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Look, I’m all for privacy, liberty, rights, etc. But this video (embedded below) is pretty ridiculous. Listening to this, you’d think Google was born of a desire to trick everyone on the planet. Does Google make almost all of its money off of ad revenues? Yes. But does that mean they’re out to screw you by any means necessary? No.

The video even delves into Google Buzz and its privacy debacle. But it implies that the issue stems from Google’s desire to control you. Really, it’s just that Google can’t seem to comprehend social, and was rushed into rolling out Buzz, and handled it very poorly.

The bottom line is that if you really think Google is out to get you, you shouldn’t be using it — at all. In fact, they have a new analytics opt-out feature that is probably right up your alley. But you also probably shouldn’t be using the Internet at all, because all of these companies are doing basically the same thing to varying degrees.

Maybe Google wants to murder you, but I don’t know, I’d bet that they’re not going to.

Google may have hired Plaxo’s Chief Technology Officer Joseph Smarr late last year, but it’s Yahoo that’s finally adding the 8-year old idea of turning the address book model upside down and letting people subscribe to it rather than keep their own quickly outdated lists. They’ve launched a new feature called “Share my info” in Yahoo Contacts that is, like the old Plaxo product, a way to subscribe to contact information and have it automatically updated.

Instead of updating your friends’ contact information when it changes, your friends just do it for themselves and then everyone with permission to get that information automatically has their address book updated.

It saves a lot of hassle and it was brilliant when Plaxo launched it in 2002.

But it never really caught on with the masses and most people today are stuck with address books that are little better than they had a decade ago. Plaxo’s spamming problem probably didn’t help gain user trust, which was part of the problem. But Plaxo also lacked other features like email to make it a really useful place hold your address book.

Syncing products bring the promise of contacts Shangri La, but they never quite seem to work. I still maintain a desktop address book synced with Mobile Me as well as Google Contacts synced with my phone, and it’s a huge mess of duplicate contacts and outdated information.

There’s also a bunch of independent contact information for some of my friends over on Facebook. And in fact that’s often the most reliable data for older contacts because they keep it updated themselves. It’s very similar, in fact, to the Plaxo model. I’m “subscribed” to them via mutual friendship and it can be turned off at any time.

I hope Google starts doing this soon as well, simply because that’s the closest thing to a master contact list that I have in the cloud. And at some point someone has to solve the problem of syncing contact information and other data across company platforms. Yes, I know a ton of startups have tried this, but no one has quite gotten it dead simple and right.

We’re still going through these recently released YouTube/Viacom litigation documents, and it’s becoming clear that we can’t take everything that’s being said by either party at face value (as if we didn’t know that already). We’ve come across a good example. In Viacom’s document Statement of Undisputed Facts, it presented the following seemingly damning passage that indicates that YouTube co-founder Steve Chen was advocating pirating movies (a quote that’s now appearing in quite a few news articles). But Viacom may be misrepresenting the evidence. Here’s their version:

In a July 29,2005 email about competing video websites, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen wrote to YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, “steal it!”, and Chad Hurley responded: “hmm, steal the movies?”

Steve Chen replìed: “we have to keep in mind that we need to attract traffic. how much traffic will we get from personal videos? remember, the only reason why our traffic surged was due to a video of this type. . . . viral videos will tend to be THOSE type of videos.”

The quote seems to be referring to full-length movies, though viral videos are mentioned (it’s unclear in this context whether they’re saying movies will go viral, or if they’re talking about traditionally more viral video clips). As it turns out, it’s the latter. And they were probably joking about it. Here’s the actual Email thread, in chronological order:

SUBJECT: Re:http://www.filecabi.net/

Jul 29, 2005  1:05 AM, Steve Chen wrote:

steal it!

Jul 29, 2005 1 :25 AM, Chad Hurley wrote:

hmm, steal the movies?

Jul 29, 2005 1 :33 AM, Steve Chen wrote:

haha ya.

or something.

just something to watch out for. check out their alexa ranking.
-s

Jul 29, 2005 7:45 AM, Chad Hurley wrote:

hmm, i know they are getting a lot of traffic… but it’s because they are a stupidvideos.com-type of site. they might make enough money to pay hosing bills, but sites like this and big-boys.com will never go public. I would really like to build something more valuable and more useful. actually build something that people will talk about and changes the way people use video on the internet.

Jul 29 2005 6:51 AM, Steve Chen wrote:

right, i understand those goals but, at the same time, we have to keep in mind that we need to attract traffic. how much traffic will we get from the personal videos? remember, the only reason why our traffic surged was due to a video of this type.
i’m not really disagreeing with you but i also think we shouldn’t be so high & mighty and think we’re better than these guys. viral videos will tend to be THOSE type of videos.
-s

Jul 29 2005 6:56 AM, Steve Chen Wrote:

another thing. still a fundamental difference between us and most of those other sites. we do have a community and it’s ALL user generated content.

-s

It’s worth pointing out that the subject of the Email thread was ‘http://www.filecabi.net’, and that big-boys.com is now Break.com — it’s pretty clear that Chen and Hurley are referring to the brief, dumb sort of videos that often go viral as opposed to full length movies. And, based on the ‘haha’ comment (which is ommitted from Viacom’s document), Chen and Hurley may have just been joking about stealing any content at all.

This doesn’t clear YouTube by any means (there are still plenty of other suspect quotes).  But it casts some doubt on the rest of Viacom’s ‘undisputed facts’.

I’m hopelessly addicted to Push Notifications on the iPhone. Unfortunately, the system is flawed, in that the more notifications you get, the worse the experience is because it can be hard to manage them all. And one reason I always have the iPhone on me, even when taking around an Android phone, is that there’s no good way to get my notifications on another device. A new startup may offer a solution for both of those problems.

Notifo is a Y Combinator-backed company launching today. While it’s currently only available as an iPhone app, the plan is to eventually roll out to all the major mobile platforms, starting with Android and BlackBerry soon. And while the current app may seem pretty barebones, the power resides underneath; it’s a platform.

Notifo’s API makes it very, very simple for any site to insert a few lines of code in their site and offer Push Notifications very quickly. There is no approval process, you simply insert the code and you’re good to go; your site is now notification-ready.

What’s great about this solution is that it’s creating a way to get all the notifications in one place, rather than having to manage a dozen (or in my case, more) apps all with their own notifications. This way, when you load up the Notifo app, you get a stream of all the notifications you’ve chosen to subscribe to. You could get notifications about new TechCrunch posts, or even when someone responds to a comment you made on TechCrunch, for example.

The idea is similar to one of my favorite iPhone apps, Boxcar, but again, this is more about the underlying idea of notification syndication. Boxcar is more about setting up and managing notifications across a range of services they choose — and it’s iPhone-only. Notifo should let you fairly easily set up notifications for just about anything, on any device.

While they wait for others to adopt the idea (so far, Listia has), Notifo set up a few services so people can use it with the iPhone right now. For example, Push.ly allows you to get notifications for all Twitter mentions of your name. And there is a simple March Madness final score notifier that has been giving me updates all day as tournament games end, with their final scores. You can also set alerts for when individual stocks hit certain prices.

And the service also allows you to send yourself timed alerts, which are easily set up from the Notifo website.

Notifo is the work of Chad Etzel, a developer who was formerly doing some work for Twitter.

You can find the free app in the App Store here.

Plastic Jungle, a marketplace for gift cards, has secured $7.4 million in Series B funding, led by Redpoint Ventures with Shasta Ventures Bay Partners, First Round Capital and other investors participating. This brings the company’s total funding to $13.4 million.

Plastic Jungle lets you buy, sell and exchange gift cards online. Instead of receiving cash for your gift card, Plastic Jungle also lets you trade the value in for an Amazon gift card or give your money to charity. Users can receive cash for unwanted gift cards for up to 92% of the unused balance and buy gift cards at up to a 30% discount. The company says that it will use the funds to accelerate product development and work on other ways to create supply and demand for gift cards on the site.

While Plastic Jungle didn’t reveal revenue numbers, the company’s CEO Garry Briggs says that its revenue is eight times more that what it was a year ago. Briggs also said that “millions” of dollars have flown through the marketplace since the company’s launch two years ago. Plastic Jungle faces competition from CardPool and others.

I’m at the NewsMorphosis Conference in Hawaii today locked in a day of debates about the state of news quality and how the hell we find a business model to keep paying for it. It’s a big issue locally– earlier this year three of Hawaii’s five largest TV news stations merged operations and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin is  merging with the other daily paper the Honolulu Advertiser, resulting in plenty of layoffs and general civic concern.

So it’s fitting that the conference ended with a talk by John Temple, the editor of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s new Peer News site, a test case in how the future of local news could work. And thankfully, we finally got a few more details on the site and the approach.

Temple was clear to say “there is no silver bullet” when it comes to fixing the media business, but also sees a great deal of hope in the volatility– this from the guy who was head of the now shuttered Rocky Mountain News, a paper that’s already gone through what so many dailies are dreading.

“We’re not trying to reinvent a local newspaper and put it on the Web,” he said. Indeed, the mission of Peer News doesn’t even contain the words “news” or “media” or “paper.” It’s simply “to create a new civic square.” Core to the development of Peer were three questions:

-What is the role of a free press in a democracy?

-How would you best fulfill that on a local level using all the tools available today?

-How do you do that in a sustainable way?

On content, the most interesting thing Temple talked about was doing away with “articles” as we know them. He criticized the static, episodic nature by which journalists have traditional covered news, challenging readers to hunt through archives for the information they want. Instead, Peer’s “building block” will be a page that’s always updated almost like Wikipedia, or as he put it, “something closer to a living history on a topic that changes as it develops.” There will no longer be a sense of “missing” an article, because the “articles” will be living things. That also addresses the critique that local news swarms around one issue, then moves on. “We’re not going to be hot topic driven,” Temple says. Going back to those questions, Temple says the role of a free press is to inform citizens so they can make intelligent decisions. “Let’s stop making it so difficult,” he said.

The other hallmark of Peer’s approach is what has made blogs popular– a sense of community. But it’s certainly a different approach. For one thing, Peer won’t have “reporters” in the classical sense, it will have “hosts” who help facilitate this civic square answering questions for the community.  “In this era, the fact that newspapers still rewrite press releases is an embarrassment,” Temple said. “We’re not going to be stenographers. I think that’s a downfall of journalism.”

But for a site that intends to be very community oriented, there was one big shocker: Peer will not have comments. “(Comments) descend into racism, hate, ugliness and reflect badly on news organizations that have them,” said Temple. Why? Because people do not have to show their faces when they comment so there’s no sense of responsibility, he argued. “We think anonymity is a huge problem when it comes to comments,” he said.

Temple also emphasized that the coverage would not pull punches: “We’re going to call things like we see them. We think there’s real value in taking a stand.”

So what about that business model? As Temple noted, there aren’t that many business models out there to chose from. Unlike most media sites, this will be a member site that people “value and will pay for.” He added “advertising would not be a key focus for us.”

Peer should be launching early next quarter, so we’ll be able to see more of these ideas in action soon. But it’s clear that the site– or “news service” as it prefers to call itself– is taking a markedly different approach from old and what we consider “new” media right now.

And with the benefit of some of these details, it seems less out of step for Omidyar to be starting this company. EBay, after all, was one of the first sites to powerfully leverage community on the Web, pioneering a lot of the systems of trust and reputation we still use today.

(More on Temple’s blog here.)

There has always been a vibrant ecosystem around financial data. Financial institutions, such as hedge funds and investment banks, pay thousands of dollars for quantitative tabular data (financial data in spreadsheets). But now, the web has provided a mechanism to distribute and publish large amounts of data, but much of this data is raw (meaning, it’s not built into a spreadsheet format) and hard to find in a Google search. An finding the data, and then putting the data into a format that is easy to digest can be a laborious task. Y Combinator’s Data Marketplace is hoping to change this by providing a platform where financial professionals can request data sets and then data aggregators/consultants can then find and format the appropriate data.

Founded by two former analysts at investment banks, Data Marketplace is essentially the middleman in helping financial organizations find quality data on the web. Users can submit requests to Data Marketplace, and the site will send those requests to its database of 200,000 data aggregators, programmers, and consultants who specialize in finding financial data and essentially transferring it into a readable format.

Providers then post data resources to Data Marketplace, provide descriptive metadata, and also set a price. The stored metadata is used to help consumers find relevant data through traditional search engines and when browsing Data Marketplace. Data can also be posted on the site without a request, that users can search for. For example, here’s a data set of a complete list of Wal-Mart Store Locations, which is priced at $30.

Prices range for data, and can be anywhere from $5 to several thousand dollars. Data Marketplace co-founder Matt Hodam tells me he spent $10,000 in on year on data at one of the financial organizations he worked for. Data Marketplace takes a 14% cut of each transaction on the site, from the provider. Data Marketplace handles all of the payment processing and allows users to directly purchase and download resources in an accessible format online.

Hodam says that current models for selling and distributing data online are inefficient and expensive for financial organizations. Users only pay for what they need as opposed to plans or buying bundles of information. And providers don’t have many platforms where they can sell their data in a marketplace.

Data Marketplace is similar in some ways to Factual, which is a Wikipedia-like site for open data, and InfoChimps, which takes a more collaborative approach to open data.

Some people don’t like the idea of Google having any data about them. Unfortunately, if you visit a site tracked by Google Analytics (and chances are you hit several each day), you have no choice. But soon, you might.

Google is testing a browser-based opt-out solution for Google Analytics, they briefly note today on the Google Analytics blog. Specifically, this would be a “global browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics.” They note that engineers are finalizing and testing the funtionality.

How exactly this will work globally across all browsers remains to be seen. While Firefox and Chrome allow for easy use of plug-ins, Internet Exploerer and Safari are a bit more complicated. Still, if you’re a user who really cares about Google not tracking this information about you, it will probably be worth it to you to install this thing.

Of course, the other question is what this means for site owners. While it’s unlikely that a lot of users would install something like this, what if they did? That could drastically cripple the entire point of Google Analytics.

[image: Paramount Pictures]

[thanks Michael]

So in 2008, a company called Integra Communications filed for a “Nexus” trademark having something to do with voice and data telecommunications. Along comes Google a year later and files for “Nexus One.” Trademark office says no go. I’m not really surprised at this; it’s not really their job to determine which is the better or more popular product, but rather whether it is possible for the two trademarks to be mistaken for one another. Oh god! Will you have to scribble out the name of your phone now and write something else?

Continue reading…

We’re still poring over the hundreds of pages of documents that were just released in the YouTube/Viacom litigation. One document that offers extensive insight into YouTube’s early operations is Viacom’s Statement of Undisputed Facts, which contains quite a few emails from the site’s three founders: Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim (sometimes referred to as YouTube’s ‘forgotten’ founder). For what it’s worth, YouTube dispels the notion that these were really undisputed; a YouTube spokesperson said “This statement of undisputed facts is a statement of undisputed fiction.”

One of YouTube’s defenses in this case is that it has virtually no way to tell if a piece of content has been uploaded with the authorization of its owner. Which is true — Viacom has even admitted that it requested that YouTube remove many of the videos that its own personnel had uploaded. Because of the DMCA, YouTube was allowed to keep this potentially infringing content online provided it responded in a timely manner to takedown requests.

But these Emails, at least as presented by Viacom, don’t make it sound like YouTube’s founders and employees were necessarily worried about depriving content owners of videos they may have rightfully uploaded. Sometimes, it sounds like they’re pretty sure that they weren’t authorized, and were just relying on the fact that they didn’t have to do anything until they received a takedown notice. Instead, they were worried about prematurely cutting off the bulk of their traffic.

There’s some talk of creating the perception that YouTube was concerned with patrolling such content. In one memorandum, Jawed Karim told YouTube’s Board of Directors that the 10-minute length restriction the site was imposing would “reinforce the official line that YouTube is not in the business of hosting full-length television shows”, but that it “probably won’t cut down the actual amount of illegal content uploaded” because users could easily split shows in half or upload the “Juiciest bits of television shows”. Which begs the question, what was the point? Also, note that he refers to it as “the official line”.

Of course, YouTube says this is all “undisputed fiction”, and they’ll probably argue that the quotes were taken out of context (and they may well have been). If YouTube did follow the DMCA to the letter of the law (regardless of their underlying motivation), they may not have much bearing on the case.  And there’s also the fact that Viacom is being hypocritical with all of this, because it too offered user-generated video sites that relied on the DMCA, and it uploaded many videos to YouTube itself.

But it makes for some very interesting reading.

Here are from some of those early Emails and IM conversations (you can find the full document here:

On July 4,2005, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley sent an email to YouTube co-founders
Steve Chen and Jawed Karim titled “budlight commercials,” stating “we need to reject these
too”; Steve Chen responded by asking to “leave these in a bit longer? another week or two can’t hurt;” Jawed Karim subsequently stated that he “added back all 28 bud videos. stupid. . .,” and Steve Chen replìed: “okay the video they upload, first, regardless of people are going to be telling people about the site, therefore making it viral. they’re going to drive traffic. second, it adds more content to the site. third, we’re going to be adding advertisements in the future so this gets them used to it. I’m asking for a couple more weeks.”

In a July 10, 2005 email to YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen,YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim reported that he had found a “copyright video” and stated: “Ordinarily I’d say reject it, but I agree with Steve, let’s ease up on our strict policies for now. So let’s just leave copyrighted stuff there if it’ s news clips. I still think we should reject some other (C) things tho. . .”; Chad Hurley replied, “ok man, save your meal money for some lawsuits! no really, I guess we’ll just see what happens.”

In a July 19, 2005 email to YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, YouTube co founder Steve Chen wrote: “jawed, please stop putting stolen videos on the site. We’re going to have a tough time defending the fact that we’re not liable for the copyrighted material on the site because we the co-founders is didn’t put it up when one of blatantly stealing content from other sites and trying to get everyone to see it.”

In a July 23, 2005 email to YouTube co- founders Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley responded to a YouTube link sent by Jawed Karim by saying: “if we reject this, we need to reject all the other copyrighted ones. . . . should we just develop a flagging system for a future push?”; Karim responded: “I say we reject this one, but not the other ones. This one is totally blatant.”

In an August 9, 2005 email to YouTube co-founders Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley stated: “we need to start being diligent about rejecting copyrighted/inappropriate content. we are getting serious traffic and attention now, I don’t want this to be killed by a potentially bad experience of a network exec or someone visiting us. like there is a cnn clip of the shuttle clip on the site today, if the boys from Turner would come to the site, they might be pissed? these guys are the ones that will buy us for big money, so lets make them happy. we can then roll a lot of this work into a flagging system soon.”

On August 10,2005, YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim responded to YouTube co-
founder Chad Hurley (see SUF i1 (previous para)): “lets remove stuff like movies/tv shows. lets keep short news clips for now. we can become stricter over time, just not overnight. like the CNN space shuttle clip, I like. we can remove it once we’re bigger and better known, but for now that clip is fine.” Steve Chen replied, “sounds good.”

In response to YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley’s August 9, 2005 email (see SUF i146) YouTube co-founder Steve Chen stated: “but we should just keep that stuff on the site. I really don’t see what wì1 happen. what? someone from cnn sees it? he happens to be someone with power? he happens to want to take it down right away. he get in touch with cnn legal. 2 weeks later, we get a cease & desist letter. we take the video down”; Chad Hurley replied: I just don’t want to create a bad vibe… and perhaps give the users or the press something bad to write about.”

In a September 1, 2005 email to YouTube co-founder Steve Chen and all YouTube
employees, YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim stated, “well, we SHOULD take down any: 1)movies 2) TV shows. we should KEEP: 1)news clips 2) comedy clips (Conan, Leno, etc) 3) music videos. In the future, I’d also reject these last three but not yet.”

On September 2,2005, in response to an email from YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley reporting that he had taken down clips of the TV show “Family Guy,” YouTube co-founder Steve Chen stated: “should we just assume that a user uploading content really owns the content and is agreeing to all the terms of use? so we don’t take down anything other than obscene stuff?”

In a September 3,2005 email responding to YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley’s concern
that “the site is starting to get out of control with copyrighted material” (see SUF i154),
YouTube co-founder Steve Chen stated to the other two YouTube co- founders that, “what’s
the difference between big-boys/stupidvideos vs youtube? . . . if you look at the top videos
on the site, it’s all from this type of content. in a way, if you remove the potential
copyright infringements, wouldn’t you still say these are ‘personal’ videos? if you define
‘personal’ to be videos on your personal harddrive that you want to upload and share with
people? anyway, if site traffic and viralìty will drop to maybe what it is. . . i’d hate to prematurely 20% of attack a problem and end up just losing growth due to it.”

In response (see SUF i155), YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim wrote: “well I’d just remove the obviously copyright infringing stuff. movies and tv shows, I’d get rid of. . . .leave music videos, news clips, and clips we’ll of comedy shows for now. I think thats a pretty good policy for now, no?”

In a September 3,2005 email to the two other YouTube co- founders, YouTube co-founder
Steve Chen responded to Jawed Karim’s suggestion that YouTube remove “obviously copyright infringing stuff’ (see SUF i156) by stating that “i know that if (we remove all that content. we go from 100,000 views a day down to about 20,000 views or maybe even lower. the copyright infringement stuff. i mean, we can presumably claim that we don’t know who owns the rights to that video and by uploading, the user is claiming they own that video. we’re protected by DMCA for that.we’ll take it down if we get a ‘cease and desist”‘; Jawed Karim replied: “my suggested polìcy is really lax though. . . . if we keep that polìcy I don’t think our views will decrease at alL. “

In a September 7, 2005 email, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen wrote to YouTube cofounders Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, and Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital (and later a
YouTube board member) that YouTube had “implemented a flagging system so you can flag a video as being inappropriate or copyrighted. That way, the perception is that we are concerned about this type of material and we’re actively monitoring it. The actual removal of this content will be in varying degrees. We may want to keep some of the borderline content on the site but just remove it from the browse/search pages. that way, you can’t find the content easily. Again, similar to Flickr, . . . you can find truckloads of adult and copyrighted content. It’s just that you can’t stumble upon it, you have to be actively searching for it.”

In a January 25,2006 instant message exchange, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen
(IM user name tunawarrior) told his colleague YouTube product manager Maryrose Dunton
(IM user name maryrosedunton) that he wanted to “concentrate all of our efforts in
building up (YouTube’sJ numbers as aggressively as we can through whatever tactics, however evil,” including “user metrics” and “views,” and “then 3 months, sell it with 20m views per day and like 2m users or something. . . I think we can sell for somewhere between $250m – $500m . . . in the next 3 months. . . and there *is* a potential to get to $1 b or something.”

In a February 17,2006 instant message conversation, YouTube systems administrator Bradley Heilbrun (IM user name nurblìeh) asked YouTube product manager Maryrose Dunton (IM user name maryrosedunton), “was it me, or was the lawyer thing today a cover- your-ass thing from the company?” Dunton responded, “oh totally. . . did you hear what they were saying? it was really hardcore . . . if we even see copyrighted material on the site, as employees we’re supopsed (sic to report it”; Heilbrun replied, “sure, whatever,” and Dunton said “I guess the fact that I started like 5 groups based on copyrighted material probably isn’t so great”; in response Heilbrun said “right exactly. . . but it’s a cover your ass . . . so the board can say we told maryrose not to do this.”

In the same instant message conversation,YouTube product manager Maryrose Dunton
(IM user name maryrosedunton) reported the results of a “lìttle exercise” she performed
wherein she “went through all the most viewed/most discussed/top favorites/top rated to try and figure out what percentage is or has copyrighted materiaL. it was over 70%.” She added, “what I meant to say is after I found that 70%, I went and flagged it all for review.” When deposed, YouTube product manager Maryrose Dunton confirmed in reference to the February 28,2006 instant message exchange with YouTube co-founder Steve Chen (see SUF i195) that she was being sarcastic and did not actually flag any of the copyrighted videos for review.

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