VentureBeat

Wow, can President-Elect Barack Obama save the struggling newspaper industry, too?

Okay, probably not, but it looks like Obama’s election has caused a surge in newspaper sales, at least in liberal metropolises areas like New York and San Francisco. The New York Times, for example, tells AllThingsDigital’s Peter Kafka that it’s rushing 50,000 more copies of today’s edition to press — and The Times (which syndicates VentureBeat articles on its website) already increased today’s print run by 35 percent. Today’s paper will “significantly surpass” sales after the 2004 election.

People are eager to get a physical souvenir, so you can find copies of today’s newspapers available on eBay for as much as $20. (Hey, it’ll probably be worth more tomorrow.) I can’t imagine this will do anything long-term to turn around the print journalism industry’s declining fortunes, but it does show that people will still buy printed newspapers, even if it’s only once every four years.

Anecdotally, it looks like other papers are benefitting too: The newsstands near my Noe Valley apartment were sold out of the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today and the Los Angeles Times. Kafka reports seeing similarly empty stands in New York.

Of course, interest in the election spurred plenty of web usage — Akamai Technologies, which provides online content distribution for CNN, NBC, the BBC and others, saw a new record in global usage last night, as did CNN.com.

The New York Times continues to redefine the role of a big newspaper with today’s release of its first application programming interface (API). Using the Campaign Finance API, developers will be able to incorporate data about who donated to which presidential candidate — the same data used to build The Times’ campaign finance map (pictured below)– into their own applications. Coming up next will be an API to access The Times’ movie reviews.

Releasing APIs is yet another forward-thinking idea from a newspaper that has been quite smart in its embrace of the web, and I’m not just saying that because The Times syndicates some of our posts. The Times has perhaps the best-designed and most-popular newspaper website around. (Of course, with the newspaper industry struggling and The Times’ own earnings at a less-than-stellar level, the newspaper company is facing an “innovate or die” moment.)

The Times has also been aggressive in pushing beyond that website, with applications for social networking site Facebook, the iPhone and hybrid web/desktop platform Adobe AIR. Still, those are all basically channels to distribute The Times’ articles. APIs take things a step further, because they allow developers to determine how data gets presented.

This is an important step for the survival of big media companies, says ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick. He argues that reporting is becoming less of a scarce commodity, so the future value of the Times and similar companies lies in their “information processing resources and archival content.” While I hope Kirkpatrick is wrong about reporting, he’s definitely onto something. One of the big parts of The Times’ abortive Times Select initiative was making readers pay for archival content — a payment that I, for one, was happy to make. Times Select didn’t work out, but there’s untapped value in the archives.

The question, of course, is the same question facing the newspaper industry — how to turn that value as into money. It’s not clear how the APIs will do that; the terms of use say The Times could charge for the data in the future, but it isn’t doing so yet.

Hopefully the money side can be worked out, because it would be very exciting to see journalistic data and content powering a wave of new web apps. The Campaign Finance API is pretty cool idea in and of itelf, by the way. Sure, all of the data comes from public documents, but The Times has the resources to really make that data accesible and comprehensible to the public. Analyzing campaign finance data can reveal a lot about how governmental decisions get made, so the more transparent the donations become, the better.

Here’s the latest action:

Amazon Web services go down over the weekend — The problems crippled messaging service Twitter and many other sites.

MySpace to join OpenID? — TechCrunch’s sources say the social networking site will join the OpenID initiative, which allows one login to work across multiple sites, later this week. If so, it would be the second-largest OpenID implementation ever, second only to Yahoo.

The New York Times and LinkedIn forge a content partnership — Users of the business-oriented social network will be shown personalized news from the New York Times about the industry they work in, according to ReadWriteWeb. These users can then share this news with colleagues.

Justin.TV reaches 1M registered users — Those users create the content for the video site, which received 5 million unique visitors last month. The big question is whether the site is making money from all those visits.

What’s behind the IPO drought? — We’ve covered the issue before, but the Wall Street Journal’s opinion piece about possible causes and effects — with an emphasis on the need for Sarbanes-Oxley reform — is worth reading.

Facebook sues German clone StudiVZ — The suit alleges that StudiVZ copied Facebook’s “look, feel, features and services,” according to The Financial Times.

Game development company Flagship Studios goes under — The company is “a startling example of what not to do when finding funding for your startup,” according to Valleywag, because it used the intellectual property of its two games (including Hellgate: London) as collateral when seeking loans. That was a big risk, and one that didn’t pay off — now the rights to those games have reverted to the lenders. (Chief executive Bill Roper is pictured to the left.)

Pressflip search engine is the new Persai – The new blog search engine is a relaunch of a site called Persai. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington is not impressed, and says Pressflip is only worth noting because its founders previously wrote the blog Uncov, which made its name criticizing startups and entrepreneurs.

Monitor110, the startup that monitored the Internet for financial tips, closes — The company had already raised $20 million, but couldn’t find the additional financing that it needed in May.

Former Broadcom executive Henry Samueli to plead guilty in backdating case — The Broadcom flameout saga continues, with former chief technology officer Samueli admitting that he previously lied to SEC investigators about whether or not he had illegally back-dated stock options.  Among Broadcom’s two founding Henrys, Samueli was the good cop. That’s why it was surprising that Samueli pleaded guilty to avoid jail time. But the other Henry, former CEO Henry Nicholas, is up for a raft of criminal charges from drug dealing to using prostitutes. [Samueli photo via Forbes.]

Game association trumpets games in the workplace — It’s no surprise that the Entertainment Software Association, the industry cheerleader for companies that publish video and computer games, would produce a positive report about games in the workplace. The ESA-sponsored study, carried out by KRC Research, shows that 75 percent of U.S. organizations that use video game-based training are getting positive results, and looking to expand their usage of games. Meanwhile, more than 75 percent of those without work-focused video games plan to introduce them in the next five years. If we didn’t enjoy any excuse to play games, we’d probably be a little more skeptical. Instead, we think this survey sounds about right.

More than one billion PCs now being used in the world — Research firm Gartner guesses that number and projects it to double by 2014.

Sony has lost $3 billion plus on the PlayStation 3 so far — “Even if the platform is ultimately successful,” an annual Sony company report says, “it may take longer than expected to recoup the investment, resulting in a negative impact on Sony’s profitability.”

LinkedIn may be coming to China — More here.

Review: Psystar’s unauthorized Mac clone is just like a real Mac — Psystar provoked excitement among many bloggers, at least, in April, as it promised to deliver a Macintosh operating system in a machine that it sells for far cheaper than the products that inspired it — in possible violation of Apple’s terms of service. No legal challenge has come from Apple, though. Now, Tom Krazit at CNET has a review of it here, after having used it for a month. He says it’s like using a Mac. [Photo via CNET.]

Five previously-undisclosed features due for Mac’s latest operating system, “Snow Leopard” — According to a scoop published by blog Apple Insider, the new features include a new multi-touch framework, smaller-sized applications, more advanced word processing features, auto activation of fonts, and support for the ZSF file system. Snow Leopard is due next spring. Also, we’ll see how fast Psystar implements it once it’s out.

Old iPhones worth as much as new ones on eBay — Blogger Jason Kottke breaks down observed sale prices on the auction site. And I quote:

- A lot of five never-opened unlocked 16Gb iPhones went for $2,755 ($551 per phone)
- A used unlocked 8Gb iPhone went for $405
- A used unlocked 16Gb iPhone went for $585.

Sun has a massive 256-thread Niagra processor coming in 2009 — The details here.

New York Times: Google News is not growing very fast – This article talks about issues at Google’s automated news aggregator. Although it’s not disclosed in the article, I suppose the New York Times would prefer its readers to use its own automated news aggregator, Blogrunner.