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SolarWinds, an Austin, Texas network management company that claims to be rapidly growing at the expense of larger rivals, has picked up the assets of a smaller company in the same business, New Zealand-based Kiwi Enterprises, for an undisclosed sum.

Despite a ten-year history, SolarWinds got its big start two years ago with an investment from Bain Capital and Insight Venture Partners, according to chief product strategist Kenny Van Zant. Earlier this year, the company filed for an IPO, although it has delayed going public because of the recession.

Despite holding off on the IPO, Van Zant says the company’s business of selling network management software against competing products like HP’s Openview and IBM’s Tivoli is booming. By the end of 2007, SolarWind’s revenue was over $60 million with high operating margins, and Van Zant says it’s now over $75 million a year.

The secret is keeping down customer acquisition costs and offering an alternative to the expense-heavy enterprise software model.

The story has been much the same in other segments of the software industry, of course. Every software startup, from geeky programming-oriented firms to business blockbusters like Salesforce, has claimed to be in reach of major revenue by eating into the enterprise software sales of a few big companies, including HP, IBM and Cisco.

But Van Zant says that growth in his part of the industry isn’t slowing due to the recession, and several expanding startups may have enough cash flow to make acquisitions. SolarWinds has made three to date.

Here’s the latest action:

Meg Whitman, governor of California? — That’s the rumor following Whitman’s resignation from the boards of eBay, Procter & Gamble and Dreamworks SKG. Current Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (yes, the Governator) will leave office in 2010, and term limits prevent him from seeking re-election. Whitman, the former chief executive of eBay, and, like Schwarzenegger, a Republican, has hinted that she may run in the past. One potential primary rival could be Steve Poizner, the current State Insurance Commissioner and former founder of the Silicon Valley-based SnapTrack — which sold to Qualcomm in 2000 for a billion dollars. CNET has more.

Sling Player Mobile for the iPhone unveiled — Another Macworld announcement has Sling Media, makers of the popular Slingbox, entering the App Store with a application to stream television content to the device. But unlike Joost, which also does this, Sling streams it from your DVR and allows you to manage your box remotely using the iPhone software, as CNET points out. The app will launch sometimes in Q1 2009. The company also plans to use Macworld to show off Slingbox HD streaming to Mac computers.

Google launches Picasa for Mac – Macworld technically started today (though the keynote address is tomorrow and we’ll be covering it live), and Google took the opportunity to finally unveil a Mac-compatible version of its Picasa software. The software manages your photos and easily syncs them with Google’s online portion of the service, Picasa Web Albums. The big question is: Will this get Mac users to switch from iPhoto? Probably not, if you use Picasa Web Albums this is nice, but it’s kind of ugly (reminds me of Firefox on the Mac — not the prettiest software), and will require that you move all your photos over. The Google Blog has more – or watch the video below.

Is Gmz the Twitter hacker? — TechCrunch thinks so after finding some posts on a hacker site called Digital Gangster. Their source says that Gmz obtained the account information for the various celebrities that had their Twitter accounts hacked and posted the information on the site.

Listen to 2008’s hot music for free with Music Blog Zeitgeist — A collection of the top songs, artists and albums from last year are all streaming for free on the new site from the MP3 blog aggregator Hype Machine. It’s a nice layout and has some great music — all for free thanks to streaming provided by Imeem. ReadWriteWeb has all the details.

FileMaker Pro gets a new interface — The popular database software for the Mac (which also works with Windows) has launched version 10. The company says it’s the first new interface in 10 years.

Toshiba is moving into the solar-energy business — I guess consumer electronics aren’t hot enough, Toshiba is now chasing the sun! The plan is to build utility-scale solar power plants rather than cells for home use, according to CNET.

AT&T iPhone tethering also launching at Macworld? — We know it’s coming, but TUAW hears from a “trusted source” that it could come as soon as this week. It would cost an extra $30 a month to let you use your iPhone as the Internet access point for a computer. There would be a 5GB limit on data usage — which is the same cap that you get with AT&T’s stand-alone high speed Internet cards for $60 a month.

It seems like there are dozens of online storage companies around, but a new startup called CTERA says it has the best solution for small businesses — a small device called CloudPlug that sends your data online. It’s launching at the Consumer Electronics Show, and it also announced raising a first venture round of undisclosed size from Benchmark Capital.

The Petach Tikva, Israel company describes its system as “cloud attached storage” and says it combines the advantages of network attached storage (NAS) and cloud storage. As with network storage, your files are first copied to on-site external hard drive. However, the data is then sent, via the CloudPlug, to an online storage site. That means businesses can save money and space on hardware (as they would with other online storage products), but the data gets transferred more quickly, it doesn’t require downloading any software, and you can back-up your computer when it’s disconnected from the Internet, or even turned off.

I have to admit, that last item is particularly appealing. Last month, I praised online backup service Backblaze, but I actually gave up on it because the backup only occurred while I was online, which made it really slow (I’m debating whether to sign up again). And I keep hearing that businesses are looking to the cloud as a way to save money on maintenance and hardware. It’s hard to know if CTERA’s cloud attached storage model will be the one to take off, but the backing from Benchmark, one of the leading investors in online business software, is certainly an encouraging sign.

Founder and chief executive Liran Eshel isn’t revealing much more about the product and its pricing, except that it will be released sometime in 2009, and that CTERA will likely sell its services through Internet service providers.

Hewlett-Packard is launching a bevy of new products today that show it is designing its products to take into account the lighter pocketbooks and energy usage concerns of consumers.

These products being unveiled this week at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas reflect a more focused HP.

The company isn’t throwing spaghetti at the wall anymore. It quietly pulled out of the TV market in 2008, but is staying in markets such as digital photo frames where it feels it can differentiate itself.

One of the products that reflects this attitude is the company’s newest gaming computer, the HP Firebird desktop with Voodoo DNA (left).

Before HP bought Voodoo in 2006, the small Canadian PC maker specialized in custom-designed computers with hand-painted cases. Gaming freaks happily bought these for as much as $10,000. But the company will sell this machine for under $2,100. ($1,799 for basic version and $2,099 for advanced) The system is more power efficient than typical gaming computers of the past as well.

Gone are the days when the Voodoo division designed products without regard to energy efficiency or cost, said Rahul Sood, the chief technology officer for the HP Global Voodoo Business Unit. This machine strikes a balance between performance, style, cost, energy efficiency and small size. Sood says the design still reflects Voodoo’s style and penchant for cool tech, dubbed Voodoo DNA.

“We consider this a high-performance hybrid machine,” Sood said. “The big desktops of the past are not sustainable designs. The economy has changed, and this segment of the market is changing.”

As gaming computers go, this one is powerful but it’s also geared toward people who want to do other things with their computers. The HP computer has Intel’s fastest consumer-oriented processor, the Intel Core 2 Quad Processor Q9400, and dual Nvidia GeForce 9800S graphics cards in SLI mode. It has a 350-watt power supply but it also has liquid cooling that keeps the machine fanless and quiet. The machine uses about a quarter of the power of last year’s HP Blackbird 02 gaming desktop. For video, go to http://www.youtube.com/HPVoodooPC.

HP is also introducing several models of business laptops in the ultralight notebook category. Among the bargains is the HP Pavilion dv2, which has a 12.1-inch screen and weighs 3.8 pounds. It’s less than an inch thick, has a 500-gigabyte hard drive, and has a new single-core Advanced Micro Devices Neo processor and Yukon platform. It also has ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3410 graphics. The machines cost $600 to $800 and come in Espresso Black or Moonlight white. They’ll go on sale in March.

HP is also introducing a larger HP Pavilion dv3 notebook model with a 13.3-inch screen, a 2.3-gigahertz AMD Turion dual-core processor, ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics, a magnesium case and a price ranging from $800 to $1,200.

There are more variations on these themes, as well as a new HP MediaSmart home server (for storing and backing up lots of data in the home) and a new version of HP’s Netbook, the thinnest and lightest portable computer, dubbed the HP Mini 2140. The designs are good and HP is being realistic about what it can charge for these machines in a tough economy.

In digital photo frames, HP will launch a new line of 3.5-inch to 10-inch frames in March. These LCD displays have Wi-Fi connections so that they can download pictures from Internet sites such as Picassa, Flickr, Facebook and MySpace. You can use the Wi-Fi connection to display widgets, such as traffic information, news and sports scores, or listen to web radio stations. You can also stream content from an HP MediaSmart home server, get photos from camera phones via MMS messaging, and otherwise use the frame to stay in communications with a distant loved one.

The amount of memory included, which is a key determinant of the value for people who want to store large collections, is yet to be decided. An eight-inch frame will sell for $179.99.

In discussions about the conflicts in the Middle East, one of the consistent, sensitive points of debate has revolved around the question of media bias in covering any related events — which is why the adoption of online communication mediums like Twitter and YouTube in the chatter around the most recent Gaza conflict is both timely and interesting.

Tweet the press (conference)

In reading up on the current situation, you may have chanced on the Israel Defense Forces’ YouTube channel, blog, or even the press conference the New York Israeli Consulate held via Twitter (transcript here).

And you may also have come across the Gaza government’s (i.e., Hamas’) YouTube-knockoff channel, AqsaTube, and related site, available in 8 languages.

The use of online tools for political PR isn’t by any means new. And the concept of seeking out the relevant channels to reach a mass audience is as age-old as any means of public communication. Still, the way these channels (particularly those that fall into the social-media bucket) are being used reflects an apparent understanding in their inherent potential to breed a sense of transparency and accountability, which are critical to any successful PR push.

Running a press conference on Twitter gives people the sense that they can each act as a ‘citizen journalist,’ per se. You have a question for the IDF? Ask it via Twitter and you might just get an answer — minus the red tape. Liberating, isn’t it? To some extent, sure. At the very least it gives you the feeling that it is. And that feeling might drown out your reaction to — or perhaps even ignorance of — the reported struggle to actually allow foreign reporters into Gaza.

Social propaganda is still propaganda

So, despite the play of these more social online outlets in the overall coverage and discussion of the conflict, you might still find it difficult to unearth truly unbiased related journalism. Sure, there are protest and bloody warfare photos on Flickr, ongoing rants on Twitter (at the time this article was written, the hottest topic on Twitter was #gaza) and the more sensational news stories bookmarked on Digg. And there’s much information to be digested there. But, considering the sources, much of what you’re reading is still biased.

So whereas before one could blame the media for too easily succumbing to the PR machines, these machines are now out in our own element — our social nooks online — and up for our own interpretation and reaction. Call it a heightened need for citizen vigilance.

[photo: flickr/zoriah]

Is the Chinese government’s web-wide crackdown on pornography, announced today, just about stopping porn? Given larger socio-economic issues in the country and the wide range of Chinese internet companies singled out for “severe punishment” by the Chinese government — leading search engine Baidu, foreign contender Google, and portals like Sohu and Sina — we wonder if it is a pretext for a broader crackdown on web companies. Could it be a ruse to disguise more general web censorship, especially against political dissent?

We asked some VentureBeat readers in China what they were seeing. Here are their responses.

First, from a well-placed entrepreneur and investor who chose to stay off the record:

China does these campaigns every year, though I don’t remember seeing seven ministries/agencies doing it jointly. They tend to fade after about a month.

I think this year’s will have more teeth. This may be the most sensitive year since the internet hit China: it’s the 60th anniversary of the country’s founding, the 20th anniversary of [the Tiananmen Square protests], 50th anniversary of the Tibet invasion, all in the context of a rapidly weakening economy. I think you will see much more rigorous web censorship and controls this year, and I would expect them to have more staying power than previous campaigns.

By the way, in exquisite timing, these [Not Safe For Work] pictures of actress Zhang Ziyi [excerpt above] hit the web hours after the new campaign was announced.

Another reader, a veteran of Chinese and foreign companies who also chose to stay off the record, added this colorful perspective:

Porn has always been a problem in the Chinese government’s eyes. There were multiple efforts in the past few years to curb the rather rampant soft core porn that is regarded as “unhealthy.” In recent months, the amount of explicit content has gone up significantly, so a crackdown is just due. But the Chinese government is very good at accomplishing multiple aims with one initiative, so the timing now of course has to do a bit with nervousness about the economy. By the way, crackdowns like this usually happen before Chinese New Year (January 25th) in order to drive a “harmonious” holiday. The government has a pretty good control on other “inappropriate” content already, so this is not a big deal in China.

More generally, this has been a very eye-opening year for the internet in China. There is the Hong Kong pop star Edison Chen’s naked pictures with a number of famous pop starlets; video porn on 56.com; Olympic “sex parties,” and most recently China’s most famous female star, Zhang Ziyi, has been caught with suggestive pictures with Vivo Nevi on a beach (see link above).

In the U.S., this is no big deal, but China is still a very conservative, Confucian, Oriental society, far from the openness of western countries. Just because the same internet technology is used in China doesn’t mean Chinese have the same value system as the U.S. Porn in China is considered as bad and sometimes worse than political dissent. For example, a year ago, a man was sentenced to death for operating an explicit porn site, while typically many political dissidents were just detained.

Lastly and most publicly, here’s what Kaiser Kuo, the group director of digital strategy for Ogilvy China, had to say:

I don’t think it has a thing to do with dissent: it’s just what it is, a crackdown on porn. They targeted some of the biggest web properties in China (Sina, Sohu, Tencent, Netease) as well as many other smaller sites, and they’re just trying to get rid of porn, which is still pretty pervasive on the Chinese internet despite many similar crackdowns in years past. They’re not dissuading anyone from using the internet. And they don’t use porn sites for cover the way hacks (warez, etc.) used to do it in the States. Keep this in context: look at what Australia’s doing to combat kiddie porn, even cracking down on peer-to-peer file sharing! Same kind of thing, but this has only taken the form of stern warnings so far.

Second-guessing the motivations of the Chinese state when it comes to internet policies reminds me of what Freud said. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Sometimes, though, you’re right to see everything as a phallic symbol. Sure, there might be political motivations behind these sorts of crackdowns, and perhaps targeting these very high-profile websites like Baidu, Google, Sina, Sohu, Netease and Tencent is meant to send a message ahead of a sensitive year. It’s equally possible that with sex-related content all over the Chinese Web in 2008, from the Edison Chan photo scandal to people like “Kappa Girl,” they really are simply trying to crack down on people showing off their naughty bits.

Tomorrow at 9AM PST, Apple will hold its keynote address at the Macworld Expo. Myself and Dean Takahashi will be on hand to bring you any announcements from the keynote as they unfold live.

As usual, we’ll have a page on VentureBeat set up with a FriendFeed room embedded in it. What should make this even more interesting for you who choose to watch on venturebeat.com is that FriendFeed now has a real-time component to the site, which will allow us to stream stuff to you without you having to refresh the page at all.

This should work perfectly for a live event. I’ve embedded an example of what it will look like below.

Macworld, while always a big event, is epecially interesting this year for a couple of reasons. First, Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of product marketing will be giving the keynote instead of chief executive Steve Jobs (who is under the weather, but not dying). Second, this will be the last Macworld event Apple participates in.

Which rumors will be true? Tune in tomorrow morning to find out.

Microsoft said today that Xbox 360 sales have topped 28 million since the game console launched in 2005, allowing it to claim a solid second-place position in the game industry.

The Redmond, Wash.-based software company also said its Xbox Live player community has now grown to more than 17 million active members, up from 14 million before the holidays. Those members have increased their online spending more than 84 percent from a year ago. Since 2005, Microsoft said more than $1 billion has been spent on Xbox Live, with revenues fueled this season by a new user interface, dubbed The New Xbox Experience.

Microsoft said it has doubled its market share in some key territories. In places such as Japan, that doesn’t mean much since Microsoft’s position there is dead last. But it matters more in areas such as Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Sony is in third place with about 17 million consoles sold (pre-holidays).

The sales suggest a strong holiday showing for Microsoft, though it’s still far behind Nintendo’s Wii, which has sold more than 40 million units worldwide by various accounts. It also means that video game sales as a whole have likely held up well despite the economic turmoil. The strong year-end sales of Xbox 360s was probably helped by lower prices and new models, code named Jasper, that are said to be more reliable.

The company said that between Christmas and New Year’s Day, Xbox Live had its busiest week ever with more than 1.4 million concurrent members online. The company said that its new Netflix movie-streaming service on the Xbox 360 was one of the most popular new features.

Popular movies included The Dark Knight, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Iron Man, and Tropic Thunder. Popular arcade games (available for download) included A Kingdom for Keflings, Castle Crashers, Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, Puzzle Arcade, and Worms. And popular game-related downloads included Rock Band, Guitar Hero, Halo 3, Gears of War 2, and Call of Duty 4.

Until Apple’s keynote address starts tomorrow at 9AM PST, there are going to be non-stop rumors about which products will be unveiled. It’s becoming more clear what is going to be announced (iMacs, Mac minis, 17-inch MacBook Pros, DRM-free iTunes?), but there is always the chance that there will be a wild card.

The satirical news site The Onion has a great video mocking the Macworld product launch hype with its “MacBook Wheel” computer. This is classic stuff (”predictive sentence technology”), much better than that Simpsons spoof.

Watch it below:

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

We’ll be covering the Macworld keynote live tomorrow morning.

The number of videos viewed by Americans increased by 34 percent over the past year with 12.7 billion videos viewed in November 2008 versus 9.5 billion the previous November, according to the latest report from comScore Video Metrix. That means Americans spent a whopping 40 percent more time watching online videos over the course of the year, notes NewTeeVee.

Seventy seven percent of the U.S. internet audience watches online video — that’s a lot of couch potatoes surfing the internet with laptops balanced precariously on their knees (raise your hand if you’ve ever been burned by an overheating laptop).

ComScore reports that 146 million viewers tuned in to watch online videos in November 2008, which isn’t a huge spike from the 138 million in November 2007. However, in 2008, the average viewer watched 273 minutes of online video during the same month. That’s an increase of more than an hour in the past year (195 minutes in November 2007), or two and a half episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

While the average video was watched for 3.1 minutes, the average video on Hulu was watched for an impressive 11.9 minutes, longer than any other internet property in the top ten list. Hulu’s offering of premium TV shows and films is definitely a factor in keeping U.S. viewers watching longer, even with ads sprinkled sporadically throughout.

The top ten list of online video sites has subtly shifted over the course of the year. YouTube remains king of the castle, accounting for more than 98 percent of all videos watched on Google sites (Google’s market share is strong at 40.3 percent, up from 31.4 percent a year ago). YouTube attracted 97 million viewers, who watched 5.1 billion videos on the site. Please tell me you didn’t watch this one, in which the Jonas Brothers cover John Mayer’s “Gravity,” perhaps one of the worst things brought to you by the year 2008:

Despite all the hullabaloo about Hulu traffic dropping steeply after the election, the site kept its no. 6 spot from October to November 2008. It turned out those numbers had not included traffic from video embeds, and the nation wasn’t actually suffering from Palin withdrawal.

While ESPN probably isn’t too scared that VentureBeatnik MG Siegler is never going to visit ESPN.com again due to a new site redesign, it should take note that ESPN.com’s slight drop has knocked it to the bottom of this top ten list. Meanwhile, ABC.com and Break.com didn’t even make the list this November (here are the November 2007 numbers), though ABC’s much-praised video player was one of the first to stream TV episodes and do it well.

One of my key predictions for 2009 was that Apple’s iTunes store would go DRM-free. There are always a lot of Apple rumors out there, but I was so confident in this one that I actually made the prediction twice. It turns out that may have been a good call, as Apple and the major music labels have come to terms on a deal, reports CNET’s Greg Sandoval.

Sandoval’s source is very specific on the details of the deal, including that Apple had to cave on its fixed pricing structure for songs. The good news is that the price for many songs in the iTunes store may actually drop to $0.79 (from $0.99 while the most popular ones may get a slight bump in price while they are still hot before settling at $0.79.

The deal, which could be announced as soon as tomorrow during Apple’s keynote address at the Macworld expo, also apparently allows users to download music over the air on their cellular networks — no Wi-Fi connection required, as is currently the case. That option on the iPhone, which has the iTunes store built-in, could be a huge boon to mobile music sales.

Apple currently offers some of its tracks without DRM in its “iTunes Plus” section, but EMI was the only major music label that signed on to offer these. This deal would add Sony BMG, Universal and Warner Music to the mix. While Apple chief executive Steve Jobs said in 2007 that he expected half of all the music on iTunes to be DRM-free by the end of that year, that never happened.

Instead, the labels used that one last position of power they had over Apple (which is now the number one music retailer in the U.S.) to bargain over prices. The labels have long since given all their music in DRM-free format to iTunes competitors like Amazon MP3.

If this report is true, it’s great news for Apple and music lovers in general. I’ve been using Amazon MP3 for the past year since iTunes was not DRM-free, but I much prefer the seamless integration iTunes offers. I simply did not want to be locked into iTunes if (God forbid) I didn’t always use an iPod or iPhone in the future. With DRM-free music, it won’t matter.

My only concern now is that iTunes’ Genius sidebar one-click purchase feature may become a bit too useful.

Again, this DRM-free deal may or may not be announced tomorrow. We’ll be covering the keynote live to let you know the latest.

[photo: flickr/Martin Kryzywinski]

Change.gov, the website where President-Elect Barack Obama’s transition team can interact with constituents, just unveiled a neat tool using startup technology — through Blist, the simple database for non-experts, the team is sharing its giant list of donors.

The transition team was already publishing the list as a simple HTML table, but using Blist makes the data much more interactive. You can sort the data just as you would on a spreadsheet — searching, for example, for the biggest donor, or for donors who work for Facebook (it turns out there’s just one). The table is embedded on the web page, so you don’t have to download a giant Excel file, and it also allows me to embed the data behind the jump in this post. (By the way, if the list covered donations to the Obama campaign proper, my name would be on it.)

National Journal’s David Herbert, a fellow Stanford Daily alum, sorted through the numbers and spotted Craigslist founder Craig Newmark among the new donors.

This is a big improvement for Change.gov and is one of the coolest ways the site is living up to its promise to increase transparency. It’s also a great showcase for Blist’s potential — it’s one thing to say the Seattle startup’s product is a ridiculously easy-to-use database, and another to actually have a compelling demonstration of its usefulness running on a prominent website. In my past life as a local government reporter, I often had to sort through reams of budget and salary information on spreadsheet printouts, so it would be great to see more government agencies sharing data via Blist. It would also be great if Blist was a little faster.

The company raised $6.5 million from Frazier Technology Ventures and Morgenthaler Technology Ventures in March.

Read the rest of this entry »

Independent musicians looking to launch their careers online will soon have a brand new tool to measure their popularity in real time: Band Metrics. Its parent company, Atlanta-based Indie Music, raised an undisclosed angel round of funding to continue developing the application, currently in a private beta.

The service — launched in response to the explosion of digital do-it-yourself music recording and publishing tools — crawls the web for semantic data indicating name recognition, music trends and fan interests. This allows artists and groups to adjust their image and strategy as they go to have the best shot at making it big. A TechCrunch50 semi-finalist, Band Metrics has been heralded as Google Analytics tailored to the music industry.

Anyone can register for the beta on the app’s web site. Not much has been released about how its patent-pending technology actually works, or how it displays results in ways that make it so easy for bands to digest and react to. However, graphics on the site suggest geographic and long-term analysis.

Atlanta entrepreneur Allen Graber led the angel investment. The other investors were not disclosed.

$800 million in capital went to music technology in 2008 despite the downturn. Companies like SellaBand, OurStage, Amie Street, and others devoted to getting the word out about fledgling bands, have also taken healthy slices of this pie.

Well, 2008 is over and The Beatles catalog of music still isn’t legally available on the internet. However, a free and legal download of every tune is now available from a very unexpected source. Norwegian broadcasting company NRK is releasing a podcast that tells the story behind each Beatles song, followed by the actual tune in its entirety — all 212 of them. Did we mention it was free?

A deal between NRK and Norwegian organization TONO, which owns the music rights, allows NRK to publish the podcast “Our Daily Beatles” which is available here for download (it’s an RSS XML file). The podcast chronologically follows each song, with a three-minute tale about the track’s history. According to NRK’s website, the deal gives NRK the rights to publish previously broadcast radio and TV programs that contain less than 70 percent music.

So maybe it’s not the most ideal way to download Beatles tunes on the Internet (the podcast and background stories are entirely in Norwegian, unfortunately), but it’s free. It’s certainly cheaper than the $800 Beatles iPod package from department store Bloomingdales. Apple’s negotiations to get the songs on iTunes stalled when Apple Corps Ltd., the Beatles holding company, and record label EMI, which owns the recording rights to Beatles’ songs, could not come to an agreement late last year.

Well, there’s always the hope that Michael Jackson will leave his share of the Beatles music catalog to former Beatle Paul McCartney. There are several reports that Jackson, who owns much of the catalog’s publishing rights along with Sony, has revised his will so that McCartney will get control over the band’s songbook when the pop idol dies. Jackson may have turned only 50 last year, but he sure looks closer to 64.

ESPN launched its new site design today and all I can say is “wow.” And it’s not a good “wow,” it’s a horrified “wow.” I can’t separate those advertisements from the content, and so I’ll never visit this site again.

It’s sad, because ESPN does have great content when it comes to sports. In fact, I don’t think it’s any stretch to say that it has the best content out there. But with this redesign it’s crossed a line that I expect other sites may try to cross as advertising revenues dip in the weak economy.

First of all, when you load up espn.com, you’re greeted with a huge overlay that includes not just a giant static ad, but also a video that auto-plays! It was annoying enough when ESPN had a little video in the corner that played when you loaded the site previously, but at least with that you could see other content too. Now you’re forced to sit through this overlay or click out of it. It doesn’t run every time you visit the site, but more than enough to make it so I won’t go back.

Secondly, the site itself is still just a giant ad disguised as a sports site. I’m looking at the site right now and I can’t tell if I’m at a site about sports or the website about the Ford F-150. I hope I don’t accidentally click anywhere because I must have a 50 percent chance of hitting one of these ads.

I would just visit ESPN through my RSS feed reader and avoid all this nonsense, but ESPN has chosen to go with truncated feeds — lame. And so I’ll take myself to CNNSI (which is almost as bad) and Yahoo Sports for my sporting news.

The worst part of this is that I’m actually still a subscriber to ESPN Insider. It’s mostly because I keep forgetting to cancel my $5-a-month subscription, but this just reminded me. It also gives me an idea: What if ESPN Insider subscribers got to view the site with absolutely no ads? I would gladly pay something like $5-a-month for that.

What do you say ESPN? It’s either that or lose me forever.

Update: For those who think ESPN really needs to cram as many ads as possible onto its web site, consider this: The sports cable channel makes something like $4.3 billion a year just in subscriber revenue thanks to deals with cable and satellite operators, the New York Times found out in November. (Thanks Michael.)

Xobni, a plug-in that tries to improve email organization in Microsoft Outlook, has raised $7 million in a second round of venture financing.

Xobni’s most prominent feature is an inbox sidebar that shows profiles of people you’re corresponding with. By making related content (phone numbers, past messages, files exchanged, and more) immediately accessible, Xobni helps you avoid fruitless or time-consuming searches through giant piles of email; Microsoft founder Bill Gates (somewhat hyperbolically) called it “the next generation of social networking.” Xobni also makes it easier for other web services to interact with Outlook, including Yahoo Mail, LinkedIn, and Facebook. I believe VentureBeat Editor Matt Marshall is the only Outlook user on our team, but he praised Xobni for improving his email efficiency.

The San Francisco startup faces plenty of new competition. For example, I’ve been impressed with Postbox, another startup that wants to tackle email overload. A German Outlook plug-in called Lookeen even brags about being a better search tool than Xobni. But that alone should tell you that Xobni is making a big splash — it’s been downloaded 1.5 million times. One of the company’s goals for 2009 is moving into bigger, “enterprise”- level companies. The fact that Cisco joined the new round is certainly a vote of confidence in this direction.

Xobni, which was incubated by Y Combinator, previously raised a $4.26 million first round. Prior investors Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, Baseline Ventures and Atomico participated in this round too.

Those of us in the San Francisco Bay Area can watch the construction of the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge anytime we want. Unfortunately, most of the time that means sitting in traffic on the current Bay Bridge. But now there’s another option, and it’s not just for us locals: Watch it on Google Earth.

The large construction project is now being rendered in full 3D in the “3D Buildings” layer on Google Earth. It’s the first time a construction project has been featured, according to the Google Lat Long Blog.

Seeing as completion of the bridge isn’t scheduled until 2013, it’s obviously not all built yet, but a transparent placeholder is also displayed in 3D for the remainder of the bridge. This allows you to see what the one giant suspension tower will look like.

From the Google Earth entry:

The signature portion of the new East Span—and the Bay Bridge—will be the world’s largest Self-Anchored Suspension Span, which will also be the first bridge of its kind built with a single tower.

Oddly enough, I was just remarking over the weekend on Twitter how I don’t fully appreciate that I can see the Golden Gate Bridge from my desk, and users on FriendFeed were quick to point out that, thanks to online services like Google Earth, pretty much anyone can see such great views virtually. Now that includes giant construction sites as well.
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