Over the last decade the major music labels — and their trade organization, the Recording Industry Association of America — have established a repeated pattern of attacking consumers in the name of squelching illegal file-sharing. Piracy, they claim, has been the industry’s undoing, accounting for an over 50% drop in sales since 1999 (the industry likes to discount the impact of legal per-song music downloads via services like iTunes, and the myriad other changes facilitated by the rise of high-speed Internet connections).

Their efforts to combat piracy are often draconian: threatening tens of thousands of people with lawsuits claiming obscenely high damages; attempting to coordinate their threats with consumers’ ISPs; and, most recently, supporting legislation like SOPA and PIPA that would undermine the fabric of the Internet. Hell, Universal once pulled down a 30 second YouTube video of a dancing baby because the baby had the audacity to dance to a Prince song.

Which is why my jaw dropped when I saw that VEVO, a property jointly owned by some of the biggest record labels in the world, was showing a pirated stream of an ESPN football game at its Sundance PowerStation venue last month — on no fewer than two televisions, and a pair of laptops.

First, some background. VEVO is a sort of ‘Hulu for music videos’ that’s owned by Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and the Abu Dhabi Media Group. EMI (which Universal and Sony are in the process of acquiring chunks of) has licensed its content to the site. Together, these labels comprise three of America’s ‘Big Four’ music labels — Warner Music being the lone holdout. And these Big Four make up the vast majority of the RIAA.

So when you hear about the record labels suing people, or trying to get ISPs to clamp down on users, or trying to pass legislation that could destroy the web as we know it — a lot of these people are behind it.

Back to the story.

The scene at the VEVO PowerStation was fairly typical for a Sundance event. VEVO and a pair of other companies had taken over a local venue, emblazoning their logos on the wall in bright red and replacing the normal drink menu with an array of cleverly-named concoctions designed to help you forget you were sipping liquor at three in the afternoon. Celebrities strolled through at regular intervals, making rounds through the bar before they headed over to a room set aside to pick out their gift of furry Sorel boots.

The event’s redeeming factors, at least as far as this reporter was concerned, were the tasty hamburger sliders and the Patriots v. Ravens playoff game on ESPN that was playing throughout the venue. That is, until the game was rudely interrupted — not by a commercial break, but by a bizarre buffering warning.

In hindsight, I should have noticed it immediately. The shoddy video quality and jitters clearly didn’t belong to an HD feed, despite the ESPN America HD logo in the lower right hand corner. And then there’s the fact that ESPN America isn’t even available in US markets (it’s a UK-based station).

But between the blaring music and having James Marsden (Cyclops!) standing three feet in front of me, it wasn’t until the pirate flags were fully unfurled that I finally noticed them. First the buffering message appeared, then a mouse cursor — controlled by forces unseen — flew onto the TV to exit out of full-screen mode and refresh the page. I think it may have also closed a few popover ads.

At this point I tried to figure out the origins of the feed. As far as I could tell, the stream itself was coming from a Spanish-language live-streaming site called TuTele.tv. But that feed had apparently been accessed via a site called Frontrow.tv, which is itself an aggregator of live sports streams. At first glance, neither site looked particularly trustworthy.

But copyright on the web is a notoriously complex issue, so I went to the source to verify my suspicions: ESPN. Which confirmed that neither site has the rights to stream its content. In other words, yes — that game was indeed being pirated. In fact, Frontrow.tv has since apparently gone dark, likely as a result of a recent crackdown by federal authorities on sports sites with pirated content.

Given that the venue probably had access to a cable subscription (or perhaps an antenna, given that this was broadcast over the air), I’m not sure why it would decide to go the piracy route. But I do have a strong suspicion that it was done primarily as a matter of convenience.

The next day, when I made a return visit to the VEVO PowerStation, the football game obviously wasn’t on. This time the TV screens were playing VEVO music videos, which were being coordinated to match whatever celebrity was currently in the room — Tommy Lee walked in, and his music video serendipitously started playing, then the same thing happened when Deadmau5 made an appearance.

My hunch is that the team hooked up a computer to the TVs throughout the venue so that they could accomplish this synchronized star-caressing — then, rather than rework their entire setup just to play the football game for a few hours, they opted for the easier route and looked for a stream on the web.

Which perfectly underscores everything wrong with the media industry’s approach to piracy. They’ve long made out pirates to be lawless thieves who think they’re entitled to receive everything for free.

But the reality is far less black-and-white. Sure, there are some people who will duck the bill when they can — but many of them were never going to buy the content they downloaded in the first place. And a huge swath of ‘pirates’ are driven to their ways because it’s easier to stream or download something via an illegal site, not because they’re averse to paying for content. Stick a bunch of DRM and ads in front of the media they’ve already paid for, and they may opt to go with the path of least resistance next time.

Oh, and if the venue had wanted to stream that football game online legally, they would have had a tough time doing it: the only NFL licensee that offers streaming games is DirectTV, which requires you to purchase an entire season of ‘NFL Sunday Ticket’ in order to stream a game from the web. For a mere $350.

Reached for comment, VEVO unsurprisingly tried to shift any blame: it says that the event was produced by a creative agency called Continuum Entertainment, and that there were several other companies involved. However, the venue was broken into different sections, and the televisions in question were clearly those belonging to VEVO’s PowerStation — and VEVO confirms that the televisions were supposed to be used to showcase VEVO videos and “original content”. VEVO also claims it wasn’t aware the game was being streamed and that it turned it off once it realized that it was (though it was on the entire time I was there, a period of at least thirty minutes).

As for who actually decided to play the stream, or why, VEVO says the public had access to the computer being used so they can’t say for sure who exactly was responsible. Which is dubious (and almost certainly spin) — there was clearly someone actively controlling the computer, because they refreshed it when the connection stalled, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a random attendee hoarding over the laptop. Must have been one of those nasty pirates.

In any case, were it the music industry that was on the other side of this, you can be sure they’d dismiss all of the aforementioned explanations without a second thought. And then they’d probably assess damages in the realm of $20,000 per down.

We’ve reached out to ESPN to ask if it will be pursuing legal action against VEVO, Continuum, or any of the other companies involved with the event.

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, and the majority of us are likely scrambling to find that special gift. (The rest of us, meanwhile, are cursing couples.) A Valentine’s Day gift is usually more important than others because it’s a one-on-one situation, unlike Christmas or birthdays. Just one gift, to just one person — and it better be good.

With that in mind, I’d like to address an article out of AllThingsD this morning that sourced information from PriceGrabber’s Valentine’s Day Dashboard Report. The report took information from February 4 through February 5, finding that various tablets, TVs and phones are hot items for gift-crazed Valentines.

The information itself isn’t that intriguing, but it did get me thinking about handing out gadgetry as a gift.

What makes gift-giving so special to us — and such a huge part of our culture — is the fact that it’s proof of one person’s thought for another person. We’re naturally very self-centered, all of us. But by going out and thinking of, finding, buying, and wrapping a gift, we give that special someone proof that we’ve been thinking about them — proof that they’re important to us.

Of course, expensive gifts are often seen as better gifts, but that’s just a product of our consumer-driven lifestyles. To spend more on someone is nice, if thought is also a large part of the equation, but without thought the gift becomes empty. For example, last year I bought my girlfriend a pretty expensive necklace from her favorite jewelry store. I figured that since the store was her favorite, and that particular necklace was one of their most expensive, I’d be good to go.

Wrong.

She said the necklace wasn’t her style, which made a lot of sense after we went through her jewelry box and found that she only owned silver jewelry. The necklace I bought was gold.

Unfortunately, most gadgetry falls into this category. Just because it’s expensive and flashy and has an Apple on it doesn’t mean that it’s the most meaningful gift. Especially considering the fact that our gadgetry is so very personal.

The type of phone you own and enjoy using says a lot about you, and it is inevitably a part of your daily life for about two years. For some of us, it’s a more steadfast, stable relationship than the one we have with our Valentine. Why would anyone ever want someone else to pick it out for them?

The same is true for tablets and PCs. Just think of how many configurations your laptop could have come in. But you thought about it, knew your needs, knew your price range, and configured your notebook accordingly. Chances are, no one else could’ve done that for you.

Of course, there are exceptions to both of the points I’ve made — that expensive gifts are empty and that gadgets need to be chosen by the owner.

Ever since I was 16, Christmas changed at my house. There were no longer a dozen small gifts under the tree. Instead, my dad asked me in October if there was anything that I really, really wanted, and that one gift is what I’d get on Christmas. This is how I got my first car, help with the down payment on my apartment, and almost every piece of gadgetry I’ve ever owned, including the iPhone 4S.

So, according to my earlier logic, my dad would be an awful gift-giver. But that’s not necessarily the case. See, in the instance of my family Christmas, my dad always asked me what I wanted, and in turn I was as specific as possible. I was getting the end-all, be-all of potential Christmas gifts because it’s exactly what I had chosen.

Plus, we’re talking about my dad and Christmas, not your lover and Valentine’s Day.

So do your Valentine a favor this year: Unless he or she has asked very specifically for this or that gadget, take an extra minute to think what would truly make this person happy, and do your very best to make it happen for them.

Tablets and phones are great, but knowing that someone has spent time thinking about you… that’s priceless.

[Img credit: Lasse Kristensen, ShutterStock]

It won’t stop with Google Search Plus Your World. When asked if we should expect more integrations of Google+ into Google products, G+ director of engineering David Glazer said at today’s Inside Social Apps 2012 conference, ”Yes, where it’s good for the user. I think there’s more places to make people happy by showing them content they care about.” At the first major speaking engagement about its social network, Glazer also discussed user acquisition, monetization, and support for brands.

Regarding Google+ expanding into more Google properties, Glazer said “I don’t think of it in the sense of cross-promotion, but as the importance of users to users. People care about other people, and that should be baked in to what you do online. With Google+, we  don’t want another product, but we can make everything you do online better if we have some idea of your identity, your connections, and have some mechanism to have conversations.

Glazer explained the slow roll out of the apps platform as a desire to “find the balance between people saying ‘I hope they never let anyone make a game on Google+’ and people saying ‘I can’t wait for games on Google+’. Google is taking this controlled approach to avoid the influx of spam that hit Facebook when it opened viral channels after its platform launched. Glazer said “If too many [developers] jump in, it could change the character of the platform.”

Plans for helping developers gain users will for now center around organic discovery. Glazer noted that Google+ games can also be accessed from the Chrome Web Store, and when launched will open an experience in Google+. Google has also created a “Play Now” button that developers can embed on their own sites to promote their Google+ apps.

Brands shouldn’t expect the equivalent of Facebook Page tab applications any time soon, unfortunately. During the Q&A I asked Glazer how brands will be able to drive their brand Page visitors to branded apps, for instance if Google will add the ability to feature links to apps on Pages. Glazer responded “We’re considering it. It’s a reasonable request but not one we’re prioritizing right now.”

The most exciting thing to developers about Google in 2012 may be video. Glazer said “The Hangouts API is under the radar in beta, [but it will offer] a lot of opportunities for people to do cool things.  The trend is that now you can, then you couldn’t. There no cognitive friction, no technical friction, and there’s huge scale. What could I build if I assume I have cheap, interactive, easy-to-embed video, that lets me do silly things where everyone who tries it smiles.”

As part of its 2012 US Digital Future in Focus whitepaper, comScore looked at the online ad landscape and found a mix of old and new names. The report includes a list of the top 10 display advertisers in the United States (all of this data is US-only), as measured by impressions. AT&T topped the list, as it has in previous years, but there’s a newcomer — Google, which delivered 40.4 billion ads for products like Chrome, Google Offers, and Google+.

Large brand advertising on the Internet is growing in general, comScore says. To quantify that, it measured the number of advertisers delivering at least 1 billion impressions per quarter. There were 145 advertisers in that league during the final quarter of 2011, up 38 percent from the same period in 2010.

As for where these ads are actually running, Facebook remains the leader in display advertising, with 1.3 trillion impressions adding up to 27.9 percent market share. Following Facebook, in descending order, were Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google. (Remember that display advertising is a relatively new area for Google, which has traditionally focused on search ads.)

The report also includes the results of a December study looking at ad measurement. comScore calls the results “eye-opening”, arguing that visibility, geographic validation, brand safety, and audience targeting are all going to be big issues in 2012. For example, comScore found that 31 percent of ads in the study were delivered but never seen by consumers, presumably because people scrolled past before the ad loaded, or because they never scrolled down to see the at in the first place. comScore also found that 72 percent of campaigns ran at least some ads next to content that the advertisers said was not “brand safe”.

Advertising is just one area covered in the new whitepaper. We’ve also covered the findings related to online video.

At long last, HTC fans can finally stop holding their collective breath. After months of relative quiet, the Taiwanese company has taken to their Facebook page to spread the word: the Ice Cream Sandwich is coming, and it’s coming soon. For owners of certain HTC devices, the long-awaited Android 4.0 update will begin hitting handsets next month.

HTC originally promised that Ice Cream Sandwich would be hitting most of their top-tier devices in “early 2012,” but that doesn’t seem to the case anymore unless you own one of their numerous Sensation devices. If anything, it should make owners of T-Mobile USA’s Sensation 4G feel a little better about their phone being stripped of flagship status in just a few months. The international-spec Sensation will be updated as well, along with the flashier special edition XE and XL models.

Some of HTC’s U.S. devices will be getting the update not long afterward, although their note on Facebook lept understandably mum when it came to specific dates. That said, owners of the following devices can rest easy knowing that HTC is still slaving away on ICS updates meant for their handsets:

• Rezound (Verizon)
• Vivid (AT&T)
• Amaze 4G (T-Mobile)
• EVO 3D (Sprint)
• EVO Design 4G (Sprint)
• Incredible S
• Desire S
• Desire HD

Meanwhile, other hardware vendors have taken up different approaches to keeping their users abreast of the update situation. To wit: LG offered up a list of devices getting the update along with a tentative timeline, while companies like Sony and Motorola have been a bit less forthcoming when it comes to forecasting an update schedule.

Television is in trouble. Americans streamed 43.5 billion videos in December 2011, up 44% since December 2010, according to comScore’s 2012 US Digital Future In Focus report released today.  The study also showed that 105.1 million Americans now watch videos online each day, up 43% from 73.7 million in 2010.

comScore says YouTube is largely driving this, and that average minutes per video view, average videos watched per user, and total ads streamed are way up as well. TV and film studios should take notice and consider how they can create companion content to engage this growing audience and promote their traditional offerings.

Note that these stats are from an independent measurement service, and other measurements and internal traffic stats from the companies discussed may vary.

Other key statistics on American video watching habits in December 2011 compared to December 2010 include:

• The average video view length is up from 5 minutes to 5.8 minutes, showing an increasing willingness to watch longer form content
• The average viewer watches 239 videos per month
• Video advertising volume is rising faster than total videos streamed. The ratio of the number of video ads to total videos grew from 12.8 percent to 14.1 percent, with video ad volume up 20% to 7.1 billion ads served this year

• YouTube and other Google sites account for 21.9 billion of the 43.5 billion video view in December –50.4% of the total market. VEVO ranked 2nd with 801 million (1.8%), Hulu was 3rd with 777 million (1.8%), and Netflix was 4th with 431 million (1%)
• YouTube’s partner channel program has been a success, pushing more professionally developed content to viewers. In December, VEVO’s channel had 53.5 million viewers, Warner Music had 31.7 million viewers, and Machinima had 22.7 million viewers, indicating strong interest in Justin Bieber and watching people kill each other in Call of Duty

Some of us can’t be bothered to check in, but still want to find interesting people nearby. The challenge for developers is how to do this in a way that is both useful and not creepy. Glancee, available for both iOS and Android, gets closer to solving these problems than most I’ve seen.

The app lets you sign in with Facebook, then it shows you people within 100 yards, or one, two, or ten miles who have things in common. In some ways this sounds similar another app I recently covered, Highlight — but there are key differences, that will make each app appeal to different sets of users.

Glancee works extra hard to match interests while minimizing the stalker feel. The main screen shows the Facebook profile photos of nearby people, but does not show a map of where they are, and it only summarizes the number of friends and interests in common. If you click through to the other person’s profile page, then you’ll see a list of Facebook friends in common as well as their interests versus yours.

The app compares your Likes in common with Wikipedia listings to identify similar categorical interests. Examples I’ve seen: If the other person likes The New Yorker, a line of text might say “You like The Econoimst.” If they like The Sopranos, it says “You like Mad men.” Sometimes these comparisons end up better than others, but overall the feature does succeed in showing you things loosely in common that might not have been obvious if you only compare Likes.

The app also goes very easy on notifications. During the past week I’ve been using Glancee, it’s sent maybe ten of them to me. I have to go to the app to see who’s nearby.

If you want to talk to anyone, a chat feature lets you message or voice call with them. A “News” tab on the home page shows you people with an especially large number of commonalities, as well as people who have visited your profile, or the activity of people you’ve communicated with. Also, the app goes very easy on your battery life.

In terms of future business models, Glancee’s ideas are along the lines of other location apps: targeting nearby ads, deals, etc. based on the users behavior.

Before I share my personal opinion about Glancee, I should point out that there are many other location apps that somehow use ambient location to try to create quality new connections. But very few are directly comparable to each other. Glancee cofounder Andrea Vaccari noted on my Highlight post that there’s also JoinMingle, Gatsby, Ban.jo, Shoutflow, Blendr, and Unsocial. And of course, there are many more location apps that have been around for years, like Loopt and Foursquare, not to mention Google Latitude or Facebook Places.

Briefly, here are the other things that some of these non-checkin apps are trying to do. JoinMingle is explicitly for professional networking, Gatsby provides a very opaque means of connecting in that it pairs you with specific people for one-hour-limited conversations, Ban.jo aggregates every other location service that it can, Blendr is dating-oriented, and Unsocial is designed around meeting people at conferences and other events. Shoutflow is the most similar that I’ve seen to Highlight and Glancee, but it’s not available in the US iTunes App Store so I haven’t personally used it. So, none of these apps appear to be that directly competitive to Glancee and Highlight (there’s lots more to say about each of these other apps, but they’re not what this article is about, sorry).

Glancee and Highlight are the ones that I’ve used that have provided social experiences that I have found to be meaningful. But, because I live in San Francisco and I’m a tech reporter, Highlight has been much more visceral for me. Being able to see exactly where other users are in relation to me makes a big difference considering that I’m in a city of hundreds of thousands of people sandwiched in a few square miles. So does the fact that it only shows people in a few blocks radius. And so does the fact that I get pinged by it whenever anyone is near. These are crucial subtle differences that totally reshape the user experience. Specifically, Highlight has been connecting me with long-lost friends and interesting new people in the tech world, who I’ve ended up having impromptu meetings with, and Glancee hasn’t.

But that’s just my tech-bubble perspective. Glancee is doing a lot of things right, and considering that a large portion of the US population does not live in dense urban areas, this could be the app for them. If you’re in a suburb or a spread-out small city or a rural area, the miles-radius range is more appropriate, and a neighborhood map is less relevant. Also, if you don’t like aggressive notifications and you like a long battery life, you’re going to like it more than Highlight.

But there’s always this caveat: Ambient location is not just something to build a company around, it is a feature that Facebook or Foursquare or any other big company doing location could also do very easily. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them test ambient out if any of these startups get serious traction. So readers, may each of you find the ambient location app that’s right for you.

In December, Eric covered Open Home Pro, a startup that lets realtors sell homes via their iPads. Today, there comes a similar effort from Pixloo, except this service is designed for use by anyone – realtors and homeowners alike. With Pixloo, you can upload information about your home, including text, photos and even videos and then immediately export that data to major real estate sites including Trulia, Zillow, Realtor.com and others, all for free.

OK, technically, Pixloo is freemium. The pricing tiers depend on whether you need one virtual tour, the number of exports per tour and access to statistics, among other things. For just one tour and five exports per tour, however, it’s free. And that will be good enough for many folks. The other paid tiers are $9/month (Pro) or $24/month (Premium). TechCrunch readers can use the coupon code “TECHCRUNCH” for a free Pro account. 

For those that need it, the startup can provide customers with an MLS # for $399, which is what’s required to export to the realtor-friendly sites like Realtor.com, RealEstateBook.com, Homes.com, or AOL or Google Real Estate, for example. (Disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by AOL).

But homeowners selling their homes themselves have the option of exporting to the sites mentioned above (Trulia, Zillow) as well as to social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Also, Pixloo is available worldwide, thanks to some support for localized sites. However, the majority of the focus at present is on the U.S. market.

Since the startup’s soft launch just three weeks ago, it’s already signed up over 500 customers before even seeing press. People found the site just by searching for keywords like “virtual tours,” for example – and apparently liked what they found.

Pixloo is currently bootstrapping, according to co-founder John Rampton, who has previous experience in this vertical thanks to time spent with real estate virtual tour company Obeo. Pixloo’s technical co-founder Mark Higbee and designer John McCann keep a low profile.

Although still a small team, the company has big plans to expand Pixloo’s offerings, and claims to be adding new export locations at a rate of one per day. The company also hopes to delve deeper into value-added services in the future, including things like text messages about new listings, mobile support, assistance in connecting homeowners with good realtors, and partnerships with sites like Zillow to help homeowners determine what their house may be worth.

To try Pixloo for yourself, head over here to sign up.

The Pirate Bay, in many ways, is disappearing. It is one of the most popular torrent sites on the web and its database of millions of torrent files – essentially pointers to pieces of files hosted elsewhere – has long been the go-to spot for budding pirates around the world. While it still exists in spirit, the admins are now moving all of the torrent files off the site and are instead offering magnet links. This is an important distinction that will move the locus of general piracy from a single site to any number of sites, reducing the Pirate Bays importance as a source.

First, let’s talk a bit about torrenting in general.

A torrent file is a document containing a number of pieces of information about a file including the names of its various component parts as well as pertinent identifying information. Torrent files do not point to specific files on specific servers but instead point to codes that identify chunks of a file. These files are actually quite large – a few kilobytes to a few hundred – and most BitTorrent feeds have used them exclusively for the past few years – The Pirate Bay included.

There’s a problem with torrent files, however, that has to do more with perception than reality. To the average politico – and to the average media lobbyist – Torrent files are “files” that point to pirated content. It doesn’t matter that there are legitimate uses for Torrents and that torrent suppliers don’t actually know what those files contain. The idea is offensive to many, and so lots of legal muscle has been flexed to attack targets that pirates have already abandoned. The pirates snicker while authorities torch ghost ships in the night.

Before going further, understand that I find the process of making money on piracy abhorrent while I consider the act of piracy to be a what amounts to a perfectly lubricated market. For example, a newsman in 1990 or so would consider what you are doing right now – reading a bit of news and opinion that you didn’t pay for – piracy. Granted that simplifies the matter considerably (you do pay for it indirectly through your attention and advertisers capitalize on that attention) but I doubt TechCrunch in its earliest form would have been very popular if it was a paid newsletter sent to Mike’s parents and close friends.

That said, as a content producer, I find general “free” piracy to be a valuable tool, even an asset, in getting the word out. There is no clear reason why I should, for example, make an out-of-date book available to folks who may want to read it. I consider this a free form of advertising and the more people who like or dislike my work, the better.

What the Pirate Bay did (and still does, just using a different record locator format) is offer links to files that may or may not be pirated content. Devin wrote a great piece on this concept last night.

What the Pirate Bay also did was popularize torrents in the same way Napster popularized peer-to-peer sharing and the same way MegaUpload popularized massive file storage and the performance upsell.

But what the Pirate Bay really did was put a snarky face on the pirate, moving the average pirate out of the realm of Neo or the evil, evil kids in this video:

In general, we hear little about piracy but the tales of happy-go-lucky antics of the Pirate Bay and the associated groups, including the politicized Pirate Party. The MPAA and RIAA would love to associate piracy with terrorism, massive theft, and the decay of Western Civilization and, in a way, that’s their right. Their goal is to sell as many widgets as possible. A pirate’s goal is to see content that is otherwise unavailable to him or her.

Not to get all Cory Doctorow here, but the Pirate Bay made pirating silly and the attacks by outside authorities made it look even more enticing. The site, with its jolly roger and swift ship tilting into the waves, makes it a Magic 8 Ball of piracy. You type something in, find it, wait, and if the stars are aligned you can grab the file you wanted. More often, however, you grab nothing because the swarm has moved on.

As I said during the SOPA hubbub, there is no way for anyone to enforce anything. There are ways to make things uncomfortable for content sharers and there are ways to arrest people for soliciting pirated content, but in the vast panoply of the Internet there’s very little chance any dedicated enforcement agency can perform its duties with any effectiveness, China’s easily-avoidable Great Firewall being one example.

The Pirate Bay changed piracy by becoming the Google of content. As of this writing it is no longer hosting torrent files and in fact you can download the entire contents of the site in a few minutes, proving that the Pirate Bay is essentially a guide and not a repository.

The attacks against the Pirate Bay have given it far more popularity than it really deserves and through a combination of excellent branding and nearly non-stop coverage, everyone with an Internet connection knows of that Jolly Roger waving endlessly in the digital winds while the real business of piracy – counterfeiting, fake DVD sales, and fraud – are going on in the shadows. Whichever side you’re on, you have to admit the Pirate Bay asks for nothing and expects nothing in return. We feed the beast that is the pirate underground and, no matter how hard we try or how many times we seize a bunch of Swedish servers, we will never tame it.

Remember when the iPhone app GLMPS launched last summer, seemingly heralding the start of a new image format that blended static photos and video? No? That’s OK. Today, there’s a new twist on the idea of reinventing the mobile photo, this time by turning static photos into animated ones. With the newly launched app called Cinemagram, you can turn your iPhone pics into animated gifs in a matter of seconds.

Cinemagram isn’t quite the same as GLMPS, to be clear. “The GLMPS app embedded an entire video as a picture-in-picture onto the image,” explains Cinemagram’s co-creator and company CEO Temoojin Chalasani. “Cinemagram is just one image with a subtle animation,” he says.

The new app was designed by the Montreal-based startup called Factyle, Inc., which you may know as the makers of Smartr, the personalized, social newspaper app for iOS and desktop. And it really is kind of fun. Especially if you like making those animated gifs and posting them to social networks. But the app’s overall UI (user interface) feels a little rough, and frankly, too Instagram-like. Or Instagram-lite. I’d love to see app makers think outside the Instagram UI for a change. (Cheers, I’m looking at you, too). Besides, haven’t you heard? We’re all ripping off Pinterest now, anyway.

But back to the app at hand:  why try to reinvent the mobile photo? Especially when apps like GLMPS seemed to be, for all their bells and whistles, a flash in the pan?

“We’ve been fascinated by this art form since its first appearance last year in the world of fashion photography,” says Chalasani. (Last year? Update: Oh this.) “We see it as a way for photographers to bring out the essence of an image, and tell the story behind their pictures in a fun and beautiful way.”

What’s more, the company said they were shocked to find that photographers spent hours in PhotoShop trying to create these sorts of images, so they decided to make an app that could do it in seconds.

You can see some of the gifs in question here on Cinemagram’s blog.

Factyle, which has been in development for over 2 years, raised $150,000 in seed funding last April from Montreal-based Real Ventures. In addition to Chalasani, who describes himself as an electrical engineer with a love of mobile and social apps, there’s also co-founder Marc Provost, a former Mathworks Inc. employee.

Cinemagram ($1.99) isn’t the first to do this on the iPhone, for what it’s worth. Kinotopic’s app (free) was previously featured by Apple for a similar effort.

comScore has released its ‘explicit’ U.S. search data for January of this year and while Google and Microsoft Bring’s search share continues to grow, Yahoo’s share dropped both year over year and month over month. This comes after Bing overtook Yahoo in terms of search queries for the first time in December. While Bing grew slightly from December 2011 to January, Google reached its highest share since December 2010 this past month.

Google search queries increased 6% year over year in January, to 66.2%, compared with 65.9% in December 2011 and 65.6% in January 2011. Bing queries increased 21% year over year in January to 15.2%, compared with 15.1% in December 2011 and 13.1% in January 2011. Yahoo queries are on a downward spiral, decreasing 8% year over year in January to 14.1%, compared with 14.5% in December 2011, 15.1% in November 2011 and 16.1% in January 2011. Yikes.

On a combined basis, Bing and Yahoo’s share of searches was 29.3%, compared with 29.6% in December 2011 and 29.2% in January 2011. Clearly, despite the fact that Bing’s technology is now powering Yahoo’s search, the rollup is still not powerful enough to overtake Google search share.

AOL queries declined 6% year over year January to 1.6%, compared with 1.6% in December 2011 and 1.7% in January 2011. And Ask.com queries declined 8% year over year in January to 3%, compared with 2.9% in December 2011 and 3.4% in January 2011.

It’s important to note that this data does not include search queries from mobile devices, which could boost Google’s share further. And these refer to “explicit” US search market share, which includes searches when someone actually types a query into a search box.

comScore also reports that the general search market continued to grow at double-digit rates in 2011, posting an 11-percent increase in 2011. Apparently, this momentum was driven by a 3 percent gain in unique searchers and a 7 percent gain in the number of searches per searcher.

Google’s search query volume grew 10 percent, driven mostly by gains in searches per searcher (up
7 percent). Bing had the highest growth in search query volume in 2011 at 40 percent, propelled by sizeable gains in both unique searchers (up 6 percent) and searches per searcher (up 31 percent).

After hitting 2 million members at the end of last month, design shopping startup Fab.com is today rolling out new iOS applications that offer a number of new features and improvements. In addition to an updated layout, search and navigational elements, one of the apps’ biggest new features is the inclusion of the recently launched new storefronts called “Fab Shops.”

These Fab Shops went live late January, allowing Fab.com members to visually browse through products via dedicated online storefronts that were organized around product categories, as opposed to by designers. That way, if you wanted to shop only for jewelry or furniture, for example, you could simply drill down into those items using the new Fab Shops option. Shops could also be sorted by both popularity and price, when they launched on the web.

With today’s mobile and tablet app updates, the shops section is split into “pop-up shops” and “more shops,” and a sort button lets you rank them by price, by bestselling, most favorited, or by “random” (the default). There are now over 20 shops to choose from.

Next to the shops button at the top of the screen, are buttons that let you see just “new” items, or those that are “ending soon.”

Also new is an updated browse menu that lets you find products by shop, price, or, in an Etsy-like fashion, by color, also featured which launched first on the web.

Since the arrival of Fab.com’s mobile apps in October, the number of sales from mobile have been increasing. Today, iPad users purchase at 4 times the rate of web users and iPhone users purchase at 2 times the rate of web users. iPad orders are also significantly larger (by basket size) than web orders, the company reports.

Fab says that mobile accounts for a quarter of all of its orders, so it makes sense that it would continue to evolve the mobile experience to match up to that of the web. Given these statistics, however, it may even be prudent to design mobile-first for the next round of updates.

The new apps are in the iTunes App Store now, so check for updates. Fab is hinting at a new “iPad-specific” app in the works that’s coming soon, but nothing more on what that will involve just yet.

Here’s a fun example of the original programming that YouTube is supposed to be investing in these days — a relay from Santa Monica to San Diego. With lightsabers.

Geek celebrity Chris Hardwick is announcing the event, dubbed Course of the Force, on the YouTube blog. Hardwick hosts the popular Nerdist podcast, and he plans to launch a Nerdist YouTube channel in April,which he says will include “Neil Patrick Harris, Rob Zombie, Awkward Family Videos, The Dudesons and The Kids in the Hall,” plus more programming that covers “gaming, science, tech and cosplay.”

As for Course of the Force, it sounds a creative way to grab eyeballs in the lead up to San Diego Comic-Con. He’s describing it as an “Olympic-torch-style” relay run. Each of the approximately 500 participants will purchase a segment of the run, and over five days, they will take turns carrying a lightsaber from the Santa Monica Pier to Comic-Con. The event is a partnership between Nerdist Industries, Lucasfilm, and Machina, and naturally the whole thing will be livestreamed on YouTube. Costumes are optional but encouraged. Oh, and the proceeds go to the Make a Wish Foundation.

This all sounds entertaining (or at least entertainingly terrible), but if Hardwick repeats the event, I’m hoping he spreads the love among nerd franchises. Specifically, I know that he’s a pretty big Doctor Who fan — so next year, how about a sonic screwdriver?

Consider today the end of an era for one of the most iconic brands in the imaging industry. While their bankruptcy protection filing from last month signaled the need for some drastic action, it’s still a bit of a shock to see Kodak announce that they are putting all of their digital cameras, camcorders, and picture frames out to pasture.

When all is said and done, Kodak expects annual operating savings of around $100 million, but the bigger loss is going to be that of a cultural icon. Kodak will still exist, sure, but primarily as a purveyor of desktop printers as well as online and retail photo printing services.

The company is also looking to expand its brand licensing program in order to bring in some much-needed revenue, but their consumer imaging division is shaping up to be a shell of its former self.

The phase out process is set to begin during the first half of this year, and Kodak has reached out to their retail partners in order to make sure their last remaining customers aren’t left in the lurch when it comes to support and warranties.

Kodak CMO Pradeep Jotwani notes that the company has been scaling back their efforts in the digital imaging space in order to focus on more lucrative aspects of their business. It’s a understandable move for Kodak to make — the company has been on the ropes for quite some time now, with slumping camera sales and some high profile departures only adding fuel to the fire. Even so, the loss of a once-dominant player in the industry stands as a reminder to competitors that staying nimble and innovative is the key to survival.

Consider the blurring lines between cell phones and cameras. Kodak dipped their toes into the water by lending their name and optics to the Motorola MOTOZINE, but never really pursued the space further. Now, a study from the NPD Group points at smartphone camera use supplanting the need for a standalone camera, and a timely gamble back then could have made for smoother seas these past few years.

The “toast” is an age-old, time-honored tradition, where we raise a glass to pay tribute to — and express our goodwill towards — friends, loved ones, and sometimes even our fellow man. They are even known to be meaningfully punctuated with by a good drinking song or two. And now, thanks to BizRate.com and Shopzilla Founder Farhad Mohit, there is, as they say, an app for that expression of goodwill. Yes, “cheers” is no longer simply a word that accompanies toasts — or the place where everyone knows your name — it’s also the “world’s first positivity app,” for the iPhone.

What am I talking about? Chee.rs, a free iPhone app that launches today on the App Store, was conceived with a simple, altruistic sentiment in mind: To help people express love and appreciation for just about anything and from just about anywhere. While that may sound a little bit sappy, this is meant to be a serious business.

The Cheers founder sold Shopzilla in 2005 for $569 million and went on to start DotSpots and Gri.pe (both of which are TechCrunch Disrupt companies). DotSpots hit the deadpool, but Mohit went on to create Cheerful, Inc, bringing Gripe and Cheers together under one roof, behind an impressive team from Google, StumbleUpon, and more.

The Cheers founder tells us that the app is meant to be the “Like button” for the world around you, except that it has the potential to be more meaningful because it allows you to create, control, and give voice to each “cheer.” Yes, there are now over 500,000 iPhone apps, and, no, we’re not aware of any apps that celebrate love and appreciation via mobile sharing.

So how does Cheers work? When you come across something in your daily wanderings that makes you want to express your love or appreciation (in socially appropriate ways, of course), you open the app, snap a picture, add some appreciative text, and share your cheer. While users are not required to be positive in their messages, nor are they required to snap a photo, the design of the app is tailored toward the inclusion of images. Both positivity and photo sharing are “highly encouraged,” the founder says.

Once a user shares their cheer, they can blast it out on Facebook, Twitter, via email, and on the Web, watching as it spreads across their social circles. Friends and other users can “like” the post or comment and reciprocate. Creating a Cheer takes less than 30 seconds, and users can create Cheers around people, places, or things, as Mohit says that he wants to keep the use case as broad as possible, to encourage engagement and sharing of restaurants, movies, books, friends, pets, and so on. The app also contains its own user rating system: In other words, the more you cheer, the more “Cheerfluence” you accrue, allowing other users to track the extent of your social cheerleading.

There’s been a lot of talk in the mobile space centering around serendipity, and the potential that location-based mobile services have to help you find something you’ll enjoy even when you’re not looking for it. While Cheers has the requisite location layer baked in, it’s not an explicitly location-based service.

But it still has some of those elements of serendipity, as Mohit cited the example of sharing a Cheers about a particular person, which was then commented on by an old friend. Through this Cheers, he was able to reconnect with that person. In that way, Cheers intends to connect people, and facilitate discovery of things you’re likely to enjoy based on affirmations of similar interests and experiences.

Those checking out the app may also notice that the app looks similar, design-wise, to some other popular social and discovery-based mobile apps. Kevin Rose’s Oink comes to mind. Mohit says that Cheers was co-developed in tandem with Oink, but the real inspiration came from Instagram’s model of photo sharing.

The more jaded among us may find reason to scoff at all this mobile love fest. Maybe it’s the approach of Valentine’s Day, but I think there’s something to be said for lowering the barriers to sharing appreciation for our favorite people, events, and entertainment in an environment dedicated to making tributes.

Cheers is still very early in its development, as Mohit says that there’s plenty left to be done in terms of better taping into Facebook “likes,” increasing activity on app itself, the ability to link to other Cheers, better browsing, and upgrades to the camera functionality, including flash. These are all things slated for future upgrades, along with developing apps for other mobile platforms.

The app has a ways to go before it reaches the tipping point, and it remains to be seen exactly how Cheers will monetize, though there is some definite potential around enabling local businesses to tap into users who blast out Cheers for their services, or branding of users with high “Cheerfluence” scores, for example. Either way, it’s probably still worth raising a glass to sharing the love. For more, check out Cheers at home here. Check it out and let us know what you think.

According to a new report from Nielsen, the number of U.S. homes that have broadband Internet, but only free, broadcast TV, is on the rise. Although representing less than 5% of TV households, the number has grown 22.8% over the past year.

In addition, the behaviors within these homes are unique. These broadband/broadcast-only households stream video twice as much as the general population, says Nielsen, and they watch half as much TV.

Nielsen hesitates to dump all these households in the “cord cutters” bucket, though, saying that while perhaps some are cord cutters (the term that refers to those who gave up cable TV for streaming TV/streaming video), other homes may be former broadcast-only homes that now have upgraded Internet service. Even though the exact percentages are unknown, combined, this two groups are making up the small, but growing demographic of Internet TV watching homes without paid TV.

Roughly the same percentage of consumers in this new and growing group of U.S. TV households watch traditional TV, stream or use the Internet as in all the cross-platform homes, but the difference is the time spent on these activities.

The broadcast-only homes spent 122.6 minutes per day watching TV compared with cross-platform homes’ 265.5 minutes. Not surprisingly, they stream more video, at 11.2 minutes per day vs. 5 minutes for the traditional households.

Those streaming numbers are interesting, however. Neither household (traditional or broadcast-only) is streaming the equivalent of even a sitcom’s worth of television. In other words, the Internet may not be just a new medium for TV to travel over, it’s an alternative to TV watching entirely.

Specifically, younger Americans are growing up involved in different activities beyond staring vacantly at the TV screen, it seems. Those aged 12 to 34 are spending less time in front of the TV (120.56 monthly minutes), but those older than 35 are spending more. And those over 55 watch the most (195.10 minutes per month).

Overall, few TV households are willing to give up the luxury of either TV or the Internet, regardless of how they choose to view either medium. The vast majority of TV households (90.4%) still pay for a TV subscription, and roughly tw0-thirds (75.3%) pay for broadband. The percentages of both have remained stable, despite the down economy. In fact, the number of homes paying for both a subscription and broadband has even increased by 5.5% over the past year.

TV viewing isn’t just being impacted by the Internet, Nielsen found. From Q3 2008 to Q3 2011, the number of those watching time-shifted TV has increased by 65.9%, and mobile video viewing has seen a 205.7% increase in users. Meanwhile, watching TV on the Internet has increased by just 21.7% during the same time. What these numbers show is that the issue isn’t as simple as switching from one medium to another (traditional TV to video on the laptop, e.g.), but that there are today a plethora of new TV consumption choices. Americans are experimenting with finding the mix that’s right for them. And that mix may not even be consistently applied by every member under the same roof.

It would seem that representatives from Change.org and SumOfUs.org have organized a global protest against Apple’s use of Foxconn and other Chinese manufacturing plants to build the iPhone and iPad.

This comes on the heels of a New York Times series exposing harsh working conditions in said plants. 250,000 people have signed petitions calling for a “worker protection strategy”, which will today be delivered to Apple stores in a number of major cities, including New York.

We’ve known about the harsh conditions at Foxconn since well before the NYT series. The media reported on suicides during 2007, and the plant got extensive coverage after the number of jumpers went up drastically between March and May of 2010.

Despite the fact that the story’s well documented, this NYT series has really fired people up. Along with today’s planned protest, we’re hearing reports that a group called Swagg Security has hacked Foxconn, retrieving usernames and passwords and uploading the materials onto The Pirate Bay.

You can check out Swagg Security’s “press release” here, but be prepared for misspellings and this unsettling feeling that the world only gets worse and worse.

An excerpt:

We believe there is no reality in hacktivism, even with good intentions. We know those who claim to be “hacktivists” that inside of you, a suppressed part of you, enjoys playing a part in the anarchist event of hacking of an infrastructure. One which at the same time presents a challenge, upon completing reveals an almost unknown feeling of a menacing satisfaction. We encourage not to continue quelling such a natural emotion but to embrace it. Only when embracing what society has taught you to hinder, is when you realize your own identity.

Appcelerator, the company behind the popular Titanium app-building platform, is announcing its third acquisition today. The company is buying Cocoafish, a mobile app infrastructure provider that lets developers add various features to apps including messaging capabilities, push notifications, photo uploads, checkins and other social features, storage, discussion forums and more. Although the name implies an iOS affiliation, Cocoafish is actually a cross-platform backend service provider supporting iOS, Android, and even Flash and Ruby.

Starting in Q2 2012, the features Cocoafish previously offered will relaunch as “Appcelerator Cloud Services (ACS)” as a part of the company’s Titanium Platform, and as complete iOS, Android, REST and Javascript SDKs for non-Titanium customers.

The acquisition follows Appcelerator’s previous buyouts of other mobile app infrastructure providers, including the enterprise-focused Aptana and, more recently, Particle Code, which brought additional HTML5 capabilities to Titanium. With Cocoafish, Appcelerator is aiming for the broader mobile market, the company explains – not just Titanium users. Now developers using Objective-C, Java, PhoneGap, Sencha or HTML5 will have access to a scalable server-side backend, similar to what other backend service providers like StackMob, Urban Airship or Parse are offering.

According to Jeff Haynie, Appcelerator CEO, the company chose Cocoafish because it’s the “most complete solution.”

“We took a look at all these companies, and what we liked [about Cocoafish] was that they have 25 well-designed, well-tested services supported,” he explained. “They’re sets of interfaces that work together.”

However, it could be argued that other possible acquisition targets simply weren’t on the market. For example, Urban Airship has been doing a little acquiring of its own in recent months, snapping up SimpleGeo to fill out its own offerings. Asked if Appcelerator considered other companies prior to Cocoafish, Haynie said they “had all sorts of conversations at different levels” with competitors, but were ultimately drawn to Cocoafish for a few key reasons, beyond its feature set. The startup hadn’t raised money, were already profitable, and they were a small, 10-person bootstrapped team based in San Francisco. It just made sense.

The new Appcelerator-branded product will roll out on March 31^st, but the company is already planning to continue the work Cocoafish had started. By Q3, the plan is to launch an on-demand, private cloud offering so developers with increased security needs can run the whole stack in their own cloud. There are also plans to support Node.js, expand the common services to offer more features (like video), and offer more identity management options for enterprise customers, like RSA SecureID and Active Directory support, for example.

Appecelerator today has over 35,000 apps that have been built using the Titanium platform, and those apps have been deployed on 40 million devices. But there are also 1.6 million web developers with the company who already use a Javascript API to build native or HTML5 apps, all of whom could also take advantage of ACS.

Although the acquisition makes Appcelerator a direct competitor to the other backend services it already supports in Titanium, Haynie assured us that there would be no change in terms of which backend services developers can use. “Like any platform company, you compete on some things, but on other things you’re helping each other out,” he said of how the new offering impacts competing services.

Don’t you just hate when you’re out skateboarding, minding your own business, and suddenly one of the wheels comes off and you break a kneecap? Well now there’s a new startup called BoardProspects, which aims to help companies build better boards. A quick glance at their website reveals that the company is not going to be able to solve your skateboarding woes, however, but it may help your business roll more smoothly.

If your company is in need of new members for the board of directors (cough Yahoo cough) or the advisory board (cough Honeywell cough), you may want to give Boston-based BoardProspects’ upcoming offering a second look.

Having just raised a $650,000 seed round, BoardProspects basically offers a platform that connects individuals (‘prospects’) with organizations, and also provides educational resources and tools to improve boardroom service.

The online community is set to launch some time in the second quarter of this year, but the first 1,000 people to pre-register for the service will receive a free lifetime premium membership (the company didn’t mention what this entails, but surely it must be good!).

Here’s the problem that BoardProspects says it identified:

There are more than 60,000 publicly traded companies in the United States that are required by law to have a board of directors. In the Fortune 1,000 alone, there are more than 1,100 directors currently serving that are over 70 years old, according to GMI Research, the leading independent provider of global corporate governance, ESG and accounting risk ratings and research.

The number of vacancies for the nearly 1.6 million non-profit organizations in the United States is exponentially larger, with more than 1.8 million of these seats turning over each year. These dramatic numbers do not include the hundreds of thousands of private companies that could benefit from building a board of directors or an advisory board, recruiting valuable members, or applying best practices to improve board performance.

Poised to prove that it’s not just about ‘who you know’, BoardProspects aims to apply social networking mechanics and technologies to “transform the way that boards and prospects connect, communicate, and serve”. It’s unclear whether they also make rad skateboards.

Angel investors who participated in the seed round include Mike Verrochi (managing partner at Blue Rock Ventures), Brendan McCarthy (managing director of Goldman Sachs) and Paul Sullivan, partner of family-owned Sullivan Tire.

Game-maker Trion Worlds is revealing its global ambitions — it just announced a partnership with Chinese Internet company Shanda to release Trion’s online roleplaying game Rift in China.

The game had a successful launch in the United States and Europe last year, winning a bunch of awards, attracted 1 million registered users in its first four months, and supposedly bringing in $100 million in revenue. Trion CEO Lars Buttler says he sees Asia as the company’s “next great frontier,” one that he plans to conquer through the Shanda deal and another partnership to launch in Korea. In fact, Buttler says that across most financial metrics, the new agreement is the largest deal ever to license a Western game in China. (However, he declined to share those numbers.)

There have been a few other success stories, like World of Warcraft, but for the most part, Western games haven’t had much success in China, Buttler says. Naturally, he thinks Rift will be a different story.

“So many people are afraid of China,” he says. “We think they are amazing. They can teach us, they can be great markets for us.”

As for what will make Rift work when others have failed, Buttler says represents a unique approach to gaming, one that combines the high quality of traditional gaming with the rapid iteration — for example, he says Trion released seven “massive” updates to Rift in the first nine months. That gives the games a “live” quality that should attract Chinese gamers and also makes piracy less attractive.

Boiling down his reasons to be optimistic, Buttler says, “Rift is great, we listen, we can innovate quickly, we will innovate for Asia as quickly as we do for [the United States].”

The Chinese launch date will be announced later.