on Safari as well.

The new improvements aside, there are some issues with the product, and none of them have to do with the fact that calendar doesn’t work, and the to-do-list is non functional. The biggest problem with the offering is the advertisements.

Having used Zimbra (work) and Google GMail (personal), I am now used to an email experience with less intrusive advertising. AOL’s new beta from advertising perspective breaks all cardinal rules of usability. They are intrusive, too in-your face and take up too much on-screen real estate. That’s the gray in AOL’s pre-Web 2.0 roots showing. Still, if you are an AOL email user, the beta is worth trying out at least once – and then making up your mind.

Bonus Link: Frank Gruber who works for AOL has a review on his blog.

Today is one of the best days in the short life of Web Worker Daily. Our very own Anne Zelenka is joining our little family on an almost full time basis (of course) with a Web Worker twist. She made her decision yesterday, and well, I have to say, I have not been able to wipe that goofy grin off my face.

She will be spending more of her time and attention in helping WWD grow to the next level. My dream is that one day WWD becomes bigger than the flagship, GigaOM, and people refer to the “site that spawned it all” as the older, dowdy and decidedly unhip brother of WWD.

Anne is perfect for getting us to that goal.  We all have seen the profound impact she already has had on our little community. She has an uncanny eye for talent, and is an amazing writer who uses simple words to express complex ideas. She will also be writing Web 2.0 and related stories for the flagship, GigaOM. As part of her new, improved version 2.1, she gets her own icon, and cool business cards.

Without much ado, Web Worker Daily readers, I give you your new editor, Anne 2.1.

If you are like us – walking around with a Macbook Pro and a Novatel EVDO Express Card modem, you don’t really have worry too much about being disconnected. However, when you congregate with friends or colleagues and find them in a disconnected state, you want to share your connection. You can do that on a Mac, though it takes a little effort.

Well, the fine folks at FON, a wireless services company based in Barcelona has come up with a nifty little Mac app that turns your machine into an instant FON Spot.

The software, though not available right now for download (coming soon) will allow people to share their 3G connections easily. (You can request a beta copy here.)

You can control how much bandwidth you want to share and why you can even charge others. One thing we do wish for is some mesh-networking features, where three or four 3G connected Macbook Pros can create a nice instant network. You know what would be cooler – if someone can built it – a utility that would allow subscriber of an expensive Wi-Fi plan to share it with those around them, say when sitting in a Cafe. That would drive people at T-Mobile insane, but it still be fun.

In preperation of the Windows Vista launch, I am trying to acclimitaize myself with Windows XP operating system, and have a brand new machine which I want to use for a week, and then compare it with my Vista experience.

Since I spend most of my time on a Mac, it is hard to figure out what applications should one install on a PC. Microsoft Office seems to be an obvious choice, though I am sticking to Google Docs for now.

I have installed both Skype and Gizmo Project, and the machine came pre-installed with Google Talk. Microsoft Live Writer is a pretty good client for writing blog posts, and Feed Demon is as good a feed reader one can get. Beyond that, well I am at a loss. A large chunk of my time is spent writing, image editing, answering email, reading RSS feeds and listening to music. Any tips on the “very best” apps would be greatly appreciated.