The average web page is now more than 1 megabyte (MB). This isn’t a case where bigger is better, it’s bad for site owners and for mobile users. Back in December, I predicted that at some point in 2012 the average web page would surpass 1 MB in size. That point has arrived — a little earlier than even I expected. On May 1, the newest web page stats released by the HTTP Archive revealed that the average web page is now a whopping 1042 kilobytes (1024 kilobytes equals a megabyte). What’s behind rampant page bloat? To put things in perspective: at the time I made my prediction, the average page was 965 KB. That’s 8 percent growth in just four months. Doesn’t sound like much? Then consider this: Back when the HTTP Archive started tracking page stats in November 2010, a mere 18 months ago, the average page was an already hefty 702 KB. Pages today are almost 50 percent bigger than that. If pages continue to grow at this rate, the average page will hit 2 MB by 2015. The main culprits for this growth are images (which account for more than half of the average page size) and third-party scripts like analytics, ads, and social sharing buttons. But what’s really behind it is our insatiable desire for richer, more dynamic content — coupled with site owners’ desire to track user behavior and get us to share their content using every conceivable widget. Mobile users are the biggest losers. While bigger pages hurt performance for desktop users, too, the biggest victims of page bloat are mobile users. Not only does a 1 MB page take forever to load, it can also deliver a nasty case of sticker shock when you get your phone bill. To give you a for-instance, earlier this month I was traveling in Europe. Before I left home, I bought 25 MB of data from my provider for $100. In other words, I’m paying $4 per page. And if your service provider doesn’t hit you with a huge bill, they’ll hit you with a data cap and throttle your service. A 2 GB data plan sounds like a lot, but if you watch videos, listen to music, and download ebooks, it doesn’t get you very far. (Consider that 1 MB equals about 20 seconds of medium-quality video or 45 seconds of music.) The proliferation of 1 MB pages will catapult you to your data cap that much sooner. But this doesn’t only cost mobile users. Bloated pages cost site owners too. Bigger pages inevitably take longer to load. There’s a huge body of research that shows that when people visit slow sites, they spend less, view fewer pages, click fewer ads, and spend less time on site. This applies both to mega-sites like Amazon (which famously announced that for every 100 milliseconds of slowdown, they experienced a 1 percent drop in revenue) and smaller “mortal” e-commerce sites like auto parts vendor AutoAnything (which found that by cutting page load time in half, it grew revenue by 13 percent). How much bigger can pages get? Like it or not, this kind of growth is the norm, and it’s going to continue to be a problem for users. Sure, today’s devices, browsers, and networks are incredibly powerful compared to the clunkers of 15 years ago, but here’s the problem with our great big juicy hominid brains: you can pretty much count on the fact that if you have a team of technology geniuses in room A working to fix one problem, there will be a team of equally brilliant people in room B developing a technology that will create a new problem. So while devices, browsers, etc. are always getting better, we’re also developing more and more bandwidth-hogging content. At best, the two factions are neck and neck. Where this will take us is anyone’s guess. Joshua Bixby is president of Strangeloop Networks, a company that provides website acceleration. Bixby also maintains the blog Web Performance Today. He can be found @joshuabixby on Twitter. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.LTE-Advanced: what it is and isn’tUpdated: Forecast: global mobile subscribers, 2010–2015The future of Wi-Fi in the enterprise
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Gigabit Squared broke onto the scene Wednesday, announcing it would spend $200 million to bring gigabit broadband to six unnamed college towns in conjunction with the Gig.U program. But this year-old startup doesn’t plan to limit itself to the Gig.U program: It wants to change the economics of delivering fiber to the home for cities across the country. That means potentially more gigabit connections across the U.S. Mark Ansboury, the president of Gigabit Squared, chatted with me this morning about the company and its plans to lower the cost of deploying and operating a broadband network. His goal is to bring gigabit speeds to as many places as possible, and along the way he may join firms like Google, Sonic.Net, Allied Fiber and several municipalities in changing the way broadband is deployed and operated in the U.S. Bypassing red tape keeps projects in the black. For the Gig.U project, Ansboury is offering to spend up to $200 million helping build broadband in six selected communities. The money comes from a combination of vendor financing provides by companies such as Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Corning, etc. who are working with Gigabit Squared as well as Chicago investment bank Stern Brothers. Communities who apply are expected to contribute too, but instead of cash they will have to make commitments that will lower the cost and headache of deployment. Communities should work to offer easily access utility poles, making right of way access discussions fast and painless, and may even commit to becoming a primary customers for the broadband, or helping Gigabit Squared sign up new customers. Google has said that the municipality’s willingness to help lower its deployment costs as well as smooth the political process, was one of the reasons Kansas City, Kansas was chosen as the place where it would deploy fiber. So in that way, Gigabit Squared is taking a page from the search giant. However, it also plans to work with cities to develop programs that will take advantage of the network, which is something Chattanooga, the nation’s first gigabit network, is trying to do. Creating programs that use the network will help drive residents to use it and engender support among different members of the community, from teachers to public safety officials. Ansvboury is even happy to bring on local ISPs if they want to come to the table to help build networks, although he does expect that the first six projects done with Gig.U will be owned and operators by Gigabit Squared. But he’s not averse to a municipality or other network provider taking over, he said. “We think of ourselves like a developer. We have a roadmap we’ve created to help deploy these networks. We lay out a path for communities to follow,” Ansboury said. Can this new model work? Currently Gigabit Squared employees have experience consulting on gigabit networks, but the company doesn’t operate one. For example, Ansboury was the former SVP and Chief Technology Officer of One Community, which helped build high-speed broadband networks in Ohio. Other executives at the company have a variety of roles in infrastructure development and finance, but not everyone has broadband experience according to their bios. Ansboury says the company is involved in some broadband stimulus grant efforts and may even make some investments in those networks, providing the private equity for those public-private partnerships. Like someone who has somehow managed to discover an entirely new way to lose weight, he seems excited to bring his models and theories to smaller cities around the country and put them to the test. Unlike, Google or even Sonic.net, an ISP in California that’s deploying fiber on top of its existing DSL network, Ansboury is going big and getting there fast. But, its unclear how much a city can promise under a model like this (or how much it will matter in the end for Gigabit’s Squared’s ROI). Google’s fiber project hit some delays while the city’s utility and Google came to terms on how and where Google would string its fiber on the poles. There are also always the possibility of messy citizen battles over ugly equipment or rights of way that the city can’t really ignore. For example, residents in San Francisco have sued to stop the placement of AT&T’s fiber-to-the-curb termination cabinets. An open network means anyone can access that gig. Ansboury says city involvement is just one element of cutting costs, although he declined to get into the specifics of the cost per home passed or the details of how GB2 would build its networks. He did say there are several elements that will enable Gigabit Squared to not only deploy a network for less, but also to sign customers and achieve a penetration rate that offers a return on Gigabit Squared’s investment. Part of that return might come from Gigabit Squared’s commitment to running “open” networks, by which Ansboury means he will resell capacity on the network to others. “We realize that if we want to get high take rates and be hyperlocal, we have to think differently and part of that means you have to change that paradigm,” Ansboury said. “You have to be a triple-play provider with broadband video and voice but that’s not only it. With the emergence of over the top services and big bandwidth sucking applications we are creating an open access strategy that allows for a town to have a something like a digital economic development service model.” He used the example of Netflix coming in and buying capacity to deliver its service to customers directly it wanted, and confirmed that other ISPs could buy capacity on its fiber. The model looks like a last mile network that might be as innovative as what Allied Fiber is trying to do nationally for the middle mile. Ansboury expects we’ll see the first network in the early part of next year as part of the Gig.U program. The Gig.U projects communities have two application windows, one closes in July and the other in November, so interested communities to check it out. As for why this effort matters, Blair Levin, the executive director of the Gig.U project summed it up nicely in a chat with me yesterday. “The problem isn’t that we don’t have a gigabit everywhere. The problem is we don’t have it anywhere,” he said. “And if we need it, we’ll need it in university towns first so let’s get on with it. It’s too late when we discover we need it everywhere because then we are pure consumers of what everyone else [namely places with existing gigabit networks like The Netherlands, Hong Kong or North Korea] else is producing.” Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.The future of Wi-Fi in the enterpriseReport: Monetizing Digital ContentHow to navigate the new world of digital advertising
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Between SOPA, PIPA and the JOBS Act, Silicon Valley and Washington D.C. have had a lot to talk about recently. Aside from headline-grabbing legislation, between work Visas and patents, there’s a good chance that at some point, your startup will need to interact with the federal government. And when it does, Michael McGeary is there to help. Watch this video for free on GigaOM McGeary is co-founder and director of Engine Advocacy, a new lobbying organization, whose mission is to “create an environment where technological innovation and entrepreneurship thrive by educating, collaborating with, and involving startups in shaping policy.” For example, when the fights against SOPA and PIPA arose, Engine Advocacy built an app that generated 30,000 calls to legislators. They also published a letter from 15 tech CEOs against SOPA in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post as well as collaborated to schedule and amplify the impact of the January 18th blackout. So as you are out building your business, how should you concern yourself with the government? When you first start out, McGeary says, you probably shouldn’t. Stay focused on your product. But be aware that the government is there, and rather than reacting to proposed laws like SOPA and PIPA, the entrepreneurial community needs to be more proactive. McGready sat down with us for a brief video chat about how startups should start thinking about the federal government, and lessons founders can learn from political campaigns. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.How to navigate the new world of digital advertisingSocial media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominatedControversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
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A number of German Internet users have received letters from a local law office in recent weeks, threatening them with copyright infringement lawsuits for allegedly distributing the science fiction movie Iron Sky via file sharing networks. There was only one way not to get sued, the letter informed them: Sign a cease-and-desist notice and pay € 800 (about $1012). These kinds of costly cease-and-desist campaings against file sharers aren’t uncommon in Germany; hundreds of thousands of Internet users have been targeted by music labels, porn studios and others with similar demands in recent years, netting rights holders millions. Unusual about this case is that Iron Sky is a crowdsourced and crowd-financed movie, produced by people who made names for themselves with Creative Commons-licensed content that could be freely downloaded and reshared. Iron Sky is a science fiction comedy, depicting a world in which the Nazis fled to the moon at the end of World War 2. It’s director Timo Vuorensola and its visual effects producer Samuli Torssonen previously rose to fame when they released the Star Trek parody Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning in 2005. That movie was offered for free online and clocked three million downloads within three months. The filmmakers have also in the past  lambasted old media for their take on piracy. In a blog post from 2009, Vuorensola wrote: “Piracy in its current, most common form – the digital download – is not a crime.” His current German distributor, Polyband, seems to disagree. The company has hired local law office Sasse & Partners, which has in the past sent out similar letters on behalf of German record companies, according to a local law blogger. Iron Sky has been heavily relying on crowdsourcing for animation, modeling and other parts of the movie making process, and €1 million of the movie’s €7.5 million budget have been contributed by fans. However, the film makers are relying on traditional distributors to actually get the movie in the theaters, and that apparently has resulted in a number of problems. Iron Sky’s British distributor initially intended to only show the movie in theaters for a single day and then immediately take it to DVD. This strategy was opposed by the film makers themselves, who wrote on their blog: “What they are doing is basically stabbing us in the back.” The duo didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit threats in Germany, but one can imagine that they’re not too happy about threatening their fans with lawsuits either. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Are Torrents a Tool for Predicting the Future?Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1Monetizing music in the post-scarcity age
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In the latest court filing in the ongoing Justice Department e-books price-fixing suit, Apple said it did not conspire to fix the prices of digital books to hurt competitors and called the case “fundamentally flawed,” according to a Reuters report. According to Reuters’ copy of the filing, Apple stated: “Apple’s entry into e-book distribution is classic procompetitive conduct” that created competition where none existed, Apple said in its court papers. “For Apple to be subject to hindsight legal attack for a business strategy well-recognized as perfectly proper sends the wrong message to the market,” it added. “The government’s complaint against Apple is fundamentally flawed as a matter of fact and law.” Apple also denied that the government “accurately characterized” the comment attributed to Jobs. The “comment attributed to Jobs” is referring to a January 2010 email from Steve Jobs in which he seems to suggest how to set prices of e-books between $12.99 and $14.99. The “fundamentally flawed” characterization of the case by Apple in the latest filing is a slightly more agressive version of the company’s initial response to the suit last month, when Apple called the accusations from the DOJ “simply not true.” In April, the DOJ filed suit against Apple and five publishers – Hachette, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins (who quickly agreed to settle), Macmillan and Penguin — accusing them of colluding to keep Amazon out of the e-book market unless it changed its pricing structure. To get up to speed on the case since then, see my paidContent colleagues’ “Everything you need to know about the e-books lawsuit” post. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
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A new survey from Informa finds that 60 percent of all global carriers plan to deploy LTE by the end of 2013. That may not seem like a surprising figure to our North American readers since every operator large and small has announced some form of 4G strategy, but in other parts of the world operators haven’t been quite as enthusiastic about the technology. Europe is still experimenting with its first LTE networks and in some cases – most notably the U.K. – regulators haven’t even auctioned off 4G licenses. In many developing markets, 3G networks are still fairly new, and as any infrastructure vendor will tell you, a lot of carriers are still making considerable investments in 2G. The standard knock on LTE was operators don’t need it. GSM carriers could milk plenty of upgrades out of their HSPA networks, making LTE an expensive and unnecessary conceit (T-Mobile USA was making similar claims before its own LTE strategy magically appeared). It was the poor fate of CDMA operators in the U.S. – with no upgrade path to better networks – that drove them to fast track 4G. My, how attitudes have changed. Informal’s poll of 528 global operators found that 70.5 percent now think there is a viable business case for LTE. I guarantee if that poll was taken 18 months ago, the answers would have been very different. So where did this newfound love for LTE come from? The short answer is the smartphone – more devices, more data demand, yada, yada. The more complicated answer is that carriers are becoming increasingly attracted to LTE’s efficiency, not just its speeds and capacity. Consumers don’t just want more data, they want to pay less for it. Without LTE, carriers may still be able to deliver the fast, but without LTE they can’t deliver the cheap. Image courtesy of Flickr user Horia Varlan Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.LTE-Advanced: what it is and isn’tUpdated: Forecast: global mobile subscribers, 2010–2015The future of Wi-Fi in the enterprise
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Autonomy founder Mike Lynch So far the big news out of Hewlett-Packard’s second quarter earnings call is that the company will lose 9,000 employees in fiscal year 2012, with former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch among the soon-to-be-departed. Overall the company plans to cut 27,000 jobs over the next few years. Autonomy saw “a significant decline” in license revenue, HP CEO Meg Whitman told told analysts on Wednesday’s earnings call. Bill Veghte, who was HP chief strategy officer and who had headed up HP’s overall enterprise software business, will step in to lead Autonomy, she added. Lynch, the Autonomy founder and most recently executive vice president for HP’s new information management unit, “will leave HP after a transition period,” according to the HP earnings release. Whitman was quick to claim that there is nothing wrong with Autonomy per se. She told analysts on the call that Autonomy will remain a linchpin of HP’s overall big data efforts going forward. She said: When Autonomy turned in disappointing results we did a fairly deep drive..it’ s not [because of the product], it’s a terrific product; it’ s not the market, there’s enormous demand; and it’s not the competition. This is a classic entrepreneurial company scaling challenge. I’ve seen this movie before. We need to put in some sales processes, a better interface to HP and our services, server, storage and networking [businesses] and we need a better structure to support a billion-dollar-plus company,” Whitman said. The opportunity around big data and analytics is fantastic and can flow across all our businesses. Overall software revenue — a key HP focus — rose  22 percent year over year including Autonomy. When of the Autonomy deal leaked last August, it was immediately controversial. When then-CEO Leo Apotheker talked it up as a $10 billion acquisition, HP had only $12 billion in cash.  The purchase closed in October. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Report: The Future of Data Center StorageForecasting the future cloud computing marketInfrastructure Q3: OpenStack and flash step into the spotlight
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When ZocDoc launched in 2007, CEO Cyrus Massoumi said some critics accused it of being “overly ambitious” in its vision of rethinking how patients reach doctors. Five years later, the company is not only used by more than 1.2 million people every month, it’s paving the way for an emerging wave of health startups. At the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York, he said that when the company was initially raising money, it was in the middle of the recent economic crisis. But by keeping their heads down and focusing, he said, they were able to build out their presence in New York, expand to other cities, and ultimately raise $95 million over the past few years. Over the past couple of years, the company has quickly grown, adding  100 staff in the past year alone. Looking out at the landscape now, he noted that it’s an especially interesting time in healthcare and for health tech startups.  “Healthcare access is one of the greatest challenges of our generation,” Massoumi said. In the next couple of years, Obama-driven changes to the healthcare system could result in 30 million new patients coming online, he said, entering a market that already has a shortage of physicians. But even though healthcare is a $2.7 trillion industry, he added, “it’s totally under-represented in terms of Internet startups.” That might be because people were burned by earlier investments, he said, but it’s also because healthcare is a massive and complex industry. Changing how customers and vendors interact in the largest sector in the U.S economy is “a daunting task for any startup,” Massoumi said. He also said that entrepreneurs sometimes look at the opportunities in healthcare too much as a patient and miss opportunities that address the needs of doctors or other players in the market. Surrounded by a family of doctors, he said he “became a doctor through osmosis” and viscerally understood the industry. This week, ZocDoc announced that it had extended its service to Denver, the 19th city to join the platform. Other metropolitan areas (besides New York), include Austin, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and Washington, DC. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Web startups: How to guard against security breachesFacebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implicationsConnected world: the consumer technology revolution
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Liquid Metal Battery, a startup developing a battery for the power grid that already counted Bill Gates and oil giant Total as an investor, has now brought on another high profile backer: Khosla Ventures. The startup, which is the brainchild of MIT Professor Donald Sadoway and is based in Cambridge, plans to announce on Thursday that it has raised a Series B round of $15 million led by Khosla Ventures. Liquid Metal Battery is developing a battery for the power grid using molten salt sandwiched between two layers of liquid metal. The battery is still at least two years from commercialization, and the team has built a 16-inch prototype, though they might later scale that up to 36 inches. The company is betting that a battery based on liquid metal electrodes will be stable, scalable, and low cost enough that it could revolutionize grid storage. Right now the grid has very little energy storage and power plants are basically producing the exact amount of energy that buildings and systems are consuming in real time. That makes the grid inefficient and also costly, and in addition the lack of energy storage is a barrier when it comes to adding less reliable clean power sources like wind and solar (the sun only shines and the wind only blows at certain times). Gates originally learned about Liquid Metal Battery when he took Sadoway’s class via MIT’s online open-course program. Gates took Sadoway’s 34-lecture series on batteries and contacted Sadoway by email to meet with him and learn more. Gates is also a limited partner in Khosla Venture’s funds. In addition to the group of investors, the liquid metal battery project received a $6.9 million grant from the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program. The bulk of the development work left to do at Liquid Metal Battery will be focused on getting the cost of the battery down and figuring out the optimal size and shape. The company will also likely need more money down the road when it wants to start commercially producing the battery. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Flash analysis: lessons from Solyndra’s fallSmart Grid Apps: Six Trends That Will Shape Grid EvolutionReport: An Open Source Smart Grid Primer
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Earlier this month, I took a look at Straight Talk, a TracFone-owned mobile virtual operator that resells service on both AT&T and T-Mobile in the U.S. I personally bought a T-Mobile compatible Straight Talk SIM card for my Galaxy Nexus because the deal for unlimited everything at $45 per month and no contract sounded too good to be true. For the most part, Straight Talk delivers on its promise with two small exceptions that I’ll point out shortly. The company calls its product a “BYOP” or Bring Your Own Phone prepaid service. Since trying the service, I’ve received a number of questions about it and the company noticed. So in order to help me answer them intelligently, Straight Talk sent me a loaner unlocked iPhone 4, two AT&T SIMs (regular sized and micro SIM) and some pre-paid monthly service cards. Unlimited isn’t quite unlimited, except for voice and messages So here are some follow up experiences I’ve had with both my phone and the loaner iPhone 4, which hopefully helps you decide if Straight Talk’s $45 month to month service is an option for you. First, let me point out the two key exceptions that I’ve found. Apple’s Visual Voicemail isn’t supported by Straight Talk, so if you go this route, you’ll be calling in to hear your messages. I don’t think that’s a huge issue, at least not for me personally as I use Google Voice for all communications. However, some folks may not be happy with the feature loss. For $45, Straight Talk advertises unlimited voice minutes, messages and HSPA+ data (There’s no LTE support, even if your phone is capable of using AT&T’s LTE service). Based on user-reported experiences, Straight Talk won’t cut you off provided you keep your monthly usage to 2 GB or about 100 MB per day. Hit either of these and you might get a message about excessive use, along with the threat of service termination. History shows that I use about 1 to 1.5 GB of mobile broadband a month on my phones (I use Wi-Fi a ton), so this works well for me. If you want truly unlimited data or use more than 2 GB per month on your phone, this isn’t the plan for you. Don’t even try it, would be my recommendation. Note: I asked Straight Talk about the limit and was told that company is trying to “focus on trust and communication with customers.” It’s likely that TracFone has no way to throttle after any limits, since it doesn’t operate the networks. As a result, the company will warn folks for excessive use and potentially disrupt service if you don’t limit your usage. Good value or no? If you can live with those two caveats, I think the service is a great value. I was using a $30 data-only T-Mobile SIM in my Galaxy Nexus paired with low-cost VoIP calling but due to coverage issues with dropped or missed calls, I’m much happier with the Straight Talk SIM. My first month of service ends next week and I’ve already added 3 months to my account for $130 thanks to a $5 bundle savings. And because my kids have T-Mobile Sidekick 4G handset and share 1,000 minutes, I ordered a pair of Straight Talk SIMs for them as well. They use very little data but tons of minutes and messages. Now I’ll save on their service and not worry about voice minute overages. Some questions people have asked me along with answers: How hard is it to set up a Straight Talk SIM on an iPhone? Great question since you can’t directly access the network or APN settings on an iPhone without jailbreaking it. It’s quite easy to set up the new SIM. Just pop it in your iPhone and hit this site in mobile Safari over Wi-Fi: http://unlockit.co.nz/ Here you’ll get a small file to download after choosing Straight Talk as your provider. This file will set up the phone to work with the new SIM and the process takes all of two minutes. Is it difficult to set up the service on an Android or other phone? Nope, this is super easy as you can access the APN settings directly on most smartphones. You simply enter the settings provided with your SIM card. It takes a minute or two at most to type the data in. What about MMS on the iPhone? The above setup solution doesn’t enable MMS, so there are several manual methods to enable both data and MMS. First, back up your iPhone in iTunes with its current SIM. Then swap SIM cards and restore your iPhone backup with the Straight Talk SIM in the handset. Again, this isn’t an issue for me personally as I use Google Voice for messages. There’s plenty of information on Straight Talk setup in this wiki page if you need it. If you have a cut-down T-Mobile SIM, you can follow these simple instructions as well. Or you could jailbreak your phone to get access to the settings. Are the network speeds the same? According to my testing: Yes. I’ve used my Galaxy Nexus with both a T-Mobile SIM and Straight Talk SIM for T-Mobile’s network and found the speeds to be equal. On T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network where I live, I routinely see between 6 and 8 Mbps down, 2 Mbps up and ping times around 120 milliseconds. The same test on my iPhone 4S with a SIM from AT&T and then from Straight Talk showed no difference either. How’s the coverage? Since Straight Talk is paying AT&T and T-Mobile for their networks, the coverage is the same as if you were paying those operators directly. I haven’t seen any coverage differences at all. If you get good coverage now from one of the two carriers, you should get the same with a Straight Talk SIM. If I can save money with this SIM, why wouldn’t I do it? First, if you’re a heavy data user, I wouldn’t recommend this option, as stated above. Second, you’re bringing your own phone. That means you either pay full price for your phone — which can be anything from $400 to $700, if not more — or you keep your current phone and close out your contract with an early termination fee. You’ll have to check with your carrier to see how much that will cost. I’ll be closing my T-Mobile contract on the two Sidekicks, for example, so my break-even point is a few months out. Lastly, if you use a CDMA phone (such one from Sprint or Verizon) or you want LTE service, this plan won’t work for you. What about tethering or using the phone as a mobile hotspot? That’s expressly forbidden in the terms of service. You might get away with it for a short bit here and there, but once you bump up against some heavy usage in a single day, you’re raising the red flag to Straight Talk’s systems. Can I port a number to Straight Talk? Yup, not a problem. You do this when you activate your SIM card online. I didn’t do this for my account. Although I now have another new phone number, nobody knows it because of Google Voice. I will, however, port my kids’ phone numbers next week. No, this service isn’t for everyone. Heavy-duty data users, folks that want LTE, use a CDMA phone or don’t want to pay full price for their handset are unlikely candidates. But for someone like myself that buys unsubsidized hardware, doesn’t want a long term contract and can supplement mobile broadband with Wi-Fi usage, the BYOP plan at Straight Talk offers solid savings and the same level of service found from national carriers. Disclosure: The free 30-day service provided by Straight Talk was for testing purposes, not for my personal use, and the iPhone will be returned, per our editorial policy. I pay for my own phone service and provided my own Galaxy Nexus and iPhone 4S  smartphones, which I bought out of pocket last year. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM ProCES 2012: a recap and analysisMobile Q4: The scramble for spectrum continues
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It looks like we were right about AT&T sunsetting its 2G networks to make way for more mobile broadband capacity. On Wednesday, Ma Bell announced it would ‘refarm’ PCS spectrum in New York City currently used by its GSM voice networks for “3G and 4G” services. That means AT&T is expanding its HSPA network — which it calls 4G – to account for the increasing data load the iPhone and other 3G smartphones are placing on its mobile broadband infrastructure. AT&T runs LTE in NYC, as well, but in a different band. Meanwhile, the backbone of its HSPA service already rides over its PCS frequencies. In March, AT&T started contacting customers with 2G only phones – specifically very old models that worked only on AT&T’s PCS frequencies – offering them free 3G replacements. AT&T isn’t shutting off 2G completely. It runs a considerable portion of its GSM network at the cellular frequency band, which all phones sold in recent years support. But if AT&T is trying to cull its subscriber base of PCS-only 2G phones, it’s a good sign it plans to shut down GSM at PCS entirely, reserving that band entirely for HSPA. NYC is AT&T’s densest market so it’s the logical place to start. Unlike the its CDMA 3G counterpart, HSPA supports voice as well as data, so AT&T really isn’t sacrificing any voice capacity. It gains the benefits of a far faster and more efficient mobile broadband network that puts GSM/EDGE sub-megabit speeds to shame. AT&T also may be working with its 3G vendors Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent to use new configurable bandwidth technologies to gradually shift GSM capacity to HSPA, as opposed to shutting off a huge chunk of its 2G network at once. Refarming has become a popular trend among U.S. carriers in the last year. T-Mobile is shutting down a large portion of its GSM network to make room for a nationwide LTE rollout and more HSPA capacity. Meanwhile, Sprint plans to retire its Nextel iDEN network by 2014 in order to reuse its 800 MHz frequencies for CDMA and LTE. Image courtesy of Flickr user joey.parsons Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.The future of Wi-Fi in the enterpriseThe mobile backhaul market, 2011-2012: more innovation, greater competitionReport: Monetizing Digital Content
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Social discovery app Sonar isn’t just about social discovery any more. One year after its launch, the New York-based startup said it wants to be less of a mechanism for uncovering connections with strangers around you and more of a tool for actually connecting with friends and, eventually other contacts, you already have nearby. “We’re not a people discovery app, said Brett Martin, Sonar’s CEO and co-founder. “We’re focused on building an easier way to connect with your friends and people here now.” To make that possible, at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, the company today released a set of new features meant to build what it calls a “here now” network and optimize communication with friends in your immediate vicinity. The latest version of the Sonar app will include the ability to send location-relevant, “Sonar Status” posts. The message is visible to anyone in the Sonar network, but it appears as a push notification to only Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Foursquare friends that are in their immediate vicinity. Similar to social apps Highlight and Banjo, and Foursquare’s Radar, it will also include “Sonar Presence,” a feature which runs in the background and automatically sends a push notification to users when friends and connections are within 500 meters. If users don’t want to receive the updates or broadcast their location, they can toggle the feature off. It will also roll out “Sonar Chat,” a private messaging feature for people in your vicinity. Proving a sample use scenario, Martin said in a blog post: “On a recent Sonar offsite trip to Central Park, one of our engineers used Sonar status to notify the rest of the team that we’d set up camp in the southwest corner of Sheep’s Meadow. When latecomers got to the park, their phones gave them exactly what they needed to know without sending a single “Where are you guys?” text.” Future applications could include enabling groups of guests at a wedding to exchange photos with each other in real time or even giving bands a real-time, mobile mechanism for distributing content to fans at a live event, Miller told me, adding that he wants it to be a “hyper-local publishing mechanism.” Social discovery/ambient location apps grabbed plenty of headlines a few months ago at South by Southwest, but the fervor around them has died down a bit (except for maybe Facebook’s Glancee acquisition). Sonar hasn’t yet disclosed how many people use the app (although they say the information is on the way), so it will be interesting to see if users think the new features provide a function they can’t already get by combining Foursquare or Sonar and text messaging (or group messaging with GroupMe, for example). When I asked Miller if the changes signaled a significant repositioning for the company, he said it’s another step toward its mission of “creating real-world, human, face-to-face interaction.” Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.How to navigate the new world of digital advertisingSocial media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominatedControversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
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After a few months in beta, Estonian startup Infogram is now open to all — and hopes that its online toolkit for building infographics can really catch the imagination. The company foun… Oh, you know what? Why not put them straight to the test: instead of a normal story, here’s an infogram instead. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Connected world: the consumer technology revolutionGigaOM Euro 20: the European startups to watchGoogle and the Ghost of Silicon Valley Past
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In order to benefit from digital media and the disruption created by the social web, content companies and publishers have to think differently about what they do, John Borthwick of Betaworks told attendees at paidContent 2012 in New York on Wednesday — and one way to do that is to stop thinking about what they produce as “content,” and start thinking about it as “information.” The problem with the word content is that it tends to focus attention on the package or the container for that content, Borthwick said, and the package part of the media business is the aspect that is being disrupted the most. Thinking of what they produce as information rather than content to be packaged, the Betaworks CEO said, puts the focus on the value of that information to users, and the package or delivery system — whether it’s a magazine or a newspaper or a mobile app — becomes secondary. Only that way can media companies figure out what and how their users want, he said. The language drives the way you think about things, and since we’re dealing with a new media landscape, we need to redefine some of the words. For me, the moment you start thinking about it as information, you start to think less about the package and more about the users. That need to understand what users want was the driving force behind two of the first services that Betaworks created, Borthwick said: Bit.ly started as a simple URL-shortener for social networks such as Twitter, but has become a tool that provides data about what links are shared and which ones are clicked on, and Chartbeat shows editors and writers what articles are getting the most engagement, but in real time rather than hours or days after they have been published. Chartbeat, he said, has become “like a Bloomberg terminal for editors.” We wanted to understand the data and the “data exhaust” around publishing… to understand the tight loop between commenting, discovery and publishing, and the data helps inform that, but in real time Transforming publishing into real-time changes the nature of what you’re doing. In order to appreciate that shift, content and media companies not only need to change the tools they are using, Borthwick said, but they have to fundamentally alter the way they think about the “content” business and what value they are ultimately adding for users.Keep up with the discussion at paidContent 2012 via livestream (registration required) and #pc2012 on Twitter. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.How to navigate the new world of digital advertisingSocial media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominatedControversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
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The jury in the epic intellectual property trial between Oracle and Google is going home after ruling today that the latter didn’t infringe on two patents related to the Java programming language. The finding is a major blow to Oracle after the same jury was earlier unable to decide whether Google’s use of Java Application Interfaces was fair use under copyright law. “Today’s jury verdict that Android does not infringe Oracle’s patents was a victory not just for Google but the entire Android ecosystem,” said Google in an email statement. Oracle did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The trial, which the judge earlier described as “the world series of IP,” has been a key test of  how far intellectual property should go in protecting common features of software development. Many in Silicon Valley have said that an infringement finding could impede their ability to develop new products. With the patent phase of the trial now concluded, Oracle is now down to its last strike as it waits for US District Judge William Alsup to rule on the fair use issue. While the jury agreed that Google’s use of the Java API’s was infringement, it was hung on the question of fair use. Judge Alsup will make his decision in the coming days. The judge, who surprised the courtroom this month by revealing that he had taught himself to code Java, has at times evinced skepticism about some of Oracle’s claims. He earlier described Oracle’s request for hundreds of millions in damages as “the height of ridiculousness.” Fair use is a legal doctrine that permits people to use copyrighted material without permission in certain situations such as reporting or research. Under American law, courts use a four-part test for fair use that looks at factors like “nature of the work” and the effect on the original work.     Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominatedControversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1Startup growth and the new recruiting ecosystem
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Apparently The Boston Globe didn’t get the memo that it’s an app-only world when it comes to mobile. According to VP of digital products Jeff Moriarty,  the Globe’s website, Boston.com, is doing quite well on mobile with more than 30 percent of visitors coming to the site through a phone or tablet browser. In fact, at a panel at the paidContent 2012 conference, digital publishers challenged the mythos that native apps provide a superior mobile experience than HTML5. “We’re not building a video game here,” Moriarty said. “It’s news, photos and text.” For many news sites, HTML5 has become the default form of coding. Even if a publisher is pushing out a mobile app, it’s often an HTML app in a native wrapper. When deciding whether to follow an app or a Web browser model, the decision isn’t a technology one — native code versus HTML5 – instead, it’s a distribution decision, said Mark Johnson, CEO of news aggregator Zite. For a startup or a company that doesn’t have a well-known brand, discoverability becomes key, so it’s necessary to stake a claim in platform app stores, Johnson said. But when it comes down to implementation Zite is basically building Web pages optimized with a native user interface. There’s far more flexibility in that approach: your Web developers suddenly don’t need to turn into Objective C programmers and you can update modify your app with pushing a complete update, Johnson said. As Zite builds up its own online brand (CNN acquired Zite last year), its dependence on the app store may lessen, but Johnson said the need for a slick UI will keep Zite app-store bound for some time. “People have a very high expectation of what the UI looks like,” he said. “You risk losing a lot of downloads if you forget the UI.” The Washington Post is splitting the difference. It leans heavily on its own mobile apps, including its Facebook Social Reader, but it also has a big presence in the mobile browser. WaPo Labs chief strategist and editor-at-large Rob Malda agreed with Johnson that the Post has the advantage to leverage a huge well-respected news brand to drive traffic to the mobile Web site. “Discoverability is not a problem,” Malda said, but he added that the Post can just as easily use that same brand to nudge its readers to its apps and other digital media technologies. Ultimately, whether the Post focuses on apps or the mobile Website, it will continue to lean heavily of HTML5 for its core development, Malda said. “I like the hybrid thing,” he said. “Laying out a newspaper – I don’t want to do that in native.” Keep up with the discussion at paidContent 2012 via livestream (registration required) and #pc2012 on Twitter. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Facebook and the future of our online livesA look back at mobile in Q1Opportunities and challenges for mobile deals
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Highlighting the growing importance of mobile advertising, Rubicon Project today announced that it had acquired the San Fracisco-based mobile ad tech platform Mobsmith. The Los Angeles-based ad tech company said the new acquisition would combine with its real-time trading platform to give publishers and ad buyers a consolidated marketplace for trades of display and mobile ad inventory. “Just like the online display market, the mobile ad market needs a complete direct and programmatic ad monetisation platfor,” Frank Addante, CEO & founder of the Rubicon Project, said in a statement. “We see an opportunity to leverage our massive installed base of comScore 500 publishers and largest independent marketplace for ad buyers to take a leadership position in mobile like we have in display advertising.” According to eMarketer, mobile advertising spending in the U.S. increased 89 percent between 2010 and 2011, to reach $1.45 billion last year. This year, they forecast it will grow another 80 percent to $2.61 billion. With Mobsmith, Rubicon Project is in a better position to capture more of those dollars. The companies did not disclose financial details, but All Things D reported that Rubicon purchased Mobsmith for $10 million. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implicationsNewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeoutThe future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
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TCS House, headquarters of Tata Consulting Services The debate is over when it comes to cloud deployment. That decision — to move — has been made and it’s time to talk about other issues, according to Dr. Gautam Shroff, VP of Tata Consultancy Services and the head of the TCS Innovation Lab in Delhi. In a recent interview, Shroff shared with GigaOM what he sees from his vantage point at Tata, the giant global IT services and consulting company.  And it is global: Mumbai-based TCS fields 214,000 IT consultants in 42 countries — including 17 U.S. offices — and 19 Innovation Labs.  TCS is the largest of the Indian IT services behemoths and the 16th largest in the world with just over $9 billion in revenue in 2011, according to recent Gartner research. That figure represents a near 30 percent growth rate over the previous year. 1. The “should we should go to the cloud” discussion is over — move on “The cloud story is a little old now. People have figured out what they need to do and where they need to go with the whole private and public cloud discussion,” Shroff said. But remember, the motivator is not cost — it’s speed, agility and accessibility of locally distributed applications using the public cloud, he said. 2. Big data remains big If you don’t think so, just look at what’s happened in the vendor community. Teradata bought Aster, EMC bought Greenplum, IBM brought Netezza. There’s a reason for that: They’re all looking at the challenge big data poses to the traditional business intelligence stack, Shroff said. New tools are needed as companies realize they need to analyze data from the outside — from social networks etc. — along with their internal supply chain data. The challenge lies in the middle of those data types. Data mining has been used for 20 years or more but not optimally because before now the data wasn’t widely available, except maybe in retail. Now it is. 3. Social media needs to come in-house Company employee portals are doing a little bit with social media but should be doing a lot more. Tata itself has a social media platform — a sort of internal Facebook/Twitter-like platform for community building and learning. “We want to marry this with our e-mail world seamlessly” so posts have all the connotations needed for people to understand the context, he said. Toward that end, Tata is building Knome which supports user Q&A, debates, shared media, and “Twitter-style” status messages.That enables ad hoc groups to form and disband as needed to get projects done. Tata has deployed 100,000 people on the Knome framework in the past three or four years. 4. The commercial world needs to tap academic research better Innovation is not coming from enterprise IT, it’s happening in the consumer realm and in academia. University research has a lot to offer and companies need to better exploit that resource, Shroff said. TCS, for example, works with Stanford University researchers on the analytics and database sides. “We need to bridge the gap between what’s written in the books and what’s happening in products,” he said. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.A near-term outlook for big dataNewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bangFrom car to cloud: the future of the in-vehicle app landscape
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Dish Network has partnered with Roku to launch a new, streaming-only service that will be sold to customers across the U.S., regardless of whether they’re subscribers of Dish’s pay TV offering or not, both companies announced Wednesday morning. DISHWorld, as the service is called, will offer a number of international packages that bundle Brazilian, Arabic, Hindi and other foreign language content. Bundles go for as little as $5 a month, and all the way up to $44.99, but customers have to mix and match bundles to spend at least $19.99 per month. Some of the bundles simply offer foreign news stations, while others include movie channels and music TV. Among the networks included in the various bundles are Sony Entertainment Television India, Al Jazeera, Willow Cricket and BBC Arabic. Viewers have access to live TV and can catch up on any of the shows that aired within the last 48 hours on any of the networks they subscribe to. A press release also hinted at additional offerings targeting other expats in the future, and it suggested that Roku decided against becoming its own operator, partnering with Dish instead: “Additionally, Roku selected Dish to manage the launch and expansion of future foreign language channels and content on the Roku platform.” The partnership is a big deal for Roku; the set-top-box has been offering subscription access to a number of foreign channels and packages for some time. But in most cases, these are sold separately by smaller companies, some of which reside outside of the U.S.. Having Dish as a trusted brand to manage and promote these kinds of subscriptions could give Roku a big boost. But it’s also a remarkable deal for the pay TV world in general. Over the last few months, there have been many rumors that one of the big pay TV providers would eventually decide to go online and target Internet users located outside of its local market with streaming-only packages — an idea that folks in the industry have been dubbing a virtual cable company. Today, this kind of virtual pay TV future became reality — for folks speaking Hindi, Arabic or any other of the targeted languages, anyway. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1Q4 Wrap-up: SOPA and the future of digital contentConnected Consumer 2012: A year of consolidation and integration
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One of the Valley’s most high profile venture brand names — Kleiner Perkins — has been served in a lawsuit for sexual harassment, gender discrimination and retaliation by partner Ellen Pao, who has been with the firm for seven years. Kleiner says the allegations are unfounded, while Fortune’s Dan Primack reports that the real problem is that Kleiner didn’t disclose the lawsuit to its limited partners before they closed their latest fund. I have no idea if the lawsuit has merit or how likely it is to succeed. But I do know that gender discrimination and sexual harassment are alive and well in the traditional venture capital community and to some extent in the Valley. The issue is something that I’ve talked about ad nauseam with female founders, reporters and press over the almost ten years of my Valley reporting career. It’s not a secret — if you’re a woman that works in the Valley, you’re familiar with this. But the reality is that this old school, old boys club mentality, is one of the many things about the established venture capital community that will need to, and I think eventually will, change, purely for competitive reasons — not necessarily because Sand Hill Road all woke up one day and took a class on gender discrimination. If firms are under utilizing women investors and are seen as unfriendly to women founders, it’s a competitive disadvantage. Some of the younger, more nimble, incubators and firms know this and are actually using how undervalued women are in the traditional venture capital community as a competitive advantage. For example, an investment thesis behind 500 Startups is to invest in under-represented groups — both women founders and founders of color — and women make up more than half of the small team of 500 Startup’s partners. There’s a growing amount of women founders taking place in Y-Combinator every year, though it’s still pretty small. But if a firm has a reputation for being not friendly towards women, then it’s just another barrier to doing these types of deals in an increasingly competitive environment. Internet firms like Etsy are trying to proactively grow — and then tap into — an emerging population of women engineers and developers. It makes sense, they’re a population that’s being under utilized. Women 2.0 is trying to grow a female founder, mentorship ecosystem as well. There’s a lot of things that aren’t working for the traditional venture capital world. The Kauffman Foundation issued a report recently that found that the venture capital industry was not delivering the desired returns, and basically not adjusting to the times. I feel like an old-school mentality around gender is just another symptom of that failure to evolve. And VC firms that are continued to be seen as old boys clubs will just miss out on potential investment opportunities. Tech Crunch and Fortune point out that Kleiner has more female partners than most, and that it’s been trying to lead in this area. I’m not sure what will happen with Kleiner’s lawsuit, but the fact that it’s out there publicly, clearly isn’t good for building their reputation around being women-friendly. Image courtesy of stevendamron. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012Flash analysis: lessons from Solyndra’s fall
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Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress and Automattic (see disclosure) says that the service is preparing for a significant change of direction — by releasing a much simpler version designed to work on mobile. Speaking at the paidContent 2012 event on Wednesday, Mullenweg said that he had been hard at work coming up with a new interface that will eradicate some of the complexity that WordPress is usually associated with. “One of the things I’ve been working on for the past few months is a radical simplification of the interface,” he told interviewer Anil Dash. “WordPress it’s a complex tool, it’s like the back of a digital SLR… but that doesn’t work on a phone.” That complexity has become one of the reasons it is used by a wide range of different people, from tiny bloggers to The New York Times, and is now reported to be the system behind one in eight sites on the web. But Mullenweg admitted it would be tough to move the company in a completely new direction, given the scale and takeup that WordPress already has. “We’re doing that, but at the same time we’ve got tens of millions of users who love the other thing,” he said. “WordPress is really on its third or fourth major pivot. It’s easy to pivot if things are going badly, but when it’s going well you have the weight of all your existing users.” However, he dismissed the idea that the core business of blogging was something that had been undermined by the rise of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and other services. “Blogging has been declared at least five times,” he said. “But that’s like saying creativity is dead, or personal expresion is dead. Ultimately some percentage of the people who get a taste for it through Facebook and Twitter want their own space. And for the most part, that’s a blog.” Keep up with the discussion at paidContent 2012 via livestream (registration required) and #pc2012 on Twitter. Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Connected world: the consumer technology revolutionFacebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implicationsCES 2012: a recap and analysis
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The country’s top tech talent may gravitate to Silicon Valley and New York, but the White House is making a hard push for them to consider a “tour of duty” in Washington, DC. In launching the government’s new digital roadmap and Presidential Innovation Fellows program, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park said Wednesday that the they’re looking for “badass innovators” to work for “a little startup called the United States of America.” “We’re looking for a few good women and men to throw their hats in the ring,” he said. As part of the program, the White House will select 15 coders, designers and other innovators to head to DC for 6- to 12-month fellowships, starting in July. Park said the fellowship will focus on five areas: open data, health information, the online system MyGov, an RFP program targeting startups and a USAID campaign. Importantly for startups, the open data initiative aims to stimulate innovation by releasing information in health, energy, public safety, the nonprofit sector and personal finance and making it machine-readable. Just as the private sector has used GPS, weather and health-related data to create apps and other products, Park said he hopes the liberation of new sets of data will lead to more entrepreneurship in new areas. As for the RFP project, Park said, “if you’re a startup who has ever tried to sell to the federal government, you know it’s a huge pain in the ass.” The goal of the new plan is to make it easier for the government to work with small, high-growth startups on tech solutions. Park made the announcement with Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel, during a presentation at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York. On stage, the pair also announced details for the country’s new digital roadmap and pledged allegiance to innovation. The overall goal of the strategy is to get the government to use technology to deliver better services for citizens, but VanRoekel said some concrete mandates include getting every agency to create a developer page and convert two priority services to mobile. He also said that, aside from emergency situations, the government would not issue any more .gov domains. They said the new digital strategy is based on the following tenets: open data is the new default; anywhere, anytime on any device; everything should be an API; make government data social; and change the meaning of social participation. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.How to navigate the new world of digital advertisingSocial media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominatedControversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
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The pitched war between content owners and technology companies doesn’t have to persist if media companies would acknowledge and adapt to the new realities of digital distribution, said Fred Wilson, managing partner at Union Square Ventures. Speaking at the paidContent 2012 conference in New York, Wilson said the content companies that learn to adjust and embrace new distribution channels can keep the revenue flowing. “I think those (traditional media) industries will survive and thrive, they just need to move from a fairly monopolistic distribution system to a wide open distribution system,” Wilson said. He said while there are some examples of good collaboration between technology companies and progressive content owners, in most cases media companies fear the unfamiliar. But he said history continues to show that new technology — whether it’s radio, the VCR or iTunes — brings in new revenue. He predicts music subscription services will have the same effect. In a perfect world, Wilson said he’d like to see a system similar to a DNS registry in which content owners would register their content and make it available with rules in exchange for copyright enforcement. That’s the fair compensation for society already enforcing the rights of copyright holders, he said. “If we have rules for TV, films, music, books, games we’d see an explosion of innovation. All sorts of services and business models could get created,” he said. If the media companies don’t adapt, tech companies and entrepreneurs are showing an increasingly willingness to create their own content. Wilson pointed to the original programing YouTube is commissioning. He said that could be where the next big media hit is. “Some of those entrepreneurs will create fantastic content that will be very popular and we will see that become very profitable businesses. Maybe the next big media companies will be built that way,” Wilson said. Keep up with the discussion at paidContent 2012 via livestream (registration required) and #pc2012 on Twitter. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implicationsThe future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM ProGigaOM Euro 20: the European startups to watch
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Any remaining doubts of high demand for Samsung’s Galaxy S III smartphone can be laid to rest: Vodafone told the Inquirer that pre-orders for the coming soon phone have set records, making the Galaxy S III the operator’s most pre-ordered Android device yet. Carphone Warehouse, a UK retailer echoed these sentiments, saying “The Galaxy S3 is without a doubt the fastest selling pre-order of 2012 so far.” This follows Samsung’s own statements early in the month; the company announced 9 million pre-orders from carriers at that time. Without actual numbers from Vodafone, it’s not possible to compare the Galaxy S III to Apple’s iPhone 4S, which launched late last year, but the figures show that Samsung has a potential hot seller in hand. That’s good news for the company, which recently took the top spot for global mobile phone sales, but as I previously noted, could lead to another long, slow rollout for the handset. Samsung says it can only produce 5 million Galaxy S III phones per month, which sounds like a lot — it is — but compared to the overall global rollout plans, may not be enough for all who want one. Samsung expects the Galaxy S III to hit 290 carriers across 145 countries around the world, so it will have to maintain a high production level over the next six to 12 months in order to avoid inventory shortages or delayed release dates in some countries. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM ProConnected world: the consumer technology revolutionWhat the Google-Motorola deal means for Android, Microsoft and the mobile industry
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Qwiki burst on to the scene with a cool platform for creating automated multimedia presentations on the fly, kind of like a robot-crafted Wikipedia. But founder and CEO Doug Imbruce saw a bigger future for the company as a publishing medium for creators. That’s what prompted him to move the company to New York late last year to be part of the city’s media and publishing scene. Now, the company’s efforts are all coming together with the launch of new media format that allows publishers, bloggers, Web personalities and others to create 60-second video stories that are embedded with other videos, images, maps and links. It’s like an interactive video slideshow that lets users click on other content throughout a narrated story, so they can choose how deep they want to experience the content. The service has gotten a big endorsement from ABC News, which will use Qwiki to tell news stories online. The network has already started putting together stories, which also appear in its Qwiki channel. Other early advocates are Stylecaster and blogger Shea Marie. The service goes into private testing today with some early users and is expected to open to the public in a couple of weeks. Users can put together a Qwiki by arranging images, videos and maps and other content into six frames. Each frame can be further edited with a caption and embedded with more images, Tweets, maps and links taken from sources such as YouTube, Flickr, Google Maps and other sources including their personal content. When the media content is laid down, a user records a 60-second narration for the story with the option of appearing in a small window throughout the Qwiki. The creator decides when to advance each frame. “Our goal wasn’t to create a single app, but release a two-way format that makes content creation and consumption richer, more fluid and engaging,” Imbruce told me in an interview. “Our vision is for short but very deep pieces of content.” Imbruce said we’re seeing the emergence of more storytelling tools such as Storify for online content. And there’s still video software like iMovie or Final Cut, that can allow people to achieve a similar effect. But he believes there’s a need for an easy tool that lets all kinds of people create personal stories. Qwiki’s new format still has maturing to do. It isn’t capable of playing back on mobile devices. And a mobile app for creating Qwikis is planned but not available yet. But it still has a lot of appeal. A couple thousand teachers tried out a beta version of the creator tool and many came away impressed with what they can do. Imbruce said there are many more features to be added that could make Qwiki even more attractive to its creators and users. For instance, Qwiki is looking at creating a “buy” button so that creators can prompt viewers to purchase items that are talked about during their Qwiki story. I like the first version of Qwiki, although I kind of wish it offered more flexibility with the timing. Right now, creators can only tell a 60-second story. But with the ability to add more content, it could really be the starting point for a bigger story. I think over time, Qwiki might be better served by allowing people the option to make videos a little longer. But, overall, I think this is a cool tool that can help people show off their creativity and storytelling abilities. New online tools, such as Pinterest, are already showing us that self-expression and curation are now very popular. I think it’s logical that a simple tool for mixing video, images and online content could also attract an audience. var galleryData = [{"title":"CreatorShot1","caption":"","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2012\/05\/creatorshot1.jpeg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"CreatorShot2","caption":"","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2012\/05\/creatorshot2.jpeg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"CreatorShot3","caption":"","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2012\/05\/creatorshot3.jpeg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"CreatorShot4","caption":"","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2012\/05\/creatorshot4.jpeg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"CreatorShot5","caption":"","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2012\/05\/creatorshot5.jpeg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"CreatorShot6","caption":"","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2012\/05\/creatorshot6-e1337781082208.jpeg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"Screen Shot 2012-05-23 at 6.53.45 AM","caption":"","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2012\/05\/screen-shot-2012-05-23-at-6-53-45-am-e1337781346193.png?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}];  LoadingNextPreviousPicture 1 of 7 Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.How to navigate the new world of digital advertisingSocial media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominatedControversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
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