Archive for: May 14, 2009

Add F-Secure to the ranks of vendors offering unlimited online backup.

The security company on Thursday said it had begun offering F-Secure Online Backup, a $49.99 products that offers unlimited online backup from a single PC.

While it sounds fantastic, PCMag.com analysts Michael Muchmore and Neil Rubenking point out that both MozyHome ($4.95 per month) and Carbonite ($54.95 annually) both offer the same capabilities. All three may be somewhat affected by the speed of your Internet connection, however.

F-Secure allows a user to back up from either a Mac or a PC to a secured remote server, and view the stored files via a Web connection. Users can either restore the files on their own PC, or to a different computer.

In November 2008, Adobe announced Flash Media Server 2.5, designed to increase the quality of video delivered over the Web. Included in it is a nifty new feature designed to allow pausing and seeking within live, streaming Webcasts. You know, the ones that normally don't allow you to pause and seek.

Dave Zatz pointed me to the topic, but according to Adobe, didn't quite get it right: the functionality has been available since the product's launch. But later this month, Adobe will release a "sample bit of code to help customers get started with DVR functionality in Adobe Flash Media Server."

The code, known as DVRCast, will be available later in the month at www.adobe.com/go/fms_tools, the Adobe spokeswoman said. Additional features include: dynamic streaming, enhanced H.264 video, and High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio support. It also includes multipoint publishing, such as the ability to inject data messages into a live stream, she said.

To enable DVRCast, a customer must purchase the software at a list price of $4,500. So far, Limelight Networks has endorsed the DVRCast functionality; I haven't seen any other content providers publicly support it, but it's an intriguing, customer-facing feature that will probably be one of the software's top selling points, I would imagine.

Amazon has set up a new program called Kindle Publishing for Blogs Beta for its popular e-book reader. The program makes it possible to access any blog on the device, once its publisher creates an account and makes their blog feed available on the Kindle Store. The full process takes between 12 to 48 hours.

Amazon gets to set the access price for the blog, generally between $0.99 and $1.99 a month, and the blog's owner keeps 30 percent of the revenue made on the blog.

If you can't beat 'em, clone 'em. Yahoo is reportedly getting ready to unveil a micro-blogging service called Yahoo Meme, perhaps hoping to do for Twitter what Buzz did for Digg. Screen shots of the service have popped up bearing the tagline, "Do not have time nor patience for blogging? So Meme is tailored for you. Wait."

The service lets users compose messages of up to 140 characters. Also offered in Yahoo Meme are search and links to multimedia. Sound familiar? TechCrunch sure thinks so. Perhaps most interesting about the service is the fact that Yahoo seems to be testing it out in Brazil, which is why the screens are in Portuguese.

Need a quick price check on that MP3 player or HDTV, but don't feel like typing in the product name into your mobile phone? Google on Thursday announced that it has integrated barcode scanning into Google Product Search for mobile.

"Sometimes, when I'm looking up a specific item in a store rather than a category of products (like "bluetooth headsets"), I'd rather just scan a barcode to see results for the exact product I'm searching for," Eiji Hirai, a software engineer with the Google Mobile team, wrote in a blog post.

The company launched Product Search for mobile for iPhones and Android devices several weeks ago; barcode scanning is thus far only available on Android phones.

To access, download the latest Barcode Scanner app from the Android Market, if you do not already have it. Next, type Google.com in your mobile browser and selecting "Shopping" from the "more" tab. Select Product Search and tap on the "Scan Barcode" button.

"After the app opens, center the red line over the barcode and hold the phone steady. When the barcode is read successfully, you'll see a Google Product Search results page back in the browser," Hirai wrote. There is also a scanner button on top of the Product Search results page.

"Today, barcode scanning works best for products like electronics, books, movies or video games, but we're working on adding more barcodes for other items," he said. "Of course, if your scan does not return a result, you can always type in the product name just as before."

The app is available in the U.K. and the U.S.

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It appears that ABC made a wise choice when it decided to put its content on Hulu. Total streams on the video site increased 490 percent year-over-year, according to Thursday data from Nielsen. Hulu recorded 373.3 million video streams in April 2009, up from 63.2 million in April 2008.

"Historically short form, clip-length video has ruled streaming on the Web--as demonstrated by YouTube's top spot month after month," Jon Gibs, vice president for media & analytics at Nielsen Online, wrote in a blog post. "Hulu, along with pure-play providers like Veoh and the TV networks, have spent the past two years trying to convince consumers that the Internet can be a good place to watch full length programming as well. April's strong showings of Hulu, Fox, and ABC suggest that consumers are beginning to listen."

Google-owned YouTube was still at the top, with about 5.5 billion streams last month. That is an increase of 35.5 percent from last year.

Yahoo came in at number three, with about 204 million streams, though that was an 8.1 percent decrease from last year. Fox Interactive Media, which includes MySpaceTV, also saw a 38.8 percent decline with 201 million total streams for April.

ABC last month announced that it will become a joint venture partner and equity owner of Hulu, currently a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp.

Hulu viewers watched 380 million videos in March 2009, according to comScore. That accounts for 2.6 percent of all Web video, and 4.9 percent of all minutes spent watching online video. Hulu attracted about 41.5 million viewers in March, who watched an average of 9 videos while on the site.

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Google on Thursday blamed a system error for service disruptions that took down many of its services earlier this morning.

"An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our Web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam," Urs Hoelzle, senior vice president of operations, wrote in a blog post. The problem started at 7:48 A.M. Pacific time and lasted for about an hour, he said.

Hoelzle said about 14 percent of Google users were affected by the outage--experiencing either slow service or complete disruptions. "We've been working hard to make our services ultrafast and 'always on,' so it's especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens," he wrote. "We're very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we'll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won't happen again."

Google likened the problem to an air traffic control backup.

"Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia. And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected," Hoelzle wrote. "That's basically what happened to some of our users today. All planes are back on schedule now," he concluded.

MasterCard announced that it will launch its Mobile MoneySend on-demand payment system in the U.S. later this month, according to FierceMobileContent.
What's that? It will enable banks to let their customers send and receive funds via SMS, the mobile Web, or downloadable mobile and PC applications, by linking their mobile phone number to a Bancorp-MasterCard prepaid card, the report said. MasterCard and Obopay developed the system together; it's already in use in 17 other countries, mostly in the Asia-Pacific region.
MasterCard has been pushing the use of mobile devices lately. Last month, the company announced ATM Hunter, an iPhone app that lets customers find nearby ATMs by keying in their address, airport code, or (if so equipped) automatically via the iPhone 3G's built-in GPS radio. There's also PayPass (pictured), a mobile payment trial the company ran a while back in NYC, and later, Dallas and some other cities.

The hysteria surrounding this morning's Google outage might work to Netflix's advantage. The DVD rental service also experienced problems last night: Members who tried to access Netflix Watch Instantly on PCs or Macs were unable to do so between 8 P.M. and 1 A.M. Eastern time.

Movies and TV shows were still available on Netflix ready devices such as the Xbox 360, Roku, LG Electronics and Samsung Blu-ray disc players, and TiVo HD DVR. Jessie Becker, vice president of marketing, said in a blog post.

Netflix will offer a credit to users who could not access Watch Instantly. But don't try to get a credit if you weren't online last night--Netflix will contact affected users via e-mail.

Is everyone OK? Take deep breaths. Google appears to be back online.

An outage that at first appeared to only affect Google News also hit other Google Services such as Gmail and Search, spreading panic across the Web--and on Twitter, of course. By 2 P.M. Eastern time, Google said it had the problem under control.

"The issue affecting some Google services has been resolved," the company said in a statement. "We're sorry for the inconvenience, and we'll share more details soon."

Google this morning rolled out updates to Google News to add YouTube video links to the service. But those who tried to access the site between 6:30 A.M. and 10 A.M. Eastern time were met with error messages. Google acknowledged the outage and apologized for the disruption, but its troubles were apparently just beginning.

Google's Apps Status Dashboard soon noted service disruptions, though not outages, with Google Sites, Gmail, and Calendar.

Users soon took to Twitter, utilizing the #googlefail hashtag, to complain about disruptions with Gmail, Google Talk, and Search itself. Theories ran the gamut, with the Twitter faithful blaming everything from AT&T to last night's season finale of "Lost".

One user suggested that the outage might help Wolfram Alpha, a new search engine set to go live on Friday.

ZDNet wrote several hours ago that the problem might have been an AT&T routing issue, but found later that it also affected providers such as NTT and Qwest, not just AT&T.

This is not the first problem to hit Gmail this year. The e-mail service went down in late February and again just a few weeks later.

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With over one billion apps downloaded, surely Apple has been making a mint off of the iPhone App Store, right? Well, not exactly--not when you factor in the amount of free apps available and the percent that Apple actually skims off of the paid programs.

Lightspeed Venture Partners has been crunching the numbers, trying to figure out exactly how much the company has made off the brisk app sales. Accord to the firm, the number of actual paid apps sold likely comes out in the 25-60 million range. If Apple gets a 30 percent cut of all of those apps, which sell at a median of $2.65, the company has made somewhere in the range of $20 to 45 million.

Now that's not exactly an astronomical number for a company of Apple's size, especially given the total number of apps downloaded thus far. Still, considering the backseat Apple gets to take in the design of said apps, it's still a pretty sweet fallout. But in the end, Apple has always been more interested in the platform than the apps themselves. Apple sells iPhones, first and foremost, and the popularity of the App Store, paid or otherwise, can only help things on that front.

T-Mobile and NBA Digital unveiled a live streaming video application for Android-powered smartphones, one that gives fans access to four separate video channels throughout this year's NBA Eastern Conference finals, according to MediaPost.
The 99-cent app, called "T-Mobile Close Up: NBA Eastern Conference Finals," includes live camera angles and post-game video highlights throughout the semifinals and finals. Users can also access extra content online via NBA.com's TNT Overtime Extra, where a so-called "mosaic player" will display four live streaming camera angles simultaneously, the report said.
Assuming it works as advertised, this is pretty powerful stuff--and shows how a cell phone video app can offer something different than the usual, repackaged graphics, dated clips, wallpapers, and ringtones you hear about every day.