The Smartphone Hub

Can building a network of local bloggers help turn online journalism into a money-making proposition? Two new media ventures are hoping that it can, and have partnered with a startup called GrowthSpur to try and make that hope become a reality. One of the ventures is another startup, a Washington-based outlet called TBD that is being run by Jim Brady, the former online editor at the Washington Post, and the other is a traditional media entity that is trying to remake itself online: the Journal Register Co., which publishes a number of daily and weekly newspapers in Philadelphia, Michigan, Connecticut and New Jersey. The Journal-Register’s new CEO, John Paton, has been aggressively launching new-media related ventures at the company, including a community journalism lab aimed at training local bloggers.

GrowthSpur will be working with the bloggers who are part of both networks to help them sell advertising on their blogs, both by training them in ad sales and by aggregating them into an ad network that can carry advertising across all of the blogs in the group. The company, which was founded last year, is run by media-industry veteran Mark Potts and has another industry guru — journalism professor and consultant Jeff Jarvis — on its advisory board.

TBD.com, which has been in development for the past year or so and is expected to launch this summer, is being financed by Allbritton Communications, which also owns the online political site Politico. TBD editor Jim Brady has said that the new venture is designed to be hyper-local and community-oriented, and the blog network is at the core of that idea (the Washington Post also has a network of local blogs that it has partnerships with). The company says it has built up a core of almost 100 local bloggers who cover the Washington area from a number of different perspectives, and content from these blogs will appear alongside news and opinion writing from TBD staff:

When you come to TBD’s home page or one of our topical pages, you will see content from across the region from a variety of sources. We will present the biggest stories that we think will be important and interesting to people throughout the metro area. And we will sort news by location, offering you news that’s important to you because it’s close to where you live, work, play or shop. When you click the links, some headlines will take you into the TBD site to content produced by our staff. Other links will take you away to content from our network members or other news sources in the community.

Local journalism-based blog networks have been tried in the past, but not always with great success. One of those efforts, Backfence.com (which closed down in 2007) was founded and run by Mark Potts, who is now running GrowthSpur (Potts talked to Mark Glaser of PBS MediaShift about the lessons he learned from Backfence). Some hyper-local blog networks and blog aggregators have prospered, however, including BaristaNet — which recently took over a local news venture that was originally started by the New York Times. Two of the newer entrants in this race are AOL’s Patch.com, which the company is aggressively expanding into a number of U.S. markets with $50 million in funding, and a venture-backed startup called MainStreetConnect.

The Guardian newspaper in Britain also recently introduced a plugin for WordPress blogs that allows them to republish content from the newspaper (provided they include advertising from the company along with the news stories), and there has been some speculation that the paper is planning to use this feature as a way of assembling a blog network of its own, which would syndicate blog content into the Guardian and also redistribute Guardian content (and advertising) through the blog network.

Despite the entrance of heavyweights such as Patch.com into the market, however, it’s still not clear whether hyper-local blogging and journalism in general can generate enough revenue to make them viable as businesses in their own right. Anyone with a stake in that market will undoubtedly be watching TBD and the Journal-Register’s attempts closely.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): What We Can Learn From the Guardian’s Open Platform

Post and thumbnails courtesy of Flickr user MrTopf

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Half of all U.S. residents who have a profile on a social-networking site are concerned about their privacy, according to a recent poll by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, and close to half of that group described themselves as “very concerned.” Fears about the issue of privacy on social networks increased as the age of the survey respondent went up, the institute said (only 43 percent of those between 18 and 29 said they were concerned, compared with 63 percent of those over 60). Women were also more concerned about the issue than men: over 57 percent of the women who took the survey said they had some anxiety about privacy, compared with 43 percent of the men.

The survey’s results certainly jibe with my experience, which is largely anecdotal. Many of my older relatives seem very concerned about the risks of putting even a small amount of information about themselves online in any form, whereas my teenaged daughters see it as simply a fact of life. They are aware of the dangers, but likely wouldn’t describe themselves as concerned or anxious.

It wasn’t clear whether the institute’s results were affected by news reports involving privacy-related issues affecting Facebook and Google, of which there have been many over the past six months. Facebook has been the target of class-action lawsuits and requests for an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission over the changes it made to its privacy settings earlier this year, and Google has also been the target of criticism from both the government and from privacy advocates about privacy settings in its Buzz service as well as privacy-related issues involving the company’s Street View photography service.

Almost half of those surveyed by the Marist institute — 43 percent from a sample size of 1,004 residents surveyed by telephone — said that they have a profile on a site like Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn. The institute found that 40 percent of men have a profile on a social network (up from 36 percent in December) while 45 percent of women surveyed have one, which they described as a way to keep in touch with family and friends. Almost 80 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 29 had a social-networking profile, compared with just 19 percent of those 60 years of age and older.

An unrelated poll by the web security company Webroot found that more than half of those who use location-based services such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt are worried about their privacy. Almost 40 percent of those surveyed said they had used geolocation-based features on their cellphones. The survey also found that nearly 25 percent of those who responded had been the victims of a “phishing” attempt to steal their social network password, and 16 percent had reported a malware infection in the past year that originated from a social networking site.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Why New Net Companies Must Shoulder More Responsibility

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Blyzz

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BillFloat, a San Francisco-based startup that wants to pay your bills and give you more time to come up with a payment, launched its services officially today (the site soft launched last week). The company also announced a $4.5 million Series A round of funding from First Round Capital, with participation from Venrock and PayPal. The venture fund and the payment company provided seed capital for the company, which was founded last year by Ryan Gilbert and Sean O’Malley, both of whom were entrepreneurs in residence at Venrock when they came up with the idea.

Earlier this year, PayPal said that it provided seed funding as part of its ongoing attempts to expand the online payments market, but it still wasn’t clear what BillFloat was exactly. Gilbert said that he and O’Malley had been thinking of a number of different services and features that would change the way consumers and businesses engage in online transactions, and were going to experiment and launch them over time. It’s not clear whether the BillFloat site that just launched is the first in this series of services.

The idea behind BillFloat is a simple one: in a sense, the company acts like a big brother and pays your bills if you can’t come up with a payment by the deadline (the service has more than 3,000 U.S. billers in its database, from phone and cable companies to insurance providers). You then get up to 30 days to pay BillFloat the invoiced amount plus a handling fee. Since many retailers and service providers charge substantial penalties if you miss a payment, BillFloat hopes to save users that pain and still make enough from its fees, which it says are smaller than the majority of those penalties (they start at $4.99 per bill).

One interesting element of the service is that BillFloat doesn’t do any kind of credit check on users before it agrees to pay their bills — the company says that it has a “decisioning engine” that determines who it should extend its micro-credit to that makes a standard credit check unnecessary. One of PayPal’s claims to fame is a similar algorithm and software system that the company says can determine from a range of factors, including a search of various web databases and online activity, whether a person is a good credit risk or not. PayPal likes to say that it knows whether it will accept you as a customer before you have even finished filling out the initial signup form.

BillFloat is similar in some ways to another PayPal-related service called BillMeLater, which eBay acquired in 2008. The service allows consumers to pay for a variety of goods and services with what amounts to a digital IOU, requiring them to provide only their date of birth and the last four digits of their Social Security Number.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): A Mobile Payments Glossary

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A full 90 percent of network TV episodes make it online, but most are gone after six weeks or less, according to an exhaustive study performed by online video search site Clicker, which looked at how much broadcast network TV content makes its way online — and how much of it stays online.

Clicker’s study looks at all shows that came online during the past Fall or Spring seasons on ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and The CW, and compares that data to the number of shows that were available through broadcast only. What it found was that a surprisingly high percentage of episodes on broadcast TV were made available on ad-supported video websites.

But how soon those TV episodes came online, and how long they lasted online tended to vary. According to Clicker, about half of all TV episodes posted came online within a day of their original air date, and nearly all were available within two weeks of their original air date.

As for when they’re taken down: of the 4,420 broadcast episodes Clicker tracked during those seasons, about 90 percent were later removed. About 60 percent of those episodes were gone after three weeks of being online, and 90 percent were gone after six weeks.

Of the networks that Clicker tracked, ABC and CBS posted the most shows online, but The CW had the highest percentage of its shows online, with 100 percent being available to U.S. Internet users.

ABC didn’t put episodes of Wife Swap or Romantically Challenged online, and full episodes of America’s Funniest Home Videos were also missing — although ABC made clips of those videos available. Meanwhile, CBS held back The Big Bang Theory, The Mentalist, Criminal Minds and Cold Case and NBC didn’t post episodes of Law & Order and Law & Order: SVU online.
Finally, Fox favorites American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance were missing from its online lineup last season, but episodes from SYTYCD are being made available online this season.

Primetime series made up the majority of shows posted online, with 84 percent, compared to daytime (10%) and late night (6%). However, due to the fact that daytime and late-night TV series run five days a week instead of the typical one day a week for most primetime series, the bulk of the episodes posted were from those times. Primetime shows had an average of 18 episodes a piece available online, while most daytime or late-night shows had more than 100 episodes posted online.

Related content on GigaOM Pro: From Spots to Spikes: TV Taps Into the Cloud (subscription required)

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Google today created a site to provide information about its broadband plans, and to encourage the thousands of people who submitted proposals to the company — trying to convince it to launch its experimental fiber-to-the-home network in their towns — to take action to improve broadband. In short, Google is trying to create a community-action network around better broadband, starting with the more than 200,000 people who have already weighed in hoping to get fatter pipes.

When Google announced its plans to build an experimental 1 Gbps fiber-to-the-home network in February, I wrote that the search engine wasn’t just looking for new web applications, but also for information that it could disseminate in order to show people and governments what a modern broadband network should cost– possibly lighting a fire under ISPs who are reluctant to upgrade their networks. Its new site gives people and municipalities a match to help with that fire, by encouraging citizens to email their representative in Congress and by providing a list of helpful suggestions municipalities can implement to ensure that fiber-ready conduit is put in place during road construction.

None of these actions, or even Google’s planned network, will change the dismal competitive landscape in the U.S. overnight, but it’s certainly a start. And yes, Google still plans to announce which town gets its network before the end of the year.

Below is what I think of as the “we want fiber” montage created by Google — with the obligatory emotionally manipulative soundtrack.

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Sprint is embracing WiMAX for now, but is considering a change over to LTE for its future next-generation mobile broadband offering, the carrier’s CEO, Dan Hesse, told the Financial Times. Sprint’s comments about a potential move to LTE are also spurring more commentary on a future merger with T-Mobile, as the smaller carrier will eventually have to offer something beyond HSPA+. A merger with Sprint would create a sizeable new carrier but also bring back shades of issues from the Sprint-Nextel deal which ultimately resulted in a $29.7 billion writedown.

Hesse WiMAX consideration isn’t that far-fetched, however — as Stacey notes, WiMAX and LTE  use the same underlying technology and 75 percent of the infrastructure equipment is the same. So there’s enough compatibility to minimize network transition costs. This fact isn’t lost upon Sprint, who as far back as March of last year was reportedly testing LTE gear in what appeared to be a research effort. And Sprint should have the spectrum available since its WiMAX partner, Clearwire, has used the “L” word as well — when Clearwire received $3.2 billion in funding, CEO Ben Wolff said the WiMAX network would be built out with equipment that could support LTE in the future.

So how and why could a merger between Sprint and T-Mobile make sense? T-Mobile needs to think beyond its 2010 strategic plan and its 3.5G bet. By year-end the fourth largest carrier expects to complete a 21 Mbps HSPA+ rollout, which can theoretically support faster speeds of 42- and 84 Mbps, but requires more investment for the fastest speeds. A better strategy may be to partner with Sprint in a transition to LTE, which would create a carrier with roughly 82 million subscribers that rivals AT&T and Verizon in terms of customer base.

However, even if Sprint and T-Mobile joined forces in a leap to LTE, one carrier’s customers or the other would be stuck in a vicious transition that would make managing dual networks as Sprint did after it purchased Nextel look tame. When Sprint merged with Nextel in 2004, it was forced to maintain that carrier’s IDEN network for existing customers — something the carrier still does today even though it expected to cease IDEN support in 2007. A similar merger between Sprint and T-Mobile would mean customer and device management of CDMA, WiMAX, GSM, HSPA+, LTE and EDGE, to name a few technologies.

There’s also no guarantee that Deutsche Telekom would walk its U.S. T-Mobile subsidiary down the aisle for a Sprint pairing. Aside from the more than $21.5 billion in annual revenues that Deutsche Telekom took in last year from T-Mobile USA, the carrier’s 1700 MHz and 1900 MHz spectrum is a valuable commodity. To pave the way for a T-Mobile merger with Sprint, DT would first have to decide to pull up stakes in the U.S. Both T-Mobile and Sprint would then coordinate a joint move to an LTE network — likely for voice and data. And a long-term transition strategy to avoid another Nextel IDEN debacle is required. So while a merger of Sprint and T-Mobile sounds good, it’s not an overnight flip of the switch on devices or handsets.

Related content on GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

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Apple’s iPhone 4 has the highest resolution for a smartphone and offers an easy method for wireless video calling, but it’s failing for some in a basic phone function — voice calling. The situation is causing outrage around the web and on Twitter: depending on who you ask, the innovative stainless-steel frame that doubles as an antenna is either the best or the worst feature. Apple claims the antenna offers the best reception ever, yet Consumer Reports testing confirms what many consumers are finding out firsthand: touching two specific parts of the frame simultaneously causes signal degradation.

Surprisingly, Apple isn’t handling this public relations challenge very well. Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, reportedly emailed a complaining customer saying, “Just avoid holding it that way.” And just prior to a holiday weekend — possibly in an attempt to bury attention — the company issued a press release pushing much of the blame on U.S. carrier partner AT&T (t). Apple claims that all iPhones have been incorrectly overstating signal strength and that a software fix will address the problem soon. Clearly, the software update will fix the visual problem, but it’s highly unlikely that the antenna problem will be affected.

At this point, the negative press shows no signs of abating over the iPhone 4 antenna issue and, for that reason, the fastest and simplest solution should be considered — Apple should simply offer a free bumper to every iPhone 4 customer. While Apple would lose out on the $29 sales of such items — and the high profit margin they likely involve — the company could negate the bad press and make things right with its customers. And the fact that Apple never made iPhone cases or bumpers before isn’t lost on me. I have to wonder when Apple actually realized the potential antenna issue.

Regardless of when the problem was determined, the peace offering of a bumper is far less damaging in the long term and is a better way to handle the situation than allegedly deleting mentions of the Consumer Reports findings in Apple support discussions or recalling the phone as some have suggested. For a company that’s built upon brand loyalty, Apple simply can’t afford to not offer free iPhone 4 bumpers.

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In an attempt to make it easier for dissidents in countries such as China and North Korea to communicate without fear of government sanctions, researchers at Georgia Tech have developed software that can hide information inside messages posted to Twitter and other social networks, as well as in images that can be uploaded to photo-sharing sites such as Flickr and Picasa. The researchers plan to unveil the program — known as Collage — and a related research paper at the Usenix security conference next month.

Some dissidents in China and other countries communicate using external proxy servers and anonymous-proxy software such as the open-source Tor program. But these require administration of a server, and can be detected and disabled or blocked by governments and security forces. By hiding communications in Twitter messages and images uploaded to photo-sharing sites, the researchers — Sam Burnett, Nick Feamster and Santosh Vempala — say that they hope to get around some of these issues:

Oppressive regimes and even democratic governments restrict Internet access. Existing anti-censorship systems often require users to connect through proxies, but these systems are relatively easy for a censor to discover and block. This project offers a possible next step in the censorship arms race: rather than relying on a single system or set of proxies to circumvent censorship firewalls, we explore whether the vast deployment of sites that host user-generated content can breach these firewalls.

The software is made up of two distinct parts, according to a copy of the paper the research team plans to present at Usenix: there is a “message vector layer” that embeds the content in the Twitter message or photo — what the group calls a “cover traffic” — and a “rendezvous mechanism” that allows various parties to publish and retrieve the embedded messages once they are downloaded from Twitter or Flickr or some other social network. The researchers say their method won’t allow the sending of large files, but will allow the transmission of short text files or other communications.

Ironically, the software uses a data-encryption method called “steganography” to hide text inside images and other files, which is the same process that the Russian spy ring recently broken by U.S. authorities used to pass secret messages and files to each other while they were disguised as American citizens. Collage, which is written in Python, uses an image steganography tool called Outguess, and a text steganography tool called Snow. The program also makes use of web-browser automation software that allows Collage to simulate a user’s behavior in filling out forms, clicking buttons, etc., so that the content can be transmitted.

The researchers admit that it is likely the governments of various countries where the software might be used could discover the hidden messages and then block either specific users or social networking sites such as Twitter and Flickr (China has blocked access to Twitter on a number of occasions, including the recent anniversary of the Tiananmen Square riots). But they say in their paper that they hope most governments will be unwilling to block these services for very long, and that “the use of user-generated content to pass messages through censorship firewalls will survive, even as censorship techniques grow increasingly more sophisticated.”

While the software will make it easier for dissidents to disguise their communications and send information without being detected, however, it will also make it easier for others to smuggle information as well — including software pirates, child-porn distributors and other unsavory characters. But the downsides of the technology might be worth it if they help citizens evade persecution by repressive governments.

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Faithful Chant

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AT&T doesn’t want mobile data usage to slow, but it’s herding users toward new punitive mobile data plans and Wi-Fi hotspots. The company handled 20 million Wi-Fi connections in first five weeks of 2010, the same number as all of 2008, said John Donovan, AT&T CTO of Operations, speaking at the MobileBeat conference in San Francisco today. And today 51 percent of AT&T’s post-paid subscribers have devices that handle both voice and data, with an additional 5.8 million non-voice-centric data devices.

AT&T CTO of Operations John Donovan

So basically, there’s a crapload of demand for data delivered to mobile devices — which “shortens the distance between intention and action,” as Donovan put it. “By 2014, total traffic in 2008 rounds to zero.”

Donovan acknowledged existing strains on AT&T’s network. “We will move heaven and earth to get out in front of this demand,” he said.

But AT&T is sending mixed messages on mobile bandwidth consumption. On the one hand, it’s abandoning the precedent of basically unlimited mobile data — with new usage-based pricing charging up to $75 per GB. That will surely have effects on both users and developers taking pains to consume less data. Perhaps, though, they’ll move to Wi-Fi.

On the other hand, Donovan talked up the tremendous continuing growth of bandwidth-hogging apps like video. From the fall of 2009 to spring 2010, Donovan said, YouTube daily video views doubled to 2 billion views per day. “We agree with Cisco,” he said, citing that company’s projection that 90 percent of web traffic will be video by 2013. “This video wave is going to be big.”

Donovan is hoping big bandwidth usage will mean big money for AT&T. He said he expects the company to be involved in creating its own apps and “enablement layer,” in addition to providing mobile infrastructure. That could point to plans to get more hands-on with mobile OS competitors, and try to own more value-added services as part of customers’ monthly bills. “We have experience in the wired broadband side in how these things can take shape and we’ve got to jump in and compete for everything that we do,” Donovan said.

Thirty-four percent of U.S. cellphone owners have used their mobile device to record a video, 54 percent to send someone a photo or video, 20 percent to watch a video, and 15 percent to post a photo or video online, according to the most recent data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

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Twitter has scaled back its plans to store billions of tweets using Cassandra, a non-relational database project that Facebook created and open sourced. Friday night, Twitter said that it will still use Cassandra in a new real-time analytics project it is building, but the decision to move away from plans to migrate tweets from its current MySQL database to Cassandra is seen by some as a blow to startups and open-source projects that are attempting to move beyond relational databases.

But in reality, the level of interest about what database architecture some popular startup is using goes beyond Twitter and Cassandra, and touches on the changing nature of both the web and the software that underlies it. In short, the story here isn’t about Cassandra or databases themselves, but about groups of pioneering programmers reacting to the new ways they can build software in a world where computing is cheap.

Twitter or Digg deciding to use Cassandra, or LinkedIn using Voldemort as a key-value store, are the equivalent of pioneers traveling along the Oregon Trail as the U.S. expanded. The excitement around NoSQL data-store projects is a modern-day manifest destiny as programmers and companies lay claim to all the power that cheap computing (through the cloud or on their own hardware) has enabled.

The bottleneck is no longer around performance or the cost of computing — it’s about quickly getting the information to thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of nodes trying to act as one computer delivering a service. Google and IBM both have written about the data center as a computer, and Facebook says it thinks of adding hardware at the rack level rather than at the server level. But the current means of storing and accessing data have not made this leap from a single server to a rack — let alone an entire data center.

As programmers attempt this leap, they face several difficulties, which include working with existing software and programming languages and figuring out what problems and bottlenecks the new services built on these monolithic computer platforms will encounter. Plus, the IT world doesn’t all move at once, which means plenty of jobs and workloads will continue with the old way of doing things — that is, relational databases such as Oracle’s offerings and the open source MySQL, which Oracle now has a stake in thanks to its purchase of Sun.

The result is not a steady movement to non-relational databases or other methods of storing data, but a back-and-forth as programmers and businesses figure out what kind of architecture they need and what problems they want to solve. For a closer look at the issue and a bunch of charts detailing how the landscape is currently laid out, analyst Matt Sarrel, has penned a report over at GigaOM Pro (sub. req’d.) on the NoSQL movement called “NoSQL Databases – Providing Extreme Scale and Flexibility.” He writes:

Discussions with NoSQL vendors, project leads and enterprise customers yield estimates that between 15 and 40 percent of all RDBMS implementations would be better suited to non-relational platforms. Gartner and IDC have stated that only 15 percent of business data currently resides in an RDBMS. And according to Damien Katz, CEO and co-founder of CouchIO, developers of CouchDB, “At least one-third of projects using relational databases should be developed using non-relational technology. However, that doesn’t mean that 30 percent of [RDBMS] installations should be ripped out and replaced. It means 30 percent of projects moving forward should consider using NoSQL.

As that quote and Twitter’s own flip-flopping on its decision to use Cassandra illustrate, the efforts to take advantage of the processing power now available aren’t as simple as the westward push by pioneers in the 1800s. However, as a movement, NoSQL adherents are blazing a similar path in both importance and an opportunity for economic gains. Below, I’ve included one of many charts in the report, which offers a lay of the land for NoSQL projects. For more, read the full report.

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