Score one to Saul Hansell of the New York Times. He recently pointed out that, in keeping with the minimalist aesthetic of its home page, Google did not provide a direct link to its online privacy policy - apparently in contravention of a California law requiring the policy to be only one click away.

Google’s initial response was to brush off the issue with the argument that anyone could easily find the policy from the search box, so that should satisfy the one-click rule.

Now it has changed its mind - though not its self-conscious minimalism. As Google exec Marissa Mayer explains today, the link to the privacy policy is now being added to Google.com - though only after first stripping another word off the home page to make room for it. Heaven forbid the wordcount should rise to 29.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Share This

Hancock, the intended blockbuster motion picture for the July 4 weekend, opened today to mixed reviews from the critics.

Just as well then that its maker Sony is looking for an impact in US homes as well as at the box office.

Stan Glasgow, Sony Electronics US president, told us at a press dinner in San Francisco last night that Hancock would be Sony’s first experiment with streaming a motion picture into the homes of buyers of its Bravia TV sets.

They would need to have bought a $299 World wide web Video Link accessory to attach to the Television and they’ll also have to pay a fee, yet to be determined, to watch the stream. Their viewing experience will be in standard definition as broadband speeds were not up to high-definition standards, said Mr Glasgow.

So the deal has about the same lukewarm attraction as the motion picture, except for the benefit of getting this streamed version ahead of the DVD release and a copy of the subsequent DVD being included in the price.

Sony states this is an industry first - getting a motion picture directly to the consumer from the content provider - but it also raises questions about Sony’s relationship with the middle man it threatens to cut out.

Sir Howard Stringer, chief executive, has been encouraging joined-up thinking by the different divisions of Sony. This means coming up with synergies that promote products, from a Sony Pictures movie encouraging users to purchase a Blu-ray player and high-definition Television or buying a games console to watch it on the PlayStation Network.

As well as this marketing network, Sony has a hardware target of having 90 per cent of its consumer electronics products featuring wired or wireless network connectivity by 2010, including Blu-ray players, cameras and its Reader digital book.

But will these work ideal with other Sony equipment using Sony standards or is the company fully embracing common industry standards?

Sony has put forward TransferJet for example, to compete with the Ultra Wide Band standard for short-range transmission of data. But Mr Glasgow insisted Sony’s goal in the future was to work on more open standards.

It also has to work with the industry on sharing access to content. When I asked about the eventual integration of the Internet Video Link into the TV, Mr Glasgow referred to the deal struck with US cable operators in Might.
All celebrations concurred to adopt Java-based tru2way as the national interactive “plug and play” standard that would enable interactive features such as video on demand.

He stated he expected both the Video Link accessory and cable boxes in future to be replaced by chips inside the Television.

This would mean content direct from Sony being offered alongside the video-on-demand services of the cable operators in a shared interface.

“The consumers deserve to make the choice of what content they want to watch, it shouldn’t be dictated by the cable companies,” said Mr Glasgow.

“Part of the agreement we have with them is we’re able to integrate on that [interface] front page to allow consumers to make those choices. That was a very critical part of the agreement.”

This sounds like another industry first - competing on-demand services on the same screen as cable technologies merge with internet-protocol streaming. In theory, the consumer could choose to watch Hancock delivered by Sony or by the cable operator, based on whoever offers the cheaper price.

Of course, Sony Photos may not make its movies available to cable operators for video-on-demand in order to help its streaming service. That would be a real test of revenue models and the extent Sir Howard anticipates his divisions to help one another.

Share This

Popularity: 5% [?]

Share This

Intel celebrates its 40th anniversary this month, but in Moore’s Law fashion it is doubling down on its future more than looking back at its past.

Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and a 29-year veteran, stated yesterday he had planted a few trees to mark the occasion but he preferred to look ahead to how the world’s biggest chipmaker could maintain its dominance and technological momentum.

In a briefing for the semiconductor press, he talked about how, like a foggy road with 100-yard visibility, there was always 10 years of visibility opening up ahead on how Moore’s Law and miniaturisation could be extended.

Chip circuit widths were currently moving from 65 to 45 billionths of a metre and there was a clear path to 32, 22, 14-15 and even below 10 nanometres, he said. “Beyond that, we’re not sure yet.”

The size of the circular wafers that chips are cut from will actually grow from 300mm in diameter to 450mm between 2010 to 2015, in order to provide greater economies in manufacturing, giving savings of up to 40 per cent.

But the cost of the retooling will force consolidation and reduce the number of chip manufacturers to less than 10, he predicted.

“We used to have 100s of companies that built fabs, this day we have tens of companies and, as we make this move, you’ll see single-digits of [manufacturers].”

There had been only three successful business models - large-scale production of a commoditised memory product as typified by Samsung, the foundry model of companies such as Taiwan’s TSMC and the vertically integrated model of Intel, he said.

It is no coincidence that those three companies announced in May that they were collaborating on leading the industry transition to 450mm wafers.

Mr Gelsinger stated Intel spent more than $7bn on plant and equipment when it switched from 200mm to bigger 300mm wafers in 2001 and it would cost more to go to 450mm.

Everybody investing less than $1bn a year in new fabs was falling off the rate needed to maintain the pace of Moore’s Law in shrinking transistors and growing wafer sizes, he stated, hinting that Intel’s biggest rival, Advanced Micro Devices, would not be able to make the step up to 450mm.

AMD said in April it planned $900m in capital expenditure this year.

Silicon, the material that the semiconductor industry has built its success on, will be used more as scaffolding in the future, Mr Gelsinger stated.

Only six elements of the periodic table were used when Intel made its first chips in the 60s, but Mr Gelsinger stated more than half the periodic table ( of 117 elements) was now being used and this number would grow.

Germanium was being used to bend silicon and high-k metal gates using hafnium had been developed, with carbon nanotubes a possible material for the future.

But silicon would still remain, he stated.

“This will all evolve on top of that silicon scaffolding and that’ll continue for as far as we can see into the future.”

Share This

Popularity: 6% [?]

Share This

When I met legendary rocker Neil Young recently, he was pretty disparaging about iTunes. It’s like all new digital media technologies, he said: great for convenience, but the sound quality sucks (since I’ve a tin ear when it comes to music, I’ll leave others to judge the validity of that comment. But Peter Gabriel, another musician who’s been working on new ideas for distributing digital music, certainly concurs.)

Young let slip that he’s now talking to record companies about licensing an substitute digital platform that he has been working on - something , he claimed, of far higher quality that could provide an substitute to the privacy-prone download world, and perhaps even a new business model for music.

The technology behind this was first shown off last month at Sun’s JavaOne conference (we blogged about it here.) Young, who is something of a techie, has spent 15 years experimenting with different technologies to assemble a complete archive of his career. He is now finally ready to release the first multi-media instalment. It will come out on Blu-ray discs, with the ability of adding extra content in future through downloads.

Bemoaning the fact that he can never keep a secret, Young told me he was now trying to promote this as a broader media platform:

We’re in discussions right now about developing our own media platform based on that. Something record companies can sell their artists’ works on. Something that can’t be downloaded, something that’s got much more depth.

It has each media component you could want, and they’re all married together in a platform. That means other artists could use it, other record companies could use it and gain the knowledge of our 15-year development curve.

This needn’t be limited to music, according to Young.

How about the history of the Civil War? How about the British Empire? If you’ve a career spanning 40 years, maybe it’s George Washington’s life. It could be a lot of things.

There’s so much to this that we can’t tell, that you can’t see in one sitting. Maybe there’s a structure there that could save the music business - a new thing, where it is creating new products.

When it comes to convenience, speed and low cost, though, iTunes (and piracy) take a lot of beating.

Share This

Popularity: 6% [?]

Share This

I like the extra desktop space of having two monitors on my desk, but I am suffering screen-envy at what Nasa scientists can now feast their eyes on at Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.

The 128-screen hyperwall-2, unveiled on Wednesday, is capable of rendering 250m-pixel graphics and is “the world’s highest resolution scientific visualisation and data exploration environment.”

The liquid crystal display wall is 23 feet wide and 10 feet tall. It allows high-resolution examination of simulations such as global weather and black-hole collisions.

The set up is 100 times more powerful than the first version of the hyperwall installed in 2002, with 49 screens. Nasa says it has “128 graphics processing units and 1,024 processor cores, with 74 teraflops (one teraflop equals one trillion floating point operations per second) of peak processing power and a data storage capacity of 475 terabytes (one terabyte equals one trillion bytes).”

That equates to the graphics power of 600 video game consoles.

Presumably, Advanced Micro Devices had a hand in this as a partner of Colfax International, the installer. I find this much more impressive than its Cinema 2.0 demonstration last week, where AMD dubiously claimed a new milestone in cinema with its latest graphics cards.

The Nasa hyperwall seems a supernova in comparison.

Share This

Popularity: 9% [?]

Share This

The most financially successful virtual worlds are not 3D and sophisticated, but flat and appealing to younger audiences.

Think Neopets, Webkinz, Club Penguin and Runescape, not Second Life.

Habbo, whose graphics are reminiscent of the Code Monkeys cartoon and 8-bit 80s video games, announced today that its 100-millionth avatar had been created.

That does not translate as 100m active members - the service had 10.3m unique visitors in May, according to comScore - but it is still an impressive indication of the growth of the service since its launch in Finland eight years ago.

Financial comparisons are difficult. Electronic Arts announced in April that it had sold 100m units of the The Sims, the video-game precursor to online virtual worlds. Blizzard Entertainment said in January it had passed 10m paying monthly subscribers for its World of Warcraft online game.

The companies do not break out the hard cash they make from these properties and neither does Sulake, the privately held Finnish company that owns Habbo and dropped the “Hotel” from Habbo Hotel in 2006.

However, it did reveal today it was “on track to reach our projected revenue goal of $85m, which indicates a healthy profit for the company” in 2008.

Teemu Huuhtanen, executive vice president of marketing, ad sales and business development, told me he thought Habbo was the largest independent virtual world, following Disney’s acquisition of Club Penguin for $700m last year, with its more than 20m users.

Monthly visitors are up 51 per cent on a year ago in Habbo’s 32 communities worldwide.

” I think the biggest reason for the growth is the redesign we did in October/November focusing on easy access and play, making sure that anyone without previous knowledge of virtual worlds could come to the web site and create their own character and start exploring,” he said.

Habbo has also partnered with movie studios and brands to help make the site more relevant to its teen target audience.

Around 85 per cent of revenues come from users paying for virtual items in the world, but advertising and sponsorship is expected to take a bigger share this year as the medium matures.

The maturity of its users does create a churn problem for Habbo. While Second Life may lose users because of the level of difficulty they face, Habbo members simply grow up and move on to more adult virtual worlds.

“Every year we need to reach the users in each market that turn 13, so it’s like a constant flow of new customers for us,” said Mr Huuhtanen.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Share This

It’s going to be a couple more weeks before the 3G iPhone makes its way to the shelves of Apple stores, but thanks to analysts at iSuppli, we now have a decent idea of how much it costs Apple to make each new handset.

ISuppli’s “virtual teardown”* of the latest iPhone, which landed in my inbox today, puts the cost of an assembled 3G iPhone at $173. That’s 23 per cent lower than the best estimate of what it costs to make the existing 8GB iPhone.

For Apple, a 23 per cent drop in cost could lead to fatter margins, in spite of its decision to abandon the iPhone’s earlier unsubsidised $499 price tag in favour of a subsidised price of $199. As iSuppli writes:

“The size of the subsidy paid by the wireless carriers to Apple will be about $300 per iPhone, iSuppli estimates. That means that with subsidies from carriers, Apple will be selling the 8MB version of the second-generation iPhone to carriers at an effective price of about $499 per unit, the same as the original product.”

Some of Apple’s extra margin will be pared by loss of a share of operators’ subscription revenues, an early concession that Apple has agreed to drop with the 3G iPhone. Some estimates had put Apple’s share of subscription fees at 10 per cent for the first-generation version.

In choosing to revert to a traditional subsidy-based model for the new iPhone, operators seem to be willing to take a short term hit in hopes that service and data fees for the 3G iPhone will be higher than those for iPhone 1.0.  If iSuppli’s analysis is right, Apple stands to make out well regardless.

*ISuppli analysts arrived at their $173 figure by getting on the phone with suppliers and supply chain analysts to develop an educated guess about what was likely to go into the new iPhone, and how much it was likely to cost. The final estimate did not include other costs, like the cost of software development, shipping, and packaging, iSuppli said.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Share This

Moo, the maker of cool calling-cards for the Web 2.0 generation, has had to turn a little square for its move into the business market.

Its new business cards, announced today, are more conventionally sized than the MiniCards it pioneered with up to 100 different photos on the reverse, selected by users from online photo galleries such as Flickr.

“It’s the most requested product we’ve had. People say ‘What I really want is a square one,’” says Richard Moross, Moo’s founder.
“It’s a larger more sympathetic canvas for pictures and designs and it’s much more accepted as a standard.”

Mr Moross can also square this change to addressing the much larger business market with the evolution of the use of Moo cards, from featuring Second Life avatars to advertising small businesses.

“We started as a business thinking how people were going to convey their virtual identity offline, but I think people’s virtual and real selves are much closer than we thought and to that end the professional use of the cards has really driven the demand.”

Mr Moross says Moo’s Printfinity™ variable print technology is still unique in the industry and lends itself to business applications where companies can show a range of products or brand statements on the back of the cards.

Moo ships from the UK and  is based in London. It has  printed around 10m MiniCards in the past year and has shipped  to 181 countries since it’s launch in September 2006. Around 55 per cent of its sales come from North America and French Italian, German and Spanish versions have just been launched.

The privately-held company has yet to reveal any financial numbers but has set its sights on challenging  VistaPrint, the Nasdaq-listed online printing company.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Share This

Twitter, the service that wisely restricts blog posts to 140 characters or less, has finished its much-anticipated third-round VC funding.

That’s 139 characters, so I should stop right there. Except to tell you that Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder, is now an investor, as is Spark Capital, the Boston VC firm, whose Bijan Sabet will take a perch on Twitter’s board.

Existing investors – New York’s Union Square Ventures and Tokyo-based Digital Garage – also took part in the round, but no figures or valuation for the company were revealed.

Twitter has suffered significant downtime of late as its popularity has grown. Biz Stone, co-founder, stated in a blog note that the funding would help the company focus on its infrastructure to make Twitter “reliable and robust”.

Revenues and profitability would have to wait until Twitter had reached its vision of becoming a “global communication utility,” he said.

Share This

Popularity: 9% [?]

Share This

It looks as though Google is about to hand more ammunition to the critics who claim that it is fast gaining excessive power in the digital advertising industry.

A spokesperson for the company says that on Tuesday it will announce a new Web measurement tool to give advertisers a better idea of the true size of online audiences. This sort of information is badly needed - as we reported before, there are big disagreements over the way companies like comScore and Nielsen assess the size of a particular Website’s audience, and the row that has been raging over this issue has damaged what little credibility they had left.

Google should be in a better position than most to provide an accurate picture. While no details are available yet, one person close to the initiative says the analysis will come from data pulled directly from servers - both Google’s and those of third parties.

The new measurement tool will not be offered separately, our source says, but will be built into Google’s own media planning service. That suggests that only advertisers who run their campaigns on Google will get the extra insight. If so, this is a textbook example of how Google’s superior access to data could help it tighten its grip on digital advertising.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Share This