Google Broadband: One Giant Step For Google

By James Zipadelli

Google is planning on building and testing its own high-speed broadband networks in select U.S. cities, the company announced in its blog recently. The company has put out a request for information (RFI) until March 26 to see how many communities want to participate in this experiment. A Google spokesman says, “We will connect at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people, in one or more trial communities across the country.”

One city that is participating in Google’s experiment is Baltimore, Md. A team of technology and business leaders began working Feb. 22, and entrepreneur Dave Troy says Baltimore’s government and research institutions are also on board. “We hit the ground running,” Troy says. “We have world-class research institutions (the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University). One of the things Google listed is 3-D medical technology. This is something that Hopkins has done. We can do that right here.”

According to Troy, there were other reasons Google’s experiment benefits the city. For example, Baltimore’s proximity to Washington, D.C., makes it helpful if there is a question on regulations. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which President Obama signed Feb. 17, 2009, included the Broadband Initiatives, which has essentially the same goal: to “accelerate broadband deployment in unserved, underserved, and rural areas and to strategic institutions that are likely to create jobs or provide significant public benefits.” Troy says that Google’s experiment helps because it creates competition. “Not only is Google getting access to more people, but they are doing it by using an open access approach,” Troy says.

Asked for clarification, the Google spokesman says, “We will allow third parties to offer their own Internet access services, or other services, using our network. We believe this approach will maximize user choice as well as spur greater innovation and competition. Most providers in Europe and many places elsewhere in the world operate open access networks.”

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association, which represents cable operators, is optimistic. “We look forward to learning more about Google’s broadband experiment in the handful of trial locations they are planning, says spokesman Brian Dietz. “The cable industry has invested $161 billion over the past 13 years to build a nationwide broadband infrastructure that is available to 92 percent of U.S. homes, and we will continue to invest billions more to continually improve the speed and performance of our networks and provide tens of millions of consumers with the best possible broadband experience.”

Not everyone is pleased with Google’s experiment, however. Scott Cleland, president of Precursor and chairman of NetCompetition.org, called Google’s announcement a “PR stunt.”

“This is classic Google,” Cleland says. “Everything is about them. When the nation is trying to move from a jog to a run, they’re wanting to take airplane rides.” Cleland says the timing of the announcement was poor because it coincided with the National Broadband Plan.

“They want a gigabit to the home, which is 50 times more than people have right now, and there aren’t any applications other than Google’s plan that takes advantage of that network,” Cleland says. “Google is the biggest bandwidth consumer in the world because YouTube broadcasts over the Internet and it’s 14 times bigger than any video broadcaster. Google is constantly crawling the trillion pages on the Internet.”

AT&T spokesperson Jenny Bridges was cautiously optimistic. “We commend (FCC) Chairman (Julius) Genachowski for his plan to set an ambitious goal for broadband deployment in America,” Bridges says. “But in setting a 100mb goal, the FCC surely recognizes the massive investment by the private sector that will be required. As the Commission’s own broadband team estimated, it would cost an additional $350 billion to bring 100mb service to every household in America. It is thus all the more important that the FCC resist calls for extreme forms of regulation that would cripple, if not destroy, the very investments needed to realize its goal.”

Verizon Wireless spokesman James Smith says, “The Internet ecosystem is dynamic and competitive, and it’s delivering great benefits to consumers. Google’s expansion of its networks to enter the access market is another new paragraph in this exciting story.” To learn more about Verizon’s network, VerizonFIOS, click here. VerizonFIOS serves 16 states including Maryland and Washington, D.C., according to the fact sheet.

Baltimore’s Troy says the benefits for the city from Google’s experiment are just beginning. “It will make Baltimore a world-class destination for technology entrepreneurs,” Troy says. “It also will keep people here that might go somewhere else. The combination of those two things makes it extremely compelling.”

Spinning Tweets of Gold: Twitter’s Revenue Model

By John Greaves

Twitter, the social networking giant that has revolutionized the way we interact with each other and search for information, seems to be planning to monetize using third-party applications. On the other hand, it might be planning to charge companies for access to its site’s products. Or maybe it will just sell ad space. It’s still not clear despite Twitter co-founder Biz Stone’s promise that we would know how his company plans to start making money in early 2010.

The question of Twitter’s move toward monetization has been a topic of discussion for years, and of course, Twitter has a history of promoting third-party apps without being paid for them. So intense is interest in how Twitter will monetize that a hoax last year concerning paying for premium accounts led to a firestorm of outrage that increased when protesters learned they were the victims of a prank by BBspot.

This is partly because Twitter’s investors have long maintained that they were in no hurry to make money off the micro-blogging site. Stone told reporters in 2009 the company wasn’t fretting about the need to monetize. “There are no dates when we need to break even. We have plenty of money in the bank,” he says.

The question remains, what is Twitter planning and will it be successful? In 2007 Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter and the current CEO, let slip some of the ways he thought the site could generate income. “Two more-straightforward ideas: 1) Ads on the site. We have a little AdSense on there now, but we haven’t really tried. As the traffic grows, some tasteful sponsorships might be sellable. 2) Charging companies who are using it for marketing or other commercial purposes. If an organization finds Twitter to be a valuable communication tool with their customers/constituents/etc — especially if we’re sending lots of SMS’s for them, which cost us money — it seems viable to make an offering around that,” he said.

Steve Hofstetter, a comedian who has helped create apps for Facebook and the iPhone as part of promoting his brand, is enthusiastic about Twitter monetizing through ad revenue.  “Click on their website right now, you know they have that little useless twitter definition, who gets utility out of that? People in the office enjoy that, if you made that a tiny little ad; it doesn’t just give utility to Twitter, marketers put ads on sites because they’re good for the consumer, I’ve found good stuff through banner ads,” Hofstetter says.

Nevertheless, according to Radar Research founder Marissa Gluck there is a problem with simply relying on advertising to monetize social media. “In terms of advertising, click-through rates and engagement historically tend to be very low on social networks, consumers aren’t really there to search out products or to purchase, they’re not in that mode, they’re not in that mentality, so consumers are not really engaging with ads on social networks because they want to engage with their friends,” Gluck says.

On the other hand, Gluck points to the fact that Twitter wears many hats in the social media arena and can perhaps choose multiple revenue streams to be successful including the second option Williams mentioned. “Twitter is everything from a social network to an RSS feed to a broadcasting platform, so Twitter is a little bit different, which is why for Twitter it makes more sense to look towards paid subscriptions from commercial enterprises as well as advertising,” Gluck says.

Ian Swanson, the CEO of Sometrics, a company that helps developers and brands monetize the social Web, thinks Twitter is right to avoid the ad model for now. “If you look at the expertise of the company, you’ve got to say is this a media company, is this a company that belongs on Madison Avenue or is this a tech company? They really know their strengths. Hey we’re really good at building this platform, really good at the technology - so let’s allow the brands and third-party applications to build on top of our platform and if we go through and charge people for that access, almost like taxing the system, eventually they’re going to make money and that’s just a smart approach for them.”

This echoes comments made by Stone to the Reuters Global Technology Summit in May 2009. “”There are no people at Twitter who know anything about advertising or work in advertising. So we don’t have anyone there to make or take those calls,” Stone says.

It is obvious that third-party applications have figured out how to monetize using Twitter. A PR Newswire press release notes that TwitterJobSearch, the first real-time job search engine, has evolved its offering to include an In-Stream Ads service. Back in 2007, Steve Poland even blogged on easy ways to make money with Twitter using third-party applications. Ad.ly “enables Twitter publishers to make money from the content they produce on Twitter by sending one tweet every day from advertisers that they approve.”

The question is not whether it’s possible for Twitter to monetize itself. Rather everyone is wondering whether 2010 will be the year when Twitter begins to spin tweets into gold.

Pinpointing the Future of Geo APIs

By Ron Callari

Geolocation APIs are flourishing and third-party API developers are multiplying faster than bunnies on a hot spring day. Twitter’s acquisition of Mixers Labs and GeoAPI have a lot to do with this exponential activity, but other APIs and location-based-services have been flourishing on their own paths as well.

Facebook is sitting back examining the digital landscape before making a move. Couple this with the heated smartphone explosion in the last 12 months, and you have a perfect digital storm brewing on the horizon. 2010 may be the Chinese Year of the Tiger, but it’s also the Year of the API.

It’s no longer good enough to know “what’s happening” a la Twitter circa 2006-2009 - now according to CEO Evan Williams, it’s more important to know “where it’s happening.” Noted in his “Mixing It Up at 795 Folsom St ” blog, 2010 will be the year that “the Twitter API integrates its platform with new and existing apps the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla.”

What geolocation brings to the table that has somewhat stalled the traditional social networks of Twitter and Facebook is a quicker means to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. With smartphones came cameras and GPS systems allowing for an easy and direct conduit to local advertising for shops, restaurants, bars, tourist attractions and a multitude of other businesses. In turn, APIs that open their platforms to the public can grow their reach and the diversity of that reach with newer monetization models.

So while some call geolocation one step closer to ‘improved stalking,’ others believe that there will be a paradigm shift and a more relaxed definition as to what privacy means to us in the year 2010.

Let’s take a look at today’s most shiny thing as seen through the eyes of third-party developers, CEOs and other thought-leaders in the soon-to-be-very-crowded location-based space.

Andrei Taraschuk, Founder | UMapper
The big idea behind UMapper is enabling its customers to manage the entire map life cycle from creation to monetization. With UMapper you can create, distribute, track and monetize maps. In addition, UMapper is map-agnostic framework - meaning it works with different map data providers including Bing, Google, Yahoo and OpenStreetMap.

In questioning Taraschuk as to how UMapper works with Twitter’s GeoAPI, he notes, “We used the Twitter search API with a geographic filter, which can search tweets in a specific location / radius.” Basically a simple platform to work with, “The GeoAPI implements Twitter’s search methods making it very easy for integration with Flash we used Tweetr ActionScript library.”

Users can create UMapper/Twitter maps that in turn can be embedded on their websites or Facebook pages. Others have used them to enhance blogs and news articles. “For example, if you are writing an article about a flood, you can create a Twitter map that shows people tweeting about flood in the area,” Taraschuk says.

Paul Hallett, CEO | Schmap
Hallett makes an interesting observation regarding what he calls the “geoparsing” of content shared on social networks. He points to the example of the wealth of local information that is shared in the body of tweets. “People tweet about great restaurant experiences, bands tweet about gigs, bars are tweeting about happy hours and so on,” he says.

The challenge for the app developer then comes down to filtering and deciphering. If someone tweets “Cool bash tonight at Joe’s,” has that person just returned from a private party at a friend’s house, or is there some kind of event coming up at Joe’s Bar? What is the event? Where is Joe’s Bar, and who might this information be relevant to?

According to Hallett, “there’s an epic commercial migration taking place right now at the intersection of ‘local’ and ’social’.” The same local restaurants, bars, shops (i.e. SMBs) that took 10 years to discover the Internet are now adapting to Twitter and Facebook with a much greater speed.” At Schmap.it, “we make it easier for these SMBs to reach local audiences, and help these target groups to discover vibrant, real-time local content,” affirms Hallett.

Jean-Francois Noel, CEO | 3rd Crust /SeeYourHotel.com
In working with Twitter’s API, 3rd Crust developed two apps that were both based on search/tracking to view where people wanted to go on vacations. According to Noel, “Twitter’s search API is very easy to use and the technical hurdles are minor.” The app provides location points and those points are added to tweets. However Noel feels that Twitter is somewhat limiting when compared to Google’s new social network product, Buzz. With Buzz, there is the ability to be more precise with one’s location and what is nearby. “In fact,” notes Noel, “I see this possibility as one of the best aspects for Buzz on the mobile devices and a problem for Foursquare.”

SeeYourHotel.com is a Web app designed to let you make your accommodations with ease, whether you are traveling for business or pleasure. Using the power and ease of Google Maps technology, you can now find a hotel, then view actual photos of the rooms and facilities, compare with other hotels nearby and then make your reservations all from one convenient site.

Keith Lee, CEO | Booyah & Founder of MyTown
With the location-based social network of MyTown reaching its recent milestone of one million registered users, Keith Lee sees the intersection of the real and digital worlds opening up new forms of monetization and branding opportunities with real-world tie-ins. According to Lee, “the ability to serve geo-targeted advertising and to engage consumers with brands on a local level is the holy grail for marketers. For Booyah, we now have the ability to offer branded virtual items based on proximity to real-world retail locations.”

One of the major limitations with today’s geolocation apps is “the inaccuracy of GPS at indoor environments such as malls. This is a problem since a significant number of shops in the US tend to be indoors. Moreover, it’s challenging to determine if you’re inside the store instead of just outside the store,” Lee adds.

While MyTown does not use Twitter’s GeoAPI, it does use GPS features to check-in at real-world locations to unlock virtual rewards. Players can then buy and upgrade to real-world shops, and enjoy MyTown ownership of their favorite real-life places. The more a place is frequented, the more it raises your shops’ value and rent. It’s a fully dynamic market economy and MyTown leverages the CitySearch API as its local directory to search for nearby restaurants, stores, and other points of interest.

Keith Dutton, CTO | Geodelic Systems
Dutton believes the geolocation APIs have significant potential, as they offer other dimensions that brings targeted, relevant information to users in a specific context. “However, with all the excitement of location specific information, it is important to remember that location is just one more dimension, though obviously a very important one, to relevancy,” Dutton notes. He cites as an example, using a geolocal coupon API. “While we receive a set of local coupons, to create a positive user experience, we still need to prioritize those coupons with additional analysis along traditional dimensions,” he says.

Geodelic’s app proactively shows what is likely to be of interest to a user in his local area. The app’s raw data consists of national geotagged databases, proprietary partner feeds, public partner feeds, live geolocal API calls, hand edited content, and will soon be rolling out a general public facing content publishing system. All this is run through a search engine that takes into account your personal interest profile to highlight points of interest around you. Their many data sources allow Geodelic to augment the API information, so that when an API locates a datum on a local business, it can match it to that local business and present a unified set of enriched information about it.

Dan Gilmartin | Where/Ulocate.com
Gilmartin see the location-base service market becoming more streamlined over time. “As a company that has been developing mobile location based applications since our inception in 2003, we saw early on, a developer had to have a relationship with a carrier, then pass a series of tests in order to get access to the location infrastructure. Today, developers can get access to location from device manufacturers as well as aggregators and the possibilities become endless,” he ascertains.

Where.com’s consumer value proposition is to deliver the best in class local search and discovery experience, through the aggregation of top data feeds. They combine their content into a user friendly application and based on the users’ location and context, they provide the user with distinct offers and deals from local merchants.  Ultimately their goal is to connect consumers and merchants who will have access to a network that delivers location services to users without the need to have them download an application.

Kent Lindstrom, CEO | Oogalabs.com/PlacePop
Lindstrom was the former founder and CEO of Friendster. When he became enamored with location-based social networks, he hired the head of Google Asia Pacific to run Friendster and founded OogaLabs to develop PlacePop, his initial entree’ into the LBS space. Competing head-on with the widely popular Foursquare and Gowalla, Lindstrom’s vision is predicated on providing users with a “dead-simple app” that reduces the mobile location experience to its essence, “much like Facebook did compared to MySpace,” he says.

While he is not yet working with Twitter’s GeoAPI nor does PlacePop have it own API, he finds the development of geolocation an arduous challenge - but one that PlacePop is up for. “For example just to do a “check-in,” it requires multiple systems to work in tandem; namely:  GPS, the phone network itself, the app, a geolocation database, then that all has to be sent back to the phone, in just a few seconds,” Lindstrom notes.

When asking Lindstrom as to how he will differentiate PlacePop from the likes of Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and MyTown who all gained a foothold in the market last year, he sees it as such: “In my experience, the first movers rarely end up winning, because of the enormous burden of pioneering. Lycos, Powells.com and even his own former company Friendster were all eventually exceeded by the likes of Google, Amazon and Facebook.”

Zak Tanjeloff, Founder | Brring.com & NearToHere
Tanjeloff has not worked with Twitter’s GeoAPI. His alert service called NearToHere has been developed on the Wikipedia API. The challenges he sites in developing geolocation apps points to the “inability for iPhone apps to run in the background - meaning that unless our apps are running, we do not have access to geolocation data, and therefore, cannot deliver relevant content all the time,” he cautions. However he is very enthusiastic about embracing the enormous possibilities of geolocation apps. “With the availability of tremendous APIs to small developers like myself, we are able to build products, seemingly once only available for James Bond, in a quick, efficient, and most importantly, inexpensive manner.”

In considering collaboration with other location-based social network Tanjeloff says, “we are going to continue to layer more content into NearToHere to make it a more robust experience for the user.” Since we are a travel guide, in addition to Wikipedia content, we will next be layering in Yelp’s geolocated content to provide reviews of local business to users as they pass them.”

Tim Napoleon, Co-Founder/President | AllDigital, Inc.
AllDigital offers software and online services that enables the secure transport of digital content to IP-enabled devices including mobile computing devices, the desktop computer, and digital televisions.

In discussing geolocation challenges with Napoleon, he firmly believes that “The biggest issue with GEO data is end user perception. It needs to be really clear how this data is being used or the industry risks consumers disabling the feature,” he says. He sees the ubiquitous nature of geo-information affecting almost every Web page or application we use. “The widest use case is ‘ad targeting’ and ‘right restriction on Premium Content’,” notes Napoleon, where, “the granularity of mobile data is really providing media companies with new ways of pin-pointing users.”

As with so many early-stage social network platforms, extending the service with secondary applications is what makes the functionality truly useful. GeoAPI and the other geolocation APIs mentioned by our experts is a work in progress and as all have indicated, there is a lot more work that needs to be done. With Twitter and Facebook holding their developers conferences two weeks apart in April, I am sure the momentum for API development will kick into high gear shortly thereafter.

As to what major platform will lead the ‘geolocation’ charge by year-end, Booyah’s Keith Lee seems to think if “Facebook decided to incorporate a check-in process into their own API, it will have the capability of destroying all other check-in functionality (found in the majority of location-based social networks) because no one will be able to compete with their 400M+ social graph.” Others think Twitter and their acquisition of Mixer Labs’ GeoAPI will be the major catalyst to give them a leg-up in the geolocation universe.

With success comes consolidation. Potentially some or all the API development firms mentioned here may eventually be absorbed. Schmap’s Hallett is actually planning for that end-game as part of his exit strategy. He believes it’s extremely important that the smaller players like his company Schmap need to “establish defensible positions” to prepare for that outcome. He argues, “My point here is that when a smaller location-service player fails to establish a defensible position (erects little in the way of competitive barriers), then the big guys don’t need to acquire, they can just compete and squash it.”  However, “If the position is defensible, because the smaller player has built up a large enough base of loyal clients/users, or because it has certain key elements to its rollout that would prove difficult or time-consuming to replicate, then an acquisition makes more sense.”
The Year of the API may be a long-winding road as a result of geolocation being part of the mix.

Pirates Beware: eBooks Are Not Songs

By Rebecca Henely

For the customers of Lori James, chief operating officer for AllRomanceEbooks.com, the suave, swashbuckling pirate is a favorite literary trope. However, James makes sure to teach her customers that “Not all Pirates are Sexy.”

On the AllRomanceEbooks.com’s website, readers and visitors are invited to sign a petition to fight eBook piracy. The petition has 218 signatures as of this writing. Yet while James is committing herself to fighting the problem, she — and others — are unsure of the scope of eBook piracy.

“I’ve yet to see numbers presented [that] I felt were a true reflection of the scope of the problem in terms of the initial theft or lost sales,” James says. “I know some publishers and authors look at the number of downloads and count those as lost sales, but there are people who will download a book for free just because it’s free and never read it. That doesn’t really represent a lost sale because the person never would have purchased the book.”

Nevertheless, some technical measures have been put into protecting books from being pirated. James states many of the books sold on AllRomanceEbooks.com have some sort of digital rights management encoded in them.

Stephen Cole, managing director for Ebooks Corporation Limited, says that eBooks.com utilizes Adobe’s Content Server system to protect against piracy. “Because of the protection provided by Adobe Content Server, very few books are pirated as a result of people buying an ebook and somehow hacking it,” he says. “There are pirated books out there, but as far as we can see they arise from people scanning or re-keying.”

Cole says Ebooks.com has been working to prevent piracy by offering incentives with eBooks that can’t be pirated. Most pirated books come in a pdf format. While these can be uploaded to popular e-readers like Amazon.com’s Kindle and Barnes and Noble’s Nook (just as Kindle or Nook eBooks can be backed up on a computer as .pdf files), Cole says Ebooks.com’s new reader for the computer The Amigo Reader, will give readers an interactive experience they can’t get from a pirated book, like the ability to share notes with others and a live chat about the book.

“In an age of rampant piracy, it’s important for book publishers to keep adding value to books, which cannot be included in a pirated book. Amigo Reader goes some way toward that goal,” Cole says.

Take-down notices have also been a tool for the distributor. James says this has helped her company, AllRomanceEbooks.com, and has been very successful for book publisher Macmillan, which has been diligent about takedown notices. “A service like this could be especially valuable to small or mid-sized presses who don’t have staff dedicated to this function, so we are considering it,” she says.

Cole states that piracy will continue to be a problem for eBooks, although most likely not on the level of music piracy, as most eBooks are copy-protected. “Books are not songs,” he says. “When the Internet happened, there were 2 billion people out there in possession of CDs that had unencrypted, easily copied music on them. In effect, everyone who owns a CD and a PC, even an untutored technophobe, is a couple of clicks away from forwarding a song to their 500 best friends. This is not the case with eBooks.”

Yet James states when it comes to pirates, there are two types: “those [who] can perhaps be persuaded not to [pirate] and those who can’t.” She says the best way to prevent piracy is offering eBooks at legitimate sources and combating illegitimate ones. ”I firmly believe that the vast majority of our customers and readers are honest people,” James says. “They understand piracy is stealing and they understand that re-distribution of content contributes to the erosion of an industry that brings them countless hours of joy and entertainment.”

Hulu Hops Onto Caption Search Technology

By Dave Fidlin

With the Internet maturing and online video become the norm - not a novelty item - enhancements are being created for streaming content. Caption searching, one of those enhancements, was added recently to the popular site Hulu. But a smattering of smaller companies had already been offering a similar service before Hulu added the feature to its site in late December.

Hulu Labs, the online video portal’s development arm, is running the feature in beta while engineers continue to work on perfecting the technology.

In a statement, Eugene Wei, Hulu’s vice president of product, says the feature will enable users to search for captions of thousands of videos across hundreds of shows. For now, Wei says users can access the feature through Hulu Labs’ website. Eventually, a feature tab will be included on all Hulu shows that have captions.

Wei points out how captions search might be beneficial to a viewer of an online video. Wei says he was watching an episode of “House” recently, and a joke between main character Dr. Foreman and Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin took place. Wei says he was in a quandary when he wanted to watch the episode a second time.

“I couldn’t remember which episode it was in, let alone which moment within the episode,” Wei says in the statement. “With the new caption search, I just type in ‘Mike Tomlin,’ and voila.”

Jason Blackwell, practice director with ABI Research, says features like Hulu’s caption search will be an asset to users with online content growing exponentially each year.

“It’s going to be important for all service providers,” Blackwell says. “I think (Hulu’s caption search) is an important step in what will become the future.”

Blackwell says ABI will soon begin to study features like caption search and examine specifically how it can be beneficial not only to online video, but other specialized services, such as pay TV and other cable and satellite services with a user interface.

While Hulu’s caption search is breaking new ground for the company, it is not a pioneer in the technology. Numerous smaller companies have offered similar services, some as long as five years.

One of those companies, Realtime Transcription Inc., offers a service called Transendia. Tanya Ward English, technology director for Realtime Transcription, says Transendia offers a video search based on the full text of a transcript, in addition to glossary tags for non-spoken information within a video.

Ward English says Transendia caters to a higher-end market. Many of the company’s clients do not want videos hosted on such public sites as YouTube. Instead, she says, those clients opt to use a customized player with full search and playing options from Transendia.

“One of the most useful and unique things about our technology, I think, is something upon which we have a patent pending,” Ward English says. “That’s the ability go pin-point search video or audio files directly from a text search engine like Google or Bing.”

Ward English, a self-described advocate for people with hearing loss, says caption search technology is especially beneficial for online users who have such a condition.

Blinkx, another smaller, specialized company, was launched in 2005 and went public two years later. Suranga Chandratillake, CEO and founder of Blinkx, says his company offers an advanced video search engine feature that gives online video users an opportunity to not only search for captions within a program, but to look for titles and episode names of particular programs.

“We can extract a lot of information from what’s going on inside a video,” Chandratillake says. “Our video search engine doesn’t just work on our own site. It can also get results from other sites like YouTube, or any other site with video out there.”

Chandratillake says Blinkx has been a popular service with advertisers, and revenue has doubled in the past three years.

More companies are sure to join Hulu, Realtime Transcription, Blinkx and others as the quest continues to make caption search technology an integral part of online video.

The Paywall Debate: A Historical Perspective

By Sheila Shayon

The New York Times Company recently announced a paid, metered model for  the beginning of 2011. Users will have free access to an - as yet - unspecified number of articles per month, and then be charged when usage exceeds that number.

What they’re looking for - like all Web publishers, is additional revenue streams. The company says this will provide the “necessary flexibility to keep an appropriate ratio between free and paid content and stay connected to a search-driven Web.”

“Our new business model is designed to provide additional support for The New York Times‘ extraordinary, professional journalism,” says Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., chairman of The New York Times Company and publisher of The New York Times. “Our audiences are very loyal and we believe that our readers will pay for our award-winning digital content and services.”

News Corp, the largest and loudest proponent of ‘pay-to-play’ online content, has also begun rolling out pay walls for its online news. “We’ll be charging for online wherever we have publications,” says chairman and CEO, Rupert Murdoch. “Consumers are willing to pay to be entertained and informed.”

And therein lies the problem.  According to Joseph Turow, professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, “The media history of the 20th century has been teaching people that content is cheap. It goes as far back as the late 19th century, when The Ladies Home Journal and Saturday Evening Post exhorted readers to buy what their advertisers were selling, because they support your magazine. There has always been the intrusion of advertisers - you, the consumer, don’t have to pay for anything because it’s all ad-supported. But - this does not work on the Web.”

Media history is a series of outmoded distribution and economic models being ported from one technology to another - without requisite reinvention or evolution: newspapers and radio to TV and now the Internet. The basic equation of distribution, access and revenue - has not yet been adjusted for the Web.

A bit of historical perspective is helpful in understanding the axial moment we’ve arrived at today regarding a fundamental shift in the delivery and economics of mass media. It was the advertising industry, in the 1920s, which first coined the term medium as a backdrop to placing ads across different media, which were previously known as publications.

In the early 1960s, Marshall McLuhan coined the term global village. It described the end of an individualistic, visual, print culture due to emerging electronic media, which would move society from individualism and fragmentation to a collective identity, and a “tribal base.” These comments, made in the 1960s, of a global village, interconnected by an electronic nervous system pre-dated the Internet but stamped the concept into the DNA of popular culture 30 years before it actually happened.

Digitally defined pay walls have been compared to the Internet equivalent of the Berlin Wall. Professional journalists fear the disintermediation wrought by the Web, especially the burgeoning forms of social media such as blogging, and massive content factories employing amateur experts for meager wages.

Simultaneously, it’s a fact that bloggers and crowdsourcing are uncovering news otherwise not covered. Traditional journalists writing behind pay walls are prevented from building their own personal brands, while un-credentialed and unskilled writers can rise to the top of their peer heap in meritocratic online communities.

The explosion of social media bloggers underscores the fact that the online experience is not just about the content.  It is about the relationship. Pay walls limit a news organization’s relationship with its customers - the public.

Pay wall proponents are exponents of news organizations no longer providing free content at point of delivery. The underlying theory is that this will augment the value of news content by reinstating rules of scarcity and habituating a new generation to paying for news.

The pay wall protestors affirm a fundamental lack of understanding of the information abundance era — a misguided effort to sustain a 20th century ethos of intermediated media. Charging for content depends on an entitlement environment, an antiquated business model built on scarcity and publishers who control the food chain.

Charging is replete with its own lack of profitability: increased marketing expenses; smaller audience; less ad revenue; fewer clicks and links. The new linked economy, leveraging networks and specialization efficiencies born of Web usage, demands collaboration.

The following timeline takes a historical point of view on major metrics for when the media of newspaper, radio, television and Internet reached mass (for the time) distribution, and how and when audiences began to pay for content. The incubation period ranges from 1615 years for newspapers; 21 years for radio and 14 for TV. The Internet still hasn’t been able to prove a pay model for its content, but e-commerce agent, Amazon, did post a profit in 2002.

The entire content industry is in upheaval. Transformative technology, free public classified sites like Craigslist, the impact of the economy on advertising and fundamental changes in consumer habits, add up to new rules and shifting business models.

“We are now in the midst of an epochal debate over the value of content, and it is clear to many newspapers that the current model is malfunctioning,” Newscorp’s Murdoch says.

One thought is that e-readers may ’save the goose,’ holding the line for charging at the handheld device portal.

“It’s a continual process of advertisers taking over and supporting media, and a continuing dilemma: denying the right of professionals to be paid for what they do. People go to The Huffington Post and feel they’ve read the NY Times. The propositions that worked historically for radio and TV were ported to the Internet and they just don’t work there,” Turow says.

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