uisocialsciences.org

Virtual Worlds Management, a company specializing in the virtual-world market, released figures showing that venture capital and media firms have invested more than $148.5 million in 12 virtual worlds during the third quarter of 2008. So far for the year, total capital investment is more than $493 million.

According to the company, most of the funding is going to developers who create environments that have “strong gameplay elements or ties to media brands.” Investors are also targeting the youth market and have been looking for more youth-centered virtual worlds than ever before.

The bulk of the past quarter’s funding went to MMO (massively multiplayer online) game publisher Trion, which raised $70 million recently in a round that was led by Act II Capital, as well as Time Warner and Peacock Equity.

But most of the attention is shifting away from conventional MMO environments and moving to the youth sector. Of the 12 virtual-world developers that secured funding during the third quarter, six specifically target children or young adults. In fact, Gaia Online, a virtual world for teens, secured $11 million in July, and Knowledge Adventure, which provides an interactive educational environment for children, was able to land $5 million in funding in August.

The idea that venture capitalists will be more frugal over the coming months than they’ve been in the past few years has been discussed quite a bit amid the current economic crisis. But considering the sheer value of money spent on in the third quarter alone, virtual worlds may be one place that start-ups can buck that trend.

Click here for ongoing coverage from CNET News, ‘Tough times for tech’

Now that the FCC has delivered a smackdown to Comcast for its sketchy anti-BitTorrent activities, it’s about time that some other company stepped up to the plate and breathed life into the Net neutrality debate. Surveillance State is happy to report that the Walt Disney-owned ESPN sports network, through its selective blocking of people from particular Internet service providers, may very well wake the sleeping giant that is Net neutrality.

ESPN360.com bills itself as the premier destination for streaming access to live sports events. If the sport or team you love isn’t important enough to be shown on cable TV, no fear, ESPN will stream it to you online for free. Well, that is if you a subscriber to the right Internet service provider.

ESPN's warm welcome to customers of ISPs that have signed deals.

(Credit:
ESPN360)

Customers of AT&T DSL and Verizon’s Fios services, along with approximately 20 more ISPs, can have free, 24-hour per day access to ESPN’s exclusive sports content. Customers of Comcast, Cox, and hundreds of other ISPs, both big and small, are left out in the cold–forbidden to access content that ESPN has, via exclusive contracts, guaranteed that you cannot obtain via any other means in the U.S.

Love Italian soccer and get your Internet access through Comcast? Too bad.

After telling out-of-luck users that their ISPs haven’t coughed up funds for their customers to access ESPN360, the sports network informs them that AT&T customers do have access, and helpfully provides them with a toll-free number that they can call to make the switch to that ISP. How nice of ESPN.

ESPN's message to Comcast's customers

(Credit:
ESPN360.com)

There are many reasons why an ISP would decide against paying ESPN for its premium Web content. A spokesperson for Cox Communications told a journalist back in 2006 that signing on to carry ESPN360 would require Cox to burden all of its customers with additional costs–even those who don’t want the service.

Many customers in the United States still have no real choice for their ISP. For example, if you live out in rural Montana and the one cash-starved regional ISP that offers broadband Internet access hasn’t agreed to ESPN’s shakedown effort, you have no options.

Not surprisingly, this discriminatory policy concerns Ben Scott, policy director at Free Press, the group leading the fight against Comcast’s anti-BitTorrent filtering and other foes of Net neutrality. When asked for his view, he issued the following statement:

ESPN360 raises the unsettling prospect that each ISP will someday have its own distinctive “Internet experience” that includes all kinds of exclusive content in parallel walled-gardens. That is a troubling vision for anyone that values an open media system shared by all Internet users alike.

Most interesting, I suppose, is ESPN’s policy of discriminating against particular ISPs, while at the same time giving free access to any user visiting the site from a U.S. military or university Internet connection; that is, users coming in via a .edu or .mil IP address get to view the sports content without any money changing hands between ESPN and Uncle Sam.

While the decision to support the troops (via free access to European soccer) is a noble one, the decision to give college students a free ride is extremely interesting. After all, the major media companies have shown no real restraint in trying to shake down university users–at times, taking thousands of them to court for their attempts to download content for free.

The cynical among us might perhaps see this as a Joe Camel-esque tactic–offer free access when they’re young, hope that they develop a habit, and once they graduate or leave the military, they’ll look for an ISP that has cut a deal with ESPN.

ESPN spokesman Paul Melvin dismissed my cynicism, explaining the decision to offer free service to these millions of Americans:

These groups are not commercially served by an ISP, and they are not likely to be commercially served in the reasonably foreseeable future. Given this, there is no reasonable chance that we could strike a deal with a retail ISP, nor that the market will continue to grow and offer them greater choice. As a result we adjusted to these specific circumstances.

To try to understand how government regulators would see this issue, I turned to Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), one of the most powerful members of Congress in issues related to telecommunications and Net neutrality.

[This issue has] nothing to do with network neutrality debates, which focus on the practices of the broadband providers. What is in question, is the practice of a content provider, a website owner, in terms of how it chooses to make its content available … I don’t see it as a matter for policy makers to get involved in. I see it as a matter for private contracts, to be determined by content providers.

The congressman is correct in that this is not a traditional Net neutrality conversation per se, since that term usually applies to discrimination by the company owning the “last mile”–the connection to a user’s home. Perhaps a new term will need to be invented by the “Save the Internet” crowd, so as not to further dilute the “Net neutrality” phrase. However, what does concern me is the rather shameless attempt by ESPN to shake down big ISPs, while at the same time giving away its content to millions of college students for free.

Boucher added that:

If ESPN had market power, i would agree that there would be anti-trust issues. Companies that have market power have different market obligations. [However], this is one web site that is putting up sports content, competing with others. Even though ESPN is popular, I don’t think [anti trust] applies. It might in TV broadcast, but certainly not on the Internet.

While I respect the congressman (and am a huge fan of his work in fighting against the dreaded Digital Millennium Copyright Act), I think he is on the wrong side of this issue. Due to the exclusive contracts that ESPN has negotiated with various sports associations, the company does have market power. If you love European soccer or another sport that can’t draw enough viewers to justify TV coverage, there is simply no other (legal) way to view live sports events in the U.S. ESPN is the only game in town.

Libertarians out there will, like the congressman, argue that ESPN is a private company and has a right to decide which customers can access its content. If ESPN offered a generic service (like e-mail, horoscopes, or photo sharing), that would certainly be true. However, because ESPN has exclusive contracts for U.S. distribution of many types of sports content, I don’t think these same rules apply. ESPN shouldn’t be able to get exclusive access to this content, and then deny it to millions of Americans.

Yes, the content is expensive–which is why ESPN could allow the customers of non-kickback-paying ISPs to pull out their credit cards, and sign up for an individual account in order to view these games. Unfortunately, this is not something ESPN is interested in. Explaining this lack of an individual subscriber option, ESPN’s Paul Melvin simply stated that “it is not the business model that we’ve chosen.”

commentary

Nearly three years ago, my company had no Macs. When I joined, I insisted on getting a
Mac, and for nearly a year I was the lone Mac user within our small company.

Two-and-a-half years later, we’ve grown nearly tenfold, and 70 percent of the company uses Macs. Nearly all new employees choose a Mac, and even those who stay with their comfortable Windows box (ThinkPads, mostly), within a year they are asking to swap out for a Mac, too.

Macs are contagious. But they are much more so now that Apple has given its advocates convenient ways to “sell” the Apple experience.

Businessweek wrote recently about the rise of the Mac within enterprises, quite possibly driven by the “iPod/iPhone halo effect” that pundits have long mused would drive Mac sales.

The
iPhone and iPods are definitely helping to drive adoption of Macs, but I think the reason is actually more nuanced: These consumer-focused products give Mac advocates like me a convenient selling point when promoting the Mac.

Will it be hard to use?

No, it will be just as easy to use as your
iPod.

Does it work well with Microsoft Office?

Yes, you can run Microsoft’s Office for Mac natively on the Mac, and it actually looks better on the Mac than on Windows. It works as well on the Mac as iTunes works on Windows.

And so on.

Apple advocates have always promoted the Mac as a better computing platform. Now, however, we actually have “gateway drugs” to get people hooked on the beautiful aesthetics, ease of use, and coolness of Apple technology through the iPhone, iPod, etc. We take our friends and family to the Mac store. We immerse them in the Apple experience.

And they like it. To an ever increasing degree, they like it.

Also, check out how Apple compares to Google, Microsoft, and open source in terms of industry interest.

Petrify, liquefy: new ways to bury greenhouse gas–Environmental News Network via Reuters

More coverage of Masdar Initiative in Abu Dhabi to build a sustainable city with recycled water and renewable energy.

Time magazine declares biofuels a scam, listing the many problems with biofuels including deforestation in Brazil.

Building the Zero-Emissions City–Technology Review

Here’s a new one: Scientists will test whether they can get stone to absorb thousands of tons of CO2. It’s an alternative to carbon sequestration in underground caverns, which could leak.

Fear, but Few Facts, on Hybrid Risk–The New York Times

University of Texas researchers create a microbe that can produce ethanol and other biofuels. Can a licensing deal and venture-backed start-up be far behind?

New Source for Biofuels Discovered–Renewable Energy World

Who saw this coming? An article covers concerns over electromagnetic waves from hybrid
cars, but thus far, there’s no conclusive evidence on the potential problems.

A snapshot of Senate hearings this week on the impact that U.S. government mandates for ethanol are having on corn prices. This article points out that even if mandates were loosened, high oil prices would keep corn ethanol demand strong.

The Clean Energy Scam–TIME

A sampling of
green-tech news.

The WSJ gives the good news/bad news on carbon markets. Yes, the volume of carbon trading is going up, but as carbon-cutting projects face more scrutiny, the UN is getting overwhelmed. Also, there’s no long-term plan post-Kyoto.

The Ethanol Industrial Complex–Forbes.com

Carbon Markets: Booming but Vulnerable, World Bank Says–Environmental Capital (WSJ.com)

Sony Ericsson wants mobile software developers to have the best of both worlds.

For example, Java developers could decide to use the richer user interface technology found in Flash Lite, said Ulf Wretling, general manager, head of developer program and communications for Sony Ericsson. Or maybe a developer wants to use Java’s three-dimensional graphics for a mobile game but would prefer to use Flash Lite for menus, he said.

Next week at JavaOne, the company plans to demonstrate its Project Capuchin, which will allow software developers to create applications for mobile phones that can use pieces of both Java ME and Adobe Systems’ Flash Lite to create their applications. The company plans to release a set of APIs (application programming interfaces) and a software development kit in the second half of this year to bring the two different mobile development styles together.

This technology will be used on the mass-market mobile phone, not the smartphone category with more sophisticated operating systems. Sony Ericsson phones will arrive in the second half of the year with this technology, but the company plans to release the software development kit before the phones arrive.

The problem with this kind of project is that while it creates a “bridge” between the two technologies, as Wretling put it, it also pulls developers away from the current road map for both Java and Flash Lite. The difference here is that developers will still be able to create regular Java or Flash applications using this set of APIs, just mixing and matching technology from the other camp as needed.

Oh, please. For just twice that, I could spend a whole four-to-five minutes weightless in space aboard Richard Branson’s suborbital party plane.

Zoom…

With further development, though, Thunderbolt hopes that its jetpacks will ultimately be used for a “host of defense, commercial, and personal purposes, including support of military missions, disaster relief efforts, border patrol assignments, and even overcoming those snail-paced commutes.” That’s good, seeing as most of us live farther than 3,600 feet from our offices.

The machine can run on either “specially promoted” hydrogen peroxide in a dual-fuel mode (available starting in August) or standard high test peroxide (available in May). A dual-fuel capable jetpack has a longer flight time (the full 75 seconds, as opposed to 45 seconds) and can go faster (75mph compared with 65mph), giving it the ability to go twice as far on one tank–but that’s still only about 3,600 feet.

(Credit:
Thunderbolt Aerosystems)

A company called Thunderbolt Aerosystems announced this week the release of the Thunderpack, which “represents more than a decade’s worth of effort to apply modern rocket fuels and propulsion technologies to create a practical and economical personal air vehicle.” It’ll fly you around for a total of 75 seconds. That’s certainly an improvement over a jetpack at the Wirefly X Prize Cup in 2006 that could stay aloft for a mere 30 seconds.

First Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo unveiling and now a new jetpack? Somebody forgot to tell me that it’s Worldwide Wacko Futurist Pipe-Dream Week.

The market price for the dual-fuel Thunderpack is expected to be in the $100,000 range, with the high test peroxide model selling for $90,000.

Thunderbolt, which was founded by San Francisco Bay Area entrepreneur Carmelo Amarena as a strategy for dealing with a stressful commute, hopes that technological improvements within a year will enable up to 35 minutes of flight.

Javier Soltero, CEO, Hyperic
http://www.hyperic.com

(Credit: Hyperic) So, what are the Cloud’s equivalent for the on-premise electric meter and circuit breakers? Many smart people are chasing to answer that question. Unfortunately, as Dave and others have identified, the Cloud does not have the level of standardization that the power grid does. Each Cloud runs at its own ‘voltage’ and has ‘power sockets’ that are shaped differently and that will make it very difficult to come up with a single solution. There’s been a lot of discussion about the impact openness and standardization will have on the viability of the Cloud as a platform but not enough of that discussion has focused on where manageability fits in.

The separation of Cloud offerings around consumption of resources versus consumption of applications makes a lot of sense. Regardless of the use case, the idea that a business might choose the Cloud as a platform to build and consume applications because it inherently reduces or removes the operational burden is ridiculous.

Those meters at your house are there to provide the necessary ‘local’ management for a utility whose backend infrastructure you don’t see, can’t understand, and don’t care to manage. Without those meters and breakers you wouldn’t trust billing, service levels, or even be able to manage problems like broken appliances. To take this one (rather ridiculous) step further, imagine if every time you wanted to install a new light fixture you had to call up PG&E to tell them to shut off power to that section of your house so you don’t fry yourself.

Guest post by Javier Soltero, CEO of Hyperic

Operations is one of the key open issues that will define Cloud computing’s future.

In order for the Cloud to be trusted like the power grid is, there needs to be a place where both Cloud providers and consumers can see real-time information about how these complex environments are behaving from a customers’ perspective.

Disclosure: my company has a partnership with Hyperic. In the past we have also battled for
Wii supremacy.

This will take some time to sort out. In the meantime, Hyperic has chosen to start by providing a transparent, free, third party mechanism to demonstrate the health and performance of the various Cloud offerings called CloudStatus.

CloudStatus is monitoring the various Clouds by both running inside and outside their respective environments, and displaying the performance and health information in a way that is simple enough for the customer to understand. The service was also designed to provide visibility into multiple Cloud environments regardless of the type of offering.

Enterprise software consumers (the folks whose money most Cloud providers are looking to get) know better than to assume that any new platform (whether it’s “the Cloud” or Linux or Java) is inherently management free. Because of this, I’m confident that until management technology (including everything from provisioning to monitoring) matures, the enterprise will still regard the Cloud as a place to do science experiments.

I asked Javier Soltero, CEO of Hyperic to provide some insight as to why the Cloud is as much of an operations as it is a deployment battle.

The simple reason is that software, regardless of who is developing it, always fails. Those who refute that point haven’t been around technology long enough or haven’t paid attention to the fact that every single ‘Cloud’ has had outages recently.

The problem is that consumers of those services are looking at the services from a completely different vantage point than their providers. Taking the “power utility” analogy often applied to Amazon.com as an example, you can imagine the difference between the tools used by folks like PG&E to manage the power grid versus the single meter and breaker panels you have in your own house.

Cloudstatus monitoring Amazon EC2

Ultimately, the goal is to give the consumers of the Cloud visibility while allowing providers to prove the reliability and performance benefits of the platforms they offer.

The big question is what role do Cloud providers have in providing management technology to their customers. All Cloud providers have management tooling they use for their own internal operations (a lot of them use Hyperic HQ!).

When Hyperic launched CloudStatus.com, I think most people took a look and figured they would never need such a service. Then all of the sudden we saw multiple outages from Google and Amazon and CloudStatus.com became the best resource to figure out what was going on.

commentary (Credit:
Jack Aboutboul)

There are some things for which organizations are best positioned to self-support. For everything else, there’s commercial open source.

From its countdown server to the video streams behind NASA TV, NASA runs a lot of Fedora (and Red Hat Enterprise Linux), as Jack Aboutboul was privileged to see on a recent tour of NASA’s facilities in Jacksonville, Florida.

I suppose it’s not surprising that an organization like NASA would use free software like Fedora, in addition to its commercial cousin, RHEL. After all, NASA is powered by rocket scientists (pun intended) that want maximum control over their IT. Fedora gives that to them. No, they don’t get commercial support for it, but they likely don’t want it, either.

(Credit:
Dan Farber)

IAC is no exception. Despite starting to inch up in the wake of Diller’s November announcement, the company’s stock has now resumed the general downturn it’s been on since a high point in 2003, and there’s little certainty as to what it might do on Thursday.

However, IAC won’t be permanently severing its ties with these companies, thanks to a recently announced ad network that will handle inventory for Ticketmaster, LendingTree, and HSN, as well as the company internally known as “New IAC.” This means that Diller, who will remain a shareholder in all five post-split corporations, might not be fully unloading his company’s problems.

The story is familiar by now: Diller, determined to solidify himself as capable of mastering both old and new media, has long insisted that a lack of confidence on Wall Street has suppressed IAC’s stock price. So last November, Diller made the big announcement that IAC would be slimming down to a core of ad- and subscription-supported Internet media brands such as Ask.com, Match.com, Bloglines, Citysearch, Vimeo, and Evite.

On a general level, the split will make IAC and its perception on the Street less of a mess: nobody’s going to argue that it’s not a true Internet media company now.

IAC executives have been encouraging shareholders to look toward the company’s future for months now, and with losses from the soon-to-be-gone brands set aside, IAC actually beat Wall Street’s estimates for its second-quarter earnings. But on Thursday, when they’re dealing with the revamped IAC hands-on for the first time, many of the old issues won’t be gone. It’s simply a difficult time to be in the business of online media.

That’s not to say that it’s a bad move on the part of IAC’s board. The Malone spat aside, splitting up IAC was a decision met with nods of approval, with the harshest criticism often being that Diller shouldn’t have gotten himself into such a pickle in the first place. (In 2006, New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof dedicated an op-ed to him, entitled “America’s Laziest Man?” for taking home a fat salary while IAC’s stock languished.)

More specifically, IAC is shedding some properties that were threatening to stall, if not sink, the company’s progress. LendingTree was pummeled by the subprime mortgage crisis. A $300 million writedown on Cornerstone Brands was the main culprit in IAC’s second-quarter losses this year. Ticketmaster continues to perform well, but with the loss of its biggest promoter, Live Nation, the future might not be quite as bright.

IAC Chairman and CEO Barry Diller

The company still has the task of building new properties such as FiLife and RushmoreDrive. Other brands could use some resuscitation too: Evite finally has some plucky competitors, Match.com by no means has a lock on the online-dating industry, and the IAC split won’t change the fact that Ask.com still has to compete with Google. Compete.com says traffic has been tepid at CollegeHumor, the fratty entertainment site in which IAC bought a majority stake in 2006, giving Diller a legitimate shot at 21st-century youth savviness (though, to be fair, traffic has been on the rise at sister site Vimeo since early this year).

To use a nautical metaphor–yacht aficionado Diller is a fan of those–IAC has upgraded to a more streamlined fleet of ships. That, unfortunately, doesn’t get rid of the thunderheads.

With some major money losers cast off, IAC will have more financial and human resources to devote to the remaining brands, and less head shaking from Wall Street about what, exactly, the company does.

There will be a press release but no major fanfare, an IAC representative told CNET News on Monday. There also won’t be any disruption over at IAC’s gleaming glass headquarters on Manhattan’s West Side, as no one is getting relocated. Of the brands to be spun off, only the Los Angeles-based Ticketmaster actually has employees in the New York flagship office, and they will remain there even after the split.

Online advertising is a relatively nascent sector of an industry that is starting to see the effects of a rough economy. That could be part of the reasoning behind why IAC’s five-way split and subsequent refocus on online ads are being treated internally as business protocol rather than a ribbon-cutting spectacle.

This has been talked up as an almost spiritual renewal for IAC, which simultaneously weathered a bitter proxy battle with powerful shareholder John Malone of Liberty Media. With that over, and the blueprints laid for the split, Diller festooned the June cover of Portfolio, with the magazine proclaiming a “ninth life” for the former Hollywood mogul. But Diller’s renaissance may be coming at an awkward time, as the outlook for the online-ad industry–the foundation for the new IAC–is not exactly certain.

The rest of its brands would be spun off, grouped into one of four publicly traded companies: ticketing company Ticketmaster, travel company Interval Leisure, retailer HSN (the Home Shopping Network and catalog company Cornerstone), and Tree.com (the set of real-estate and lending brands that encompasses the troubled LendingTree).

Market research firm eMarketer has reduced its estimates for online-ad spending in the past few months–twice. Fox Interactive Media, the digital subsidiary of News Corp., missed its annual revenue goal this spring. Even this year’s Olympics are evidence that online advertising is a tough market, even without economic woes taken into account: just look at NBC’s reluctance to stream some of the more “blockbuster” events live.

The company should nevertheless be optimistic, of course, especially considering that the Malone saga could’ve taken a turn for the worse and doomed the split in the first place. It’s already weathered a few tough skirmishes.

InterActiveCorp, the sprawling conglomerate of brands helmed by media titan Barry Diller, is formally splitting into five separate companies Thursday. And it hopes to do so quietly.

Let me see if I’ve got this right. Oil’s hovering near an all-time high, rising prices combined with food shortages are responsible for riots around the world, and we’ve got ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN are literally wasting hours on the existential significance of a Chicago pastor. As we used to say in Brooklyn, give me a frigging break.

(Credit:
Trinity United Church of Christ)

(Credit:
Topix.com)

This is how Tolles put it to me: “As we’re seeing all the time, newspapers, which once were local monopolies, are watching that one-time windfall go off to money heaven. When newspapers go on the Internet, they make 10 percent of what they used to make. I’m giving Molotov cocktails to the mob. If the sheriff is a bad guy in a small time, what you want is some guy who just got shafted to go online while he’s still hot and say this jerk sheriff, etc. etc. You want a platform for opinions that can speak truth to power for the individual.”

The formula’s working. ComScore now rates Topix just behind The New York Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today in terms of individually branded Web sites. Knight Ridder, the Tribune Company, and Gannett liked what they saw and bought up a 75 percent chunk of the company.

Topix is on to a big idea, and so if Tolles or any other start-up can shake up the media landscape, more power to them. Too many important stories are passing by without notice.

Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.

If my hunch is right, Chris Tolles has a better shot at representing the future of media than does Chris Matthews and his ilk. And that would be so fine by me–and probably lots of you, as well.

Most people in New York and San Francisco many not be using Topix, but Tolles has a bigger audience in mind: most of the folks between the coasts, who are increasingly underserved by corporate media.

Chris Tolles

At the Web 2.0 Expo last week, I had a long conversation with Tolles, who runs Topix.com, about the fragmentation of media and where technology is taking it. If you’re not familiar with Topix, get to know it.

Does anyone seriously doubt that we’re at a point where the need to talk back to the talking heads is super-important? The orgy of idiocy surrounding the Jeremiah Wright coverage is a perfect case in point. I thought I was inured to the banality that informs the punditry of Matthews, Joe Scarborough, Sean Hannity, and the rest of the blabatocracy. Not even close. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think the electronic media had collectively adopted the new corporate slogan: “All Jeremiah Wright, All the Time.”

Tolles operates on the sound assumption that the media outlets with the most engaged audiences will thrive. Nowadays, about 60 percent of the content on his site consists of original user content. Reader opinion gets featured prominently next to regular news feeds. In addition, Topix uses a network of volunteer editors (around 4,400) who package and post news tailored to their localities.

My hunch is that most mainstream media would choke at the prospect, but you want the most people participating.

I’m generalizing here, but it’s safe to say that vapid television coverage that’s less and less relevant to their lives has become the norm, rather than the exception, everywhere in this country–especially outside the big urban population centers.