Since launching in beta last July, Ireland-based music video site Muzu.tv has secured a decent amount of recognition for its monetization priorities. The site gives 50% of the net ad revenue generated by an artist's content back to the artist (or label) without any exclusivity contracts.

Banner ads and in-video advertisements are embedded in an artist's content in the Muzu player, which is itself embeddable in sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. Anybody or any band can create a channel on Muzu dedicated to their personal music, and monetize their video content. While monetization has been somewhat problematic on YouTube, the option to make money there does exist.

Continue reading →

Amazon officially debuted the Kindle DX today, following several days of leaked images and information that resulted in almost full disclosure.

The Kindle DX has a 9.7" e-ink display and offers 3.3 GB of storage versus the Kindle 2's 6" screen and 2 GB of storage. Rather than knock down the $359 price of the only three-month-old Kindle 2, the Kindle DX simply enters the market at $489 and creates a new size-based tier.

Continue reading →

Nearly a year after the iTunes App Store launched, AT&T has finally made a wireless account manager available for the iPhone. This week, the mobile carrier debuted "myWireless Mobile," which lets iPhone users manage their wireless bills and plans, and track their voice, data and text message usage.

The app is free and is an extension of the Web-based "myWireless" account manager found on att.com. To access your records, you must first be registered myWireless user. Similar to T-Mobile's MyAccount, which was launched in the Android market in March for users of the popular G1 handset, myWireless allows management of not only a single handset, but also a whole family's set of phones.

Continue reading →

Today, Intrinsyc Software announced an Android app called UX-Zone that detects when the user has entered a particular femtocell coverage area, and switches to a new home screen with appropriate apps for that area.

Femtocell is a relatively young technology, which acts as an indoor miniature cell tower, giving users additional wireless coverage with the help of their home or office broadband connection. With UX-Zone, a user's Android home screen automatically changes to "Home" and "Office" modes when femtocell presence is detected.

Continue reading →

From the workaday businessman to the President of the United States, for years, the American white-collar workforce has found itself choosing the Canadian BlackBerry. But after a recent period of aggressive marketing and promotion by Research in Motion which has coincided with a flare-up in consumer smartphone spending, the BlackBerry is also looking like the choice of the general populace.

As Verizon's exclusive entrant in the four-runner race of touchscreen smartphones, Research in Motion's BlackBerry Storm has proven to be a success among business and non-business users alike. RIM CEO Jim Balsillie has been widely quoted this week as saying, "That product was a huge success in terms of sales and adoption," adding that a next-generation device is on the Storm roadmap, off-handedly confirming rumors that began in April.

Continue reading →

Literally millions of unauthorized documents -- some of them personal, easily too many of them classified -- have made their way freely through P2P networks, many of them without any malicious user whatsoever even requesting or copying them. Sometimes, literally, they just show up. If the problem isn't P2P itself but the people using it, then shouldn't the users of P2P services be given warnings? That's the question being tackled by the US House of Representatives today.

H.R. 1319 or "The Informed P2P User Act" was heard today by the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection. The bill seeks to curb the inadvertent disclosure of tax information, health records, and confidential or personal documents over peer-to-peer file sharing networks.

Continue reading →

It's like the golden age of radio for the Internet generation. The same company that in 1927 formed a nationwide network from 16 affiliate radio stations announced it has spun off the single largest online radio service to date. CBS has formed a new business unit called the CBS Interactive Music Group, which rounds up more than 100 sites and 400 stations and combines them with AOL Radio, Yahoo LaunchCast, and Last.fm under a single governing body.

CBS says that in March, CBS Radio had over 6.5 million listeners who streamed a combined 83 million hours worth of audio. Taken alone, it sounds like a massive number, but when compared to the consumption of audio through sites such as Pandora and Jango, the grandiosity promptly dissolves. According to siteanalytics.compete.com, cbsradio.com enjoyed only 97,150 unique visitors in March while radio.aol.com only had 41,108.

Continue reading →

The first release candidate of Windows 7 has been posted for download, and will remain available until the end of July. Windows 7 RC is a free download as part of the Customer Preview Program, and will expire on June 1, 2010 (at which time you should be running the final release).

Microsoft suggests a system with a 1GHz processor or faster DirectX 9-enabled graphics processor with WDDM 1.0+, 1 GB RAM and 16GB of storage for a 32-bit installation, or 2 GB RAM and 20GB of storage for 64-bit. Both the 32- and 64-bit versions are available in English, German, Japanese, French, and Spanish.

Continue reading →

The mobile enterprise sector has got its newest supergroup. Today, HP and BlackBerry maker Research in Motion announced their alliance and that their first collaborative efforts are ready to be shown to the public: HP CloudPrint for BlackBerry Smartphones, and HP Operations Manager for BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

CloudPrint is a product of HP Labs, which, in short, is a cloud-based print server. It allows Internet-connected mobile devices to print e-mail attachments, Web pages, photos, and documents, and has been in various stages of development since 2007. Through its partnership with RIM, HP will make the service available to BlackBerry Internet Service subscribers and BlackBerry Enterprise Server customers.

Continue reading →

NPD's smartphone market research ranked Research in Motion's BlackBerry Curve (8300 series) as the best-selling smartphone for the first quarter of 2009. The device outsold Apple's iPhone 3G, thanks in part to its equal availability on all four major United States carriers and aggressive promotion from the Canadian smartphone company.

RIM has also been careful to offer exclusive devices to each carrier, such as the Verizon-exclusive BlackBerry Storm, which was also the third place best seller in the first quarter of the year, according to NPD. T-Mobile's exclusive BlackBerry, the Curve 8900, will be showing up on AT&T over the summer, the phone company said this weekend.

Continue reading →

American television programming is controlled by approximately ten major companies (give or take a few depending on the interpretation of "major") which include: Time Warner, News Corp., GE, CBS, Viacom, The Walt Disney Company, Hearst, NBC Universal, Scripps, and Liberty Media. These companies are as deeply intertwined as their histories are long.

John Malone's Liberty Media is responsible for the networks under the Starz Entertainment and QVC brands, and has a controlling stake in the United States' largest satellite television provider DirecTV. Liberty Media holds a 48% stake in the US' largest satellite television provider, which it obtained through a stock swap with News Corp, in which Liberty sold back its shares of News Corp. in exchange for News Corp.'s shares of The DirecTV Group.

Continue reading →

Thanks to the slow-moving United States legal process and the glut of copyright litigation, the names of P2P services often live on long after their actual services die in popularity. Limewire is one of those, thanks to the high profile cases it found itself wrapped up in.

One of those cases was a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing in 2007 that focused on security holes opened by LimeWire, and showed that over 200 classified government documents were available for download via the service. General Wesley Clark said, "It's just totally unacceptable. The American people would be outraged if they were aware of what's inadvertently shared by government agencies on P2P networks."

Continue reading →

One year ago, Sprint affiliate iPCS sued Sprint over its WiMAX venture with Clearwire, claiming that Sprint violated exclusivity agreements and willfully withheld the 4G technology from affiliates like iPCS.

The Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois denied Sprint's motion to dismiss the claims by iPCS, which seek to block Sprint from "obtaining directly or indirectly the benefits of advanced technology without providing that technology and sharing its benefits with its affiliates."

Continue reading →

To ensure Verizon's merger with Alltel was a pro-competitive move, the Federal Communications Commission and Department of Justice required that Verizon divest from 105 mobile markets where Verizon and Alltel services overlapped. The merger will make Verizon the largest mobile carrier in the United States, and this mandate constitutes the biggest divestiture Verizon Wireless has had to execute in its nine years of existence.

Because the action is so large and complex, (each marketing area has approximately 200 pages worth of assets to auction off) Verizon has filed for an extension with the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, asking for another 60 days to complete the divestitures.

Continue reading →

Having a copyright law that was drafted before the Internet Age has proven too problematic for New Zealand, and after trying a number of incremental updates, the government is considering a total rewrite.

Prime Minister John Key took office in November, and his center-right National Party ended a nine-year Labor Party incumbency. Controversy arose shortly thereafter as The Copyright (New Technologies) Amendment Act 2008, which was passed before Key's election, came into force. A clause in the act allowed ISPs to terminate a user's account based upon suspected illegal file sharing, similar to theThree Strikes Rule being drafted in France at the same time.

Continue reading →