Business News

The past year was viewed by many as the ” year of the user” in the tech world. Perhaps in no place was this more true than in online video.

Users shared, downloaded, and discussed videos online in greater numbers than ever before, making video sharing services amongst the most popular sites on the internet.

The explosion of online video in 2006 also, however, brought the familiar subject of copyright infringement back to center stage as studios came in search of royalties from copyrighted videos.

As the studios began to see just how much money was to be made from online video, they began to form new partnerships and launch new services to compete with the already-booming video-sharing sites.

2006 was a banner year for YouTube. The video-sharing site, which was launched in February of 2005, claimed over 40% of the online video market share by May.

By October, YouTube was logging more than 100 million video downloads per day and by the end of the year, the site had become the number six most popular on the internet, according to Alexa Web Search.

The biggest news to concern YouTube, however, had nothing to do site traffic. In October, Google announced that it had agreed to purchase the video-sharing site for $1.65bn in stock. The deal was Google’s largest purchase to date and gave the search giant control of nearly half of all online video-sharing.

While writing about the Google purchase, Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li offered an explanation for the phenomenal success of YouTube.

“YouTube is a gem because it figured out what Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and all the other video players in the marketplace could not,” wrote Li.

“It is not about the video, it is about the community around the video.”

Members of the community were some of the biggest stars on YouTube in 2006. The saga of ” Lonelygirl115″ garnered worldwide media attention over the summer. Everyone from 78 year-old pensioners to blender salesmen became cult celebrities through YouTube.

With the building of that community, however, came a slew of legal headaches for YouTube. Users routinely posted videos of copyrighted programs and films, and as YouTube’s success soared, so did interest from the studios whose work was being posted.

YouTube avoided litigation from Universal by signing a licensing deal with the studio just before it filed suit against two other video-sharing sites, and the merger with Google allowed the site to take advantage of Google’s deals with Sony BMG and Warner Music Group.

Youtube, which has a policy of removing any copyrighted material at the request of the owner, was forced to take down tens of thousands of videos in two high-profile claims from Comedy Central and the Japan Society for the Rights of Authors, Composers, and Publishers.

Some companies decided to introduce video-sharing services of their own rather than fight the battle over copyrights. In August, Sony an nounced the purchase of video-sharing site Grouper, and early in December rumors began to surface that four major media networks were discussing the launch of a video-sharing site that some dubbed a “YouTube killer.” Even CurrentTV, a television network that airs user-generated content, attempted to get in on the video-sharing market by launching a joint-venture with Yahoo.

While TV and film studios attempted to make the jump from the TV to the computer, Apple made a move to go the opposite direction.

Staying true to their old tagline, Steve Jobs and co. decided to “Think Different” and the company announced a service that lets users download feature-length movies over their internet connection and watch them on their PC, iPod, or even their TV.

The iTunes Movie Store allows users to download movies for prices ranging from $9.99 to $14.99 and transfer them to their iPods or to a set-top box dubbed the “iTV” that the company plans to release early in 2007.

Following the announcement, Jupiter Research vice president and research director Michael Gartenberg told vnunet.com that “the big news is that Apple wants to be in every room of your home.”

Gartenberg’s sentiments were backed up by Jobs, who outilined a vision of ” itunes in the den, the living room, the car and the pocket.”

Apple appears to not be the only company with this vision heading into 2007. YouTube recently announced a deal to distribute mobile video with wireless carrier Cingular, and in October Microsoft’s Zune portable media player was released, sporting wireless networking capabilities and the ability to play video. While 2006 was the year of user-video, 2007 may become the year of mobile video.

Coversant, the first provider of inter-enterprise Collaborative Messaging software, today announced the release of SoapBox Platform 2007 — the industry’s most advanced offering for custom development and deployment of highly scalable collaborative IM solutions. Independently verified tests(1) proved performance benchmarks of up to 250,000 concurrent users and 5,000 messages per second on a single SoapBox Server — further making it the most affordable platform for scaling instant messaging applications to serve large user populations. These results are nearly double the performance of competing XMPP-based servers in the Enterprise Instant Messaging space.RIPL Corp. of Seattle, an operator of next-generation social networking applications, recently selected the SoapBox Platform 2007 as its collaborative messaging solution of choice after a battery of independent tests at HP Labs. “We looked carefully at the other XMPP messaging solutions out there,” explains Bill Messing, a former executive at MSN and Classmates.com who is now CEO of RIPL. “We agreed on the Coversant platform after determining it was the lowest cost to own and operate, both per server and per user. They are worlds ahead of the competitors we evaluated in both scalability and responsiveness, and we can see them coming to dominate their market within several years.”

SoapBox Platform 2007 includes updates to the company’s flagship SoapBox Server and the SoapBox Studio suite of software development kits, the latter recently made freely available (see “Coversant Open Sources SDKs,” 11/28/06). The SoapBox Platform is ideal for independent software vendors (ISVs), Internet service providers (ISPs), and other custom development organizations that build and deploy community-driven web applications or mobile service offerings for social networking, online auction, online community, and other Web 2.0 destinations. For corporate enterprises, SoapBox Platform 2007 supports increased numbers of federated servers across more domains to foster secure collaboration across business boundaries to all of a company’s external customers, partners, and suppliers. (more…)

Google (GOOG) unveiled a slew of new features to its Google Finance site late Monday. The new functionality is scheduled to be publicly announced on Google’s company blog Tuesday and is intended to help Google Finance improve a service that has lagged far behind those offered by rivals Yahoo! (YHOO) , Microsoft (MSFT) and AOL (TWX) since its inception in March 2006. Google’s most recent changes — a revamped user interface, a bigger bundling of historic data to work with its charts, a new way to sort through companies based on the day’s news, the ability to import and customize portfolios, a new homepage design that allows users to monitor sector performance — are the first steps of what hopefully marks a greater emphasis on a service that should get a lot more attention from the search giant. Indeed, many of the new additions are a step in the right direction and a marked improvement, such as the streamlined user interface and the feature allowing investors to easily track sector performance. The new interface makes the site considerably nimbler and easier to navigate. The sector feature enables investors to be tipped off to broader market movements — such as an overall rotation into basic materials or health care, for example — that can be more telling than the action in just one stock. Other features, meanwhile, continue to be driven by Google’s penchant to put what it sees as its strong suits — be it interactivity or search — ahead of a hardheaded consideration of what would best serve investors who use the site. The integration of up to 40 years of historic data into its charts, for example, is an impressive accomplishment. But it’s tough to see how having the stock price of General Motors (GM) in 1972, for example, translates into a big advantage for investors. Even more so than vision, the biggest challenge for Google Finance will be its alarming lack of resources, especially considering the company’s hordes of engineers.

All Cylinders Not Firing

Google Finance has fewer than 10 engineers working on the product, with four of those devoting a scant 20% of their time to the effort under Google’s famed system of allowing engineers to devote one-fifth of their time on test projects that are not their main staple, says Katie Stanton, product manager of Google Finance. But when it comes to its Finance site, Google should be putting a lot more muscle behind the rollout. Unlike many of Google’s heavily anticipated product launches, including Gmail — the company’s widely adopted and acclaimed email system — or Google’s News Site, Google Finance has yet to make a big splash in the marketplace. Google Finance counted only 579,000 unique users in October, compared with 13.7 million for market leader Yahoo! Finance, according to researcher Nielsen Net Ratings. Microsoft’s Finance site saw 11.7 million unique users in the same period, while AOL Finance logged 10.3 million. It’s still too early in the game to pass a verdict on Google Finance, says Stanton, and 2007 will likely be the make-or-break year for the site. Though she acknowledges that the reception to Google Finance has not been spectacular so far, she says that the site was launched sooner than it could have been with an eye to working out kinks based on user feedback. Still, for Google, a company with some 85 identifiable products, the time draws nigh to decide what to keep and what to kill. Letting products languish under the label of experimentation will ultimately drag down the Google brand. The company recently showed that it was capable of doing away with struggling projects when it quashed its lagging Google Answers service — the first time a significant Google project had been publicly scrapped. But the company should take the other road when it comes to Google Finance. A win there would give it more than a strong product in a fast-growing field — it would show that the company was able to apply to successfully leverage its deep technical roots into richer media environments it will increasingly find itself competing in. Trimming down on many other product lines may be the order for Google. But doubling down on its Finance site could be a promising investment.