The final results are in: eBay and private investors led by Silver Lake Partners have struck a deal with Skype founders and JoltID, the technology company controlled by Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. They are also transferring the ownership of intellectual property needed to make sure that Skype works as an Internet telephony service. More than 500 million Skype subscribers can breathe a sigh of relief. Skype founders will be making an investment in the new entity and will get a 14 percent stake in the company. The deal is likely to close in the fourth quarter. Those are the facts. Below the fold you can read my winner-and-loser scorecard on this deal.

Found Money: Zennström and Friis are the real winners here. For a few hundred thousand in legal bills, they have not only managed to wipe out an investor competitor, they have shifted the focus away from the ignominious failure that was Joost. They have turned their ownership of a P2P technology into yet another payday and, most importantly, they are now sitting in the catbird seat to reap the rewards of Skype again. Verdict: Winners

Double Dipped: In order to get the deal done, both the investors and eBay took a hair cut. Investors now control 56 percent of the Skype while eBay’s stake is down 5 percent to 30 percent of the new Skype. There is a lot of spin in the press release issued by Skype, but the fact remains as I pointed out on the day this deal was announced, Zennström and Friis had them by the curlies. It was clear that this deal wasn’t going to get done without their blessing.

“Skype will be well positioned to move forward under new owners with ownership and control over its core technology,” said eBay President and CEO John Donahoe. “At the same time, eBay continues to retain a significant stake in Skype and will benefit from its continued growth. We look forward to closing the deal and focusing on growing our core e-commerce and payments businesses.”

Poor John is stuck being the mop-up man. eBay, thanks to the stellar work of its previous management team including Meg Whitman, currently running for governor of California, is paying twice for its mistakes. If my previous employer, Business 2.0, was still publishing the 101 Dumbest Things list, I would make eBay’s original Skype deal as the No. 1 dumbest thing…ever! Verdict: Losers.

Index-ed to Nothing: Now let’s look at this great spin quote:

The investor group will no longer include Index Ventures, which has withdrawn from participation. Commenting on its decision to withdraw, Danny Rimer of Index Ventures, said: “We are pleased that Skype will now be able to put litigation behind it, and we wish Josh Silverman, his team and the Skype investors well in continuing to grow a great business. Although Skype has the potential to be a great investment, the deal terms changed for Index such that it no longer matches our investment criteria and thus we have decided not to participate in the transaction.”

Index Ventures and Mike Volpi were the architects of the deal from day one, and so no, they didn’t opt out of the agreement. No one opts out of a deal for which they are happy to bend a few rules. What it means is that they were hustled out, and that tells me two things: This was way, way personal. I have heard it from my sources that there is no love lost between the various entities involved and the lawsuits just brought the hostilities out in the open. Verdict: Losers

Making a Marc: Earlier this morning I spoke with Marc Andreeseen of Andreessen Horowitz and asked him about the deal. “We wouldn’t go through this for just a company, but this is Skype, so from our standpoint it was worth going through,” he said. He pointed out that his firm is all about founders and “we like founders being part of the company.” He added that there is “no emotional baggage and we didn’t take this personally.”

This was a high-profile deal for a new fund. Given that Andreessen Horowitz bet so much of their fund’s total money on this deal ($60$50 million of $300 million), any successful conclusion is a win. Verdict: Winners

Silver Lake Partners: The rest of the investors can breathe easy that this got through. Those personal emails didn’t make pretty reading. The fact that they don’t have to deal with Volpi and Index might be a blessing in disguise. Verdict: Winners

Canada Pension Plan Investment Board: Are they still there…oh cool! Verdict: Meh!

No Silver Lining?: One person who I totally feel for is Silverman, the current CEO of Skype. He gets to run a company which will have the looming presence of its founders.

Whatever the press spin might say, the new investor group is like a poisoned well. It will be a polarized group, always looking over their shoulders. Silverman is going to need to keep a lot of people happy, and those board meetings with nearly two-dozen people aren’t going to be fun, either. But as Biggie Small once said:

“It’s like the more money we come across, the more problems we see.”

Earlier this decade, when cable companies started their foray into the phone business, not many gave them much of a chance to succeed. Sure, they could sell a lot of broadband connections, but no one thought they would be players in telecom services such as voice. Fast-forward to today, and the situation is entirely different. During the first half of 2009, cable companies across the globe generated about $30 billion in telecom service revenues, according to Telegeography, a market research company. Voice, in fact, has become the secret weapon for cable companies around the world.

Those revenues come from 49 million voice subscribers and 82 million broadband customers worldwide. Cable companies’ revenues have grown 28 percent every year since 2003 vs. overall wireline business growth of 4 percent. CableCos now account for 29 percent of broadband subscribers and 9 percent of voice subscribers in countries where they are allowed to compete with the phone companies. That works out to about 15 percent of residential telecom revenues in countries where cable and telecoms are allowed to compete.

The reason we are seeing this growth is primarily because of North America. The presence of highly competitive players such as Time Warner Cable and Comcast is a major reason why telecoms are on weak footing in the U.S. And there is no sign that U.S. CableCos are easing up the pressure on phone companies.

For instance, during the third quarter (ending Sept. 30), Time Warner added 117,000 new residential high-speed Internet customers (up 32 percent from second-quarter net additions of 88,000 subscribers) and 62,000 voice subscribers (down 39 percent from 103,000 new voice customers added during the second quarter). Comcast, on the other hand, added another 361,000 broadband subscribers (up 455 percent from 65,000 new additions during the second quarter)  and 375,000 voice customers, up 61 percent from 233,000 subscribers added during the second quarter.

Even in the highly competitive and mature markets of North America and Western Europe, the leading cablecos have grown their telecoms revenue by almost 10 percent relative to the third quarter of 2008. Despite the added pressure of a deep recession, these leading cablecos have seen their broadband Internet subscriber bases grow by 7 percent and their telephony subscriber bases by 13 percent over the last 12 months. “Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Liberty Global all now feature in the top 15 ranking of broadband Internet service providers, and telecoms remains an engine for growth for many cablecos around the world,” added TeleGeography’s John Dinsdalee.(Telegeography)

CableCos are likely to have a major impact in Eastern Europe and Latin America. In Asia, the role of cable is being viewed as limited. In places like China and India, cable is not allowed to compete with phone companies.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on a bit of a Microsoft offensive. Earlier this week, while talking to press in Boston when Schmidt was asked to comment on a statement by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, he said, “I’ve learned not to respond to quotes by Steve Ballmer.” Oh Snap!

“Hopefully we won’t repeat the same mistakes that Microsoft did 10 years ago that ultimately led to all these things that have been happening with them,” Schmidt zinged back today when FOX Business Network’s Neil Cavuto asked him about recent comparisons with Microsoft. I bet Bill Gates must have said the same about IBM.

He also talked about Twitter and Facebook, the economy, the recession, and a whole bunch of other current events during his interview. Actually, this clip is worth watching, and Cavuto is rational in his questions. So if you have time, check it out.

Photo courtesy of Charles Haynes via Flickr.

The instant messaging world should prepare for a major quake — thanks to Facebook, which seems to be all set to launch a new connection interface that would allow Facebook Chat to work with any kind of XMPP client.

The news of this development was first reported by Mickaël Rémond on the company blog of Process One, a Paris-based messaging startup. “It now seems the launch is close as the XMPP software stack has been deployed on chat.facebook.com,” writes Rémond, who is a leading expert on instant messaging and ejabberd and is an active member of the XMPP Standard Foundation.

About a year-and-a-half ago, Facebook had announced that it would build “a Jabber/XMPP interface for Facebook Chat” and that “users will be able to use Jabber/XMPP-based chat applications to connect to Facebook Chat to” communicate, check their friends’ profiles, and set their statuses.

Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, or XMPP, has surely become the de facto standard for messaging and presence. After a big push from Google Talk, XMPP is going to get the next major push from Facebook. The world’s largest social-networking service, with over 350 million subscribers, is about to launch the XMPP connection interface. That will allow users to use Facebook Chat with any XMPP client — whether on the desktop or mobile. A good example of how this works is Adium, a popular open-source IM client that allows you to communicate with disparate IM networks. The latest version of Adium supports Facebook Chat.

Why is this news disruptive? Simple: Until now, in order to use Facebook Chat to communicate, one needed to be logged into the Facebook web site or mobile service. However, if the chat can be accessed on any device regardless of whether you are logged into Facebook’s web site, the usage of that IM is only going to increase. This would, in turn, mean tough times for older IM networks such as AOL’s AIM and Microsoft’s MSN.

To understand why independent Facebook Chat on the web (and on the wireless networks) is disruptive, just take a look at its amazing rise. It was prototyped in January 2007 at a Hackathon and become a real project in the fall of 2007 with four engineers. In April 2008, the service went live for consumers and was available to 70 million Facebook users at the time. As of September, nearly a billion user messages were being exchanged every day with 1GB traffic at its peak, according to a presentation made by the Facebook development team at a conference in Edinburgh in September.

Mario Queiroz, VP Production Management for Google Android, talked about Android and its competition, the iPhone, in an interview with FOX Business Network’s Liz Claman. Queiroz touts his company’s approach to form partnerships and alliances with carriers and handset makers as a better way of doing business compared with the iPhone. You can watch the video, which comes across as an Android advertorial.

Google is getting ready to make its Wave technology more widely available, CEO Eric Schmidt told a gathering of reporters in its Boston offices.

“[Google's Wave team is] getting ready for a much broader distribution. Ready means very soon. Very soon is like weeks not years,” Schmidt said. “The experiment has yielded a very, very innovative model and a lot of buzz. We want to see if it will scale.”

Maybe when more people are using it, there is a good chance someone will figure it out and explain to me how it is supposed to improve my online life. (If you want a good Google Wave Primer, check out this research note over on our subscription research service, GigaOM Pro.)

Amongst other things, Schmidt commented on media, news and bloggers, reminding me of what my mother once told me: it is better to keep quiet about things you don’t know much about. Just because they can sell online ads and do search, who do Googlers think they know everything about media and politics? Why do they think they have all the answers, when they can’t get more than half their products right?!

Photo courtesy of Charles Haynes via Flickr.

The great Skype legal mess is about to come to an end, thanks to a settlement between  eBay — and private investors led by Silver Lake Partners — and Skype co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. As part of the deal, the two Skype founders will get 10 percent of the company in exchange for allowing it to use the Global Index technology from their IP company, JoltID. They have an option to pay $83 million for another 3 percent of the new Skype. They will have two board seats on the 23-person board. These details were reported by Kara Swisher on her blog last night. I reported the news of a settlement this past weekend. Since then, more details have emerged that Index Ventures and Michael Volpi were both out of the deal.

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.

Ever since Blake Krikorian left Sling Media, the place shifting startup that he sold to Echostar for $380 million in September 2007, he’s been lying low. Instead of trying to build yet another startup, he has been spending time trying to put together a killer home entertainment system that uses HDMI-over-fiber, dozens of iPod touch devices and many Apple displays spread across his home. “It will either be a great thing or my family will hate me,” Krikorian joked when he stopped by in our office last week. This do-it-yourself project is a way for him to think about what he will do next.

And as he waits for inspiration to strike, Krikorian 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. He is also going to make a minority investment 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 close to $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.

“About two months ago, I started talking to Jim about Clicker and fell in love with the service,” Krikorian said. “I had no plans to be on any boards or work with any startups, even though I get asked often.” Blake said that he became a fanboy and saw the obvious need for a service such as Clicker.

In the traditional TV universe, with finite number of distribution channels, TV Guide did quite well, because it laid out available content as a grid, that could easily be thumbed through as a guide. In his research report, The Future of Pay Services, GigaOM Pro analyst Steve Hawley points to several efforts being made to streamline content discovery in the old television space. Online video is even more complex.

In the broadband world, where there is one giant distribution channel, the Internet, video discovery becomes a vexing problem. As more and more video becomes available on the web, discoverability of content becomes as important as publishing of video content. That was Lanzone’s basic premise when he described his company to me many months ago. There are quite a few efforts under way to solve this problem, as outlined by Chris in his GigaOM Pro feature (subscription required), but Clicker has proved to be a critical hit among its beta testers.

At the same time, Lanzone has to know that he is swimming with the sharks. The cable companies, content owners and TV networks are frenemies — allies at some times and mortal enemies at others. Krikorian has been through these same ups and downs with SlingMedia, and perhaps that is why Lanzone is excited to get him in his corner.

Lanzone, of course, doesn’t know what he has signed up for: Krikorian is going to be sending his team bug reports and product suggestions!

Photo of Blake Krikorian courtesy of UberGizmo.

There are no longer any doubts that T-Mobile has hitched its smartphone bandwagon to Google’s Android operating system. The company today said that it will be selling four Android-powered handsets to its (current and potential) customers during the vital holiday season. It is clear T-Mobile is hoping to sell a lot of smartphones. As part of its push, the company is making some plans regarding applications and application discovery. Here are some excerpts from their email pitch sent earlier today:

With the introduction of the T-Mobile myTouch 3G, T-Mobile created T-Mobile AppPack on Android Market, which features select 3rd party and T-Mobile made apps. T-Mobile recently refreshed AppPack with new, suggested applications – 34 apps in all, including a mix of free and paid apps. Later this month, the company will take this a step further by introducing a T-Mobile Channel on Android Market (that will be live by Thanksgiving), and Android Market (including the T-Mobile Channel) will soon feature carrier billing making it easier and more streamlined for customers with T-Mobile Android devices to purchase their favorite applications.

When I read that pitch, the first thing that came to my mind: hey isn’t that what the carrier decks of yore really used to be?

Carriers playing godfather to the fortunes of small companies in exchange for some baksheesh. Apps placed by them on the deck was how start-ups fortunes were decided. Carrier decks also were a way to sell premium applications and services. So how are T-Mobile channel and T-Mobile App Pack any different than the carrier deck? My inner skeptic says: not much!

Any thoughts folks?

Amazon HQ: Photo Snapped From Vulcan HQ in Seattle

So it is official: Apple says it has more than 100,000 apps in its iTunes App Store, a bit of news that was reported by AppShopper and Mobclix last week. In terms of landmarks, 100,000 is merely a number, soon to be forgotten as the amount of apps crosses 200,000 or a million or whatever. Why it matters is that these growing number of applications are making our smartphones more personal — even more personal than our PCs.

A mobile phone is more personal than a PC because it ties in our real identities, location and personality. It accords a level of intimacy that the browser-based web and our PCs don’t have. Unlike a toaster oven or a grill or a TV, a malfunctioning handset can make you so angry that you write a break-up letter and publish it with your phone. A missed call is the difference between a broken heart and happily ever after. An SMS can make you smile if it arrives on time. No other device in our life has the purity of a phone…and not just an iPhone.

Apple’s reluctant foray — don’t forget that for the longest time it said every service should be delivered via the web browser — into apps actually taps into the very emotional relationship we have with our devices. And that is why many people (if not all) don’t much care for being advertised to on this most personal of platforms. Apps have made an iPhone into an e-reader and a portable game machine. I predict that with the right apps it can also become a personal wellness device.

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But there is a flip side to the growth in the number of apps, and as a result, the Apple’s App Store juggernaut may face challenges including the Android platform, as previously noted.

As the number of apps continues to grow, the company will needs to focus on the discoverability of the applications. App discovery is vital for developers who need to sell applications in order to make money. If they don’t make money, then they shift loyalties to other platforms including Android, which is not going to be a pushover.

So what is Apple going to do next? It’s going to increase the “personal” quotient on its App Store. Think the genius feature on steroids! More app recommendations and more automatic discovery of apps based on our usage might be in our future.

Stay tuned!

There is a good likelihood that Skype; its founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis; and a group of private equity investors led by Silver Lake Partners are close to settling their legal disputes, allowing eBay to sell 65 percent of Skype for about $2 billion. I had first reported the news this past weekend. As part of the settlement, Zennstrom and Friis are likely to get a board representation, and there is some talk of Index Ventures being out of the deal as well.

Zennstrom and Friis have been locked in a bitter dispute over the use of the Global Index, a key technology owned by JoltID, a company jointly controlled by the Skype founders. eBay, in a stunning breach of fiduciary duty, didn’t buy this technology when it acquired Skype four years ago.

From the way it is understood, Zennstrom and Friis will have a board seat on the newly independent Skype, which would be allowed to use JoltID’s technology. In addition, there is a good chance that Index Ventures, one of the primary architects of the buyout, will not be part of the new deal. Mike Volpi, former CEO of Joost, isn’t likely to be part of the new enterprise.

I am not surprised that Index and Volpi have been left out in the cold. There’s no love lost between Skype co-founders and the Index group. If you read through some of the emails that were submitted along with legal documents filed in support of Joost’s case against Volpi and Index, then you know why.

Some details of the story were reported by the New York Times today. Please check out my previous report on the Skype’s legal fracas, as well, which includes a timeline of events.

If you’re as interested in the inner workings of the mobile phone business as I am, then there’s a good chance that you are familiar with Christian Lindholm, partner and director at Fjord, a convergence design agency — or if you are a mobile phone user who has bought a Nokia device over the past decade or so, then you at least have been exposed to his work. He invented the Nokia Navi-key user interface, and he’s viewed as the father of the Series 60 user interface.

Let’s just say Lindholm knows mobile user interfaces really well. In this video interview, he chats with me about the iPhone, Android, and the current problems Nokia faces. He discusses the Maemo platform, Nokia tablets, and how difficult it is to build a mobile operating system. Lindholm talks about why a typical mobile OS has a shelf life of nearly 10 years, and from that perspective, both Android and the iPhone have a good future. If you have time, watch this video interview with him.

Cisco Systems is going shopping again: It is buying the set-top box business of DVN Holdings, a company that is listed in Hong Kong and has major IPTV-related operations in China. Cisco recently announced its decision to buy video hardware maker Tandberg and 4G wireless hardware maker Starent for roughly $3 billion each. In comparison, this is a tiny deal: Cisco will pay up to $44.5 million for the set-top box business of DVN, the company said in a press release today. Approximately $17.5 million will be paid up-front, with an additional maximum amount of $27 million to be paid over four years based on the achievement of specific sales milestones. Cisco is a major player in the set-top box market in the U.S., thanks to its successful acquisition of Scientific Atlanta. By buying DVN’s set-top box business, Cisco is extending its reach into China, one of the key overseas markets it has earmarked for growth.

Digg and Slashdot were abuzz earlier this morning with the news that Skype was going to go open source. The buzz was based on a post on a French blog by Olivier Faurax. The news is true and false at the same time. “It is our intention to make Skype for Linux an open source app in the near future and make the UI source code available to the community at large. This should help to speed up the development process and enhance support for the myriad of Linux distros,” a spokesperson told us.

On the Skype blog, a spokesperson writes:

Yes, there’s an open source version of Linux client being developed. This will be a part of larger offering, but we can’t tell you much more about that right now. Having an open source UI will help us get adopted in the “multicultural” land of Linux distributions, as well as on other platforms and will speed up further development. We will update you once more details are available.

What that means is that the core protocol will not be open sourced and will remain closed. I think the point here is clear; a majority of the underlying technology for Skype service is owned by JoltID, a company controlled by Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. Skype and its founders are locked in a legal battle over the use of this technology.

It doesn’t look like Skype is going to open source its other clients. I think the ramifications of the Linux version being open sourced are pretty huge. An open source version of the client could lead to Skype being embedded in non-PC devices. One of the best examples of this marriage of Linux and Skype is the new Nokia N900 which uses the Maemo variant of Linux. Skype could be embedded in different Internet devices such as tablets that are being developed by various companies. In addition, it could also help Skype be prepared for new Linux-based OS variants such as Google Chrome OS.

All in all, it seems like a very smart move: the only question that remains is when will Skype actually do something?

Yesterday at the urging of a friend, I ordered “Your Brain at Work” by David Rock on my iPod touch via the Amazon Kindle app. In doing so, I became one of many people who are helping the iPhone become more than just a phone. It’s latest role: e-reader. Book-related apps saw an upsurge in launches in September, according to a survey conducted by Flurry, a San Francisco-based mobile application analytics company. So much so, that book-related applications overtook games in the App Store as a percentage of all released apps. The trend isn’t an aberration. In October, one out of every five new applications launching on the iPhone was a book, Flurry said.

Why is this important?

Because from August 2008 to the same month in 2009, more apps were released in the “games” category than any other and, as a result, the iPhone (and iPod touch) became a new handheld gaming platform, one that impacted Nintendo DS. The Japanese game device maker acknowledged that the iPhone and iPod touch were among the reasons why its profits declined drastically in the most recent quarter. Flurry emailed me some notes regarding its “Smartphone Industry Pulse” newsletter for October:

The sharp rise in e-book activity on the iPhone indicates that Apple is positioned to take market share from the Amazon Kindle as it did from the Nintendo DS. Despite the smaller form factor of the display, we predict that the iPhone will be a significant player in the book category of the media and entertainment space. Further, with Apple working on a larger tablet form factor, running on the iPhone OS, we believe Jeff Bezos and team will face significant competition.

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Since its launch, the iPhone has quickly mutated from an Internet-enabled smartphone to a gaming device — and now an e-reader. It is only a matter of time before someone figures out a new role for the iPhone. Unless the Apple Tablet becomes a reality, I think there is going to continue to be a market for dedicated e-readers, mostly because it is impossible to read large amounts of text on a smaller screen.

Related posts: “What Is It About e-Readers?” and “Will Publishers Ever Make Money Off e-Books?”

Related reports from GigaOM Pro (subscription required): “Evolution of the e-Book Market” and “How Barnes & Noble Can Avoid Getting Netflixed”

The ongoing legal scuffle between Skype, a division of eBay, and its founders, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, may soon see a resolution, according to someone familiar with the situation. The parties are in discussions to resolve the various issues. The talks are described to be at a sensitive stage and can break down without any conclusion. If the founders and the company can come to an agreement, Skype will be able continue to use JoltID’s technology to power Skype and not disrupt the service that is currently used by hundreds of millions consumers.

I have some further information on the talks, but I am currently trying to pin down the details, as well as waiting to hear back from Skype and other parties involved in the deal, including the Skype co-founders.  It was pretty evident from the get-go that Skype didn’t have any other option but to come to some sort of an understanding with the founders.

About two months ago, eBay announced that it was spinning out Skype, and the deal valued the Internet telephony division at $2.75 billion. Skype founders had been trying to find a way to buy back their startup, but instead, eBay decided to sell 65 percent of the company for nearly $2 billion to a group of investors led by Silver Lake Partners, Canada Pension Plan, Index Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. (Marc Andreessen declined to comment on the deal.)

Skype’s co-founders sued eBay, Skype, and pending investors for using Global Index, a core technology held by their company, JoltID. eBay, at the time it purchased Skype, didn’t buy the JoltID technology and instead opted for a long-term contract. The end of that contract has led to the current legal mess of suits and countersuits between eBay, new investors and Skype founders.

One of the key people in this deal was Mike Volpi, once regarded as the heir apparent at Cisco Systems. In his column today, San Jose Mercury News’ Chris O’Brien has more details about Volpi’s current spate of legal troubles. Volpi helped put together a deal that essentially made Skype founders sue him and the venture firm he joined in July of 2009, Index Ventures. If you read through the various emails exchanged between Volpi and Danny Rimer, a principal at Index Ventures, you can understand why the Skype founders are angry, especially since he was the CEO of Joost, a failed video startup founded by Skype’s  co-founders. Volpi was sued by Joost because, he “learned how to modify JoltID’s proprietary software to run on the web without the aid of a peer-to-peer software when he was transitioning Joost from a peer-to-peer service to a web-based Hulu clone.”

In October 2009, the two co-founders filed an injunction that made it virtually impossible for Skype to continue its spin-out. Stacey summed it up nicely:

In addition to preventing Volpi and Index from using confidential information in general, the injunction specifically asks that the judge keep Volpi and Index from using such information to operate Skype or engage in any strategic planning for the service; from talking about that info with the other members attempting to purchase Skype from eBay; from soliciting employees of Joost and Joltid with offers to join Skype; from communicating with current or former employees of Joost or Joltid regarding the companies’ confidential information; and from further participating in the Skype acquisition or assuming any position with Skype until a final adjudication of the merits of the case.

What that means is that in order for Skype to exist it had two options: Do a deal with the Skype founders, or switch to SIP-based architecture. The latter may be an expensive and difficult option. Skype faces various challenges if it tries to switch to using a SIP-based architecture, Ian Bell outlined in his post earlier today. Jeff Bonforte, former CEO of Gizmo5, disagrees and believes that challenges are not unsurmountable, as he outlines in a comment to Ian’s post.

I guess Skype’s buyers and current management might be going with option No. 1. I will be back with more details soon.

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!

Being not from around here (San Francisco), they got lost a little and that gave me an opportunity to walk around the mall. I had nothing in particular I needed except I had a few minutes to kill. For some odd reason I ended up in the Dockers’ company store. I say odd because I don’t wear Dockers’ pants – chinos or otherwise. My formal trousers are either Canali or custom made. And since I don’t need more than three pairs – gray, black and blue – I am okay splurging on these.

For everyday pants, I often order stuff from J. Crew, which has been consistently making great chinos. Sometimes when I am feeling adventurous I would buy casual pants from Brooks Brothers, but for me J.Crew is best value for money. What more they hem the pants to my exact specifications for free, which allows the pants to be a better fit.

Anyway, back to Dockers, a brand owned by Levi Strauss – I walked around the store and found a great pair of chinos that are just outstanding. I am not sure how they are going to stand the rigors of time, but the K-1 straight fit pants I tried out were perhaps the best fitting pants I have ever slipped on this year.

“Based on a vintage military pant from our archives, we included an authentic button fly and combat-ready cotton twill,” is how the company describes these pants that can set you back by about $68-a-pair. It is the unbelievable soft three-ply cotton twill that got me, and I was also taken in by the hook-and-eye front closure and the button fly. The only thing that doesn’t meet my standards – the deep front pockets, which look odd after you slip a blackberry and a bill fold.

Nevertheless, there is something timeless about these pants, reflecting a bygone era. Being a bit of a nostalgia-buff, I like these contemporary-spins on older fashions.

Beyond the K-1, it seems Dockers has updated the look of its entire line-up of pants, many of them priced right for today’s down economy, like $38 for a basic white shirt. I think it might be worth a visit, next time you are shopping for a pair of chinos.

I am celebrating the New York Yankees victory over Red Sox this past weekend by wearing these cuff-links made out of old New York subway tokens. I am sure I have more lying around in my storage box in New York.

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.

The big theme at our NewTeeVee Live conference last week was the coming mash-up of online video with the traditional TV services. Today, Grid Networks, a Seattle-based startup that uses P2P techniques to distribute videos, has released a new service, GridCast TV, that allows TVs to receive Internet video streams.

How it works is actually pretty simple. Any computer that has Grid’s plug-in installed can look for UPnP (universal plug and play) devices and then re-point the stream to the big screen television.

The new GridCast TV service can already reach over 35 million homes, because it leverages existing UPnP (universal plug and play) devices such as the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Internet-enabled TVs. The service doesn’t require a set-top box or any other additional hardware. Some Grid Networks customers, including Revision3, IndieFlix and havocTV, have already begun using GridCast TV to deliver high-value video to their viewers’ TVs, and others will follow in the weeks ahead.

Grid Networks raised $9.5 million from investors that include Panorama Capital, Cisco Systems and Comcast. The company has managed to get its P2P client software bundled in many products including gear from Cisco’s home networking products.

Related Post from GigaOM: Grid joins the P2P CDN Party.

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

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.