Miro kicks Joost's ass

Augustine says: I love Miro too and love the content from Nature, National Geographic, and TedTalks. I would be proud to contribute the  http://footagesandbox.com/    visual search interface (currently demo-ing YouTube API) and additional AJAX or UI engineering time to support this worthy project to keep Miro growing and innovating.

from Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

The Participatory Culture Foundation has published a compelling chart comparing the free, open Miro video player to Joost, a closed and proprietary system that's crippled with DRM and only carries content from those few producers lucky enough to get a deal with Joost. By contrast, Miro has done extensive outreach to indie creators, has no privacy-invading tracking of your viewing habits, delivers HD video, and is built on free software and open standards.

Using Miro is as easy as using a TiVo. Download the free software, pick the channels you want (over 2,500 of them at present, and anyone can publish new channels), and Miro will subscribe to your favorite net-shows, checking their RSS feeds for new episodes and downloading them with BitTorrent, so that the folks who make your shows don't go bankrupt on bandwidth bills. As a bonus, BitTorrent means that the more popular a show gets, the faster you'll get it -- no more sites being clobbered because too many people are using them at once. It doesn't matter what video format the shows are in, because Miro includes VLC, the open video player that can play pretty much every file-format on the net.

Miro is produced by a nonprofit, the Participatory Culture Foundation, who pay a staff of 11 (mostly hackers) to continuously improve and enhance the free/open Miro codebase. Miro is available for the Mac, Windows and Linux, with all versions being released simultaneously.

I'm proud to volunteer on the Foundation's board, and delighted to see how well we stack up against Joost, a company with more than 100 employees and a gigantic marketing budget (Miro's marketing budget is zero). Joost is a pretty nightmarish vision for the future of Internet video: a DRM-crippled, locked up future where video producers and viewers are beholden to a single company that chooses what does and does not get shown. This is the Internet, after all, not cable TV. Let's keep it that way! Link, Link to download today's new Public Release 3 of the Miro software for Mac, Windows and Linux

(Disclosure: I am proud to volunteer on the Board of Directors for the nonprofit Participatory Culture Foundation, which produces Miro)

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Apple's MacBook and MacBook Pro quietly updated

from Engadget by Thomas Ricker

Filed under: Laptops

The rumors were rampant about the pending upgrade; now the deal is done. The Apple MacBook has finally moved to the Santa Rosa architecture with a healthy GMA X3100 video bump from the lethargic GMA 950 of yore. Available now starting at $1,099 for the 13-inch, 80GB, 2GHz white model on up to $1,499 for the 160GB, 2.2GHz black variety of hard-posing laptop.

Update: The MacBook Pro can now be configured with an optional 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo for a $250 premium over the previous 2.4GHz flag-ship configuration.

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Privacy Groups Mull 'Do Not Track' List for Internet

from Slashdot by Zonk

Technical Writing Geek writes with a Reuters story about a collection of privacy groups looking to set up a 'Do Not Track' list online, similar to the 'Do Not Call' list meant to dissuade telemarketing. "Computer users should be notified when their Web surfing is tracked by online advertisers and Web publishers, argue the Consumer Federation of America, the World Privacy Forum and the Center for Democracy and Technology, among other groups in a coalition promoting the idea. Rather than burying privacy policies in fine print, companies should also disclose them more fully and provide easier ways to opt out, the groups said. The organizations submitted the proposals to the Federal Trade Commission, ahead of the consumer watchdog agency's workshop on Nov. 1-2 to study the increasing use of tracking technology to target online ads.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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More Facebook Music Rumors

i think Facebook might just buy iLike, especially with Microsoft money ...  :-)

from TechCrunch by Erick Schonfeld

Is Facebook finally going to take on MySpace as a place for bands and music fans to hang out? We've heard various Facebook Music rumors before. The latest one comes from CO-ED Magazine.com (so you know it's got to be true!).

According to CO-ED's executive editor Stephen Gebhardt, who says he heard it from a group of marketing managers at a major music label, Facebook has been holding secret meetings with all the music labels and will announce Facebook Music next week at New York's ad:tech conference (where it is also expected to announce its social ad network).

Here are the details Gebhardt was able to gather: Facebook Music will essentially be a way for musicians (or their labels) to create their own fan pages just like on MySpace, each with a separate sub-domain within Facebook. Facebook members will be able to join any artist's network as a "fan." This will be similar to joining a group, but centered around music. Members will be able to listen to streamed songs, watch videos, add music to their own pages, find out about upcoming tours, and meet other fans. Facebook is also supposedly working on sales widgets for these pages (to be introduced at a later date) so that artists can sell downloads directly through Facebook. (Watch out iTunes).

MySpace, Apple, Google . . . who will Facebook pick a fight with next?

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Ad Infuse Continues to Grow

from MobileCrunch by John Kullman

Ad Infuse, a company that delivers personalized mobile handset advertisements, announced today that it has closed 14 new mobile advertising and marketing deals and 22 new publishing deals so far in 2007. Ad Infuse hopes to finalize several more contracts by the end of the year. The company added that inventory across its content channels will exceed 160 million impressions per month as of October, 2007.

Ad Infuse thinks that the future of mobile advertising will be more personalized than mass market oriented. By bringing together carriers, brands, content providers and consumers, Ad Infuse specifically targets consumers, so advertisements can be more cost efficient than the old impersonalized advertising method.

"Advertising on the mobile device is a new frontier," said Brian Cowley, CEO of Ad Infuse. "Companies that do it right can increase consumer loyalty, build revenues and extend "brand awareness. Ad Infuse creates a customer-centric mobile environment where people can connect to and interact with the brands that define their lives."

I'm not sure if it is fair to say that advertising on mobile phones is a new frontier. In this quick tempo technological world, if an idea has been around for more than a few months it starts to get the label of being old. This probably isn't fair but some people feel the need to criticize a good idea they didn't think of. Specifically targeting individuals or small groups of people, with specially tailored advertisements may be the future of advertising not only on mobile devices and computers, but also in other media formats. I can see a time when two different television sets in two different houses in the same neighborhood are tuned to the same show, but different advertisements are watched by each household.

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