Surf-Hint news of web 2.0 web site and hint of web site that worth to be visited

Despite a few hiccups on the big launch day, DC Comics' webcomics initiative Zuda Comics went live before the end of business Tuesday on the Left Coast. The first webcomics push by a corporate comic book publisher, Zuda is attracting a lot of attention as the webcomic-o-sphere tries to figure out what it all means.

The Zuda Comics Web site has a clean layout, even though it's quite busy. At the top you can navigate to the main Competition page, where you can vote on the 10 best submissions of the month; Submit a Comic, where you can register and upload eight "screens" from your comic; and Explore comics, where you can read the 10 editorially-selected competitors and the contest winners. Winners are offered a one-year contract for creating 52 episodes.

The Explore section is clearly built for expansion. You can search for comics alphabetically through a drop-down menu, or by genre via the left-hand nav bar. The Submissions page does a very good job of explaining how to submit your comic to the competition, with image sizes, file format, resolution, and other juicy necessities. The Competition page shows large thumbnails of the competing comics, alongside a story synopsis, creator information, average reader rating, and other data.

The center of the front page is taken up by the current contest winner. Although you might expect this space to be empty--how can they have a winner if the first competition has just begun?--Zuda has up to six "instant winners" per year. The first one, Jeremy Love's "Bayou," anchors the page, with the rest of the competitors represented by thumbnails below Bayou. On the right is the Zuda blog, although there's no direct link to the Zuda Comics forum that's hosted with the other DC Comics message boards.

Although the layout works well for presenting Zuda's mixed functions, the webcomic reader is Flash-based, and that raises a whole bunch of Flash-based questions. On the one hand, Flash players look nice. However, using a Flash player as a webcomic reader is nearly unique in the world of webcomics. Richard Stevens of Diesel Sweeties, one of the most popular webcomics that has also made the jump to newspapers, questions the use of Flash. "I really hope this doesn't catch on; it makes bookmarking into a nightmare--there are no plain URLs! It's too much technology for no real benefit."

The viral nature of promotion on the Web runs counter to using Flash, notes David Willis, creator of the webcomic Shortpacked! "Which I imagine is the point," he adds, "but it hurts the ability to grow an audience."

The other problem with Flash-for-webcomics is that it runs slower than loading a simple JPG image. "I'm on a three megabit cable connection, I shouldn't have to sit through LOADING LOADING LOADING screens between comics pages. This isn't Commodore 64," complains Stevens. Kaja and Phil Foglio, having made their comic Girl Genius into a print-to-web success story, agree. "As most webcomic readers are very sensitive to load times, I can't help but think that they will have a fairly restricted readership."

The contracts issue has been a contentious one in the webcomics community, too. Zuda pays $1000 for 52 episodes, plus a small percentage of merchandising and reprint rights. Most people doing webcomics self-publish, retaining control of ancillary rights but making regular production of strips difficult until the audience grows large enough to sustain the creator through merchandise sales and ad clicks. "It may be a few years before you have the readership," says Willis. He notes that there are other webcomic collectives, like Keenspot that, so far, seem to have contracts far more rights-friendly than Zuda.

Willis and Stevens both feel quite strongly that Zuda's contract isn't good for creators. "Zuda is trying to put the cat back in the bag. Artists already wised up--we're used to owning our own stuff and making our own way," says Willis. Stevens pointed out that for the money Zuda offers, "you might as well make your own page and put up Project Wonderful or Google ads, unless there is some massive promotional push behind Zuda that I haven't seen."

At the time of writing, Zuda Comics had not yet responded to queries about their contracts and Flash player.

Although Willis didn't like a lot of what he saw in Zuda's first day, he did see some bright spots. "I think Zuda can find an audience, and perhaps diversify the webcomics field a little, but true success stories (for the artists) are found elsewhere." Other webcomic creators had a different take.

The creator of Cat and Girl, Dorothy Gambrell, just didn't care. "I don't have an opinion on Zuda. This creaking formation of an industry around webcomics--the corporate ventures, the self-promotion-clogged journalism--is absolutely my least favorite part of drawing comics on the Internet." She acknowledged the irony in that, though: "My own ability to make a living drawing comics on the Internet is in part due to the same forces that attract industry and its willing sycophants."

Kaja Foglio took a similar neutral stance. "Zuda is not likely to change the field of webcomics, since having another source for comics doesn't limit the ability of all the thousands of others to still reach their readers, but having an editorial screening may result in an overall higher quality of comics offered."

DC Comics and Zuda Comics are owned by Time Warner, so it's great to see a major publisher finally acknowledging that there's a new medium out there to be explored. But as I noted in Monday's Zuda preview story, it won't be clear for some time whether Zuda's impact will be positive, negative, or a zero-sum game.

I came across an interesting site a few minutes ago from a BACN message from Myles Weissleder, creator of the SF New Tech meetup group. One of the presenters, Mosio will be showing off their site at next week's meetup. The company specializes in mobile Q&A, letting anyone with a phone ask a question via SMS or e-mail and get public replies back from other Mosio members. The site launched at the beginning of August, and has since answered a good number of questions.

Like some other Q&A services, to ask and answer a question you've got to be a registered user, which Mosio calls "QnAgents." Unlike some expert-driven sites like Citizendium, there are no prerequisites for being a Mosio agent, just the hope that you know the answers to the questions you're answering, or will go through the effort to research them. To ask a question, just write it as a text message, and send it to ask@mosio.com. If anyone answers, you'll get a text back with their response. You can also check on Mosio's Web site for any replies. When you first ask a question the system will automatically create a username and password for Mosio's site, so you can join up later to start befriending other Mosio users to track their responses.

In addition to simple Q&A, Mosio also offers a host of "apps," which are free, subscription-based text services that range from birthday reminders, to content feeds from news providers. Like Twitter's tracking feature, you can turn them off an on either by Web or through your phone. There's even a random Chuck Norris fact generator that admittedly, is pretty useless, but free nonetheless.

I have to be honest, the look and feel of Mosio doesn't have anything on my other favorite Q&A site Fluther (review), but I'm really digging the mobile angle. Having just recently pulled the trigger on data for my phone after being on a barebones voice-only plan for the better part of a decade, I know there's a lot to be said for a site that lets you handle your business via SMS.

There is one big thing Mosio seems to be missing: a way to search through prior questions and answers. I suppose Mosio assumes that if you're visiting the site from your browser, you're on the internet anyways, and can find the information elsewhere. Considering what Fluther and other Q&A repositories have done though, a search with answers from humans might save you a question in the first place.

Related: Download.com's directory listing for Mosio

Q: Everybody is telling us to raise smart money. What’s the difference between smart money and dumb money?

“The best assumption to make is that your VC’s primary value add is the cash they are investing. Then you’ll always be surprised on the upside.”

— Marc Andreessen

Summary: Smart money is money plus the promise of help that’s worth paying for, dumb money is money plus hidden harm, and mostly money is mostly money. Weed out the dumb money with diligence. Evaluate supposedly smart money with the smart money test. Finally, assume your investors are mostly money: unbundle money and value-add to get money on the best terms possible and value-add on the best terms possible.

If smart money is money plus the promise of help that’s worth paying for, then dumb money is money plus hidden harm, and mostly money is mostly money. All three provide what entrepreneurs primarily want from investors: money.

1. Avoid dumb money: you don’t hire harmful people—so don’t marry them for the life of the company either.
2. Mostly money is great but there are very few investors who act like their primary contribution is capital.
3. Smart money is rare—after all, would you work with most investors if they didn’t bring a piggy bank? Also, too many investors think the “smart” in smart money means “we know how to run your business better than you.”

Weed out the dumb money with diligence.

Don’t assume any investor won’t be harmful. Do the diligence to prove otherwise:

• Do you trust him?
• Will he provide his pro rata in the next round? (Not so important for seed funds and angels.)
• Will he support you if the company is going sideways?
• Does he have impeccable references?
• Does he want control?
• When it comes time to sell the company, will he let you?
• Will he let you expand the option pool to hire someone great?
• Does he want to replace you as CEO?
• Will he try to merge you with another dying company from his portfolio?
• Do you want to marry him for the life of the company?
• Is he committed to investing in startups and does he have a reputation to protect in the startup world?
• et cetera…

Evaluate supposedly smart money with the smart money test.

After you’ve weeded out the dumb money, do the smart money test on everybody else:

Would you add the investor to your board of directors (or advisors) if he didn’t come with money?

If the answer is no, he is mostly money (see below). If the answer is yes, subtract some dilution from his investment since he’s eliminating the cost of a value-add director or advisor. You’re paying for the smart money investor—with his own money!

A smart money investor can be very valuable because he is good enough to be an advisor or board member and he owns enough to really care about the company in good times and bad times. An advisor or independent director won’t own enough of the company to really care if the company is in trouble—his career isn’t on the line like an investor’s.

But! If you’re wrong and the investor you thought was smart doesn’t add value, you can’t fire him like an advisor or director and get your money back. You can only hope to ignore him. Which is why it is safer to…

Assume your investors are mostly money.

Whether you raise smart money or mostly money, you should raise money as if your investors were mostly money. In other words, unbundle money and value-add. Get money on the best terms possible and get value-add on the best terms possible.

You can buy advice and introductions for 1/10^th of the price that most investors charge. An investor will buy 15-30% of your company. An advisor or independent director will require 0.25%-2.5% of your company with a vesting schedule of 2-4 years.

An advisor or independent director will be hand-picked from the population of planet Earth. He should be more effective than someone picked from the vast pool of investors who want to invest in your company.

He will own common stock, unlike an investor who owns preferred stock with additional rights.

And he won’t have conflicting responsibilities to his venture firm, other venture firms, or limited partners.

Money-add first, value-add second.

Value-add is great but it comes after money-add. First, find a money-add investor who will make an investment decision quickly, who is humble and trustworthy, who will treat you like a peer, who shares your vision, and who is betting on you, not the market.

They say that asking the right questions was more important than giving answers. If so, WikiAnswers must have some good ones in their 1 million question archive.

The millionth question in this user-generated wing of Answers.com was in the Science and Environment category, and it was “Are there readily available substitutes for gold in industrial applications?” Unfortunately, the question has not been answered yet, but it doesn’t really matter; WikiAnswers is proving to be a very valuable knowledge repository and a good place to search for an answer if your favorite search engine doesn’t give you anything of value.

ComScore data shows that WikiAnswers is growing fast, being the second-fastest growing domain of the top 1500 web domains, which sounds a bit ambiguous since it’s not really a TLD; it’s a subdomain of Answer.com. However, the million questions themselves speak enough about the users’ interest in the service. This accomplishment is even more significant when you remember that Google’s equivalent of this service (albeit admittedly different in nature, Google Answers had selected experts answering the questions and charging for it) Google Answers, was one of the rare Google services which have been discontinued.

After nearly a year of development, NYC based Fusebox has announced the private beta of an Adobe Flex based presentation platform entitled Empressr. Participation in the private beta is scheduled to last for the next month, prior to an early 2008 release featuring Adobe AIR – a tool enabling developers to deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop.

Empressr is devoted to creative presentations through a combination of “Uploading, Linking, Creating, and Sharing.” The platform, however, boasts several differentiating features – all connected to the use of Adobe Flex. By using the Flex platform, Empressr enables simple incorporation of rich media items such as video, images, charts, etc. Easy access to Flickr, Photobucket, YouTube and others ensure users will be able to create a visual story beyond bullet points and stagnant images.

Empressr also removes cross-platform problems thanks to Flex’s focus on identical performance across all major browser and operating systems. Previously, the use of unique fonts or specialized graphics was problematic to presentation builders, but will be made possible through Empressr.

Empressr is not alone in their quest to improve the process of building presentations. Most recently, MyPlick modified their slideshow creation tool to work with Google presentations. There is also a little known Microsoft tool called PowerPoint which continues to attract users

Popout

Remember Digg’s top user list? The one that got removed by Digg admins, and then kept reappearing in unofficial form (and exists to this day in some places)? Well, StumbleUpon never had an official user top list, but now it has an unofficial one: StumbleRank.

StumbleRank is a simple site which lists the top StumbleUpon users according to the number of pages, photos and videos they’ve submitted, as well as the number of their fans and reviews. The rankings are updated every 12 hours. By default, the top users are sorted by the number of submitted pages (the top guy has submitted a mindblowing 139693 pages), but you can sort them according to any of the above criteria.

You can also search for users or add new ones, but this feature doesn’t seem to be working yet, which is not surprising since the site is somewhere between an early beta and a preview stage. Still, it’s nice to see that StumbleUpon is getting the same kind of love as Digg, and this little tool will surely inspire many a StumbleUpon user to keep clicking on that toolbar.

Last night we outlined the details emerging about Google’s social networking initiative, OpenSocial. Below are some screenshots of OpenSocial in action that we didn’t have time to include in that post.

Most of these shots show the integration of iLike and Flixster applications with social networks on Ning. A few show the integration of applications with orkut and hi5. We’ve also included an overview document below.

Update: See Marc Andreessen’s screencast here.

Awww…their first outage. It’s more of a right of passage than anything.

Newly launched Hulu is showing a big, fat 404 error on their home page right now. It’s too bad, because I’ve become somewhat hooked on it over the last few days. Despite my constant criticism over the summer, I really like the service they launched.

Hulu videos seem to be streaming just fine at AOL Video.

And since Hulu isn’t available anywhere except the U.S., being down in the middle of the night PST isn’t so bad. Let’s hope this billion dollar company can keep the light on, though, because we’re watching. And waiting.

Update: aaaaand they’re back. Up at 2 am PST, which means confirmed downtime was just one hour.

Rumor has it that Israeli video startup 5Min, which has user-uploaded “how to” videos, has raised another $5 million in cash, from Spark Capital.

We covered the startup recently - think YouTube with special features like slow motion to make the videos more useful. Our original profile is here.

Ouch! How Not To Do An Angel Round

The company previously raised $300,000 in angel funding. For those entrepreneurs who are curious about the economics of angel rounds, the details around 5min are interesting. In their case, it was ugly. An Israeli (print) magazine called Globes recently got their hands on the capitalization table of 5min and published the details. The angels ended up with nearly half the company for that $300k, leaving the three founders (the first three on the list) and all other employees to split the rest.

It’s rare that this kind of information about a company is published publicly, but it shows how angels can squeeze a company if they have the negotiating leverage.

MoFuse, the service for converting your website into a mobile site, is launching its public beta in a couple of days. We first mentioned MoFuse here, when the company launched its private beta. It’s since gained about 1,000 registered users, serving up about 30,000 mobile page views each week.

With MoFuse, there are some additional custom options that most other mobile website converters don’t have, such as a WYSIWYG editor and custom color options. It also acts as a mobile portal and ad network, which you can participate in and earn a 50% split in its rev-share model. A similar service is Mowser.

PayPerPost has changed its name to IZEA, which is an effort to better organize its multiple web properties. Under the IZEA umbrella, there’s also Zookoda, BloggersChoiceAwards, RockStartup, RSSBrief, URLBrief, and BlogInSpace, to name a few.

And that’s not all IZEA has up its sleeves. This name change aligns with the company’s launching of a new service, code named Argus, which will be revealing its alpha version next week at PostieCon, the company’s annual user conference. Not many details have been given about Argus, other than what we picked up on during its logo vote, but it will go along with most of what IZEA is about–marketers and bloggers, enabling them to become one and the same, operating from a single account. There will be reporting tools, open APIs, analytics, social networking features, and other management tools.

I imagine Argus will have something to do with the better organization of IZEA’s several operating websites, with a unified distribution service of some sort, which can be leveraged by both web publishers and advertisers.

Semantic search engine Hakia has just released a new social networking feature, called Meet Others (MO). The basic idea is to "meet others" who asked the same query. This is something I've never seen in a search engine before - and actually I'm not convinced that social networking is a good fit with search. But let's take a look at how this works, using an example provided to us by Hakia:

1. You ask a query and then receive your search results:

2. You will see an icon in the top-right of search results that says "Meet Others who asked the same query". If you click on the button, you enter into a room (if the room exists) of people who have a) asked the same or similar query; and b) decided to post a message to the room.

3. You can either post a message or contact someone who has already posted a message. To post, you only need to authenticate your email address - there is no other personal info or registration required. You can choose the method you'd like to be contacted: via email (which is masked), or IM (Skype of MSN). So if a user has IM contact enabled, you can start chatting with that person with one click.

There is a voting system too, which together with message age determines how long messages stay in the room for.

Conclusion

Hakia MO kind of resembles Yahoo! Answers, in that you are basically asking a question and then getting feedback from other users. However Hakia points out that MO is not a collaborative search result voting system. They are calling MO a "peer-to-peer transactional platform". Rather than Yahoo! Answers, Hakia says that MO most resembles Craigslist - because "users post content and there are no registration requirements."

In evaluating Hakia HO, I'm in two minds about the usefulness of social networking in a search engine. On one hand, it enables you to join groups of like-minded users in a very specific topic. I'm a big Velvet Underground fan for example, so if I search for "velvet underground" then it might be useful and/or enjoyable for me to join a "room" full of VU fans and begin conversations.

On the other hand, social networking is not something I am usually looking for in a search engine. I use search engines to gather information - in and out. Once I get what I came for, I'm outa there. So, will enough users join topic-focused rooms to make Hakia's MO a compelling feature?

I guess we'll find out, but it's an open question worth seeing the results of. Google would probably be very interested to see if they can integrate social networking into their search homepage, given their new OpenSocial APIs. Although, Hakia says they have a patent application on MO - so maybe Google won't be able to do it anyway!

What do you think: do search and social networking go together? Or should they be kept separate?

Disclosure: Hakia is a sponsor of our network blog AltSearchEngines and recently they signed up as a Read/WriteWeb sponsor for November.

Over the past 10 years, Corel, Sun, IBM and others have tried to compete with Microsoft in the office software business, but thus far none of them have been able to take a significant chunk of Microsoft's large market share, which generates revenues exceeding $15 billion each year. These companies have tried everything; including Sun open sourcing their StarOffice suite and releasing it as the free OpenOffice. Yet, even this very compelling move has not been able to make a serious dent in the market.

However, with web 2.0 and the rise of Rich Internet Applications there are renewed hopes for entrepreneurs to be able to compete with Microsoft's Office juggernaut. Now these smaller players can leverage the sharing & collaboration capabilities of the Internet, remove installation & maintenance frictions, and provide globally accessible office software.

Competitive Landscape

By snapping up Virtual Ubiquity, Adobe has become the latest player in the web office market, but Google, Yahoo!, Zoho, and even Microsoft, are all established players in the game as well. Let's take a look at all of the major contenders and their strategies:

Google Apps

Google, whose web office solutions are based on AJAX, probably has the strongest and most clear online office strategy among the big companies. In order to provide offline capabilities (still a must for many, especially outside the USA) Google developed Google Gears, which is a set of browser plugins and Javascript libraries that enable AJAX applications to run offline.

Google built its web office suite via acquisitions. The startups they have acquired are: Gtalkr (instant messaging), Writely (word processing), iRows (spreadsheets), JotSpot (wiki), Tonic Systems (presentations), and Zenter (presentations). By acquiring outside talent in the web office space, Google was able to bring together a team of well focused engineers to execute their Google Apps vision.

All of Google's offerings are freely available thanks to their ad-based business model. For enterprises, Google offers an ad-free subscription based model.

Google is betting on centralized servers and thin clients. That's why they are spending $600 million to build a new data center in North Carolina - the purpose is to provide 100% uptime which is a must for enterprise grade acceptability.

Microsoft Office Live

Microsoft, the old stalwart of the office software space has a dilemma: they need to find some way to simultaneously compete with the free web based offerings from their rivals, while not hurting their existing massive revenue stream from their ubiquitous PC-based office suite. For that reason, Microsoft is not in a great position to make bold moves in the web office market.

Perhaps that's why Microsoft's vision is evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. Microsoft doesn't believe in Google's thin client model and it betting that people will continue having strong computers at home and in the office. Microsoft is not trying to centralize software, but instead keep it on the client side. In traditional terms, this means more privacy as well.

That's why, with Office Live, Microsoft is centralizing only the data storage tier. Microsoft's assumption is that every computer will have Microsoft Office installed - that's why they are readying the release of a free, limited and ad-supported version of their Office suite. Further, like Google, Microsoft recently invested $550 million to build a massive data center in San Antonio, with the purpose of providing full availability for its upcoming enterprise grade services.

Making Office free and universally accessible seems like a good idea, but personally, I'm skeptical of the user satisfaction level in a world where all applications are shifting to the web.

Yahoo! / Zimbra

Yahoo! made a late entry to the web office market by acquiring Zimbra for $350 million in mid-September. Zimbra is certainly a great web-based enterprise application provider and will bring a lot to Yahoo!, but Zimbra focuses mainly on groupware features and competes directly with Microsoft Exchange - not Microsoft Office. It is not yet known what Yahoo! will do with Zimbra. They could choose to focus on its office functions (spreadsheets, word processor) and take them out of beta. Or, alternatively, it may use Zimbra to position itself as the leading email communications company, with both hosted, ad-supported (Y! Mail) and ad-free, enterprise (Zimbra) offerings, rather than compete directly in the contentious online office market.

In any case, by following Zimbra's approach, Yahoo! appears to be betting on a decentralized office 2.0 structure. Maybe that's because Yahoo! does not want to invest in beefy server farms like their rivals, which is risky, and possibly is more concerned about privacy than others.

Adobe / Virtual Ubiquity

Yahoo! was not the only major player to enter the web office space in September: Adobe's Virtual Ubiquity acquisition seemed to announce that company's intention to compete for online office market share. Adobe uses its Flash and Flex technologies to power its fledgling office suite. However, there are some obvious concerns here:

• Adobe is inexperienced compared to rivals such as Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft at offering hosted services
• Enterprise-grade acceptability of Flash technology as an office suite backend is questionable

Alternatively, Adobe may have less ambitious plans and the reason why they snapped up Virtual Ubiquity may be to showcase the possibilities that the Flex platform can bring.

Zoho

Zoho is not as big or as well funded as the aforementioned players, but offers perhaps the most complete office suite on the Internet. Similar to Google, Zoho has a fully centralized approach and its solutions are based on Javascript technologies. Zoho's suite includes a word processor, presentation app, spreadsheets, wiki, CRM, web conferencing, project management, and much more. However, one problem that Zoho faces is that their applications are loosely connected. There is no single sign-on and sharing capabilities are weak or nonexistent between most of its parts. Trust among enterprise users may also be an issue - large corporations may feel more comfortable keeping their data with a public company. These factors put Zoho in a good position for potential acquisition.

Others

Smaller players, such as ThinkFree, suffer from being based on deprecated technologies like Java Applets. There is also gOffice, which seriously lacks usability.

Surprise Player, meebo?

meebo is one of the most successful online instant messaging clients, but with this week's annoncement of a platform there now exists the potential for a lot of development to occur around their user base. By allowing third-parties to tap into meebo's communication platform and users, the company's new development platform could actually be used to create intriguing web office applications. Below is a mockup of what a meebo platform app might look like:

The picture above imagines Google Presentations embedded into meebo.

Conclusion

Finally, we may see new web office attempts from Sun (JavaFX) and Laszlo (OpenLaszlo) - because, like Adobe, they are working hard to prove the readiness of their RIA platforms for the enterprise.

In any case, the future is online and all software makers will need to make their applications available through the web. For me, the big question is whether Google's thin client model will work or not. This model would lead us to live with dumb machines that hook into Google's server farms to do any real computation.

What do you think the future of Rich Internet Applications and specifically the online office will look like? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

This might be a bit hard to grasp if you’re not an online advertising guru, so bear with me. eXelate is a company founded in 2006. which just received $4 million in first-round financing from Carmel Ventures.

That was the easy part. Understanding what they actually do can be tricky, especially if you don’t speak marketingese which is pretty much the only language services like these use in their PR materials. eXelate is setting up eXelate Targeting eXchange, a marketplace that tells you what kind of users are likely to visit what site. So, if you need to deploy a baseball-related ad, they’ll tell you which sites in their network are visited by baseball fans.

Thus, the ads aren’t contextual, like on Google AdSense, but behavioral. The user’s browsing habits and interests determine which ad will be shown, not the content of the site itself. This way - or so they say - ads work better, and ad networks get more money.

Another product that eXelate is launching is called Delayed Ads, which are basically shown to the user later, when they visit a site that’s affiliated with your ad network.

It’s quite an interesting beast, this behavioral ad business, but eXelate has some big obstacles to overcome, the biggest being the fact that big sites like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have enough behavioral data to know stuff about you before you do and can use this data to display ads with extreme precision if they choose to do so. However, companies like Google have been known to buy companies like eXelate, and although billions have already been spent on online advertising by the Big Three, perhaps a new approach can still inject new life into the online ad business.

Also see: The Gphone is coming; how Google could rewrite the rules

We’ve been waiting a long time to hear from Google about its mobile plans and the so-called Gphone or Google-powered phones. According to one report, that wait may be over soon.

The Wall Street Journal today said Google is expected to announce within the next two weeks advanced software and services that would allow handset makers to bring Google-powered phones to market by next summer. Google’s goal is to make applications and services as accessible on cellphones as they are on the Internet.

To compliment the WSJ’s story, Reuters noted that Google is in active talks with Verizon, the No. 2 carrier in the U.S., about putting Google applications on phones it offers.

And in early October, The New York Times posited that the Google phone may not be a phone at all but a mobile operating system.

Obviously speculation abounds, which the tech community thrives on. The WSJ believes that Google-powered phones will wrap together several Google applications like the search engine, Google Maps, YouTube, and Gmail — no surprise there. It makes sense.

The WSJ says the “most radical element” of Google’s plan is its push to make software for the phone(s) open “right down to the operating system” — again, no surprise. It makes sense.

If the Google phones are “open”, independent software developers would gain access to the tools they need to build additional phone features, something that Nokia is already experimenting with. Apple will also be opening up, to some degree at least, early next year.

Of course all of this — and what’s been written the past two months — is speculation. It’s time we hear from Google.

Original concepts: last100 and Lorin Wood.

Also see: The Gphone is coming; how Google could rewrite the rules

Now you have no excuse for missing that Golden State Warriors game. You will be able to watch all games televised by ESPN and TNT this NBA season no matter where you are and what equipment you have on hand.

Thanks to new digital rights, ESPN and TNT will start the NBA season by streaming games live on their broadband outlets — ESPN360 and TNT Overtime (available on TNT.tv and NBA.com). You can watch games on TV, on your phone, or on a computer. (MediaDailyNews.)

“Part of the point is that when we get exclusive games, we can broadcast them anywhere,” John Skipper, the executive vice president for ESPN content, told The York Times.

The digital rights, announced in June, will pay the NBA $7.4 billion through the 2015-2016 season. As part of the deal, ESNP and TNT can deploy their digital rights this season. The first year of the TV portions of the contract does not start until after next season.

For ESPN, it can stream games on the Mobile TV service that is available on Verizon’s MediaFlo, as well as on ESPN360. The rights also allow for live and on-demand streaming of ESPN studio shows and live audio streaming of their radio and TV shows dedicated to the NBA.

TNT, which as the same rights as ESPN, will use its broadband service, TNT Overtime, to stream its games, highlights and other NBA programming. TNT can also stream its games to cellphones, offer NBA podcasts, and expand league content into areas like fantasy games.

The NBA also has granted digital rights to the networks on platforms not yet available.

Wonder how Yao Ming will look on that tiny cellphone display.

“Here at Google, we take our user’s privacy very seriously. In fact, we’re not even allowing ourselves to joke about this topic – yes, it’s that serious. To give you an idea, here is some of the data we don’t pass on to anyone outside our 10,000+ employee company (provided there’s no subpoena making us pass it on, and provided there’s nothing we define as “imminent harm“; and even if we pass something on, we make sure third parties have privacy policies like ours):

• Your registration confirmation containing the information on sites you signed up for, and the password you’ve chosen. It is safe with us in Gmail.
• Your web search history containing your dreams and wishes, and the one time you googled your ex – these are all protected by us.
• The Google Toolbar URL data transmitted to us in case you enabled PageRank checking. We keep this very safe at Google.
• The love messages you sent via Google Talk in June using the off-the-record option. Googlers won’t tell a thing!
• The sites you clicked on in Google results, especially those sites (you know what we mean). Quiet like a fish.
• Your private information which you provided to social network Orkut. It’s completely safe with Google.
• The kind of sites you visit which contain AdSense or (soon) DoubleClick ads. We value your privacy with this data.
• The things you bought using Google Checkout, including that strange DVD from March 14th, 3:30pm. Our employee’s lips are sealed on that one, and your credit card number is safe with Checkout.
• The content of the confidential company memo you saved in Google Docs, the one about the new direction your company wants to take. Trust us, it’s our secret too now.
• The Hotmail email you send to someone who has a Gmail account. We don’t let others read those!
• Your Google Spreadsheet with your income and taxes since 1999. Our employees won’t share with anyone!
• Your Google Presentation containing those hush-hush product releases for next year. No kiss and tell.
• The one time you researched bomb building on Google Groups. We turn a blind eye on that one, perhaps you researched for a friend.
• Your embarrassing party pics of your private Picasa album titled “spring_break”. We understand what it could mean to your future employer, so no word on it from us.
• The content of your Blogspot blog in which you go through great efforts to post anonymously, as the diary-style is quite telling. No sir, no one will find out.
• That email you were typing but then canceled, which we had transmitted to our server thanks to Gmail’s Ajax auto-saving. We know you didn’t want that to share, so we won’t either!
• Every single sentence you translated in the Google Translator. Every single one is safe with us.
• The sites you visited while installing the Google Web Accelerator proxy. We don’t want to share them, really.
• Those random notes you’ve been collecting at our Google Notebook service. Like Fort Knox.
• The one time you searched for “Falun Gong” on Google.cn. Our support person responding to the Chinese government knows that might have just been an accident.
• The restaurant you looked up in Google Maps last night, and the calendar entry you then added, and the subsequent mail you wrote to Susan. Shhh....
• The Google Page Creator draft of your new homepage which you then decided to trash fearing your neighbor would object to your political views. Secret, we promise!

As you can see – and we don’t think we need to offer additional proof for this other than our word, like the time we said we “don’t do evil” and then never did evil – all your data is safe with us and our employees. Again, except for those subpoeanas (and assuming we will not be hacked, and that no service exploits will be found), but to quote from our PDF on the subject of log retention which we linked from our blog ...

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As a matter of policy, we don’t provide specifics on law enforcement requests to Google.>>

... you can see we don’t even share info on what we’re sharing – we’re that privacy aware! In fact, we urge you to increase your trust with us if there’s still a doubt lingering with you. Because, in the words of our chief executive officer Eric Schmidt this year:

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And:

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Please visit our new Google Privacy Channel at YouTube to find out more. We won’t tell anyone which videos you watched. Unless they’re really funny ones. (Kidding!!!)”