On the heels of announcing a payments partnership with Facebook, PlaySpan is making another announcement regarding the startup’s UltimatePay payments product. PlaySpan is launching UltimatePay Mobile, a virtual currency and micropayments monetization widget for smartphone platforms. The initial private beta launch will support Android phones and Nokia phones with WebRuntime installed.

UltimatePay is a ‘Monetization as a Service’ platform for apps, games, videos and digital goods. Based on the user’s location, the payments platform draws from over 85 different payment options. Because of its vast variety of payment options (which include PayPal, pre-paid cards, and a number of credit cards), UltimatePay is designed for a global audience.

UltimatePay Mobile gives smartphone developers a way to deliver a one-click payment experience to mobile gamers, and provide a comprehensive payments offering. The platform allows players to view their balance and transaction history, while allowing them to purchase items in-app without ever having to leave the game.

Of course, PlaySpan isn’t the first startup or company to bring in-app payments to Android phones; PayPal, Boku and Zong all offer in-app payments libraries to developers.

PlaySpan, which recently raised $18 million in new funding, already has a number of partnerships with a number of gaming and media companies, including Ubisoft, Sanrio and others. Perhaps the company can leverage some of these relationships to offer UltimatePay in publisher’s mobile games.

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PlaySpan’s Ultimate Pay Brings In-App Mobile Payments To Android…

After a Summer spent in “Lockdown”, Facebook apparently got quite a bit of work done. They’ve already had a number of events just in the past few weeks. And now they’re having another one.

We’ve just been alerted about an invite-only press event taking place next Monday, November 15 at 9:30 AM in San Francisco. At the bottom of the invite, it notes that “This special event is in advance of Mark Zuckerberg’s conversation on 11/16 at Web 2.0 Summit.”

So what will Facebook be talking about? Who knows. The invite has chat bubbles on it, but as we’ve learned in the past, these often have nothing to do with the event.

After Facebook’s last event, in which they unveiled some big updates to their Places product including Deals, we asked Zuckerberg if the company had any other big things to launch this year. He indicated that more was on the way, but at least one more big thing was coming soon.

Is this the big thing or a smaller thing? Tune in Monday to find out.

Update: Actually, looking at their icon again, you’ll notice it is their Inbox icon (at least on the iPhone) and not their chat icon. Could this be the unveiling of the new Facebook mail product — Project Titan? Let the speculation begin!

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Facebook Holding Yet Another Event Next Monday In San Francisco. Inbox…

While social commerce network Lockerz has been flying under the radar, the startup has quietly been able to raise an impressive amount of funding and accumulated nearly 18 million members after being open to the public for under two years. Lockerz has raised a total of $30 million, most recently nabbing $18 million from Kleiner Perkins newly launched sFund. Both John Doerr and Bing Gordon sit on Lockerz board of directors.

The Lockerz social commerce platform revolves around the idea that influencers within a social network can become brand and content advocates and affect the behavior of their friends. Lockerz is primarily targeted towards men and women ages 13 to 30, attempting to build a community of trendsetters and tastemakers who love to shop, play and connect on the Web.

Lockerz provides incentives like the ability to earn discounts on brands to encourage users to share content on the site. Members earn “Pointz” by watching videos, listening to music and inviting friends; pointz can then be used lower the prices of merchandise on the site. Users can also earn “Decalz” for sharing (similar to badges). New boutiques launch every Tuesday and feature brands such as 7 for All Mankind, Alex & Ani, Splendid, Rock & Republic, Matt Bernson, Quiksilver, Nintendo, and Xbox 360.

Founded by Kathy Savitt, a former Amazon and American Eagle Outfitters exec; Lockerz eventually wants to be the go-to commerce homepage for teens and young adults. One interesting part of the startup’s social growth is that it has no connection to Facebook. Savitt says that they are looking into connecting with Facebook, perhaps through a Facebook app, but that growth seems to be doing just fine with out the social network.

Lockerz started with 50 college kids that were friends and family of Savitt and her two daughters, and grew to 17.5 million users in less than one year. The site gets a little under 1 million unique visits per month (according to Google Analytics).

Social commerce is certainly hot these days, with social networks and commerce sites all throwing their hat in the ring with various products and acquisitions. But Lockerz has been able to gain a viral following from a subset of users, which is impressive. It should be interesting to see if the startup can continue its ascent.

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sFund-Backed Lockerz Wants To Be A Social Commerce Destination For…

The necessity of getting tested for STDs is often avoided as much from embarrassment as from fear of the outcome. Like buying condoms at the store, it’s a situation where your private life is suddenly exposed, and even though it’s not something to be ashamed of, it’s something you’d rather keep to yourself. People shy from going to the clinic or hospital, even when it’s a serious matter for themselves or others, because of this natural tendency to eschew public scrutiny.

A project at St. George’s University in London aims to prevent this problem by making STD testing as private as pregnancy testing. They’re doing so by developing a mobile phone-compatible chip that would be capable of returning results within 15 minutes.

Continue reading…

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Mobile-Based STD Test Kit To Improve Conditions In Third World, Frat…

Yesterday Facebook released a clever way to continue to download Google user data, despite Google banning Facebook from using their APIs. It looks to me like they aren’t going to try to stop Facebook from using this more manual approach. Instead, for now, it’s being escalated only via words:

We’re disappointed that Facebook didn’t invest their time in making it possible for their users to get their contacts out of Facebook. As passionate believers that people should be able to control the data they create, we will continue to allow our users to export their Google contacts.

That’s a nice swipe there in the beginning, about how they wish Facebook had spent time giving people a way to liberate their own Facebook data rather than building tools to end run around Google. That last bit though, about “people should be able to control the data they create” doesn’t quite hit the mark though in my opinion.

We’re talking about your Facebook friends list and their email addresses. You create your list of friends, of course, but you generally aren’t uploading email addresses to Facebook, your friends do. Still, I think there are excellent logic arguments for allowing users to download friends’ email addresses, too. More on that later.

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Google’s Response To Facebook’s Response To Google’s Facebook…

When textbook tablet startup Kno raised $46 million in September from Andreessen Horowitz and Silicon Valley Bank, it was shooting to price its dual-screen tablet at under $1,000. On Tuesday, it will announce the pricing of its tablets at $899 for the dual-screen version and $599 for the single-screen version. It will also start taking limited pre-orders for shipping before the end of the year.

At $599, the single-screen tablet, will be $100 more than a WiFi-only iPad and the same price as a Samsung Galaxy Tab from T-Mobile without a contract. But the Kno is ginormous. Even the single-paned one, with its 14.1 inch screen, is nearly twice as big as an iPad. That one debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco (see demo video below).

Although the Kno has a color touch-screen and runs a browser and learning apps, it is competing less with the iPad than with the extra-large Kindle DX, which sells for $379, has a 9.7-inch black-and-white screen, and also targets the textbook market.

What it will come down to, though, is not so much the price of the device as much as the availability and price of the textbooks on each device. Kno CEO Osman Rashid declares that that the number of textbook titles available on the “Kindle Dx won’t be more than ours.” By the time, the Kno gets into students hands there will be tens of thousands of textbook titles for sale at 30 to 50 percent cheaper than the print editions. The Kno should pay for itself within three semesters, and students won’t have to lug around a backpack full of paper textbooks. They can also take notes on the Kno.

The money is in the textbooks and apps, not in the hardware. “We don’t see ourselves as a hardware platform, but as a learning platform company,” says Rashid. In a year or two, it is not hard to imagine that $599 Kno costing only half as much, opening up the world of digital textbooks to even more students. Below is the demo video if the Kno from Disrupt:

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Kno Tablet Will Start At $599 For Single-Screen, $899 For Dual-Screen

Nextag, a comparison shopping site for products and services, has acquired online deals aggregating service NextCoupons. Financial terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed, but this is clearly a minor transaction and primarily a way for Nextag to bring in more talent and resources.

NextCoupons allows shoppers to create an account and share offers with the site’s visiting online deal hunters. NextCoupons’ technology provides retailers direct access to the site’s coupon inventory, allowing them to post their own coupons and promotion codes and view statistics on previously posted coupons.

The Santa Monica, California-based company says it offers coupons from over 500 retailers through a variety of delivery methods, including an iPhone formatted site, social networking integration with Twitter and Facebook feeds and browser integration with a Firefox Toolbar.

NextCoupons CEO Joseph Raffetto says its technology will enable Nextag, which claims 30 million+ monthly customers, to further enhance its users’ online shopping experience through greater personalization and social media features.

Nextag specializes in search technology to let users find products, prices and information whenever and wherever they need them. Nextag operates comparison shopping sites in the US (Nextag.com), the UK (Nextag.co.uk), France (Nextag.fr), Germany (Nextag.de), Spain (Nextag.es), Italy (Nextag.it), Australia (Nextag.com.au) and Japan (Nextag.co.jp).

Nextag is headquartered in San Mateo, CA with offices in London, Tokyo and Gurgaon, India.

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Nextag Acquires Online Coupon Provider NextCoupons

Lately it seems like there is endless news around messaging, VoIP and video calling. Apple recently announced they’d added FaceTime support for the Mac, and had shipped 19 million FaceTime-enabled iOS devices since June. Google Voice also made headlines last week for an outage, but I think the bigger news associated with that downtime is how fast they’ve been growing. And there’s been a flurry of startup activity around messaging and communication as well, such as the super innovative GroupMe releasing an Android App.

The resounding theme from all these seemingly disparate announcements is that messaging, voice, video, and chatting applications are on fire. Sure, we all use social media, but it sure hasn’t dampened people’s affinity for texting or making a call.

More revealing, all of this innovation seems to be happening at the application layer, far from the AT&Ts of the world, who are missing another wave of innovation which is happening on top of their networks. It’s very evident that Google and Apple are making overtures to become your de facto voice and messaging provider, and the carriers are sitting with their pants down, struggling to plan how they stay relevant.

Why the Carriers Will Become Irrelevant in Voice and Messaging

It’s easy to bash carriers. I recently wrote about the technical reasons why AT&T’s network is so awful which got their higher ups to contact me and whine about what I’d written. Truth is, there are long-standing reasons behind AT&T’s failures—network decisions take many years to unfold, especially since the telco monopolies are, by their very nature, slow to respond to change and innovation.

But forget the past, let’s look at why the carriers are poised to become more and more irrelevant beyond being pipe providers in the future. And let’s do so specifically around voice and messaging, the bread and butter services that they evolved to provide.

Imagine the future of communication on your smartphone: you’re on a video call with your significant other across the world on different networks, you tap your screen, and instantly their phone screen mimics yours as you flip through photos of your trip while continuing your call. Or imagine sending out an MMS to a group, and when each of your friends open it they immediately tap into a live HD audio/video stream which you’re broadcasting to everyone. No delays, no dialing, and no going in and out of different apps—it just works.

All of these amazing use-cases, and more, will be enabled by 4G wireless standards. This is because 4G is 100% IP-based, which is what the internet was founded upon. Today, voice is routed separately from data on mobile networks due to legacy “circuit-switched” architecture. With LTE, the first phase of 4G, voice and video sessions will be packetized and sent over the network from your smartphone just like any other application layer data, which will open a range of new capabilities.

LTE Now; Voice in 2013 – Are You Kidding Me?

But there’s a roadblock to realizing this vision of ubiquity. Right now the carriers can’t agree on what’s happening with respect to voice. In classic fashion, they are stuck in endless consortium meetings arguing about standards instead of moving forward, picking one, testing, and deploying.

Some carriers are behind a voice technology called IPMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), which is 100% IP-based, and others are clinging to VoLGA (voice over LTE via generic access), which splits mobile voice and messaging apart from the IP-based LTE network in a technique called “circuit-switched fallback”.

Guess when they plan to resolve all this? 2013! Per this AT&T slide from a few weeks ago. And it’s easy to envision any resolution extending years past this date, which is crazy considering what’s at stake for the carriers as they struggle so stay relevant in voice communication.

FaceTime best foreshadowed their dwindling relevance, since video calls over WiFi bypass the carrier network entirely. And though FaceTime doesn’t yet work on 3G you can see the writing on the wall. Meanwhile Google Voice still requires you to dial out using your carrier’s network, but Google’s acquisition of Gizmo5 last year foretells this will go away in favor of full VoIP too. Then of course there’s Skype, which now works over 3G, bypassing the voice network of your carrier too.

The Bureaucracy Behind Why The Carriers are Missing Out

Carriers are in the process of transitioning from a telco model, which is closed, to the internet model, which is open. In the old days it was deemed acceptable for them to stew over standards for multiyear periods, but innovation on the internet doesn’t work this way.

Recently at CTIA, Verizon declined to discuss the VoLTE situation because they simply don’t have anything cohesive to communicate. This is embarrassing, considering their LTE network is supposed to be ready by the end of the year. What this means is that voice will be routed over their old network for years to come—fabulous.

This is absurd, and is symbolic of how consortiums and standards bodies work in telecom—anyone who has ever sold to or interacted with a carrier understands the glacial pace at which they move. What the carriers really need to do is get out of bed and resolve how voice will be packetized, then move forward and deploy it. It’s simply embarrassing that they can’t do this, but it’s not surprising, since they still receive so much revenue from voice plans.

The Internet Wins Again – Go Back to Sleep Carriers

The future in mobile communication is being written at the application layer—both by innovative giants like Apple and Google, and smaller startups such as GroupMe and Twilio—not at the infrastructure layer by the AT&Ts and Verizons of the world. The carriers had a chance to provide a better voice and messaging experience with 4G, and to charge a toll for that experience, but they are missing that window.

Apple and Google are closing it fast. Back in June, when iPhone 4 was released, people wondered why Apple made FaceTime an open standard. Here is one important reason why: A closed standard may have caused an overly fragmented market for video-calling, which would definitely benefit the carriers. This is  likely, at least in part, why Steve Jobs decided to open up FaceTime, as any open standards success in video/telephony limits the power of the carriers.

The funny thing is, they seem to be screwing it all up without Steve’s help. There is simply no doubt that the future of voice and messaging is with companies innovating at the application layer, and my guess is there is going to be a ton of investment activity and M&A in this space as new realtime communication tools are developed over the next few years.

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Google Voice and FaceTime – Why the Carriers Are Losing Their Voice

First shoes, now diapers. Amazon is reportedly about to announce on Monday the acquisition of Quidsi, the New Jersey-based ecommerce company behind Diapers.com, Soap.com, and, most recently, BeautyBar.com. Fortune’s Dan Primack, who broke the story from a maternity ward in Boston where his daughter was just born (no joke), puts the price of the all-cash deal at $540 million. A year ago, Amazon bought online shoe retailer Zappos for $1.2 billion.

Founded by Vinit Bharara and Marc Lore, Quidsi has raised a total of $78.5 million. Its most recent funding was a $20 million debt round last April from investors including Accel, Besssemer, MentorTech, and New Enterprise Associates.

Diapers.com is the company’s flagship brand, with an estimated $300-million revenue run rate this year. Soap.com just launched in June, and BeautyBar.com launched last week. So the vast majority of revenues is still coming from Diapers.com, which would value the deal at less than 2X revenues. Feeling threatened, Amazon recently started undercutting Diapers.com on price, a strategy which may have helped convince them to sell.

If the deal goes through, it would just go to show that you can still build an ecommerce startup if you go after the right niche. But it would also prove that if you get big enough, Amazon will notice and either buy you or try to squash you.

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Amazon Buys A Lot of Diapers.com For $540 Million

Editor’s note: Guest author Jon Evans is a novelist, journalist, and software engineer.

Oh, Research In Motion. You never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

RIM was born in my home town, at my alma mater, so it’s depressing watching their empire rot and crumble before the Android / iPhone onslaught. I had high hopes for their new tablet, a potential game-changer—but alas, they’ve hamstrung it before it’s even been released. Here’s what they should have done with it:

1) Embrace Android (phones)

RIM proudly announced that while their PlayBook can’t connect to cell networks, it can tether to a compatible BlackBerry via Bluetooth. They might as well have installed a ”For BlackBerry Owners Only” startup screen. Way to pre-alienate most of the market, guys.

Instead they should have stressed that they can also connect via Wi-Fi to Android 2.2 phones, and announced an Android app that syncs data between Androids and PlayBooks. They can’t support the iPhone, Apple would never allow it, but Android’s wide open.

“But Android is the competition!” No, Android tablets are. Tablets and phones are entirely different entities. RIM’s tech people understand that: it’s why the PlayBook runs a brand-new OS built by QNX, a company they bought earlier this year, rather than a new iteration of the archaic BlackBerry OS. Which is no bad thing—QNX is well-regarded, and time-tested. (I fondly remember being reprimanded for hacking into my high school’s QNX system many years ago.)

Until RIM drops that millstone called the BlackBerry OS, or replaces it with a QNX-based version, Android and Apple will eat their phones for lunch. Meanwhile, they need to accept that the PlayBook should complement rather than compete with Android phones.

2) WebWorks or AIR: Pick One.

I’m an app developer. Pity me. I have to know Java, Eclipse, Objective-C, XCode, and both the Android and iOS SDKs.  I could use a cross-compiler like PhoneGap, but they’re clunky and slow to implement new features. If Windows Phone 7 takes off, I need to master another language, environment, and platform—and while BlackBerry apps are written in Java, it’s an older version than Android’s, and the SDK is completely different.

I liked Palm, but I was delighted to see it die, and Nokia’s decay into irrelevance is a relief. Nothing against them; I just don’t want the hassle. App developers don’t want choice, we want consistency.

So what does RIM give us? Choice. First they offer free PlayBooks to developers who build PlayBook apps with Adobe’s AIR. Then they say you can build both PlayBook and BlackBerry 6 apps with BlackBerry WebWorks. Rather than split their development and support resources between two different platforms, they should have chosen one and ran with it. These “choices” will only confuse and irritate the app makers who will determine their fate.

3) Change the name. And the target market.

PlayBook? Really? You’re Research In Motion. You’re business, baby. Your tech level may be a little antiquated, but you’re secure, you get stuff done, and the new tablet brings you back up to speed. You should be targeting corporate videoconferencing and hospital patient data and business travelers. That’s why you’ve got BlackBerry tethering, right?

Instead you called it the PlayBook and can’t stop talking about how it runs Flash, both of which will make CIOs everywhere raise skeptical eyebrows. You’re trying to be all things to all users, including consumers—but Android tablets run Flash too, and they’ll be available for Christmas; the iPad boasts a bigger screen, superior apps, and the Apple halo; and worst of all, the PlayBook will probably launch right in the teeth of the iPad 2 hype machine. RIM should conquer the business-tablet space first. Instead, they already look like also-rans before they even have their running shoes on.

It’s a shame. I wish RIM well, and their new tablet looks like a potentially superb device. But they’re squandering that potential before it even has a chance to succeed.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

How RIM’s PlayBook Could Have Succeeded

And yet, sitting in his new office in New York’s West Village, Hsu seems utterly confident, framing each prediction with a when-not-if mentality.

The well-funded RecycleBank— which has raised more than $70 million from VC firms like Kleiner Perkins, RRE Ventures and Sigma Partners— is a recycling rewards program that works with municipalities and large corporate sponsors, like P&G and Kashi, to install local programs in US and UK cities.

Under RecycleBank’s program, a household signs up for an account online and receives a special bin or “smart cart” for their recyclable waste that is equipped with a unique RFID-tag. When the hauler arrives to remove the waste, the cart is weighed and the household’s account is credited with points based on that weight. Those points can be redeemed online for rewards or savings with more than 1,000 local and national businesses.

Since its inception in 2005, RecycleBank has installed itself in more than 300 cities in the US and UK, with 3 million-plus households under contract. According to Hsu, revenues have been tripling every year, for the last two years, and the company is very close to profitability.

Hsu, who was formerly the CEO of 24/7 Real Media (an online marketing firm firm acquired by WPP for $649 million in 2007), was brought on to get the firm solidly in the black and to use his marketing background to help the company achieve tremendous— some might say unrealistic— growth offline and online.

“One of the things I will bring to bear in this company is the ability to grow to a mass market scale so that RecycleBank can be the first green mass market brand,” Hsu says. “This company will IPO in the next several years.”

So what is Hsu’s battle plan to get RecycleBank ready for a 2013 IPO— an IPO that he says will value the company in the multi-billion dollar range?

Hsu has three priorities: a new revamped online portal that leverages social tools, increased corporate sponsorships and a major push to get RecycleBank in new cities.

According to the CEO, he wants to work with municipalities to create hundreds of hyperlocal online destinations, to connect the users within RecycleBank communities. These new sites will feature social chat, gaming, a bulletin board for neighborhood announcements and a schedule of local activities. Calling it “Facebook with a purpose,” he says he doesn’t “want to reinvent the wheel of how people communicate but we want to leverage those tools successfully.”

Currently, RecycleBank makes the bulk of its revenues from its deals with municipalities— local governments pay the company a fee for diverting waste from landfills. The company also gets money through corporate sponsorships, but it only has a few dozen of these partnerships today. Over the next few years, RecycleBank plans to dramatically expand its portfolio of lucrative sponsorships, and Hsu predicts, eventually the amount of dollars coming in via sponsorships will significantly outweigh the amount from municipalities.

However, if RecycleBank wants to become a truly, global green, mass market brand, it will need to find a way to crack the markets outside of the US and UK. For example, given China’s rapid urban development and 1.3 billion strong population, it is a rising power player that is creating significant economic growth— and by extension, mountains of waste. It may be relatively easy to deploy millions of “smart cans” to households in highly developed countries, but it will be interesting to see how the RecycleBank program fares in the world’s major developing regions.

Hsu says he wants to tackle the larger international picture but it will be a challenge to do it directly (at least in the near term), because of their ambitions at home and in the UK. At least for the next few years, he wants to stay focused on expansion in these markets, and perhaps, link up with international partners to address other regions. The arms-length approach will likely blunt RecycleBank’s effectiveness in new markets, but it’s a start.

Hsu has a long way to go before he proves himself to his staff and RecycleBank’s investors— and he’s giving himself a short runway to do so— but he says he’s happy to have at least impressed one very important critic: his three-year old daughter.

“I really cherished my time at 24/7 Media…but it was hard for me to describe to my daughters what exactly I did. So I would show them a website, like Weather.com and show them the banner ads that they see on the top and sides and say to them abstractly, “Daddy’s company helps show those ads.” And they would nod to me, and they loved me because they’re my daughters but at the end of the day they didn’t really understand. Today when I tell my daugther…I show her the recycling bin and the trashbag and she can see how my company can move from the waste bucket to the sustainability bucket, she understands. She understands that daddy helps put less garbage on the street.”

See our video with Hsu above.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

RecycleBank CEO: We Will IPO In 2013 (TCTV)

Our post earlier tonight about Google shutting down Facebook’s access to Gmail data exports makes me think two things. First, I’m not sure there’s much data that Facebook doesn’t already have with it’s 600 million users (although 1.3 billion people visit Google sites a week, so they’re not exactly slumming). And second, the data protectionist era has now begun in earnest.

Trade restrictions, tariffs, etc., called protectionism, is always a double edged sword. It has the short term benefit of helping domestic companies stay competitive and profitable, and that also protects jobs. On the downside the consumer is hit with higher prices on whatever industry is being protection. And protected industries tend to lag behind competitively, so when/if the restrictions are lifted they are in a very bad situation.

But here’s the very worst part of protectionism. If you start it, you can expect the other side to start it to. That’s when you get what’s called a trade war, and lots of potential economic gain evaporates.

I’m seeing all the signs of a “data war” beginning now. It’s not among nations, though. The players are the big Internet companies who have lots of user data today, and want more (all of it) tomorrow.

For a long while the webmail companies have generally been lenient about exporting user data via an API to other applications. It’s what the user wants, and most everyone is reciprocal. Or, they’re too small to matter yet. This is a “free data trade” type situation with the best economic consequences.

Well, everyone but Facebook. They’ve just pretty much refused to let users export social graph data, even though they import it like crazy from every source they can get their hands on.

This is a game theory situation. One party isn’t playing ball, but’s reaping the benefits of open data policies by all it’s big competitors. That forces competitors to protect their data as well (Google’s done it in a surgical way to avoid fallout with other non-Facebook companies). But once this ball starts rolling, and it has, it’s pretty hard to stop it.

Expect it to get worse from here.

Ultimately that’s very bad for the companies involved, but it’s also bad for consumers who now have fewer choices with what to do with their…err..Google’s data. In other words, we all lose.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Data Protectionism Begins In Earnest

Amazon-owned IMDb released a nifty iPad App earlier this year which allowed customers to access more than 1.5 million movie and TV titles with information on millions celebrities, actors, actresses, directors and crew members. The Movies and TV app also allowed users to access movie trailers, find localized movie showtimes in the U.S., and more. Today, the company is releasing brand new iPhone and iPad apps with a bunch of new features and functionality.

First, the apps now include international movie showtimes for 13 countries including the UK, Canada,
Australia, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, New Zealand Argentina and Chile. Fans will also be able to rate movies directly from the app.

The homescreen has been redesigned to integrate the latest trailers of movies, and the apps both feature updated entertainment news from hundreds of media outlets. Another addition that could be useful for hardcore IMDb users is the ability log-in with IMDb Pro accounts from the app to access contact information and representation listings. Pro users will also be able to place calls from the app (for the iPhone app). The company is also pushing its IMDb “everywhere” strategy by allowing users to log-in with their Facebook account, and share information to Twitter and Facebook from the app.

IMDb’s apps are fairly popular so these new additions should only help increase downloads. The Movies & TV app for the iPhone and iPad has been installed by “millions” and is being downloaded at a rate of nearly 1 million per month. The site is also undergoing a complete redesign as it hits its 20th anniversary and released an Android app in June.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

IMDb Goes Global With New iPad and iPhone Apps

Consumer electronics maker Panasonic is cozying up to Tesla with a $30 million investment, in exchange for a 2% stake.

Although Panasonic and Tesla have worked together in the past, under the new partnership, the duo will closely collaborate on the development and marketing of new Tesla battery packs that feature Panasonic lithium-ion cells.

“Panasonic offers the highest energy-density cells and industry-leading performance with cutting edge Nickel-type cathode technology.” Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in a statement late Wednesday, “We believe our partnership with them will enable us to further improve our battery pack while reducing cost.”

Under the terms of the deal, Panasonic purchased Tesla’s stock in a private placement for a price of $21.15 a share.

The structure of this alliance is not out of the ordinary for the electric car maker, which has been richly funded but deficient in profits. Over the past two years, Tesla has strengthened strategic relationships with investment deals.

Notably, in May, Tesla and Japanese automaker Toyota announced a major partnership to cooperate on the development of new electric vehicles. As part of the deal, Toyota agreed to plunk down $50 million for Tesla’s common stock. And Toyota was not the first major corporation to bet on Elon Musk’s roadster. In 2009, Daimler invested an equivalent sum in exchange for a 10% stake and technology, according to reports.

Although Tesla is moving forward with plans to ramp up vehicle production over the next few years, the company has also placed a greater emphasis on its powertrain business, which services other car manufacturers. Last month, Tesla disclosed it had a $60 million contract to supply parts to Toyota for the production of the upcoming electric RAV4.

Clunky battery parts may seem relatively boring when compared to Tesla’s sleek roadsters, but it may be the key to finding their (so far elusive) path to stable profitability.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Panasonic Invests $30 Million In Tesla, For 2% Stake

Today at its mobile event, Facebook executives Mark Zuckerberg and Erick Tseng gave some (vague) answers as to why there still isn’t an official iPad application.

Zuckerberg was pretty blunt when it came to explaining why there wasn’t an iPad launch during today’s mobile event: “The iPad isn’t mobile”. He later qualified this statement to say that Facebook loves working with Apple, but that the iPad isn’t as mobile as a phone (he’s right).

Tseng stepped in to add that the rise of tablets isn’t going to be about the iPad alone — we’re going to soon see numerous additional devices running on Android and possibly other platforms. And given Facebook’s limited resources, it doesn’t really make sense to hone in on a single platform.

Facebook needs a solution that will let it deploy features across multiple devices quickly, so there isn’t a lag time like there has been between the Android and iPhone apps. In other words, we’re going to see a web-based mobile application that’s going to be targeted specifically at the tablet form factor.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Why Facebook Still Doesn’t Have An iPad App

Have you ever stopped to evaluate your life in terms of small decisions you made that impacted who you are and what you do? Decisions such as a left turn here, saying hello to a stranger, picking one place to eat over another? Ever wondered what life would be like if you went the other direction, ignored that new person or picked the sub place over the soup place?

Simple decisions like these are sometimes the most important choices we can make in our lives. They often seem meaningless at the time, and yet each choice we make leads us down different forks in our life. Sometime they intersect with, and change, the lives of others as well.

For Jen McCabe, a small decision that changed her life forever was deciding to drive tired, a decision that could have cost her life, not to mention those of others. Fortunately, Jen’s decision – and the accident which followed – wasn’t fatal, but it did destroy her car and shatter her knee. It also made her an entrepreneur.

When I met Jen, I was taken back by her direct and real nature. When I pick guests for “Speaking Of…” I look for character and, more important, a story that defines who they are and which might benefit our community if shared.

Following Jen’s small decision to keep driving and not pull over, she had to learn how to walk again and lost her ability to do things for herself for nearly a year. She realized there are thousands of things you take for granted and that you can often feel alone. Those realizations inspired her to co-found a company called Contagion Health that produced imoveyou.com, a exercise challenge site for helping those that you love get the motivation they need to get their health on track again.

Jen won’t drive tired again, but she wouldn’t change what happened to her. It helped to define who she is and what she wants to do with her life.

Video below (with some awesome advice for entrepreneurs towards the end).

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Speaking Of… Hellraiser with Jen McCabe of imoveyou.com (TCTV)

Yahoo.com is down again for the second time in as many weeks. Which is news because Yahoo never goes down. Except recently. And they’re probably so busy dealing with that outage that no one noticed that Halloween is over, and so they should probably stop promoting it on Yahoo Shopping.

Will the last person out please turn the lights back on?

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Halloween’s Over Yahoo, So Turn The Lights Back On

About a month ago, we noted that LeWeb would be getting a bit more TechCrunch flavor this year. For the seventh iteration of the popular tech conference based in Paris, France, organizers Geraldine and Loic Le Meur decided to make their startup competition a bit more like a mini-TechCrunch Disrupt. That is, of the 16 startups launching, 3 will get time on the big stage to present in front of everyone and a winner will be chosen. And that won’t be the only TechCrunch influence felt.

As you can see on the just-released program for LeWeb ’10, TechCrunch names are all over the agenda. A group of us are slated to interview some of the big names in tech on stage during the two-day conference, which takes place on December 8 and 9 this year. And there seem to be a range of other interesting talks and panels as well.

A taste of the highlights:

• Leaders from Google, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Mozilla, Foursquare, WordPress, EA, MySpace, UStream, Evernote, Microsoft, PayPal, Nokia, RIM, and more on stage.
• You can learn about how to get your company acquired (with people from Microsoft and Twitter).
• You can learn about how to create a top mobile game (with the CEO behind the company responsible for Angry Birds).
• You can hear about innovation in other parts of the world, such as Japan (with the CEO of DeNA).
• You can hear about where the media is heading (with people from CNN and Techmeme).
• A partner at DST will talk about investing hundreds of millions in Zynga and Facebook.
• You can learn about the building of a solar pane plane.
• Howard Lindzon, Gary Vaynerchuk, Leo Laporte, Dave McClure, Yossi Vardi, Dave Morin, and more will all be on hand for talks.

And, of course, the Disrupt-like startup competition finals with be hosted by our own Michael Arrington and August Capital partner David Hornik.

For a longer intro, be sure to check out Loic and Geraldine’s full rundown in the video below. And if you’re interested in attending, use this link for a 200 euro discount for TechCrunch readers. Hopefully we’ll see some of you in Paris in a few weeks.

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LeWeb ’10 Program Revealed — With A Whole Lot Of TechCrunch

In conjunction with the company’s developer conference, PayPal announced a slew of news and product releases this week, including a new micropayments product and an apps platform for businesses. But tucked away in a release was another piece of news from PayPal that could be huge. PayPal just released a new version of its popular iPhone app that allows users to find businesses near their immediate location that accept PayPal as a form of payment. Launching in San Francisco initially, the feature encourages merchants to attract nearby customers to their stores by posting deals and promotions to the app as an incentive for customers to visit their businesses.

Customers can search by category and location, and find and select stores, services, or special offers. Users can pick up the goods or services in person, but pay the merchant using their PayPal app. Users can also use tags from Bling Nation, a startup that has partnered with PayPal to use the startup’s mobile payment chips to deduct funds from a PayPal account.

One of the big selling points around using PayPal for merchants is the ability to offer deals as an incentive to drive buyers to a store or restaurant. Whether it be Groupon-like daily deals or just ordinary coupons, there’s no doubt that deals do help drive online to offline sales.

PayPal President Scott Thompson tells TechCrunch (see video below) that eventually this local feature will have “ubiquity,” meaning you’ll be able to access these merchant listings and pay with PayPal wherever you are in the world. Local is one of the key parts of PayPal’s future strategy, says Thompson. He’s confident that has the world becomes more connected, eventually all local merchants will accept PayPal as a payments option for in-store purchases.

For PayPal, local payments certainly makes sense. Online to offline sales is a big part of local commerce, and if PayPal can become a payments mechanism in the local market, it could be pay off in revenue for the company.

One competitor worth noting in the local payments space is Google Checkout. While Google Checkout doesn’t have as extensive of a reach as PayPal, Google Checkout has an ace in the hole when it comes to Google Places. Google Places allows local businesses to claim and edit a page, post realtime updates (eg, “happy hour tonight”), post reviews, create a custom QR code, and even offer coupons. And Google indexes and highlights these pages in search results, most recently launching a more integrated placement of Places page within Google search.

Google could easily turn on a transaction (such as a daily deal) for these merchants, and use Google
Checkout as the payments mechanism. The same experience could extend to mobile phones.

The advantage Google has over PayPal is that with Places, these relationships with local merchants are already built into the search giants business. At last count a few months ago, Google had Places pages in place for over 4 million businesses but I’m sure this number is higher. PayPal on the other hand will have to forge new relationships with all these local businesses to get them on board with their payments platform. Not only do they have to find the businesses, but PayPal has to teach them how to use their mobile apps as a payment mechanism. Scaling PayPal’s local feature will be a huge endeavor for the company, which is why PayPal is testing the feature out in a limited market in the San Francisco.

This why it makes sense for PayPal to form partnerships on its local endeavor. Google is an unlikely partner considering that the company already has its own payments platform. Facebook Places could be a potential partner (PayPal is already a micropayments partner for the social network’s virtual currency platform Credits). Facebook is rumored to be turning on a deals feature for Places and PayPal could be a way to process these payments. And Groupon is rumored to be brokering a payments deal with PayPal as well.

So while Google Checkout still doesn’t have the sort of users numbers that PayPal does in the payments area, Google has much more in the war chest in terms of local. With local up for grabs, the battle between the two payments platform just got a whole lot more interesting.

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PayPal Beats Google Checkout To The Local Payments Market But Will It…

Nearly a year ago, Microsoft pulled together a group of reporters for Bing Fall Release event. The highlight of the presentation was a demo showing off some nifty new features in Bing Maps. The problem? All of this stuff required Microsoft’s Silverlight browser plug-in to work. I berated the company for once again pushing users towards a more proprietary web. So today it’s time to laud them, as they seem to be backing away from that strategy.

During last week’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC), ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley asked Bob Muglia, Microsoft’s SVP of the Server and Tools Business, why the company failed to highlight Silverlight in a meaningful way this year. His answer was rather surprising.

“Silverlight is our development platform for Windows Phone,” he said. And while he said that the technology has some “sweet spots” for media applications (presumably like Netflix, which uses Silverlight on the web), its role as a vehicle for delivering a cross-platform runtime appears to be over. “Our strategy has shifted,” is how Muglia put it.

Instead, as they made clear during PDC, Microsoft is putting their weight behind HTML5 going forward. Hallelujah.

Microsoft’s new IE9 web browser (which is in public beta testing) will be a big part of this strategy. And presumably, a lot of the things that currently require Silverlight, like some of those nifty Bing Maps features, will move to HTML5 going forward. Again, that’s great news.

So why is Microsoft doing this? It seems that Microsoft sees the writing on the wall. They likely know that’s it’s going to be much harder to make a dent in the new developer world order with Silverlight, which still has a relatively small market penetration and no penetration in mobile, than with HTML5, which is (or shortly will be) everywhere — including all of Apple’s devices.

“HTML is the only true cross platform solution for everything, including (Apple’s) iOS platform,” Muglia told Foley.

This is a very different tone than Muglia had just a year ago, when he and then Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie were out on the circuit drumming up support for Silverlight with hopes that it would become a new de-facto standard like Adobe’s Flash. It’s not clear if Ozzie’s imminent departure from the company has anything to do with this change of tone or vice versa.

Regardless, Silverlight will now be mainly known as the development platform for Windows Phone going forward. In other words, the way to make native apps for those devices. But for just about everything else, it will be HTML5 or bust. And that’s great news for all end users. It’s one less plug-in to download. And it’s another step towards a unified web.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Microsoft Has Seen The Light. And It’s Not Silverlight.

If you look closely at this shot of the bombs allegedly sent from Yemen to Chicago you’ll notice what looks like a small camera up in the corner. Slide down the side and you see the volume buttons and I suspect the silver area is where the battery holder once stuck to the circuit board. It’s clear that this was a phone – probably of modern vintage – so which phone is it?

Read more…

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Which Cellphone Did The Yemeni Terrorists Use?

Facebook has just sent us an invitation to a special event that’s happening this Wednesday. The theme? Mobile.

Facebook’s last big event was on October 6, when the company rolled out a totally revamped Groups feature.

Updating with more

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Facebook Holding Special Mobile Event This Wednesday

“If you waited for the white iPhone, you’re an idiot. You’re a stupid human being who has waited 5 months for a phone that’s a different color. That you’re just gonna put a cover on anyway. So you’re a fool. In fact, why don’t you go get an EVO or something? Or a Droid. 2. They apparently does.“

Back in July, a group named jLe Productions made a great mock iPhone 4 commercial addressing the antenna issues. Now they’re back. And this time they have a promo for the mythical white iPhone 4. And once again it’s great.

Watch it above, or watch their earlier spoof below.

And here are some of our other favorite humorous Apple-related videos from the past few months. Yes, there have been a lot of them:

• Video: An EVO 4G Salesman Confronts An iPhone 4 Shopper (NSFW)
• The Rebuttal: An EVO 4G Owner Walks Into An Apple Store (NSFW)
• The iPhone 4 Antenna Song
• A Must Listen: The Steve Jobs Song [Video]
• Darth Vader Calls Apple About His iPhone 4 Antenna [Video]
• MG Siegler’s Double Rainbow iPhone Love

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The Banned White iPhone 4 Promo [Humor]

With more than four million users, Mint’s personal finance platform no doubt has a massive amount of data that it can mine regarding consumer’s spending habits. In fact, the site already uses some of this data to show seasonal trends. Today, the Intuit owned company is launching its realtime customer data insights to the public, after soft launching the product almost two months ago.

Mint Data aggregates anonymous spending data from Mint’s users to give you realtime insight on what people are spending on across the country. For example, the platform lists the most popular restaurants in San Francisco (by visits), the top shopping spots in New York City (by highest average spend), and the highest spending cities in the U.S.

Mint Data will also show spending data both by average purchase price and by popularity, which is defined by number of transactions per month. The rankings can be viewed by category, such as “food and dining,” by specific business, and broken down to the city level. For example, Mint Data shows that the average spend at a Starbucks in New York City is $5.38. The site also compares this to the average spend at coffee shops overall, which is slightly higher.

In terms of actual regional data, you can choose from 300 cities in the U.S. to compare spending. And Mint.com users can compare their own personal finance and spending habits by category or merchant against averages in their area, or against the national average.

As a consumer product, this data is pretty fascinating, and a great way to get a little more insight as to how your spending stacks up against the rest of the consumers in your city or at a particular store. I can imagine that that some of this data could be mined even deeper to compare demographics and spending.

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Mint Data Delivers A View Into The Spending Habits Of Its 4 Million…

Something is definitely up at uber nerd site and “Directory of Wonderful Things” BoingBoing.net. A trip to the front page brings up the charming image above, which seems to be some sort of vulgar message from someone called “the|one” to site editor Cory Doctorow. The hack also ingeniously incorporates the “Jessi Slaughter ‘You Dun Goofed’” viral video.

Diehard fans have found a workaround URL for now. And the official BoingBoing Twitter account seems to have a sense of humor about it, tweeting stuff like “So much for the 100,000 Hours Without a Hack T-shirts,” “Someone’s gonna get a subpoenis… I mean a subpoena” and “Look, at least it’s not the new Gap logo.”

Update: Looks like the hack has been taken down. TechCrunch reader Machika Kuro informs us that this was most likely a SQL injection attack.

Via Mark Frauenfelder

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Looks Like BoingBoing Got Hacked (NSFW)

This morning Pinterest co-founders Ben Silberman, Paul Sciarra and Yashwanth Nelapati woke up to a barrage of tweets, “So @myspace has completely ripped off @pinterest. It really pisses me off when an old, tired hack tries to undermine hardworking inovators. [sic]” Myspace revealed its new redesign last night and Pinterest users quickly picked up on the similarities between the two site aesthetics, leading to an intense Twitter debate.

The offsite grid layout used by both Myspace and Pinterest is nothing new; Lazyfeed, http://enjoysthin.gs and countless other sites have a similar design. But the fact that former Myspace Director of Technology Dave Peck emailed Pinterest back in March asking for an advance invite is interesting, especially when you read the email.

Founder Silberman told TechCrunch, “The Myspace product team joined our site really early and so I’m sure they took inspiration from it. Our impression was that they took some information and we were touched that our users were vocal about it.”

However, Silberman who retweeted the accusations from the official Pinterest account this morning, emphasized, “I wouldn’t go as far as saying they ripped it off. They’re probably in tune with organizing friends around interests after they missed the boat on friends,” referring to how you can now use Myspace to follow Topics pages.

Pinterest is still invite only and is currently seeking funding. Despite being in stealth mode, the social cataloguing startup has 17,000 users and is about to experience it’s one millionth “pin.” Silberman plans on launching in a couple of months, encouraged by all the user support today, “It’s cool when you’re a small company and your users stick up for you.”

Myspace had 90 million users this September according to comScore, marking a 18% drop from last year. This recent design and concept overhaul was an attempt to win back some of the traffic lost to competitors like Facebook.

Myspace screencap via The Guardian

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Myspace Accused Of Ripping Off Stealth Startup Pinterest

Google TV is now out there in the wild. There’s no indication of how it’s selling just yet, but my hunch is that like early Android, it may be some time before sales really take off. That shouldn’t be too surprising considering that the platform is built on top of Android. But there aren’t a lot of apps yet that are tailored for these new devices. They need more. And they know the way to get them. Free giveaways!

As they’ve announced on their Google TV blog today, the search giant is giving away 10,000 Google TV units to developers. Yes, 10,000.

The give-away started this morning at the Adobe MAX conference where they dished out 3,000 units. And it will continue over the next couple of weeks as Google will patrol the Google Code forums to look for developers who sound even remotely interested in developing for the platform. Or you can submit a request to get a unit for development.

Says Google:

As we’ve always said, the coolest thing about Google TV is that we don’t even know what the coolest thing about it will be. The experience is in the hands of its users and developers, and everyone is invited. Come play.

The Google TV unit being given away is the Logitech Revue, a device which normally sells for $300.

Sadly, this giveaway is U.S.-only for the time being. And yes, they want some sort of proof that you are actually a developer that plans to make an app for the platform. I’m thinking about learning Java to build a solid fart app for the platform to get a free unit myself.

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Want A Free Google TV? Become An Android Developer; Google Is Giving…

Amazon has just released a new free iPad app, called Amazon Windowshop that the company says is a complete “rewrite” of Amazon.com specifically for the iPad. Optimized for touch screen tablets, Amazon Windowshop makes it easy to swipe through the store to browse products on the iPad.

Similar to Amazon’s website, the app features product lists including “Featured”, “Bestsellers”, “Recommendations”, “New Releases”, “Most Wished For”, “Most Gifted”, and “Movers & Shakers”.

Amazon presents products via a grid-like interface, but will include pop-outs of specific products with high-resolution images, user reviews, descriptions and videos related to that product (which includes 30 second samples for the music items).

For Amazon Prime members, the app will indicate which products qualify for Amazon Prime and include Amazon 1-Click checkout. You can also share products from the app via e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter, save an item for later by adding it to your Wish List, and more.

Essentially the app is a suped up version of Amazon.com that is designed specifically for the iPad. It almost feels like a catalog, because of the layout and images. As the holiday season draws near, Amazon is undoubtedly ramping up its online shopping offerings, and capitalizing on the continued growth in the the consumer use of the iPad.

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Amazon Launches Brand New iPad Shopping App Called Windowshop

Three and a half years ago, Google made what seemed to be a pretty big $100 million acquisition: FeedBurner. You remember that company, right? They’re the ones that dominated RSS management before all of that real time tech came along and rendered it obsolete for many people. Today, Google is putting the real time paddles to FeedBurner’s heart in an attempt to rivive it.

If you visit FeedBurner today, you’ll see a “Try out our NEW (beta) version!” message in the top menu. Clicking on this will take you to the new version. So what’s new? The entire look and feel has been revamped. The new Home screen is loaded up with overview stats and alerts for the sites you run. But the real key, of course, is in the Feeds area.

Here’s you’ll see a completely new way of looking at your subscribers and data. In a move that should surprise no one, it looks a lot more like Google Analytics. But the key is what’s going on behind the scenes. As Google notes:

The real story is what’s new under the hood, however: the new interface provides real time stats for clicks, views, and podcast downloads, which means you can start seeing what content is drawing traffic from feed readers, Twitter, and other syndicated sources as it happens.

In fact, Google mentions Twitter a couple times in their post about the update — more than they mention their own RSS reader product, Google Reader. Clearly, they see where the future of content consumption is heading.

And it’s interesting that Twitter is so vital here. One of FeedBurner’s co-founders and CEO was Dick Costolo — yes, the same man who is now the CEO of Twitter.

Costolo left Google in July of 2009 after he had already moved on from the FeedBurner team. It seemed pretty clear to many of us that after the acquisition, Google wasn’t putting the resources it should have into the product. And its time at Google has been filled with bugs, problems, and a general growing disinterest from most users.

Maybe that will change now. Maybe. This update is about two years too late.

[thanks Michael]

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Google Finally Updates FeedBurner To Focus On Real Time Stats And…

Head to leading music video portal VEVO this morning and you’re going to see something that’s quite out of the ordinary: a new music video starring Andy Grammer that puts you in the director’s chair. Hit ‘play’ and things will start simply enough, with Grammer walking down an alley as he croons toward the camera. But after a few moments you’ll see a popup asking if you want him to “Bump into Movers” or get “Dumped by Bikers”. Better make up your mind — you only have ten seconds to make your choice, and it actually impacts which version of the video you’ll be seeing. It’s part video game, part choose-your-own adventure story, and it’s what you might call “engaging as hell”.

The video may well be a taste of what’s to come over the next few years as musicians, entrepreneurs, the labels, and web publishers work together to figure out the future of music content online. And it’s surprisingly fun — there are dozens of possible versions based on the choices you make, with variations that include everything from dancing housekeepers to multiple cameos from actor Rainn Wilson (Dwight from The Office). But the story behind the video is also compelling. Over the last week I’ve spoken with some of the key players involved with the production to learn how it was put together, and where they see things going from here.

Interlude

If the interactive portion of the video seems vaguely familiar, it’s because we previously wrote about the startup that’s building the technology behind it: Interlude. This Israeli company was founded by Yoni Bloch — who is actually a well-known musician himself — and has developed a platform that can add this engaging, interactive layer to video content. Interlude put together a demo video of Yoni early this year, and it was a huge success in Israel — he tells me that 25% of the country’s Internet-using population watched it. And perhaps even more impressive: the engagement stats showed that nearly everyone watched the video more than once, so they could discover the multiple routes.

Of course, interactive videos aren’t exactly a novel idea — we’ve seen plenty of startups looking to add an interactive layer on top of video footage, and it’s even possible to use YouTube’s annotations feature to build some basic interactivity. The key distinction that Interlude brings to the table is an interactive experience that’s seamless: the content doesn’t pause as it waits for you to make your decision. Instead, you see an overlay for a period of time determined by the artist (for the Grammer video it’s 5-10 seconds), and the audio and video never cuts out.

S-Curve

It’s one thing for a startup to build a snazzy custom video player — but how do you actually get artists to use it? That’s where S-Curve, a record label founded by former Columbia Records President Steve Greenberg, came in.

Greenberg (who is also known for discovering The Jonas Brothers and is a Grammy-winning producer) says that S-Curve is still a small company, which gives it the flexibility and a very strong incentive to keep innovating as much as possible. To do that, the label is working to discover and foster new technologies that are related to the music business — and then to actually use these technologies with S-Curve artists (and help connect the companies with the rest of the industry). Along with Interlude’s interactive video project, S-Curve has also been involved with Hashtag art, which was used by Katy Perry.

In return for helping these companies get off the ground in the hard-to-crack music industry, S-Curve will sometimes take an equity stake in the company, which is the case with Interlude. Greenberg expects that Interlude’s technology will extend well beyond music— he says there’s been interest from the advertising world, producers of online webisodes, and a content creators from a variety of other categories. In short, he says “the only limitation is the creativity of the people making the video — lightbulbs are going to go off when everyone sees it”.

VEVO

The third piece of the puzzle is distribution — you need people to actually see what Interlude, S-Curve, and Andy Grammer have put together. Cue VEVO, the music video portal that’s a joint venture between Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Abu Dhabi Media (EMI participates as well, and all VEVO content is syndicated to YouTube in a setup that still confuses me).

VEVO would be featuring Grammer’s music content anyway (S-Curve is distributed by UMG) but this video in particular is going to be given very prominent placement. The reason? It’s the first video to be part of VEVO’s new Video Evolved showcase.

VEVO CEO Rio Caraeff says that the site wants to do everything it can to feature innovative music content — he says that “music videos are ripe for reinvention” and he wants VEVO to be a place to help these experiments come to life. So the site is setting up a separate section that will highlight these new technologies as they launch. In some cases, VEVO will simply be embedding content from other services onto the Video Evolved site. But in the case of Interlude, VEVO has actually integrated the startup’s video player into its platform, so it will be hosting the content itself.

VEVO is also doing something special to mark the launch of its first truly interactive music video: the site will be tracking which ‘routes’ made through the video are most popular and after two weeks this version will be considered the ‘official’ release — it will be the version that’s given to other content channels like television and YouTube.

There’s a clear theme running through all of this: the desire to discover the future of music videos and their interplay with the web, whatever that may be. And while it’s far too early to say whether this interactive music video technology will be as ubiquitous as the “static” music videos that came before it, I can say one thing with certainty: it’s pretty damn fun. Sure, it’s quite possible that the novelty will wear off after a few of these, but I found myself watching the video repeatedly just so I could find Dwight — the last time I was this engaged in a music video was Britney Spears’ Sometimes. I finally found Dwight, and it seems like the labels won too: I now have this Andy Grammer song stuck in my head.

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Interlude, S-Curve, And VEVO Team To Launch Ridiculously Engaging…