Wired: Epicenter

YouTube Blocks Non-Partner Device Syabas as Allegations Fly

Eliot Van Buskirk — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:06:56 +0000

Syabas Popcorn Hour devices like this C-200 can no longer play YouTube videos, due to the absence of a deal between Syabas and Google/YouTube.

YouTube is set to become a regular feature of televisions, but only through its partners’ hardware. So far one company been blocked from accessing YouTube videos on its set-top box pursuant to a July 2008 change in YouTube’s terms of service, with others soon to follow, according to sources close to the situation.

Syabas, which has had about 16 months to sign a contract with Google’s YouTube service since the new terms of service went into effect, will no longer be able to show YouTube videos on televisions through its set-top boxes.

The reason there’s no deal, according to Syabas COO Alex Limberis, is that YouTube demanded a multimillion-dollar advertising commitment in return for permission to display its videos on televisions through the Popcorn Hour A-110 and C-200 set-top boxes.

“YouTube mentioned that they are only going to work with ’strategic partners,’ ” Limberis told Wired.com. “When asked what it would take to become a strategic partner, they said we would need to spend ‘multiple seven figures’ with them on advertising.”

A source familiar with the situation who asked not to be named said that while YouTube asks for a “marketing commitment” from device manufacturers who want to display its videos, past deals have not approached seven figures. In addition, some of that money goes towards advertising the devices themselves, not just buying ads on YouTube. More importantly than agreeing to the marketing commitment, according to our source, developers need to use YouTube XL and a browser-based UI approved by YouTube — something Limberis told us Syabas doesn’t want to do.

YouTube responded to Limberis’ blog post explaining the lack of YouTube service on the Syabas hardware by pointing out that Syabas and other companies have accessed YouTube’s API from set-top boxes without a contract — in violation of the terms of service — for well over a year.

“Since July of 2008, YouTube’s Terms of Service has restricted implementations for televisions based on our APIs. YouTube has been in active discussions with various developers on how best to implement YouTube on set-top boxes and TVs. There are several companies, however, that have deployed solutions, like video-scraping technology, to circumvent the rules and violate YouTube’s Terms of Service. Companies that have negotiated agreements to use our APIs, like TiVo, Sony [Electronics], Panasonic and [Sony] PS3 are not impacted.”

YouTube strategic partners that have signed contracts in order to display YouTube content on televisions and set-top boxes include Apple (Apple TV) as well as, according, to eHomeUpgrade, Netgear, Nintendo and Samsung.

“We expect that many of those partners have met the spend requirements,” said Limberis. “Obviously, as a smaller company, we can’t handle that type of ad spend.” As a result of losing access to YouTube, he added, his company is exploring options with other online video sites for its next round of set-top boxes.

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Listen to ‘World’s First Twitter Album’

Eliot Van Buskirk — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:52:52 +0000

Each song on this Twitter-able album is represented by no more than 140 characters of code.

Anyone with half a brain can put a song onto Twitter by pasting in the URL for a song. For some, that isn’t enough — they figured out how to paste entire songs into the 140-character Twitter window. A free, open source program called SuperCollider (simplified instructions below) turns the short strings of code into music.

It all started when Dan Stowell, a Ph.D. candidate at London’s Queen Mary’s Centre for Digital Music, tweeted “instructions on how to make a sound like waves crashing on the shore” according to a statement. Other students responded in kind, ultimately contributing 22 tweetable songs for a crowdsourced album called sc140, released in conjunction with The Wire magazine.

Plenty of other software exists that can turn code into sounds, but Music Ally newsletter (subscription required) calls this the “first ever Twitter album” and it’s right about that so far as we can tell. Here’s what the 11th song on the album, “MicroMoog,” looks like in my Twitter feed:

We’ve simplified the legwork required to play these as they are meant to be heard — as code — in the following beginner’s guide to the sc140 album. If you’d rather hear it quickly, stream the songs in your web browser instead. We found listening to the code more interesting because many of the songs include generative code and sound different every time.

Here’s how you can to start listening to Thor Magnusson’s “07″ (or any other song on the sc140 album) in under five minutes:

1. Install the recommended version of the open source SuperCollider 3 software.

2. Run SuperCollider 3 and click the Boot button in the “localhost” window.

3. In the “SuperCollider (Post Window)” window, choose File > Open a new Code Window.

4. Paste Magnusson’s coded song into the new Code Window. Here’s the code:

play{x=SinOsc;y=LFNoise0;a=y.ar(8);(x.ar(Pulse.ar(1)*24)+x.ar(90+(a*90))+MoogFF.ar(Saw.ar(y.ar(4,333,666)),a*XLine.ar(1,39,99,99,0,2)))!2/3}

5. Execute the code for Magnusson’s “07″ by pressing Enter (on a Mac) or CTRL+Enter (on Windows) with the cursor at the end of code in the Code Window. You should hear something like this excerpt from “07″:

We ran into one issue — Thor Magnusson’s 140-character song dropped a few characters from the end when we tweeted it, although other songs didn’t have that problem. And clearly, this 140-character music format has its limitations in terms of expression and nuance. For instance, you couldn’t encode a normal song with vocals and so on into SuperCollider 3 language and have it sound just like a CD.

That doesn’t stop it from being really neat.

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Gameloft Says It, Others Reining In Android Plans

Reuters — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:42:28 +0000

BARCELONA (Reuters) — French mobile phone games company Gameloft said it and other software developers were cutting back investment in developing games and other applications for Google’s Android platform.

Android has won attention in the mobile industry lately, with Motorola and Sony Ericsson choosing it for their new top models.

“We have significantly cut our investment in Android platform, just like … many others,” Gameloft finance director Alexandre de Rochefort said at an investor conference.

Rochefort said the company has cut back on investment mostly due to weaknesses of Android’s application store.

“It is not as neatly done as on the iPhone. Google has not been very good to entice customers to actually buy products. On Android nobody is making significant revenue,” Rochefort said.

Games for iPhone generated 13 percent of Gameloft’s revenue in the last quarter. “We are selling 400 times more games on iPhone than on Android,” Rochefort said.

(Reporting by Tarmo Virki; Editing by Dan Lalor)

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Google’s Chrome OS Netbook Video Shows Lala as Embedded Music Service

Eliot Van Buskirk — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:09:16 +0000

Google’s new playable music search feature was just a hint at the future of Google’s musical ambitions, if its new concept demonstration video of next year’s Chrome OS netbooks — featuring an embedded Lala music playback app — is any indication.

About 40 seconds into the video to the right, Google’s video depicts a user accessing a Lala playlist through a dropdown applications menu at the upper left, causing a collapsible Lala window with a playlist and playback controls to appear (screengrabs below).

Google’s search engine already includes a pop-up window that plays music from Lala and other services after users search for them. It will likely pursue the same strategy on its netbooks as suggested by this video — not because Google wants to be nice to Lala, but because consumers may hesitate before buying a Google Chrome OS netbook if it means leaving their music collections behind.

“The browser is the new iPod” has been Lala’s mantra this year, making it precisely the type of service Google would want to include on its browser-only, Linux-based device, which is slated for a late 2010 release.

The ad-free Lala service sells streamable songs for 10 cents a piece and allows users to duplicate their computer’s collection into the cloud. This means netbook owners who stay near an internet connection can effectively play their home collections and buy new songs for ten on the dollar, which could make a lot more sense to music fans than the dollar or more they pay for downloadable versions of the songs.

But what if you can’t access the cloud?

Lala told Wired.com last month that its as-yet-unreleased iPhone app will cache the last few hundred songs you’ve played on its memory so you can play them back without being online. If Lala implements the same feature in its Chrome app and Google netbooks have at least as much memory as an iPhone, Chrome OS netbook owners will be able to listen to a decent number of their Lala tunes even without an internet connection.

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Ad-Supported Music Contracts Again, as MySpace Buys Imeem

Eliot Van Buskirk — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:00:33 +0000

News Corp’s MySpace purchased streaming music competitor imeem for a bargain price reported to be in the ballpark of $8 to $10 million, but the lion’s share of the purchase price isn’t for the service itself — it’s for key staff to guide MySpace’s transformation into an entertainment destination.

The straw that broke imeem’s back appears to have been an October 21 lawsuit brought against the company by indie label consortium The Orchard, which took the company for the maximum penalty of $150,000 for each song allegedly hosted without permission.

Even before that lawsuit, imeem struggled to pay high music-licensing rates during a tough ad market. When investors declined to keep funding the expensive free music service, imeem could not keep up with payroll and debt payments and was forced to sell, according to All Things Digital.

Imeem’s “talent” is a key part of this fire-sale deal, according to multiple sources close to the situation. It’s almost as if as if MySpace’s search for a MySpace Music CEO morphed into an online-music-company shopping spree. The site’s $10 million acquisition of iLike in August brought the iLike-co-founding Partovi brothers on-board, while this imeem acquisition adds imeem founder Dalton Caldwell and possibly other key staff. A team of entrepreneurial start-up founders could be just what the doctor ordered if MySpace is to heal its Facebook-inflicted social networking wounds and become more popular as a place to watch videos and listen to music, which has always been its core strength.

As part of the bargain, MySpace also gets the SnoCap embeddable music store and seven-million-song-plus content identification database, which imeem acquired in April of last year. SnoCap already forms the back-end for music stores on MySpace and elsewhere. In addition to allowing MySpace to operate its own download store, SnoCap will help the site identify user-uploaded content in order to pay copyright holders, the same way YouTube does with its ContentID system.

News Corp now owns two of the sites linked from Google’s new music search tool, which can’t hurt the company in its bid to build MySpace into a stronger entertainment destination. Still, MySpace Music and its iLike and imeem properties continue to face stiff music-licensing costs, competition from YouTube, and another challenge from the Universal- and Sony-backed YouTube spin-off Vevo, which Wired.com confirmed is set to launch on December 8.

Investors including Warner Music Group injected an estimated $30 to $35 million into imeem, so this $8 to $10 million buyout represents a big loss (Warner wrote off $16 million of its imeem investment earlier this year). Despite the fire-sale price, MySpace’s purchase of imeem begs the question of whether any money from the sale of a start-up that’s partially owned by a major label trickles down to the artists they represent. From what we understand, artists will only receive a share if that is stipulated by their contracts.

Imeem began streaming complete songs from all four major labels for free on December 10, 2007 and continues to do so, although you can only embed a 30-second sample for most of them.

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Photo courtesy of Flickr/TheNotQuiteFool

Wikipedia, iPhone Among Decade’s Top 10 Internet Moments

Belinda Goldsmith — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:17:43 +0000

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The launch of Wikipedia, emergence of the iPhone and the election of President Barack Obama were among the 10 most influential moments on the Internet in the past decade, according to the annual Webby awards.

Other events singled out by the New York-based International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, which has presented the annual Webby awards since 1996, were the Iranian election in 2009 when protests demonstrated the power of Twitter and other social network in reshaping democracy.

“The Internet is the story of the decade because it was the catalyst for change in not just every aspect of our everyday lives, but in everything from commerce and communication to politics and pop culture,” said David-Michel Davies, the executive director of The Webby Awards, in a statement.

“The recurring theme among all of the milestones on our list is the Internet’s capacity to circumvent old systems and put more power into the hands of ordinary people.”

Here is the Webby’s list of the 10 most influential Internet moments of the decade:

Craigslist, the free classifieds site, expands outside San Francisco in 2000, impacting newspaper publishers everywhere
Google AdWords launched in 2000 allowing advertisers to target their customers with laser-sharp precision
Wikipedia, the free open-source encyclopedia, launches in 2001 and today boasts more than 14 million articles in 271 different languages and bringing strangers together on projects
Napster shutdown in 2001, opening the file-sharing floodgates
Google’s IPO in 2004 put the search engine on the path to powering countless aspects of our everyday lives
Online video revolution in 2006 that led to a boom in homemade and professional content on the Internet and helped reshape everything from pop culture to politics
Facebook opens to non-college students and Twitter takes off in 2006
The iPhone debuts in 2007 and smartphones go from a luxury item to a necessity with an app for just about every aspect of modern life
U.S. presidential campaign in 2008 in which the Internet changed every facet of the way campaigns are run
Iranian election protests in 2009 when Twitter proved vital in organizing demonstrations and as a protest too

Photo: An Apple iPhone 3GS and an Apple Macbook Pro are shown at the Apple retail store in San Francisco, California in this July 21, 2009 file photo. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith

(Writing by Belinda Goldsmith, Editing by Sugita Katyal)

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Verizon to AT&T: Can You Sue Me Now?

Eliot Van Buskirk — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:28:56 +0000

AT&T may have the iPhone, but Verizon Wireless claims its network offers five times the 3G coverage — a stinging accusation considering that even the best phone in the world can be hobbled by a slow or nonexistent data connection.

After Verizon’s “There’s a map for that” ads (video above) started appearing online and on television, AT&T asked a judge to bar Verizon from airing them. An Atlanta judge denied that request Wednesday. So for now, the ads mocking AT&T’s “There’s an app for that” ads, and the one where the iPhone is banished to the Island of Misfit Toys, continue to run.

To counter the attack, AT&T launched an ad campaign of its own (video below) featuring a guy in a blazer who isn’t Jason Schwartzman filling in a checklist of AT&T’s alleged advantages over Verizon. The point appears to be that when you have access to AT&T’s 3G — or its slower Edge — network, the iPhone works great.

(A Wired.com comparison of the 3G speeds of various cellphone networks found that AT&T’s 3G network is the slowest in the country.)

Verizon redoubled its attack following AT&T’s parry, claiming in a response filed earlier this week: “AT&T did not file this lawsuit because Verizon’s ‘There’s a map for that’ advertisements are untrue; AT&T sued because Verizon’s ads are true, and the truth hurts.”

Ouch.

It’s no coincidence, of course, that Verizon’s attack on AT&T coincides with the availability of its iPhone-competing Droid smartphone, which has been selling briskly although it’s not flying off the shelves at the same phenomenal rate at which the iPhone did.

After conducting an in-house survey, AT&T determined that Verizon’s ads are misleading because the average person doesn’t understand the difference between 3G coverage and the Edge network. The company claims that Verizon’s 3G coverage ads are unfair because they don’t take AT&T’s Edge network into account. The map contains several prominent references to “3G,” which appear to make clear that the map refers to 3G coverage.

If one company can successfully sue another because consumers don’t understand something, opportunities surely abound for similar lawsuits.

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The Incredible Shrinking AOL: 2,300 More Employees To Be Cut

John C Abell — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:20:14 +0000

AOL plans to shed 1/3 of its employees after it is spun off from Time Warner on Dec. 9, according to an SEC filing. That’s about 2,300 staff.

If it’s any consolation to the nearly departed, CEO Tim Armstrong has decided to forgo his 2009 bonus, which could have totaled $4 million, wsj.com reports.

AOL cut 700 people — about 10% of its workforce — in January and currently has about 6,900 employees. When it merged with Time Warner in January 2000 AOL had 12,000 people on the books.

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Crowdsourcing Social Networks to Inform Public Policy

Eliot Van Buskirk — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:43:44 +0000

Photo of Anil Dash courtesy of Flickr/Joi

Six Apart co-founder Anil Dash plans to reinvent the way the government listens to its citizens. We’re not talking about wiretapping. Rather, he wants to solicit expert opinions on scientific matters through a new social network belonging to the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Expert Labs. Dash pumped his idea Wednesday afternoon during a keynote address at the Web 2.0 conference in New York.

The new Expert Labs social platforms, Dash said in a statement, have the potential to “make our government better, make our society better, advance scientific research and make people feel more connected to those social institutions that serve them.”

The blogging pioneer, whose company runs the Blogs.com, Movable Type, TypePad and Vox platforms, will direct the new organization, which will not be part of the government. Expert Labs will be funded by a $500,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation as part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, publisher of Science journal.

Dash said the goal of the Expert Labs incubator is not create a new social network, but to “us[e] open web technologies [to] make it easy for policy makers and scientists to connect with one another using the web sites and programs they’re already familiar with” such as Facebook and Twitter. Further inspirations for the program include the innovative digital arts program Eyebeam and Peer-to-Patent, which allows citizens to help find relevant information for assessing patent applications.

Dash broke the initiative down into three distinct stages, each involving a different slice of the American citizenry.

“We’re going to tap into the expertise of the policy community to identify what questions need to be answered,” he said. “We’re going to tap into the technology community to collaboratively build platforms that help get those questions answered and finally, we’ll tap into the science and technology communities to provide the answers themselves.”

Dash expects the networks incubated by Expert Labs to shape emerging policies on “almost any issue” including “science, technology, public health and more.”

Employees of the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy apparently contacted Dash after reading his August 14 blog post naming the federal government as “the most interesting new tech startup of 2009.”

“To know that the White House read what I said and was actually listening, that in itself is much more motivating than a million other things — like money or building something really cool,” Dash told the New York Observer.

Science executive publisher Alan Leshner coined the term “cloud expertise” to characterize Dash’s crowdsourced approach to letting citizens inform public policy through the social networks they already use.

“Opening government up to a broad array of expertise is the next logical step in improving American policy-making,” said Leshner. “The goal of the Expert Labs initiative is to help policy-makers tap into the full spectrum of insights on critical issues, using technology to encourage the broadest possible participation by citizens.”

One big question that remains unanswered is how these social networks will filter out non-experts and those intent on derailing dialogue from the conversation, while still allowing outlying ideas to flow in from the fringes. Craigslist founder Craig Newmark expressed concern earlier this year that the same trolls who disrupt online conversations in most other places would disrupt it on official government social networks, if given the chance. Newmark is listed as a “friend of the Labs” on the Expert Labs website, so presumably this concern — no doubt shared by others — will inform how these expert networks are constructed. Details about how they will operate were not available, because the first step is to build them. The solution could be as simple as waiting until a critical mass of experts unfriends the trolls.

The administration has made several attempts to learn from the technology sector, having met with Facebook, Google and Ideo to improve the way it attracts job applicants. Using whatever social networks emerge from Expert Labs, citizen experts with good ideas should be able to contribute them to the public policy dialogue without taking a full-time federal job.

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Top photo courtesy of Flickr/Joi

Celemony’s Melodyne Makes Easy Work of ‘Hard Day’s Night’

Eliot Van Buskirk — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:55:24 +0000

Celemony's Melodyne Editor separates various audio elements of the Beatles' Hard Day's Night, letting producers treat audio files as if they were MIDI files (click to expand).

When Celemony posted a demonstration last summer its lead developer Peter Neubäcker dissecting chords and rebuilding them as he pleased, we called it a major breakthrough. After testing the software, we stand by that assertion.

Autotune and other technologies have allowed manipulation of single notes, but until now, nothing let you edit polyphonic audio files as if they were notes in a MIDI file — assigning new pitches to notes, moving them to new positions in the song, and so on.

In layman’s terms, this has the potential to let people rewrite music that’s already been written, fix wrong notes, pick apart samples and basically get their hands on the DNA of a song or sample (thus the feature’s name, “Direct Note Access”).

Celemony released Melodyne Editor with Direct Note Access this week as standalone software and as a plug-in for audio programs, putting this breakthrough technology into the hands of average producers. (Prices range from $99 to $350 depending on what other Celemony products you already own.)

In the interest of science and kicks, we threw the hardest challenge we could think of at Melodyne Editor: the opening chord from the Beatles’ “Hard Day’s Night.” The infamous “praaaaang” sound that begins the song baffled musicologists and music fans for decades, until Professor Jason Brown of Dalhousie University used fast-fourier transforms to identify each note in the chord (we used the digitally-remastered version of the song for this test):

Celemony Melodyne Editor and professor Jason Brown mostly matched up, although Melodyne missed a few notes that Brown was able to identify. In the below playable chart, green indicates a match between Melodyne and Brown’s analysis; orange indicates that the right note was identified in the wrong octave, most likely due to the high number of overtones in this complex chord; and red indicates that there was no match:

Note	Melodyne Detection	Melodyne’s Isolated Note	Professor Jason Brown’s Detection
E			George Martin’s piano
C6			John Lennon’s guitar
G			George Harrison’s guitar, GM’s piano
D	Overtone		GH’s guitar, GM’s piano
C5	Overtone		GH’s guitar
A			GH’s guitar
G	Note		GH’s guitar
F♮	Overtone
D	Note		Paul McCartney’s bass, GH’s guitar
C4	Note
A	Note		GH’s guitar
G	Note
F♮	Note		GM’s piano
D	Note		GM’s piano
C3
A	Note
D	Note

(Melodyne makes overridable decisions about whether a tone it detects is a note or an overtone.)

As a rough demonstration of what is possible with Melodyne Celemony Editor, here’s a version of the “Hard Day’s Night” chord with each of the detected notes put in a new place:

And here’s the result of some quick tinkering with a later section of the song:

Conclusion

Celemony Melodyne Editor analyzed all of “Hard Day’s Night” in about a minute. Considering the complexity of the chord, it did an impressive job of figuring out which notes were involved — remember, this chord stymied experts for 44 years. Overall, it was better at identifying lower frequencies, and vocals sometimes sounded tinny on new notes.

But the overall accuracy in identification and the ease with which we were able to alter notes proved this to be a powerful new tool. I tested it quickly for the purpose of this article in order to create the above tweaked versions. If one were to put more time into choosing notes, the results would surely be better musically-speaking. When used with more clearly-defined notes, single-instrument recordings and simpler samples that haven’t mystified experts for decades it performs better.

Celemony Melodyne Editor and similar follow-up technology will clearly make sample-based music more creative by allowing musicians and producers to rearrange notes within polyphonic samples. Like many innovations, it will probably muddy copyright waters — in part because it can make samples more obscure and harder to identify. (Is it the same song if all the notes are new?)

For most music fans, of course, that doesn’t matter. The important thing is that Melodyne will lead to more interesting beats and melodies in a number of ways. Even sticklers who despise sampling and (especially) autotune should grant that this granular level of editing can make the art of sampling more artistic.

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