stimutran-sme.com

The real deciding factor came when Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) met with members of the NAB. They told him that they feared their Web competitors would get a deal done first. Under the terms of the legislation, SoundExchange, the body that collects royalties and is part of the Recording Industry Association of America, has until Dec. 15 to negotiate a new rate. The NAB apparently was worried that the deadline didn’t give the organization enough time to strike its own royalty agreement.

“Berman said ‘Fine, we’ll extend the date until Feb. 15, which gives you two more months to talk,’” said one music-industry source with knowledge of the discussions. “There isn’t anything in the act that prevents traditional broadcasters from reaching their own royalty rate.”

Regardless of whether that’s true, this weekend saw Pandora, a struggling music service, whip up enough support among fans of Web radio to help persuade the House of Representatives to unanimously pass the Webcaster Settlement Act on Saturday, according to multiple people associated with the bill. The proposed legislation is designed to give Internet radio stations added time to negotiate a settlement with the music industry on reduced royalty rates.

Technology companies are supposed to be wide-eyed novices on Capitol Hill. I’ve read that they don’t spread enough money around or aren’t hip to the ways of Washington.

That did the trick, according to the source. Dennis Wharton, an NAB spokesman confirmed Saturday night that the NAB met with Berman and that the deadline was extended. He said the trade organization has dropped its opposition in both houses of Congress.

“You know,” said a fatigued Westergren, “it was a nerve-racking day.”

Two other factors, however, likely played larger roles in getting the bill through the House: the lobbying efforts made by National Public Radio and some 12th-hour deal making to appease traditional radio broadcasters, who were trying to kill the legislation, according to sources.

NPR, the publicly and privately funded nonprofit organization created by Congress in 1970, has plenty of friends in Washington. The group, which produces Webcasts and supports the bill, e-mailed members of Congress on Saturday, explaining how much it needed the legislation and that a deal on a new royalty rate couldn’t be struck without it, sources said.

This means that unless something unforeseen happens, the Webcaster Settlement Act should pass, according to insiders.

According to one Washington lobbyist, phone calls from the public were one of the factors that helped the legislation pass in the House and now have it headed for a Senate vote within the next two days without any major parties gunning for it.

In crunch time, Howard Berman came through
Saturday started with lobbyists for the National Association of Broadcasters “making a huge press in the House, blasting every (Congressional representative’s) office” with appeals to kill the legislation, according to a lobbyist with knowledge of the events.

Then what? Internet radio stations must still reach an agreement with the artists and labels about how much to pay them for streaming their music over the Web. Sources on both sides say they are closer than ever before to a number, and should the Webcasting bill pass in the Senate, they predicted that a deal could be reached as early as next month.

Lower rates are vital to the survival of Internet radio stations, according to Tim Westergren, Pandora’s founder, who pleaded with the public on Friday to call their congressional representatives and demand they support the bill. Webcasters and the music industry are close to reaching an agreement, but if the legislation fails to pass it could push the discussions back months and deliver a financial death blow to some services, Westergren said.

“The upshot is that the deal will force newspapers to become even more dependent on Google than they are today. By handing Google control of up to 90% of paid search and content advertising, Google will exert tremendous power over both newspapers’ ability to reach readers and their ability to generate online advertising revenue,” the group, which represents 18,000 newspaper titles around the globe, said in a statement. “Perhaps never in the history of newspaper publishing has a single, commercial entity threatened to exert this much control over the destiny of the press.”

Meanwhile, sources say U.S. officials are debating whether to challenge the Google-Yahoo revenue-sharing ad deal, or broaden their investigation into Google’s overall dominance in the search advertising market.

Meanwhile, the Newspaper Association of America, which is a member of the WAN and repersents more than 2,000 newspapers in the U.S. and Canada, issued a statement of its own, saying its board had taken no position on the proposed Google-Yahoo ad partnership.

Also on Monday, the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) came out in opposition to the deal, saying it would weaken the competition for search marketing between Google and Yahoo and lead to higher prices and less revenue for newspapers who rely on the companies for a significant portion of their online advertising revenue and on the search engines to drive traffic to their sites.

Updated 3:15 p.m. PDT with newspaper group opposing the deal.

The European Competition Commission decided in mid-July to open a preliminary investigation into the deal’s potential effects on competition in the European market, Jonathan Todd, a spokesman for European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes, told Reuters.

Antitrust regulators in Europe are following in the footsteps of their U.S. counterparts and looking into a proposed advertising deal between Google and Yahoo, Reuters reported on Monday.

European Competition Commission officials did not immediately respond to e-mails seeking comment.

Under the agreement signed in June, Google will provide Yahoo with ads that will run on Yahoo’s search site.

A Google spokesman provided this comment via e-mail: “The agreement is limited in scope to Yahoo’s U.S. and Canadian Web sites, and it will not have any significant effect on Europe. We are of course co-operating with the Commission and are confident that they will reach the same conclusion.”

“What we don’t know how to do is design for complex, closed ecosystems where you have to consider all aspects. There are just no companies that are good at system engineering and sustainability design,” he said.

(Credit:
Martin LaMonica/CNET)

NEW YORK–The solution to climate change boils down to industrial design, contends entrepreneur and inventor Saul Griffith.

After his talk, Griffith said that creating long-lasting products is significantly less polluting than recycling and take-back programs. “Recycling gets you maybe halfway there…but (designers) need to get out of their head that recycling is the full solution.”

“We need to give products to consumers with one-tenth the power consumption and that last ten times as long,” Griffith said. “That implies service economies (for refurbishing or repairing products). Those will be the business models of the future.”

Perhaps the most important technology to reducing personal carbon footprints is videoconferencing, which would allow people at work to avoid polluting air travel, he argued.

Asked how long-lasting products could possibly stay current in the fast-changing technology industry, Griffith said that the “cloud,” or the Internet, could provide updates to chips and devices like cell phones.

Saul Griffith has crunched the numbers on how different aspects of life have contributed to his carbon footprint. He argues that the consumer electronics industry needs to make longer-lasting products to reduce their inherent energy content.

Scientists are increasingly able to measure the carbon contribution of different activities and products. Having run the numbers on how much renewable energy can contribute to reducing carbon emissions, Griffith has concluded that the scale of industrial transformation is enormous.

Updated at 1:20 p.m. PT with corrected language in quotation.

The recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” and several patents, Griffith’s “day job” is president and chief scientist of Makani Power, a company backed by Google.org to generate electricity from kites flying at high altitudes. He also co-founded other ventures, including Optiopia, Squid Labs, Potenco, Instructables.com, and HowToons.

The area of consumer electronics, in particular, needs to make a radical shift from products that are replaced every few months or years to what Griffith called “heirloom” products, like a Mont Blanc pen or Rolex watch that lasts decades. Long-lasting products have a significantly lower embedded carbon footprint, he said.

By exactly accounting for carbon emissions in his personal life, Griffith found that “stuff” that he owned was almost 14 percent of his total carbon footprint in 2007, which was pushed higher than the U.S. national average because of extensive flight travel.

“This is a lot like retooling for World War II when the U.S. made 300,000 aircraft from 1939 to 1945,” he said, adding that refrigerator and auto factories were converted during the war effort. “The reality is that we can do it. We made 10 terawatts of power generation over the last 40 years. We need to do it again, a little quicker, but we have to do it radically different–not with pipelines and fossil fuels this time.”

There is debate how much is an acceptable level of carbon concentration in the atmosphere, but Griffith picked 450 parts per million–corresponding to a 1.5 to 3.5 degree Centigrade temperature increase–because it could avoid the “list of horrors,” such as mass species extinctions and destruction of coral reefs. The level before the industrial revolution was 290 ppm and is now between 380 ppm to 390 ppm, he said.

Griffith gave the keynote speech at the Greener Gadgets conference here on Friday where he ran through a flurry of numbers on energy and climate change to argue that the consumer electronics and IT industry needs to make drastic changes to curb its significant contribution to greenhouse gas emissions.

Videoconferencing

His talk was a reprise of the one he first gave last year, where he crunched the numbers on his personal carbon footprint and calculated how much energy people need to consume daily to keep carbon concentrations at 450 parts per million.

“We can measure all these things now–carbon dioxide, energy, toxics–and the fact that we know the consequences will put a huge amount of pressure on the consumer electronics industry.”

After his talk, he said that designers have shown the ability to make more carbon-friendly products. But what’s lacking is a deep-seated understanding of sustainability across the entire industry’s supply chain.

Of course, what will matter greatly is which shows Syfy will create. And for whom. Maybe, just maybe, it wants to get beyond some of the limiting notions of the phrase “science fiction.” Maybe it will create a new interpretation that is somehow more involving for more people.

The childlike word trend (and there’s nothing wrong with it, IMHO) surely got its thrust in tech. Should the phrase “science fiction” be immune from that?

There has been something of an outpouring of bile directed at NBC for its decision to change the name of the Sci-Fi channel to Syfy.

I know that those who feel that science fiction is an entity to be venerated like the relics of a saint may feel deeply aggrieved, though the Sci-Fi channel doesn’t actually present all that much programming that might strictly be defined as science fiction.

I will attempt to forget, for at least a moment, that “Syf” is the Polish word for “total bloody mess.” (It seems to have its roots in the lesions of syphilis.) And “Syfy” would be, well, the plural.

Moreover, isn’t there something a little strange when so many who live, breathe, and adore brands called Google, Twitter, Yahoo and, my favorite this week, Aardvark, and whose lexicon comprises such abbreviations as “luv,” “LOL,” and “IMHO,” suddenly toss spit at science fiction being reduced to Syfy?

Sometimes words or phrases linger in the language and take on personas that those who love them didn’t quite mean them to have. Sometimes, and it’s happening far more, thanks to the Web, words and phrases are exposed so much, they mutate beyond anyone’s control. “Liberal” is one. “Conservative” is another.

Then I’ll feel free to admit that the name change might not be so terrible.

Science fiction sometimes feels a little like that–an exclusive and aging club for those who possess the trappings of membership: some facet of supposed nerdism, some commitment to scientific superiority.

On the other hand, there’s Syfy’s tagline: “Imagine Greater.” I’d love to try to defend it (and fail). But my attention is being pulled toward imagining a greater dance floor version of Steve Wozniak. Is that within the realm of human possibility?

Will he get a new license plate?

However, I suspect that somewhere beyond the arguments for wanting a name the channel can trademark is an argument that the phrase “science fiction” has become a little old.

Perhaps one of the biggest of these is the word “literature.” Too often, literature has been uttered with a very fine British accent in an attempt to make it the Ritz-Carlton of books. Instead, it’s become the Buckingham Palace. A place where some might stop and stare, but which far too few could imagine they’ll actually enjoy. So they don’t bother trying.

(Credit: CC Xurble)

“The mobile-device-market slowdown has continued more rapidly than previously expected since Nokia issued an update on November 14, 2008,” the company said in a statement. “The industry continues to be impacted by the effects of a global consumer pullback in spending, currency volatility, and decreased availability of credit.”

Nokia on Thursday lowered fourth-quarter sales expectations for the second time in a month. The world’s largest maker of mobile phones also warned it can no longer predict its market share for the quarter.

The company also said it doesn’t see the situation getting much better in 2009, with an expectation of sales falling by at least 5 percent from 2008 levels. While Nokia has previously said it expected a “market decline” in 2009, it hadn’t specified how much of a decline.

In addition to the weakening economy, Nokia is also facing more competition in the smartphone market, especially from companies such as Research In Motion, which sells the BlackBerry devices, and Apple, which sells the
iPhone.

The company also blamed “insufficient visibility in the marketplace” to confirm its previous expectation of 38 percent or better market share in the fourth quarter.

While it’s evident that consumer spending has slowed down in the industrialized Western markets, Nokia executives also pointed to slower consumer spending in developing markets. Nokia has been very successful over the past few years selling low-cost devices in these markets. The company had believed that these developing markets would be relatively immune to the slowdown hitting developed countries. But the company is finding that not to be the case.

That said, the company did say it expects to gain market share in 2009.

As competition in the handset market intensifies, Nokia is also focusing more attention on its services. The company also announced this week enhancements to its messaging and mapping services that can be used on mobile devices as well as PCs.

Nokia has also taken a hit in the high-end smartphone market. Even though the company still dominates the market with about 42.4 percent market share for the third quarter, according to market researcher Gartner, it did see sales slow in that quarter.

Before the start of its Capital Markets Day in New York City, Nokia broke the bad news to analysts and investors that it sees more trouble ahead in the current quarter. Specifically, the company expects device volume to fall below the 330 million units it estimated in mid-November that it would sell for the quarter.

However, Nokia isn’t sitting still. Earlier this week, it announced its latest smartphone, the N97, which offers a tilted, full QWERTY keypad and a touch screen. The new device, which will sell for a whopping 550 euros ($695), will be available first in Europe.

Nokia wasn’t the only company to be hit in the third quarter. This week, Gartner reported that overall sales of smartphones had slowed to their lowest level since the firm started tracking the sector.

Update at 9:15 a.m. PST: Clarification made to Nokia’s market share expectations for the fourth quarter.

Shell is certainly just one super-player with its eye on cellulosic ethanol.

Royal Dutch Shell and Codexis have expanded their partnership to see if biofuels made from non-food sources can be commercially viable.

Codexis, which signed a 5-year deal with the energy giant in 2007, is known for developing a “super enzyme” for its biocatalysts.

As part of the deal, Shell increased its equity stake in Codexis, resulting in another board seat. Shell already had one board seat from the deal made in 2007.

Biocatalysts are used in cellulosic ethanol production to break down the agricultural by-products into sugars so that they can then be fermented and distilled into biofuel.

Many companies are looking into “renewable petroleum” and research institutions have been looking at enzymes to speed up the cellulosic ethanol production process. General Motors is an investor inMascoma, and was one of the sponsors of a recent study that found cellulosic ethanol could compete with gas.

The deal, announced by the two companies announced this week, is an expansion of a pilot project Codexis was working on with Shell to improve biocatalysts in conjunction with Iogen Energy.

One start-up company, Sapphire Energy, is even looking at using algae as a non-food source.

“In just over two years, our biofuels collaboration with Shell has grown from a pilot project to a significant multifaceted program to create commercial-scale biofuels from non-food sources,” Alan Shaw, Codexis president and CEO, said in a statement.

(Credit:
VentureBeat)

Chris Shipley, host and producer of the Demo conferences, is stepping down in 2010 to make way for Matt Marshall, CEO and editor in chief of the tech blog VentureBeat.

Shipley acknowledges the rough seas for start-ups now, but says, “I’m the eternal optimist. We innovate our way out of these economic issues.” But is she perhaps leaving Demo at just the right time? “I have no rosy glasses,” she says, “but Demo is a platform that has survived at least four economic cycles. I think it will continue to do well.”

At the next Demo event, Demo09, which will be held March 1 in Palm Desert, Calif., Marshall will share the stage with Shipley. He refers to this show and the one after it as his “internship.” Afterward, his company will be at the helm of this old conference.

It will, of course, be a difficult year for the conference business. Marshall says, “I do recognize that it will be a hard time,” during this recession, and he says that, “We’ll be watching the conference business…and tweaking the model.” He did not rule out reconsidering the steep presentation fees for the show, but notes that it has worked so far for Demo–even under the TechCrunch attack. “Fifty to sixty companies keep showing up,” he said. “They say it’s worth it.”

Unlike TechCrunch, which gives stage time to presenting companies gratis after a vetting and selection process, Demo charges a significant fee for presenters, which TechCrunch conference co-producer Jason Calacanis has called “payola.” Demo, however, also selects companies for the stage based first on merit, not on ability to pay.

New Demo honcho Matt Marshall.

Beyond Web 2.0
Demo also casts a wider net. Non-Web products like the Moobella ice cream maker and the Pleo robotic pet were shown at Demo. TechCrunch focuses on earlier-stage companies and primarily Web-based products.

For its part, VentureBeat gets a shiny new revenue stream. Only the biggest blogs and online news outlets make enough revenue to support a reasonable-size staff of content creators. All others–TechCrunch included–would not likely be sustainable without an additional revenue stream, like events. Publishing company IDG will continue to own the franchise, and will support the show logistically, but from 2010 on, Venture Beat will create the content for the conference and will share in the revenues from it. “We have a pretty good profit share,” Marshall said.

Demo has been a fixture of the start-up community for years, but got an uptick in awareness when Michael Arrington, founder and editor in chief at TechCrunch, proclaimed, “Demo needs to die,” and in 2008 ran his competing start-up event, TechCrunch 50, at the same time (but in a different city) as DemoFall 2008.

Shipley staying engaged
While Shipley is stepping out of the limelight at Demo, she will stay on the advisory board and continue to circulate in the start-up world. Her consultancy, Guidewire Group, works with start-ups to “help validate their business strategies and accelerate their growth,” she said. “Demo gave me a chance to have short, intense relationships with companies. Guidewire allows us to get even closer, and help them build businesses.”

CNET News will have in-depth coverage from Demo09.

Marshall takes pains to differentiate between the TechCrunch50 mission and Demo’s, which is “focused on companies that have something to launch for the market.” Data from the competing 2008 events bears this out to a degree: 42 percent of the products demo’d at TechCrunch50 were immediately available for use by the public; at Demo, about 67 percent were.

With the VentureBeat relationship, Demo will get something it’s been needing for all of its 13 years: An online community that lasts beyond the conference itself. Marshall will continue in his role as editor in chief of VentureBeat.

I use two tests: The SunSpider benchmark from the WebKit project, and the V8 benchmark suite from Google, both of which run a variety of computing tasks rather than real-world applications. Such synthetic benchmarks are always tricky business, often not aging well as technology improves, but these two are widely used.

The upshot: Chrome wins both tests handily, with
Firefox in second place on Sunspider and Safari in second place on the V8 benchmark.

The results are an average of three runs on a dual-core Lenovo T61 running Windows XP with 3GB of memory. Results may differ on Apple Macs, of course, and of course bear in mind that there’s a lot more to browsing than just JavaScript speed.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

On SunSpider 0.9, the results were a more even distribution. Chrome scored 1,775–and bear in mind that here smaller numbers are better–to Firefox’s 2,671, Safari 4’s 4,257, Opera’s 5,513, Safari 3.2.2’s 6,345, and IE’s comparatively feeble 7,168.

JavaScript is a programming language that powers not just innumerable ordinary Web sites, but also many Web-based applications such as Google Docs. With the computing industry’s major push to cloud computing, Web application performance is increasingly important, and there’s a race on to see who’s got the best JavaScript engine. JavaScript engines even have become a named feature, with Chrome’s V8, Firefox’s TraceMonkey, Opera’s Futhark and upcoming Carakan, and now the
Safari’s newly branded Nitro, which is Apple’s version of WebKit’s Squirrelfish.

Google’s latest version of Chrome has claimed the lead in my JavaScript speed tests, but Apple’s new Safari 4 beta is the first browser to challenge it on Google’s own performance benchmark.

Also in my tests are Safari version 3.2.2 and the beta of 4.0, Mozilla Firefox 3.1 beta 2, Microsoft’s
Internet Explorer 8 release candidate, and Opera’s version 10 alpha.

On Google's V8 suite of JavaScript tests, the Safari 4 beta was the only browser to get close to Chrome.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

The Safari 4 beta had a respectable showing on version 3 of Google’s tests, for which a larger number is better. Its score of 1,396 meant it’s the first browser to come anywhere near Chrome, which this time around achieved a score of 2,240. Opera scored 202, Firefox 181, Safari 3.2.2 173, and IE a pathetic 63.

On the SunSpider test, the new Safari 4 beta scored third place.

I’m using raw versions of these browsers, though. Chrome is available in three versions, stable, beta, and developer preview, and I’m using the latter, which is the least stable. The latest Chrome developer preview, 2.0.164.0, includes a significant new component to the V8 engine.

“We’re opening up the platform to anyone who wants to put their video service on this box,” Wired cites Wood as saying. “We’re going to release the software developer kit, so anyone can publish any channel, and users can access Web content on their TVs.”

It’s been known for a while that Netflix and Roku’s four-month-old relationship isn’t exactly a monogamous one. But it looks like Roku is hoping to play the video-streaming field even more than we initially thought.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

“They made a small investment in us…and they knew from the beginning that we were interested in working with other (content providers), just like they’re interested in partnering with other boxes,” he said.

So who’s next, I wonder? Hulu? YouTube? Amazon? I guess Roku figures if there are lots of fish in the sea, why not swim with them all?

The Netflix Player by Roku

Will Netflix feel jilted by the move? Woods says no, that both companies intended to work with others all along.

But Roku isn’t waiting around for Netflix to make those deals.

For its part, Netflix announced deals Monday with CBS and the Disney Channel that will allow the movie rental service to stream episodes from current seasons of shows. In July, Microsoft said it would allow Xbox 360 owners with Netflix accounts to stream “Watch Now” movies and TV shows through their game console, without any extra hardware or software.

CEO Anthony Wood told an audience Wednesday at the Streaming Media West conference in San Jose, Calif., that his company is focused on enabling its set-top box to stream video from any content provider, according to Wired.com.

Roku makes the $100 Netflix Player, which enables customers to stream movies from the Netflix site to their TVs. It’s a product that could be a hit, if only Netflix could secure partnerships with more of the major movie houses and seriously beef up its “Watch it Now” library.

With Macworld coming up in just two weeks, the parade of Apple-flavored rumors, wishes, and murmurings continues.

We have some serious doubts about the likelihood of such a device. These doubts are based both in the quality of the sources as well as the practicality of introducing a new form factor to the iPhone/iPod Touch platform.

Those cautionary words echo the historical perspective offered by CNET News’ Tom Krazit, writing a week ago on the occasion of some earlier Nano-esque reports:

iPhone Nano rumors date back to the launch of the original iPhone, when a financial analyst predicted that Apple would have a slimmed-down version of the iPhone out for the 2007 holiday season. That obviously didn’t happen, and other reports this summer and more recent speculation about a $99 4GB iPhone to be sold at Wal-Mart have kept the rumor alive.

And Monday, Tom took stock of a potential clue in this story: “iPhone Nano cases appear online.”

See also:
•: No Jobs means no Macworld splash
•: Apple’s blind-side hit on IDG
•: Rumor has Apple updating Mac Mini
•: Analyst predicts Apple will unveil Netbook
•: ‘MacHeads’ film to debut at MacWorld

The latest to surface–or resurface–involves a purported concept photo of what’s said to be an “iPhone Nano,” a more or less three-quarter-size version of the
Apple iPhone. Even as it presents the photo, MacRumors.com also invokes a healthy dose of skepticism:

Guess which one is the rumored iPhone Nano?

(Credit:
MacRumors.com)