After all the turmoil Yahoo has gone through in the past month, the company is finally making moves on a legitimate plan to consolidate its resources on a handful of successful products and services crucial to its bottom line.

Today Yahoo announced that it’s shutting down digital magazine news app Livestand, which it only launched back in November 2011.

“When we discontinue products, it will be so that we can focus on opportunities where we lead and where we can create the most meaningful experiences for people using our products, and for our partners, developers and advertisers,” Yahoo stated in a blog post. “One of the first decisions we’ve made along these lines is to discontinue our personalized digital newsstand app, Livestand for iPad.”

Livestand was facing plenty of more popular competitors, such as Flipboard, Editions by AOL, Pulse News, Zite, and Google Currents. But even in a crowded market, Yahoo didn’t need to be focusing its efforts on side projects like this. The company said it still plans to focus on creating a more mobile web-friendly experience for its existing products. As we said at the beginning of the year, Yahoo can start by revamping Flickr.

It’s nice to see new CEO Ross Levinson actually doing something to lessen the company’s glut of useless services and products. But the work is far from over.

Fortunately, we’ve comprised a list of 10 products Yahoo needs to immediately shut down. (Well, it’s actually only a list of nine, since Livestand is now dead.)

YouTube is no stranger to live streaming popular events, such the  Coachella Music Festival back in April. But for its upcoming live stream of Australia’s annual Vivid Live music event held at Sydney Opera House, YouTube is showing off a new tool called Frontrow commissioned by the event organizers to help enhance the experience.

The Frontrow tool mixes elements of Instagram with the exclusivity of big-ticket concerts, and you engage in the experience without ever leaving home. You can zoom in and out using the Frontrow camera tool and snap pictures using filtered views. You can then share those images with friends, post them to social networks, etc. You can’t record clips of the concert and apply those filters in the same way you can with a service like Viddy, but it does give people an additional reason to check out the live stream.

I’ll be curious to see how many of these filtered Vivid Live concert photos end up on Google+, which is currently making a push to become a major competitor to pro photo site Flickr.

The Vivid Live live stream is free to access, and we’ve included a screenshot and short demo video showing off the new Frontrow tool below.

Update 5/25/2012 (2:00 p.m. PT): An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that Frontrow was created by YouTube. The Frontrow tool was actually commissioned by the Vivid Live organizers for use on YouTube’s livestream.

Facebook CFO David Ebersman

The screw-up resulted in a major disappointment in Facebook’s stock debut: The stock’s 15 percent decline since the IPO last Friday may not in itself be tragic. But worse, lawsuits are flying saying that legal guidelines weren’t followed. And there’s the sad fact that regular mom-and-pop investors were apparently left with the more losses on average than large institutions who got privileged information. This all was aggravated by a separate annoyance: glitches in the Nasdaq stock market trading process, which caused delays in trade and cancel confirmations, among other things.

However, based on a number of interviews VentureBeat has had with observers and other sources close to the process, it’s apparent that Facebook itself may be most to blame for the fallout. Facebook chose to be more furtive in public announcements about its business than it was in private talks with large investors.

The “update”

The decisive action by Facebook came on May 9, three days into the “roadshow,” which is the time when Facebook and its bankers visit major investors in hopes of getting them to buy the IPO stock. On that day, Facebook’s executives, led by chief financial officer David Ebersman, signed off on new language in the company’s updated IPO prospectus.

In that May 9 update, Ebersman decided to use vague language when describing how the company’s second quarter was looking. It was extremely understated, considering what we would later find out. According to the filing, specifically on page 57, Facebook said that it was experiencing the same trend in the second quarter that it had seen in the first quarter, that growth in “daily active users” (DAUs) was increasing more rapidly than the growth in ad impressions, driven by many users’ shift to mobile devices.

The exact wording is here:

Based upon our experience in the second quarter of 2012 to date, the trend we saw in the first quarter of DAUs increasing more rapidly than the increase in number of ads delivered has continued. We believe this trend is driven in part by increased usage of Facebook on mobile devices where we have only recently begun showing an immaterial number of sponsored stories in News Feed, and in part due to certain pages having fewer ads per page as a result of product decisions.

Now Facebook is generally growing quickly — and its ads are growing, even if they are growing more slowly on mobile — and so this update itself didn’t send any alarm bells to most investors, and it shouldn’t have. After all, Facebook had long warned about this mobile problem, ever since the first IPO prospectus filing on Feb 1, that revenues could be negatively affected by its huge mobile growth, because monetizing mobile hadn’t been proven. (Indeed, VentureBeat was the first to report this on the day of the IPO filing.)

Facebook’s lawyers may, in the wake of the legal mess it has gotten into, try to argue that the new May 9 language about “DAU’s increasing more rapidly than the increase in number of ads delivered” pointed to something more significant than Facebook had released before. But the reality is that this wording was just too vague to be construed by normal people as meaning anything more than what had already been mentioned before. The sad thing is, if this was such an important update for Facebook, its team must have argued about it a hundred times before publishing. So why was it written as though it was purposefully trying to obfuscate? More on that in a sec.

First, there’s been sloppy reporting about the May 9 update, and it’s worth setting the record straight. The WSJ, the leading publication for many bankers, for example on Thursday implied that the May 9 update was the first time Facebook disclosed that the mobile risks “may negatively effect results.” But the WSJ is wrong. That wording had been in Facebook’s S-1s from the beginning. Take a look for yourself at the original February filing. (See pages 5 , 13, and 46.) The fact is, there is nothing within the S-1 update on May 9 that would give normal investors the sense that there had been a material change about Facebook’s revenue prospects.

The private guidance bombshell

The more significant point is, on the next day, May 10, Facebook made private statements to a select group of banking analysts, telling them the revenue prospects had changed. This was arguably material information at the time — a big no-no.

Here’s what happened on May 10: Facebook got on the phone with a select group of 21 analysts, including analysts of its IPO underwriters, and briefed them on what was really going on behind the S-1 update. Facebook executives guided those analysts through much more explicit material than the S-1 update contained, according to our sources, saying that Facebook now expected the second quarter to be on the “low end of the range” of the financial guidance Facebook had previously given them. VentureBeat has confirmed this wording with someone with direct knowledge of those talks.

Of course, this new information prompted the analysts to take a look at the guidance Facebook had previously given to them, then estimate where the “low end” was, and revise their own forecasts accordingly. They did this beginning on May 10, as disclosed by leaks to Reuters. The banks now forecasted 30.4 percent year-on-year 2012 revenue growth on average, instead of the 36.7 percent growth previously expected. (Compare that to 2011, when Facebook’s revenue grew 87.9 percent year-on-year to $3.71 billion.)

Let’s back up for a second. When Facebook gave its original guidance to analysts in March and April, at the start of the IPO process, it was on firm legal ground in doing so. Indeed, this guidance is a normal part of the process, described in good detail by Henry Blodget, himself a former Wall Street analyst, in his good post about the IPO process Tuesday. He covers a lot of ground that I won’t go over again here.

However, Facebook’s subsequent guidance to analysts, made on May 10, “to the low end” of the earlier guidance, was not on firm legal ground, because this was clearly new information not already in the S-1. It was also clearly different than the general guidance made originally to analysts.

The bankers’ downgrades beginning May 10 were significant, as we previously reported, and were shared with a limited circle of investors. The bank analysts also released lower earnings-per-share estimates, as well as lower revenue forecasts for the second quarter. The estimates ranged between 5.4 percent to 7.3 percent lower revenue for the second quarter than previously — very significant adjustments.

Here are the second quarter revenue estimates, as leaked to Reuters:

• Morgan Stanley — $1.111 bln (new) from $1.175 bln (old)
• Bank of America — $1.100 bln (new) from $1.166 bln (old)
• JPMorgan — $1.096 bln (new) from $1.182 bln (old)
• Goldman Sachs — $1.125 bln (new) from $ 1.207 bln (old)

This obviously was material information for investors. Following the changes, Facebook and its bankers, led by Morgan Stanley, were forced to respond to questions from key clients. We see that these key investors, once informed by these roadshows and reports, started to slash the number of shares they intended to buy. One example was Los Angeles-based Capital Research & Management which cut the number of shares it wanted after talking with the company and underwriters, according to the WSJ.

But not every potential investor was privy to these revised reports.

The mood of investors in IPO stock

Unprecedented territory

So lets summarize why this was so problematic. SEC guidelines prohibit a company from issing information that is materially different from that already in its S-1 prospectus. So what constitutes “material” information? The definition of material information is that “which would be likely to affect a stock’s price once it becomes known to the public.”

Now we’re hearing from sources that Facebook is arguing that guidelines around what constitutes materiality is disputed when it comes to the issue of financial guidance. Facebook could arguably say it didn’t know if its new guidance on May 10 was going to end up being material or not. Indeed, the Facebook IPO is unprecedented because this sort of change in guidance has never happened before, at least it has never happened this late in the IPO process. But precisely since that is the case, because Facebook was on shaky unknown ground, because SEC guidelines haven’t been tested specific around this particular area, Facebook should have made doubly sure to err on the side of caution.

Indeed, a source at one of the underwriting banks we talked with could not give us a clear reason why Facebook should not have updated the S-1 with firmer trend data.

(For more on this topic of materiality, see Bloomberg’s reporting on this. It’s good as far as it goes, but misses clear reference to the fact that Facebook chose a weaker statement in its S-1 update than what it gave to analysts afterward.)

Why did Facebook do it?

We’re seeing all kinds of reporting about how the IPO legal process is a mess, and it’s true that IPO guidelines are frustrating. SEC guidelines do not allow analysts to print anything between when an IPO prospectus is filed until 40 days after the IPO. Yet they’re allowed to speak verbally to a select few of their clients. The bizarre rules are a result of previous regulation, created a decade ago, after abuses made by investment bankers in written reports during the dot com era. These rules may need to be reformed, but Facebook needs to play by them for the time being.

So what Facebook should have done on May 9 is either update the S-1 with clearly stated quantitative data (and go forward with the IPO, and deal with the lower stock price), or else pull the IPO filing altogether and wait for a better quarter.

So why didn’t Facebook do either of those two things? Well, that’s the $100 billion question. One can only imagine the huge amount of pressure that the company was feeling. Facebook, a web site that prides itself on being able to see real-time data about users, traffic and advertising, clearly knew how the quarter was progressing. The roadshow came halfway through the quarter, and Facebook’s update on May 9 was clearly a sign that it realized it needed to say something about its deteriorating revenue situation.

Now the following is just speculation, but it’s possible Facebook felt that if the May 9 update were made more forcefully, the wording could torpedo the healthy IPO it had put so much work into (indeed, the CFO had been preparing for the IPO for at least a year).

Facebook bear Sam Hamadeh

This is interpretation taken by Sam Hamadeh, chief executive of PrivCo, a company that issues research about private companies. He says Facebook should have been clearer about the shift to mobile users, and tried to quantify the potential revenue in some way. Instead, he says, Facebook executives — led by Sheryl Sandberg and David Ebersman — initially appeared during the roadshow to blame the first quarter drop mostly on seasonal trends, and he bases this on sources he’s talked with who were present during the roadshow. He takes the skeptical view, which is that Facebook executives buckled under the pressure, and decided to try to sweep the seriousness of the mobile ad revenue situation under the rug, at least when it came to the S-1. It’s true that Hamadeh has been consistently bearish on Facebook, almost predictably so, and so it’s important to keep in mind he presents just one view.

Whether or not this is true — that Facebook decided to say the bare minimum because it feared the consequences of doing otherwise — it’s the events that followed that made Facebook’s fumble on May 9 look so devastating.

The subsequent analyst downgrades — and the realization that mobile problems were bigger than expected — suddenly shed a new light on a series of previous Facebook actions on the mobile front. And this light doesn’t make Facebook look so good.

Huh, Facebook was really obsessed with mobile

Instagram, for example. Back on April 9, already in the second quarter, Facebook announced a deal to acquire mobile photo-sharing site Instagram for $1 billion. Reports emerged afterward documenting that Zuckerberg had moved to seal the deal in a matter of days — almost unprecedented speed. Could this have been driven by panic reaction to internal metrics? The motivation driving the Instagram purchase is relevant because the site is so important in mobile. Facebook clearly had seen its own mobile usage growing quickly, and in particular had noticed Instagram’s mobile photo-sharing usage becoming a bigger and bigger portion of all stories posted on Facebook. This tied directly into the negative mobile trend in revenues, since photos are so hard to monetize with ads.

And then there’s the Facebook acquisition of AOL mobile patents that came on April 23 for $550 million. Was this another panicked move, driven by a growing mobile problem, the seriousness of which only Facebook was aware of?

That’s just the beginning. There are more questions than answers raised by the timeline released by PrivCo’s Hamadeh Tuesday evening on this site (scroll down).

So why did Facebook become so bullish?

Now forward-wind to Wednesday, May 16, two days before the IPO. Facebook chose to increase the IPO share offering by 25 percent. These 83.8 million extra shares came from insiders, including folks like Peter Thiel and Jim Breyer, who are on Facebook’s board, and who are almost definitely privy to the company’s true financial position. The two more than doubled the number of shares they intended to sell. The private equity arm of Goldman Sachs, one of the lead underwriters, doubled the number of shares it offered for sale. Of course, no intent can be drawn from these actions alone. There may be other reasons they chose to release the extra shares. But it looks really bad given that Facebook executives now knew that most U.S. investors weren’t fully privy to Facebook’s real, downgraded revenue outlook.

“This stinks to high heaven,” says Hamadeh, of the extra share allotment.

Facebook also set the number of shares it planned to offer to normal mom-and-pop investors — known as retail investors — to about 25 percent, much higher than is normal for IPOs. The cap was also raised for individual investors, so that they could now own 5,000 shares, up from 500 shares.

Finally, Facebook CFO Ebersman decided to set the price of the IPO at $38, at the very top of the price range, which itself had already been increased from an earlier range. This, even though Morgan Stanley has since made statements that the $38 price took into account the lower revenue guidance data.

Confused? You should be. The underwriting banks and Facebook have stayed mum on further commentary.

The big fall

The rest of the story is known: Since trading started Friday, Facebook’s shares have fallen hard. They opened at $42, and then fell and have languished in the low $30’s. Facebook shares closed at $33 yesterday, and they’re down again today, at around $31.50. Facebook had misjudged demand, and it now has a lot of angry investors. Facebook faces multiple investigations and lawsuits. Investors filed suit Wednesday in Manhattan federal court and in San Mateo county superior court in California, alleging that the company and underwriters failed to properly disclose changes to analysts forecasts made at the underwriting banks. Facebook faces claims that could be at least $1 billion or more.

To add insult to injury, as less-privileged investors complained about their investments going south, it emerged Wednesday that the main underwriting banks made $100 million in trades from the IPO, over and above the $176 million fee they charged for the process.

Facebook declined to comment for this story.

Yes, the legal process around IPOs is incredibly frustrating, and urgently needs to be looked at closely for ways to be reformed. But it’s also clear Facebook should have been more forthcoming about its real financial fundamentals. If it had, it could have avoided this mess.

[Chart image credit: Yahoo; Mood image: Kevin Dooley, Flickr]

Unlike Yahoo, AOL’s activist shareholders won’t be able to boot out the company’s CEO due to false information on a resume.

Instead, Starboard Value LP, which owns 5.3 percent of AOL, decided to create a 96-page presentation outlining all of the missteps the company is currently making in regards to its media business.

Similar to what it has done in the past, Starboard highlights that AOL spent about $668 million on acquisitions since 2009 for the purpose of boosting its display advertising business. These acquisitions include the $315 million purchase of the Huffington Post, which generated about $30 million in revenue with a staff of about a hundred in 2009. HuffPo revenue is currently up, but so are its expenses. Starboard isn’t necessarily calling the Huffington Post a bad investment, but it does accuse AOL of mismanaging the property so that it became woefully unprofitable. (See table below.)

The most damning point in the report relates to AOL’s focus on turning its hyper-local news property Patch into a profitable business. Patch is returning $13 million in revenue this year (a number Starboard is convinced is padded), after AOL spent over $160 million. Based on interviews Starboard commissioned, the majority (70 percent) of advertisers admitted they didn’t renew their ad deals with the service after the first contract ended.

Starboard estimates that AOL’s overall display ad business is losing about $500 million per year and has already lost $1.3 billion cumulatively.

So, what do the activist investors propose should happen to change all of this?

Well, for starters, Starboard wants to replace three directors on AOL’s board so that the board will better represent the interests of shareholders. It also wants to kill Patch immediately. I imagine it would probably consolidate the number of properties AOL currently owns to only those that can be profitable on their own, without the help of pushing ad campaigns from other more successful properties.

One other thunderous slap to the face: Starboard wants to change the compensation of its executive team to mirror that of a media company — not a tech company. This makes perfect sense, especially since AOL recently laid off a large swath of employees in its email and instant messaging communications department. It also sold a very valuable chunk of technology patents to Microsoft. Starboard points out that AOL’s current board is allowing the company to compare itself to the likes of Apple, Microsoft, and Google.

You can check out the full hulking 96-page presentation via the SEC. Let us know your thoughts in the comment section.

Google is rolling out a new section of its Transparency Report today that provides detailed information about copyright infringement removal requests.

“We believe that openness is crucial for the future of the Internet. When something gets in the way of the free flow of information, we believe there should be transparency around what that block might be,” Google stated in a recent blog post announcing the new section of the report.

The company first launched the Transparency Report about two years ago, which primarily focused on the number of URL or content removal requests  — as well as requests for personal data of an individual — made by governments across the world.

The new section of the report details the companies and organizations that are asking Google to remove content or de-index a URL from search results on the basis of copyright infringement. In the past month, the report indicates that 1,246,854 URLs have been targeted for removal from over 24,000 domains. The top sites being listed are shady sounding domains, such as Filestube.com, 4shared.com, zippyshare.com, etc.

So, who exactly is requesting these removals? The report indicates that over 1,200 copyright owners have asked for removals (either directly, or from an organization representing them). Here’s he shocking part though.

While companies/organizations like NBCUniversal, Lionsgate, the RIAA, and BPI (the British version of RIAA) are all at the top of the list for copyright infringement URL takedown requests, none of them come close to the top company — Microsoft, with a total of 552,252 requests.

Google also says the number of requests has been increasing rapidly, and that its not unusual for the company to receive more than 250,000 requests each week. That’s more than what copyright owners asked it to remove in all of 2009.

“Fighting online piracy is very important, and we don’t want our search results to direct people to materials that violate copyright laws. So we’ve always responded to copyright removal requests that meet the standards set out in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA),” Google states. “At the same time, we want to be transparent about the process so that users and researchers alike understand what kinds of materials have been removed from our search results and why.”

The company said it will eventually provide information about content removal requests, such as those made through its video site YouTube.

In terms of how Google goes about these copyright infringement requests is pretty reasonable at least on YouTube. Once contacted by a copyright holder, it removes the content in question and contacts the user responsible. That user can then appeal the infringement claim, and if Google hasn’t heard back from the copyright holder after a two weeks, its restored.

With its search results, it’s not as easy, but Google said it’s working hard to better identify the legitimate requests and discard all the others.

Copyright stamp photo via filmfoto /Shutterstock

There’s still plenty of buzz surrounding a potential Apple TV set, and now Forrester analyst James McQuivey is offering his own speculation: Apple should avoid taking on the big-screen HDTVs already in our living rooms, and instead offer a complementary smaller screen

“Apple should sell the world’s first non-TV TV,” McQuivey wrote in a blog post yesterday. While I’ve seen more than  enough Apple television speculation for this lifetime, McQuivey’s report is particularly intriguing to me since it aligns with my predictions from last summer.

“An Apple television would most likely serve as a secondary television set — under 30 inches, and ideal for bedrooms, kitchens and college dorm rooms — instead of elbowing for attention in the living room,” I wrote, based on the fact that it would be easier for Apple to compete in the small TV arena, and that it wouldn’t compete directly with the existing Apple TV set-top box (which remains Apple’s gateway to large TV sets).

Now, McQuivey’s take:

Instead of selling a replacement for the TV you just bought, Apple should convince millions of Apple fans that they need a new screen in their lives. Call it the iHub, a 32-inch screen with touch, gesture, voice, and iPad control that can be hung on the wall wherever the family congregates for planning, talking, or eating — in more and more US homes, that room is the dining room or eat-in kitchen. By pushing developers to create apps that serve as the hub of family life – complete with shared calendars, photo and video viewers, and FaceTime for chatting with grandma – this non-TV TV could take off, ultimately positioning Apple to replace your 60-inch set once it’s ready to retire.

While we’ve seen reports pointing to Apple readying some sort of large-screened television, there’s still nothing concrete yet. That’s a good thing, since I still think a big-screen Apple television set would be a huge mistake. With Sony and many other electronics giants bleeding money from their HDTV businesses, it doesn’t make much sense for Apple to jump into that maelstrom.

Photo: Heather Kelly/VentureBeat

Pandora gave investors something nice to listen to for its fiscal Q1 earnings report: record increases in revenue, user activity, U.S. radio station market share, and more.

The company reported $80.8 million in revenue (with a net loss of 9 cents per share) for the quarter, up 58 percent compared to the same period a year ago. Those figures beat Wall Street’s estimates of $74.3 million (and an 18 cent per share net loss). Advertising revenue was also up 62 percent year-over-year at $70.6 million.

“Pandora is off to an excellent start, exceeding our first quarter outlook and raising our expectations for the full fiscal year,” stated Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy in the report. “Advertisers want to be everywhere their consumers are. They are moving quickly to speak with their target customers across the Pandora platform, with the majority of the top 50 digital advertisers in the U.S. already having bought multiplatform advertising on Pandora.”

In the earnings call, Kennedy said Pandora is “positioning ourselves to take full advantage of political advertising,” which is likely to ramp up as it inches closer to the 2012 elections. Kennedy added that the company has plenty of room to grow as it adds Pandora-ready devices into automobiles.

The company also updated investors on the music service’s total number of active users, which grew 53 percent to 51.9 million. The total number of hours listened to for the quarter hit 3.09 billion. That’s right on track with the 1.06 billion hours reported earlier this month. Pandora also grew its market share among U.S. radio stations, which accounts for a nice chunk of local advertising dollars.

However, Pandora will still have to contend with higher music licensing costs and increased competition from services like Spotify. One thing that could be an issue, but wasn’t discussed in detail, is Pandora’s growing local advertising sales force. I suspect this will become more important as the year progresses.

Summary of Pandora’s Q1 earnings results pasted below:

• 1Q13 revenue of $80.8 million grew 58% year-over-year
• Active users reach record 51.9 million growing 53% year-over-year
• 1Q13 total listener hours of 3.09 billion grew 92% year-over-year
• Record 71.7% share of top 20 U.S. Internet radio services at the end of 1Q13
• Record 5.95% share of total U.S. radio listening at the end of 1Q13 grew from 3.11%
• 1Q12

Sean Parker’s mystery video startup AirTime is set to debut on June 5th, but that’s not stopping the company from making news today.

AirTime has received $25 million in second round funding led by Kleiner Perkins, and it has acquired the social experience company Erly, TechCrunch reported last night. The company later acknowledged the news on its blog (but didn’t reveal the funding amount). Other investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Accel Partners, Google Ventures, and Social + Capital.

Erly was founded by former Hulu CTO Eric Feng, who could potentially bring much to the heavily hyped AirTime. Beta testers have reported that Airtime is like Chatroulette with a layer of interest mapping, and with his experience building Hulu Feng could help the company to scale and build a robust community.

“Erly brings demonstrated consumer products expertise, video experience, and technical leadership to Airtime, and we couldn’t be more proud to welcome the newest members of our family,” Airtime wrote on its company blog.

Parker joined up with his Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning to create Airtime, which previously raised $8.3 million in funding.

Startup Qwiki wants to change the way we experience information, and today it’s releasing a news reporting tool that brings its technology to publishers.

Qwiki Creator, launched today in partnership with ABC News, merges web video and content for interactive presentations that offer audiences something between a broadcast and print experience. To mark the launch, ABC News is releasing 25 of its own custom Qwikis, which are embedded in on-site news stories and also running on Qwiki.com.

“Since launch, thousands of content creators — amateurs, professionals, even many large media companies like ABC — have contacted Qwiki and asked to turn their content into our format. The Qwiki Creator is the culmination of that desire,” Qwiki co-founder and CEO Doug Imbruce told VentureBeat.

Qwiki is a New York-based startup that weaves together web data sources in near real-time to create interactive, animated presentations on reference topics. The company first launched its web product in January 2011, and followed up with an iPad application a few months later. Qwiki has received $10.5 million in funding from investors (including Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin), but has also been criticized for doing little more than creating a talking version of Wikipedia.

Qwiki’s new goal is to help media companies create more engaging news stories. With Qwiki Creator, reporters can self-narrate interactive stories and pull in web content in the form of URLs, Flickr images, YouTube and Vimeo videos, Google maps, tweets, and the like. Qwiki plans to add mobile and tablet playback by the summer, and the Creator tool will support additional animations and content sources in future updates.

“The Creator is designed to let content creators produce multimedia, interactive content quickly — without the aid of a video production unit or rich media programmers,” Imbruce said.

Wednesday’s Creator release is the start of a private testing phase, but additional launch partners include StyleCaster, Cheyenne Meets Chanel, and Beauty Sweet Spot. The new tool even brings with it the promise of revenue.

“From a business strategy perspective, the partnership with ABC News — and more media companies in the future — is an exciting next step, especially where monetization is concerned,” Imbruce said. “We’re able to help democratize content creation inside organizations, and make it more efficient to create higher quality content, and thus higher quality advertising inventory, which we will participate in via a revenue share.”

The publisher tool, as I see it, represents a shift in direction for Qwiki and suggests the startup’s original consumer web and mobile reference play was about as stimulating as a forced trip to the library. But Imbruce insists otherwise. There’s no strategy overhaul here, he said. “It is the culmination of our strategy. The vision for the company has always been to create a human method for information consumption.”

So why haven’t we heard from Qwiki in a year? “We prefer to show our products, not just talk about them,” Imbruce said. “Creating a robust yet easy-to-use publishing platform was always our highest priority.”

Next up, Qwiki plans to release an API so that large scale content producers can mass produce Qwikis, Imbruce said.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

One of the good things to come out of MTV before devolving into a cable network of crappy reality TV shows is 120 Minutes host Matt Pinfield — a man who knows his music as well as he knows the music industry.

“New technology is taking music, the music business, and artists in all different directions,” Pinfield said in a recent interview with VentureBeat. “People used to be so resistant to it.”

The former Columbia Records VP said he remembers that for a long time that music labels were thinking tech would just go away, which obviously hasn’t happened. Today there are a number of streaming music and discovery services such as Pandora, MOG, Rdio, Shazam, Songza, and of course Spotify, which is leading the pack with 3 million paying subscribers.

“Sharing (music online) is going to happen no matter what,” Pinfield said. “Once you’ve let the digital genie out of the bottle, that’s just the way things go. It’s going to keep evolving.”

Pinfield said he’s noticing more bands using things like Skype’s group video chat feature to collaborate regardless of location, thus allowing them to write songs and brainstorm in a way that wasn’t really possible in the past. Things like this are what led him to his latest project.

Pinfield is teaming up with Skype on a new promotional contest, Say it with Skype. Emerging bands can upload a song or music video to be judged by Pinfield, Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy, and Ryan Tedder of OneRepublic, all of whom will subsequently act as mentors to the winning band. The winners also get an all expenses paid recording session.

“It’s hard enough for bands to get a leg up these days because of shows like American Idol, The Voice, Duets that are basically karaoke of other people’s songs. It dominates not only the pop world but also television,” Pinfield said. “This (Skype contest) is a way to use what’s great about social networking to have emerging bands upload their songs and gain attention.”

In addition to Skype and the new contest, Pinfield also told me about his positive experiences with Spotify. Having recently put together a playlist as part of a tribute article he wrote for The Hollywood Reporter on the late Adam Yauch, he said he’s embraced the service.

“It’s better for the new emerging artists,” he said of Spotify. “If somebody puts a new band on a playlist, others can discover it and look deeper into them.” Pinfield added that, while live performances are still very important for up-and-coming bands, it’s also becoming just as important to make their music available online via services like YouTube.

Pinfield also commented on the recent success some artist are having with crowdfunding their albums, saying “Kickstarter is great” in reference to the crowdfunded projects platform. Amanda Palmer of The Dresden Dolls is the first big example of Kickstarter success, raising over $800,000 for her record release campaign.

“It’s really great for bands that the record companies don’t want to invest in anymore because they’re only interested in what’s new, fresh,” he said. “There are bands out there with enough fans that are making more money through Kickstarter than they ever made when they couldn’t control the marketing money that was used to promote the record.”

Photo via Matt Pinfield/Facebook

Verizon is launching a new video search platform called Viewdini that will aggregate videos from a variety of different services for use on mobile devices, the company’s CEO Dan Mead said during a panel today at The Cable Show event.

Viewdini’s purpose is to make both finding and watching video on mobile devices easier, which is made possible through Verizon’s new LTE high-speed internet network, according to Mead. Verizon customers will be able to both search for available videos across multiple platforms as well as consume them using a Viewdini app.Verizon already has a partnership in place with Comcast’s Xfinity TV, Hulu Plus, mSpot, and Netflix, according to Cnet.

Also, Mead calls the Viewdini announcement “one of our most important of the year,” and explains that his company has been working on the platform for a few years, reports The Verge.

Essentially, Viewdini sounds very similar to what streaming video search app Matcha.tv is already doing. The only difference with Verizon’s new platform is that you’ll actually be able to watch those videos through one unified application, rather than being forced to use several different apps. That said, it has the potential to be huge.

As for whether this is actually the “most important” announcements of the year, we’ll have to wait and see. Personally, I’m not expecting anything great. The majority of media efforts like this by wireless companies fall short for one main reason: usually there is a third-party service that works as good, if not better. (Also, I’m not crazy about Verizon’s bastardization of Harry Houdini’s name for the purpose of launching this new platform either.)

The service’s first app should be available for Android devices later this month via Google Play. Verizon is showing off the Viewdini platform later today at The Cable Show floor. If Verizon releases a video of the demo, we’ll be sure and update the post.

Photo of Dan Mead by Sean Ludwig

Trion Worlds’ Defiance is one of the most ambitious transmedia projects, a story that stretches across multiple media, ever made. Debuting in April 2013, the online game world is being jointly developed in tandem with a science fiction TV show created by the SyFy entertainment network. We recently got a hands-on preview of the game where the creators described the depth of the story for the first time.

Trion is one of the most well-financed startups in gaming history, with one massively multiplayer online game world launched and several more in development. The company recently raised $85 million in equity financing and it has launched a third-party publishing platform for other MMOs.

The TV show and game are so intertwined that they share common characters who move from one media to the other. As an example, the main characters of the Defiance game cause some havoc in the futuristic city of San Francisco and they have to hightail it out of town. The TV series’ opening pilot shows the pair arriving in the remade city of St. Louis, where there is an uneasy truce between alien and human settlements.

“I cannot express how excited we are after about four years of talking about the concept and developing an amazing game to be able to show it today,” said Lars Buttler, chief executive of Redwood City, Calif.-based Trion Worlds, at an event in Santa Monica, Calif. “What excites me is that it is not another sequel of a packaged-goods game. It is a revolutionary project.”

He added, “It’s a triple-A MMO shooter for the console and PC and a premium online game, a live world, and an epic TV show. In a world where people get excited about cow clickers and the fifth game in a series, Trion and SyFy are doing something that has never been done before.”

Dave Howe, president of the SyFy entertainment network, said, “We have been a top cable network for 15 years, and this is the biggest and most exciting project I have ever been involved in.” Here’s a link to the making of Defiance trailer.

The story of the game is epic. Seven alien races arrive on Earth because their own planet has been destroyed. Those aliens don’t get along, but their peaceful move to Earth turns hostile after a terrorist act. The attack destroys the alien “Ark” ships, which carry “terraforming” technology that is loosed upon the world. The terraforming technology destroys much of the human civilization, and a war ensues.

After decades of war, an uneasy piece ensues because two commanders — one human, one alien — defy their orders in order to prevent huge civilian deaths. As the story begins, humans and aliens live side by side in small towns on a terraformed Earth. The citizens seek to find and trade items of value, such as alien artifacts from the mother ship, dubbed the Ark.

The game combines a third-person action shooter with the persistence and scale of a massively multiplayer online game. Like Trion’s other game, Rift, Defiance will enable dynamic events, where the fabric of the game’s landscape can change during special events, such as an alien invasion of the human territory.

While the TV show is set in St. Louis, where the only recognizable structure is the famous arch, the game is set in San Francisco. The events in one town can affect what happens in the other. The story of the show and the game will influence each other and evolve over time. The artifacts, vehicles, weapons, fauna, and animal species are the same across the two media.

“The game and the TV show constantly reinforce each other,” said Mark Stern, president of content for SyFy. “It is a high stakes story of courage and survival, a sweeping action-adventure with intimacy and a character drama with heart.”

The SyFy network has recruited some big stars to be in the show, including Grant Bowler (Ugly Betty, True Blood); Julie Benz (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel); and Jaime Murray (Dexter, Spartacus).

Like in other MMOs, you can create your own custom character, dubbed an Ark Hunter because you hunt after artifacts from the Ark. You can interact with thousands of people at t he same time and level up as you fight enemies and earn rewards. You can get a bunch of weapons, armor, and special abilities over time. And you can go on missions, deal with emergencies such as surprise attacks, and explore the world.

As you arrive, your job is to establish law in a Wild West frontier town with different factions of humans and aliens. In the town, there is a new gold rush as prospectors seek the energy of the Ark. Both human architecture and alien designs exists side by side.

I was able to grab an all-terrain vehicle and drive around in the Marin Headlands, north of the Golden Gate Bridge. The game was still in an early state as I could collide with another ATV without getting damaged. I stopped at one point and began shooting a bunch of monster crabs that came charging at me in waves. Then I saw a directional icon on the screen that signified a dynamic event. I drove the ATV over there and saw a bunch of humans attacking a gigantic alien monster. We had to shoot the thing’s underarms until its arms fell off and then vanquish it for good. It was a high-adrenaline game, but it wasn’t a particularly riveting or emotional battle.

“We wanted to wait until we had something meaty to play,” said Nick Beliaeff (pictured above), head of development at Trion. “We’ve focused on having something fun to play and a good show to watch without compromising the quality of the other.”

The world of San Francisco is huge in its own right, and the game will expand to include other regions of the San Francisco Bay Area over time. If all goes as planned, the story will never end. Stern said shooting has begun for the two-hour TV pilot and “it is really coming together.” The team has worked on shows or movies such as Battlestar Galactica, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Sin city.

Check out our video interview with Nick Beliaeff of Trion below and our screenshot gallery.

The third-person shooter Defiance will debut on the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 in April 2013.

Machinima has raised a fat $35 round of funding led by search engine giant Google, the company confirmed yesterday.

News of Machinima’s new funding first surfaced earlier this month. Google’s involvement marks the first time the company has spent money on the production of content. Previously, it had focused its money on attracting original programming for its YouTube or  promoting those programs across its network.

Machinima is one of the most popular YouTube partners. The production company focuses on making videos about video games and players, and it has done extremely well on YouTube. Its YouTube channel brings in over a billion video views per month (1.5 billion in March 2012). And while this new funding may seem like a great deal for Machinima, it make end up angering other YouTube partners that already feel like Machinima’s channels were getting preferential treatment on YouTube from Google.

The new capital will be used to expand its content, global sales operations, international expansion, grow its distribution, and more. In addition to Google, the round included participation from existing investors Redpoint Ventures and MK Capital. Founded in 2008, the Los Angeles, Calif.-based startup has raised a total of $49.6 million in funding to date.

Photo via Greg Aronowitz

Sadly, a great number of television sets are currently suffering from bad user interfaces, which is something Motorola plans to change.

At The Cable Show industry event in Boston today, the company showed off its DreamGallery media concept that’s powered by Motorola’s Medios cloud service. Essentially, it’s a pretty way to navigate and share stuff on your television set in a way that currently isn’t possible — assuming that all future televisions will have internet connectivity.

DreamGallery focuses on making the television a cross-platform media center that works between computers/web browser, tablets, and smartphones. It will also serve to aggregate all the content from cable TV services, the internet, and Video-on-demand services (like Neflix), into a single location.

Motorola describes the DreamGallery with edgy catch phrases like “Your media your way” in its demo video, which we’ve embedded below.

The only thing that Motorola didn’t mention? What will end up happening to DreamGallery when Google swallows the company? I say this because Google kind of already has a division in place working on the future of television with its Android-based GoogleTV platform. (Maybe you’ve heard of it?)

Let us know what you think of the video in the comments section.

Comcast is finally rolling its new X1 cable/DVR set-top box for the Boston, Mass. market, with a handful of other major markets following soon after, the company announced today.

We first heard about Comcast’s enhanced TV service nearly a year ago, with the cable giant touting a new line of cable boxes featuring a brand new channel guide user interface, integration with social services (Skype, Facebook, Pandora, etc.), and the ability to update software without returning to the physical service center. Well, the X1 is that cable box, which promises an eventual end to the crappy UI and Playskool toy-like remote that’s currently being used the majority of subscribers.

The X1′s UI is very similar to the look and feel of Comcast’s Xfinity TV web services, which is good because there was quite a huge gap in presentation quality.

The X1 box will also interact with mobile phone apps that act as remote controls, which is similar to what Roku, Apple TV, and Boxee already offer to their customers. It’s nice to see Comcast finally taking notice. You’ll also be able to navigate what’s on the screen using the app’s gesture controls. Right now Comcast is only making an iOS app available, but I’m sure Android and others will follow as the X1 launches in additional markets.

Check out a gallery of screenshots showing off the X1′s slick new interface, as well as the new iOS remote control app.

Via Engadget

The summer season is usually when the lesser-known cable channels debut their own original programing, and this year Hulu is jumping into that game with three original shows and seven exclusives.

Perhaps the most recognizable of the bunch is a new show by cult filmmaker Kevin Smith called Spoilers, which kicks off June. The show will be a mix of group chats featuring Smith (who has made a side career of spewing hot air) and his entourage talking about film as well as some animated shorts. And despite the likely low-budget cost of doing the show, it looks like Hulu has only ordered a 10-episode trial run of the series.

The other two series — unscripted travel show Up to Speed from acclaimed director Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, Slackers) and self-described “bro-mantic” basketball comedy We Got Next from Kenya Barris and Danny Leiner — won’t debut until August, according to Hulu. (List and descriptions of Hulu’s original shows included below.)

Smith’s show brings Hulu’s original programming lineup to eight total, with another five said to be announced before the end of the year.

With increased competition coming from both Netflix and Amazon on the original programing front, Hulu wants to be more than just a destination that airs popular content from the big broadcast networks (ABC, NBC, Fox, CW, and the cable giant Viacom). Chief executive Jason Kilar has previously stated that the company will spend about $500 million on content for 2012, and a portion of that will go toward these new original shows.

Here are Hulu’s seven exclusive shows, which will kick off June 3:

Rev – Rev. is a contemporary sitcom about the enormous daily frustrations and moral conflicts of an inner-city vicar. Cast includes Tom Hollander (“Pirates of the Caribbean”), Olivia Colman, Steve Evets, Miles Jupp, Lucy Liemann, Simon McBurney and Ellen Thomas. Originally broadcast on BBC Two in the U.K. The series premieres on Hulu and Hulu Plus on June 3rd from BBC Worldwide Americas Digital Distribution. Six (6) episodes in season one; seven (7) episodes in season two.

The Yard – A mockumentary miniseries that originally aired on HBO Canada, “The Yard” offers a bizarre juxtaposition of two rival cliques of elementary school children, where tension develops much like the quintessential crime-family thriller. The show has comically been referred to by Canadian television critics as “‘The Wire’ and ‘The Sopranos’ with kids.” Premieres: June 7, 2012, entire series available July 12.

Derren Brown: Inside Your Mind – Derren Brown is a performer like none other in the world. He uses psychology, magic, showmanship and suggestion to achieve things that for anyone else would be impossible. In the U.K., he is multi-award winning performer and has done a variety of huge and baffling stunts including predicting the national lottery and playing Russian roulette on live TV. New episodes premiere every Saturday beginning on July 7; Entire series available on July 28

The Booth at the End (Season Two) – Xander Berkeley, best known for his roles as “George Mason” in FOX’s “24” and “Percy” in The CW’s “Nikita,” stars as an enigmatic man occupying the corner booth of a diner. He possesses the power to grant desires, contingent upon recipients performing mysterious tasks. This half-hour psychological thriller begs the question: “How far would you go to get what you want?” Directed by Adam Arkin (“Justified,” “Grey’s Anatomy”), season two premieres on Hulu and Hulu Plus in July. Five (5) episodes.

Pramface – Jamie and Laura are two young, free and single teenagers who, after hooking up at a party, soon find they have a very big complication on their hands. Laura is pregnant. So even though they barely know each other, they now have one thing in common – and it’s getting bigger. “Pramface” brings humor and heart to a tricky subject, following these two unexpected parents-to-be as they try, and frequently fail, to negotiate family, sex and what happens once nine months is up… The series premieres on Hulu and Hulu Plus on July 19th from BBC Worldwide Americas Digital Distribution. Six (6) episodes. New episodes premiere every Thursday beginning on July 19; Entire series available on August 23

The Promise – The serial drama examines the origins of the Middle East conflict in events that took place under British rule sixty years ago. The bold and honest series cuts between the life of Erin, an 18-year old Londoner in present day Israel and Gaza, and that of her military grandfather who was part of the British peace-keeping force in Palestine at the end of the second World War. The series premieres on Hulu and Hulu Plus on August 11th. Four (4) episodes.

Little Mosque – Little Mosque is a light-hearted and comedic fish-out-of-water tale about a small Muslim community that rents the parish hall of a small town church to use as a mosque. It will premiere on Hulu and Hulu Plus this summer. 91 episodes.

Google Chrome isn’t just for über-geeks anymore. Google’s minimalist web browser is now the most popular web browser in the world, according to the latest figures from StatCounter.

For the week of May 14th to May 20th, Chrome edged out Internet Explorer — which has been losing market share precipitously — for the first time ever. StatCounter’s data shows that Mozilla Firefox has been slowly dipping in popularity, and that Chrome surpassed it in market share in early November last year (though Firefox usage shot up a bit in recent weeks).

The news isn’t too surprising, since Google has done a remarkable job of quickly improving Chrome and adding features that easily tie into your Google account. Last week, the company added a useful tab synchronization feature to the latest version of Chrome, which likely helped drive new downloads.

Looking at the browser market by region, it’s clear that South America gave Chrome a big push in worldwide numbers. Chrome’s popularity skyrocketed in South America over the last year, almost doubling to 52 percent. It’s unclear what exactly is driving Chrome’s numbers in the region, though I assume the popularity of Google’s Orkut social network in Brazil has something to do with it.

In North America, Internet Explorer is still slightly more popular than Chrome, though Microsoft’s browser has been steadily dropping in popularity over the last year. That generally seems to be the story of most regions — even though Internet Explorer 9 was a surprisingly intriguing release, it wasn’t enough to fight against the rising tide of Chrome hype.

Via The Verge; Photo via Van_PC/Flickr

Augmented reality, which bridges the divide between virtual and physical worlds, has crossed into a new frontier: print media.

Penguin Books recently unveiled a surprising partnership with Zappar App, an augmented reality entertainment channel, to bring four novels from the English Library to life. Augmented reality, known as “AR,”  is type of virtual reality that overlays objects and scenes in the real world with digital information.

To access the content, just download the free Zappar mobile app, available on Android and iOS, and select a Penguin novel on the drop-down menu. Point your smartphone camera at the cover of popular titles such as Moby Dick and Great Expectations to unlock an interactive and highly visual experience. Hover over the Moby Dick cover page, and a whale swims across your phone screen, as you’re prompted to “like” Penguin Books on Facebook.

Publishers have been experimenting with integrating AR for years (in 2010, GQ ran a series of enhanced Calvin Klein underwear ads), but this futuristic technology has not yet been incorporated into classic novels until now.

“Gimmicks are easy, compelling value-adds in transmedia are hard,” said Marshall Kirkpatrick, chief executive of Plexus Engine, on the topic of the AR-enhanced Penguin novels.

The jury’s still out on whether AR can help print publishers attract a younger generation of ADD-riddled readers.

Nicola Hill, marketing director for Penguin Press, is optimistic about the opportunity to turn static print into an interactive experience. Hill describes this partnership as an “inventive” and a “fresh publishing idea.”

But managing director for Zappar, Caspar Thykier, said augmented reality is in its nascent stage. According to Thykier, publishers should take AR with a pinch of salt. “We are taking a measured approach to this,” he said. “It would be crazy to say that we are revolutionizing publishing.”

Still, Thykier said there are limitless possibilities for AR. “It’s a bit of magic isn’t it?” he said. “It’s about exciting and surprising people with additional layers of content.”

Underwear ads are one thing, but there’s something unnatural about waving a smartphone over a classic work of fiction.

Experts say we’ll see a series of magnificent experiments over the next few years. “Most will fail,” said Chris Grayson, Director of Digital, humble.tv. “The hint of what we’re seeing on mobile today is a tease of what is to come.”

While most of the tech industry is watching Facebook’s historic IPO day unfold, data startup Visual.ly is taking advantage of the situation by showing off the capabilities of its infographics service.

Today Visual.ly launched a new interactive infographic that uses Facebook’s stock pricing data to show exactly how much the company’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is worth in real-time. The infographic displays the current stock price, a chart tracking the stock’s price over the last 60 seconds, the total value of Facebook’s stock offering, and the percentage of shares owned by Zuckerberg as well as his total worth.Visual.ly’s Editorial Director Aleksandra Todorova told me that more data points may be added to the infographic later on.

“I look at this as more of a work in progress that can be customized for a specific purpose or client,” Todorova said, likening it to developing coverage of a news story (or string of stories). Making sense of data after its been analyzed can give way to new data points, which can make the infographic tell a better story.

The new infographic, much like the Twitter Visualization Project from July, is merely an example of what the company’s service can do by using information from various databases and APIs. And as VentureBeat previously reported, Visual.ly is able to offer these kinds of infographics without the use of Photoshop or contracted graphic designers.

“Unless you follow the (stock) market closely, it would be hard to determine how rich Zuckerberg is by only glancing at the current stock price,” Visual.ly Chief Marketing Officer Tal Siach told VentureBeat.

Essentially, anyone with little knowledge of the stock market can make a rough estimate of Zuckerberg’s worth based on statements made within news articles. But I understand what Siach is getting at — with his service you can see the math laid out for you, and know immediately how many dollars Zuck is worth at a specific moment in time. And if you do make an estimate within a blog post, you can link directly to Visual.ly’s data, which is much easier to digest than typical stock charts and graphs.

We’ve added a screenshot of the infographic below, but you’ll need to click through to Visual.ly’s website to see the live interactive version in action.

Facebook is looking mighty fine today — especially if you’re Instagram, the photo-sharing company that sold its hit mobile application to the social network one month ago for a cool $1 billion in cash and stock.

But wait. Did we say $1 billion? Scratch that. In actuality, the deal, after Facebook’s opening at $42 a share on the NASDAQ this morning, values Instagram at around $1.27 billion and counting.

If you recall, Facebook purchased Instagram in a hybrid cash-stock deal, giving the baby company $300 million in cash and 23 million shares. The actual value of the deal, then, is contingent on the market’s reception to Facebook as a public company.

In theory, paper multi-millionaire Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom, who is said to hold a 40 percent stake in Instagram, saw his net worth bumped up by $37 million when trading started. At the $38 a share price, for instance, Systrom’s cut stood at around $469 million. At the opening price of $42 a share, however, we’re talking about roughly $506 million. Talk about an insta-win (though the market hasn’t sustained this sum in the first 30 mins of trading).

Other interesting questions still up for consideration: Did Facebook overpay? And can Instagram really earn its billion dollar plus value?

“We won’t know whether Instagram was worth Facebook’s outrageous investment until we see what they do with it,” Moor Insights & Strategy president and principal analyst Patrick Moorhead told VentureBeat.

“If Instagram’s mobile platform can be leveraged to more quickly monetize Facebook’s mobile platform, I can argue it was worth it. If it was a move to just remove a potential competitor, it will be a waste because there will be many, new, up-and-coming and compelling social media platforms that will arrive on the scene.”

Sterne Agee senior research analyst Arvind Bhatia views the deal a bit differently. “This is the beauty of [Facebook] using stock as currency,” he said in a phone interview with VentureBeat.

Facebook, in doling out more shares than cash, paid a fair price at the time the deal was negotiated, Bhatia believes. “Instagram will have to live with whatever the stock does,” he said. “It could be hurt if the stock doesn’t perform well.”

There’s the rub: Those 23 million shares won’t be issued until the acquisition closes, and that may not happen until the end of the year. After that, Systrom and co. may be under stock lock-up agreements that prevent them from selling their shares for several more months. By that point, Facebook could either be coasting along on the wave of public interest — Sterne Agee has set a one-year target price of $46 and a two-year target price of $59 — or careening backward toward a more down-to-earth fair value.

It’s important to note that none of this is lost on Facebook, or Instagram for that matter. “The value of the equity component of the final purchase price will be determined for accounting purposes based on the fair value of our common stock on the closing date,” Facebook clearly spelled out in its prospectus. “It is possible that the per share price of our common stock on that date could be significantly higher or lower than the initial public offering price.”

Ultimately, despite what appears to be a high price tag for Instagram, Facebook could come out the real winner in the deal depending on how the market reacts to the company and what the social network does with its sepia-toned friend.

“Mobile will be an interesting opportunity for Facebook. [Facebook] knows that the mobile web will be powerful, and it knows that real-estate is limited,” Bhatia said. Instagram, he added, will play a big role in whatever solution Facebook comes up with to tackle its mobile revenue challenges.

Photo credit: jec08290/Instagram

Amazon is pitching companies on the idea of advertising on the welcome screen of its Kindle Fire tablet — except that it will cost a minimum of $600,000 to do so, according an AdAge report.

Even though Amazon has frustratingly not said how many Kindle Fires it has sold, the company claims it’s the best-selling, most gifted, and most wished for product since its November launch. That would indicate that there are at least a few million Fires out there in the hands on Americans, and those welcome screens are ripe for ads to annoy Kindle owners.

The Kindle Fire ad campaigns will reportedly run for two months and will also be included on the E-Ink Kindle’s “Special Offers” advertising. If advertisers are willing to pony up $1 million, your company would be included in Amazon’s public relations materials as well.

It’s unclear at this time how similar the Kindle Fire ads would be to the current Kindle’s “Special Offers,” which appear on Kindles as a screensaver when you shut down the device. There are no visible ads when you are reading a book itself on the Kindle. We could imagine the Kindle Fire ads working in a similar manner.

Amazon has not yet decided if the ads will appear on all Kindle Fires or if it will just be on new Kindle Fires that are sold. The lack of clear direction has caused advertisers to decline the offers thus far, but that could change.

Let us know in the comments if you would be upset if your Kindle Fire starting showing ads.

Cable TV and Internet service provider Comcast is revising its policy on data caps, the company announced in a very thorough blog post today.

Previously, Comcast limited its residential Internet service subscribers to a 250GB data cap per month, meaning a person could use only 250GB of data before getting penalized through throttling or accruing additional charges. But critics questioned the justification of this data threshold last month and accused the cable giant of disregarding Net Neutrality with its recently launched Xfinity TV Xbox Live app.

In Comcast’s defense, the majority of internet subscribers won’t come anywhere close to reaching the 250GB data cap. And Comcast has previously said that the data caps are there to prevent abuse from a small handful of subscribers who degrade the experience of other customers due to their excessive data usage. But since data is not a utility in the same way that water and electricity are, most people rejected this notion.

Fortunately, Comcast now seems willing to adjust its practices.

“As the market and technology have evolved, we’ve decided to change our approach and replace our static 250GB usage threshold with more flexible data usage management approaches that benefit consumers and support innovation,” Comcast wrote in the post.

Over the next few months, the cable giant said, it’ll be testing at least two new approaches to data capping in different markets (a.k.a. cities). In doing so, it’ll provide details about the trials and their intended effectiveness.

The first approach will start with a data cap of 300GB per month for subscribers of its Internet Essentials, Economy, and Performance Internet service tiers (listed in order of speed performance). That’s 50GB more than the current data cap for the three lower-end tiers of service. Comcast’s two higher-speed Internet service tiers — Blast and Extreme — would have a higher data cap, although the exact threshold isn’t stated. Anyone who exceeds these data caps has the option of purchasing an additional allotment of data. Comcast uses the example of “50GB for $10,” but it’s unclear from the post if this would be the official pricing.

The second approach is similar to the first. Subscribers of all Internet service tiers would have a raised data cap of 300GB per month, as well as the option to purchase an additional allotment of data.

Comcast said it’ll suspend enforcement of its current data capping policy in all non-test markets, while noting that the company will still contact a small number of customers with overly excessive data usage.

While the larger data limits are an incremental improvement for consumers, plenty of critics (and competitors) will likely continue pressing the Federal Communications Commission to force ISPs to justify imposing a data threshold on customers.

“Increasing the data cap is a small step in the right direction, but unfortunately Comcast continues to treat its own Internet-delivered video different under the cap than other Internet-delivered video,” a Netflix spokesperson told StopTheCap. “We continue to stand by the principle that ISPs should treat all providers of video services equally.”

We’re reaching out to Comcast for more specific details of its new data threshold testing and will update the post with any new information.

Comcastic photo via cmorran123 /Flickr

Streaming music service Spotify is currently seeking a new mega-round of funding that could more than triple the startup’s current valuation, according to a New York Times report.

Spotify was previously estimated to hold a $1 billion valuation after closing a $100 million round in June 2011. The new funding round, which we first reported rumors of back in March, could end up being as high as $220 million, pushing the music startup’s valuation up to $4 billion. The startup may take several weeks to close the new round.

As for participation, Goldman Sachs is said to account for nearly $100 million of the new round, with Spotify still reportedly in discussion with many other firms.

Spotify’s strategy is built on a freemium business model, bringing in both advertising-based and subscription-based revenue. Because of its social features, which allow people to share playlists and listen and share tunes through Facebook, Spotify has been able to stay ahead of streaming competitors like Pandora, Rdio, MOG, and others.

The service has experienced massive growth in the last year, attributed in large part to the international company’s expansion of service into the U.S. as well as its integration with Facebook’s Timeline. The service has more than 3 million paying subscribers, a third of which are in the U.S. alone. But the company experienced $96 million in losses over its two years of existence due to pricey music licensing fees, which has caused some to speculate on its ability to generate a profit in the near future.

Founded in 2009, the Stockholm, Sweden-based startup has raised a total of $189 million to date from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Accel Partners, DST Global, Sean Parker, and others.

Turns out GM might have been on to something. New research from marketing agency Greenlight shows 44 percent of Facebook’s users say that they will “never” click on sponsored posts or display ads on Facebook.

UPDATE: Facebook sets $38 share price for largest tech IPO in U.S. history.

General Motors caused a stir on Tuesday when it leaked that the company would stop running ads on Facebook due to them not being effective. GM will drop $10 million worth of ads, but it still plans to spend $30 million on marketing through Facebook. That story was poor timing for Facebook, which will have its record-breaking IPO this Friday.

For its 2011-2012 Search & Social Survey, Greenlight surveyed 500 people, including students, medical staff, accountants, lawyers, and others, to gain insight about their behavior on Facebook and their sentiments toward the company. On top of finding out 44 percent would never click on display ads, 31 percent of respondents said they “rarely” click display ads, 13 percent said they don’t use Facebook, 10 percent said they “often” clicked ads, and 3 percent said they “regularly” clicked Facebook’s sponsored posts.

Also notable is that 30 percent of those surveyed said they “strongly distrust” Facebook with their personal data, which somewhat lines up with the CNBC polling earlier this week, in which 59 percent of people said they distrust Facebook on user data.

“With over 30% of respondents saying they ‘strongly distrust’ Facebook with their personal data, Facebook’s advertising program has an upward struggle,” Hannah Kimuyu, director of paid media at Greenlight, said in a statement. “Facebook’s advertising program allows brands to connect with more than 800 million potential customers, through targeting their age, gender, location, and interests — in other words, personal data.”

One plus side to Greenlight’s report is that the users who did click on Facebook ads found “the targeting effective and engaging,” Kimuyu noted. Perhaps that’s a sign that people will be less wary of Facebook ads over time.

Photo illustration: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Streaming video service Netflix is rolling out a spanking-new design for its website’s video player today, which may make people think twice about favoring their set-top box over the web browser.

As you can see in the screenshots below, the new player is gorgeous. The design better matches the user interface on Netflix’s main navigation pages. Player buttons are larger, as is the text displayed, both of which will be helpful for people who have a big enough screen to sit a few feet back when watching videos.

Another huge improvement is the navigation between episodes of a TV series. Previously, the Netflix web video player was pretty bland, and didn’t provide you with much more than the title and episode number of a show. I suspect this is because more people are primarily using Netflix to watch TV content instead of movies (which don’t really require navigation). Now, when a video is paused you can hover over the “forward” button to bring up a thumbnail of the next episode and a short description. Clicking the button next to it will bring up a full list of episodes within the current season of a particular TV series. There’s even a progress bar for each episode to show you how far along you’ve watched.

I’ll admit, I rarely use the website when it comes to Netflix because it lacks these basic pieces of functionality. But that could change now that the company has wised up.

The new video player design should work fine in most browsers, provided you have the most current version of Microsoft’s Silverlight plugin downloaded. Let us know what you think of the design changes in the comment section below.

Filed under: media, VentureBeat ]]> http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/16/netflix-video-player-update/feed/ 0 Netflix web video player gets a gorgeous new design vbtomcheredar Netflix's new web video player Netflix-webplayer-1 Netflix-webplayer-3 Netflix's new web video player http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/16/pirate-bay-offline-ddos/ http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/16/pirate-bay-offline-ddos/#comments Wed, 16 May 2012 18:53:52 +0000 Tom Cheredar http://venturebeat.com/?p=449106

The Pirate Bay is currently experiencing a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which has caused the site to remain inaccessible for the last 24 hours, reports TorrentFreak.

Members of The Pirate Bay confirmed the news with an update on their …

The Pirate Bay is currently experiencing a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which has caused the site to remain inaccessible for the last 24 hours, reports TorrentFreak.

Members of The Pirate Bay confirmed the news with an update on their Facebook page, saying “We don’t know who’s behind it but we have our suspicions.” The group added, “We believe in the open and free Internets, where anyone can express their views. Even if we strongly disagree with them and even if they hate us. So don’t fight them using their ugly methods. DDOS and blocks are both forms of censorship.”

The Pirate Bay  provides users with a way to find torrent files for software, movies, games, music, and more, which are usually being shared illegally. The site has become a symbol for piracy by both authorities and Internet users alike, despite its recent decision to stop hosting actual torrent files on its servers in favor of offering “magnet links.” These are links that take you outside the website to download your content.

So, who is to blame for the attacks? Well, there are two obvious suspects that would have a motive to shut the site down. The first of which is hacktivist group Anonymous, which The Pirate Bay criticized for the group’s role in DDoS attacks on Virgin Media last week. Anonymous’ attack on Virgin Media was a direct response to the Internet service provider’s decision to comply with a U.K. court order to block The Pirate Bay from its subscribers.

But while The Pirate Bay may not have condoned the actions of Anonymous, I find it pretty hard to believe that the group would collectively decide to punish them. The Pirate Bay — as well as its Swedish founders — embodies the piracy/anti-censorship movement. I also rule out copyright holders, who wouldn’t want to risk jeopardizing credibility in lawsuits against those accused of piracy or malicious online actions against them.

The more likely culprit for these attacks would be a governmental authoritative body working undercover. Now, obviously DDoS attacks wouldn’t seriously wound The Pirate Bay in any long-term sense — its users are far more resilient than that. However, authorities may be waiting to track Pirate Bay users that access the torrent site using unsecured proxies or other methods. Likewise, Pirate Bay members have warned people to use proxies at their own risk, and not to login to the site unless they absolutely trust the proxy supplier.

At the time of publishing, the site remains down.

Filed under: media, security ]]>

What if your ads watched you while you were watching them? Microsoft is set to debut its new motion-sensitive advertising project NUads next month, which the company says will revamp the TV ad industry by doing just that.

The company’s natural user-interface ads, or NUads, use Xbox Kinect’s motion sensing technology to transform TV commercials into something you can actively participate in with minimal effort. For instance, people can vote in real-time for a product or service by waving their hand, schedule a calendar reminder for an upcoming TV show, or say “Xbox Near Me” to see a map of locations for whatever retail store just advertised to them. Microsoft first showed off its NUads project at the Cannes International Advertising Festival last June.

“During the Super Bowl, you’re watching TV, some great ads pop up,” said Microsoft manager Lyn Watts in a recent Cnet report. “You say something like, ‘Xbox share,’ it’ll share automatically, on Facebook or Twitter, whatever you like. Advertisers are really impressed by this.”

Essentially, the NUads platform has the potential to start producing commercials that “watch you” while your watching them. In doing so, Microsoft thinks it can lure people away from DVR devices that permit skipping through the commercial breaks that play throughout a TV show. Satellite television service provider Dish Network is even making new DVR boxes (the appropriately named “Hopper” box)  that automatically “hops” through those commercials.

The NUads launch couldn’t have come at a better time for the broadcast television industry, which has recently spoken out about how traditional advertising is failing to keep up with audience behavior.

Monday, Chairman of NBC Broadcasting Ted Harbert said “we can no longer ignore time-shifting” within the business model to drive ad revenue. The problem with “time-shifted” (a.k.a. DVR) devices is that the industry doesn’t have enough control to make sure those commercials will play for an audience the way they do for live broadcasting. With NUads, there might be a compelling reason for people to watch commercials willingly and prevent them from skipping through.

NUads could replace Nielsen TV ratings

Harbert also criticized the industry’s standard for content ratings through Nielsen, saying  “We’re participating in many initiatives to try and crack the measurement code because we just can’t wait — and wait some more — for Nielsen to do it.” This puts Microsoft as well as its new NUads platform in the perfect position to step up.

Using the Kinect device, NUads have a far greater means of measuring how people react to a piece of content as well as advertising. It can detect a person’s facial expressions, record/sense audio reactions, and even transmit pieces of video. If done right, Microsoft developers could anonymize this kind of data through the Kinect SDK, and give them an incentive to make sense of this information for advertisers. Basically, a person’s unique private data wouldn’t be shared, but their collective reactions could be turned into important analytics. For example, a laundry detergent commercial that evokes an emotional response in the form of “aww” along with positive facial expressions — not, “Sally from 505 Nowhere Street laughed and cooed obnoxiously at the puppy.”

Microsoft’s Watts did, however, warn all developers to stay mindful of potential privacy intrusion features by adding disclosure statements when appropriate as well as knowing what you’ll do with the data before its collected.

Cnet’s report indicated the NUads interactive advertising platform will launch in late Spring. My guess is that Microsoft will probably coincide the launch with its Xbox announcements at the E3 event in June.

Update 5/17/2012: Microsoft reached out to VentureBeat in regards to the roll out of NUads, clarifying that it hasn’t made any announcement regarding Kinect’s ability to capture data from its users for ad targeting purposes.

The Kinect can capture user data, but Microsoft isn’t enabling this functionality right now. The company did, however, conduct an entire presentation at the PII conference discussing issues of privacy related to this kind of data capturing technology.

Microsoft’s statement to us is pasted below:

To be clear, the presentation at the PII conference did not announce targeted advertising features. The focus of the presentation was the future of advertising and the potential privacy issues managers at other companies must consider as technologies such as Kinect transform the industry. Microsoft takes the privacy of its consumers very seriously. Internally, Microsoft has strict policies in place that prohibit the collection, storage or use of Kinect data for the purpose of advertising.

Image via Microsoft

The partnership kicks off with some impressive additions: You can listen to NPR and Public Radio International shows on Flipboard, even while reading other content on the graphics-heavy aggregator. You can find these programs in the content guide under a new Audio category. To play or pause your current audio track from anywhere in Flipboard, tap the music icon on the top of the screen (iPhone) or lower corner (iPad).

In another great use of sound, Flipboard has added VoiceOver features that let visually impaired users listen to articles on the app.

If you already use SoundCloud, just add your login on Flipboard’s Accounts screen and SoundCloud will appear as a new tile on your main Flipboard page, alongside your other topics such as photography, tech, or fashion. Tap, and you’ll be taken to a SoundCloud landing page where you can navigate to your stream and see what sounds friends and family have shared, as well as your SoundCloud Likes, Sounds, Sets, and Groups.

Just last week, SoundCloud unveiled the beta version of its new web app, Next, which featured continuous play and improved social features. The move towards social makes the company a natural fit for Flipboard, which already lets you add accounts for 10 other popular social services, including Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, Instagram, Tumblr, 500px, and Sina Weibo.

Flipboard has also added support for Readability and Pocket to make it easier to enjoy content in-depth later. There is also a new Japanese version of the app, released today.

Cull TV, a site that features curated playlists of music videos from indie artists, has been acquired by social video network Twitvid, the companies announced today.

Cull TV is sort of what the internet version of Mtv would probably look like if it was still about music instead of godawful teen reality shows staring quasi-famous celebrities. The site’s user interface is focused on a full “lean back and watch” experience, similar to watching a TV channel. Videos are curated by members of the community as well as an in-house team, but  you can also create your own music video channel stream by adding videos that you’ve watched on the site or elsewhere. The site has over 2 million videos in its library and features 25 standard channels. Cull TV is primarily for discovering new content, which is why its a perfect fit for Twitvid.

“Cull TV is an intelligent, connected social service that can curate content in a different way than what we’re doing on Twitvid,” said Twitvid founder Mo Al Adham in an interview with VentureBeat.”We plan on adding that technology and know-how from (Cull’s) team into the site over the next few months.”

Twitvid relaunched from a complimentary video site for Twitter into a completely new social video network back in December 2011, as VentureBeat previously reported. Users can check their stream of video content from sites like YouTube, Vimeo and others that are shared by friends on various social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook. Twitvid users can also create their own custom channel of content that others can tune in to watch. The site currently brings in over 15 million unique visitors per month.

As part of the acquisition deal, Cull.tv will remain in operation for now, but its future hasn’t been determined, Al Adham said. And while Twitvid will gain a strong community of music video watchers from the new acquisition, it’ll also get Cull TV’s underlying curation technology. Twitvid’s stream is already optimized for video content, but it’ll probably gain a greater degree of sharing and discovery functionality.

Founded in 2009, the San Francisco, Calif.-based startup previously raised a $7 million round of funding from Azure Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson in September 2011. Financial terms of the Cull TV deal were not disclosed.