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RealNetworks and the MPAA aren’t due in court against until mid-November.

“It has nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with controlling innovation,” said Fred von Lohmann, EFF’s senior attorney.

“By reading the existing CSS license carefully,” von Lohmann wrote, “Real found a way to create a new product category without first getting permission from the Hollywood studios.”

“Hollywood can’t possibly believe that the $30, DRM-hobbled RealDVD software represents a piracy threat,” von Lohmann wrote. The studios are using the lawsuit to “send a message about what happens to those who innovate without permission in a post-DMCA world.”

The group that advocates for the rights of Internet users said in a blog post Friday night that the the primary reason the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) filed a copyright suit against RealNetworks and is trying to halt the sale of the RealDVD software is to make sure the company, and anyone else wishing to build movie players, gets Hollywood’s permission first.

Why RealDVD is so threatening to the studios is that RealNetworks has the potential to start a rebellion among gadget makers. The company is thumbing its nose at Hollywood’s licensing deals and telling the courts that it only needs to protect the DVD’s contents, which RealDVD does. If RealNetworks is allowed to build a player without a license, then others will follow. Hollywood wants to avoid that at all costs, according to von Lohmann.

Hollywood isn’t suing RealNetworks over piracy–that’s just a smokescreen, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The studios accused RealNetworks in a copyright suit of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and breaching its contract with the DVD Copy Control Association, the group that oversees the licenses that manufacturers need to build DVD players. On Tuesday, Hollywood convinced U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel to keep RealDVD off the market until November 17 at the earliest.

Watermarks and DRM
The licenses also give Hollywood the power to ask a that tech companies help in the fight against piracy, says von Lohmann.

The licensing agreements tech firms are required to sign before making movie players are a means of control, said von Lohmann. The licenses “define what the devices can and can’t do thereby protecting Hollywood business models from disruptive innovation,” he said. Representatives from RealNetworks and the MPAA could not be reached Friday.

The studios told the judge that RealDVD enables consumers to build huge film libraries without paying a cent. They just need to rent a movie and use RealDVD to copy and store the material to their hard drives. Lawyers for the MPAA described the “rent, rip and return” scenario and told the judge this could cost the film industry billions. But in his post, von Lohmann points out what many others have already noted: there is software readily available on the Internet that copies and stores films on hard drives. Most of it is unencumbered with any of the copy protections found on RealDVD.

“It has nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with controlling innovation.”
–Fred von Lohmann, senior attorney for EFF

“In the course of these years-long negotiations, Hollywood has managed to wrest several important concessions from technology vendors,” von Lohmann wrote. They “include requiring that computers do watermark detection to spot pirated copies when reading data from Blu-ray discs, and imposing DRM on resulting copies.”

He suggests that Hollywood isn’t against allowing people to back up their DVDs. He said we might see products that enable people to make copies. It’s just that the studios want to share in the profits made by such products.

When you search for something using the Sightix technology on a social network, it searches the content of everyone you are connected with, and ranks results gleaned from each user based on the strength of their connection to you. Ari Gottesmann, vice president of Sightix, gave me this example: Say you’re searching for a nightclub. The clubs your friends talk about will get a higher relevance than your friends of friends. It’s much more likely that this ranking will yield results that work for you than searching a general engine that doesn’t give extra weight to your friends’ recommendations.

It’s less likely that this technology will work when users are looking for something completely obscure to their networks, but I bet they would be surprised to find how much they can glean from their extended social circle with a tool such as this.

Sightix shows you how your network influences your search results. (Click image for full version.)

The Sightix company, originally in the business intelligence business with customers such as Dun and Bradstreet, has given its social search product a rich and complex interface. I think it’s overkill for the task at hand, but if users want to see how they’re connected to the results they get, it could be fun to explore.

Sightix is building its search product to embed in social networks. It’s not making a search destination site, which means its success hinges on embedding the technology within social networks themselves. Getting the Shin1 deal is a good first deal, and Gottesmann is working on getting the service embedded in the huge global social networks for the future.

Delver, a search engine that deciphers your social network, is still in private beta. Google is reportedly working on social search, but has yet to release it. According to Sightix, on May 1 it will deliver social search to Shin1, an Israeli social network.

The product also works as a people search engine of a sort. If there’s a good result from someone way out in your extended network, this tool will help you connect with them.

(Credit:
Sightix)

I wouldn’t say that Google is broken. But after looking at concepts by Delver (review) and Sightix, it has become clear to me how much better search can be–in theory–when it knows more about the person doing the searching, and when it knows about their social network.

What makes the BSL app work is its focus on single tasking. Instead of giving the user a mishmash of options, like most Web sites and apps, BSL keeps things simple, with big buttons and clear choices. It’s just another portal, sure, but if you’re trying to get your grandparents more involved in your family’s online life, it’s a good option for them.

The core of the service is a downloadable app that supersimplifies everything for the elderly user. It’s an e-mail client, a Web browser, a photo viewer, and so on. As a bonus, the app will run directly off a USB drive, so people can take their BSL network with them to wherever they can plug into a PC with an Internet connection.

(Credit:
BigScreenLive)

The service is preconfigured with popular feeds, but users can add more.

BigScreenLive's installable app gives a user simple access to photo sharing (shown, an RSS reader, e-mail, shopping, and the Web.

The photo-sharing feature, of course, is a key driver of this family-focused service. The viewer isn’t bad. It’s a bit flat in presentation, but functional. Unfortunately, the photo uploader is old school. You have to pick images one by one. There’s neither a bulk uploader nor a quick way to import images from a photo-sharing Web site. This will be fixed in future versions, Roy told me.

The service costs $9.95 a month, which is high when you consider that it doesn’t do much that you can’t do for free elsewhere. And the company also makes money from Amazon affiliate fees when users purchase goods. However, the audience BigScreenLive is trying to appeal to, older adults and their grown children and caretakers, is easily reachable via associations like the AARP and womens’ service magazines. So, there may yet be a good business here.

My default position on products targeted at the elder demographic is not charitable. I’ve seen too many services that are patronizing or exploitive (see “Presto puts digital photos in the hands of your grandma”). Old doesn’t mean dumb. And simply pumping up the type size of e-mail doesn’t make an app worth subscribing to or buying.

See also: Myfamily.com.

On the other hand, the BSL Web app for family members is a little too simple. It mostly duplicates the big-button BSL app for seniors, but adds a few more capabilities for marking sites as family favorites and for uploading photos.

BigScreenLive has its faults, but it’s nonetheless a nice walled garden (with very low walls, thankfully) for people who don’t want to deal with the frenetic and inconsistent interfaces on various Web sites, sharing services, and e-mail apps.

(Credit:
BigScreenLive)

It’s family day for me at Webware. After posting about the Gmail-as-baby-book tip, I got a pitch about BigScreenLive, a new online environment for older adults who are frustrated by the Web and e-mail.

The app comes preconfigured to read and display newsfeeds from several U.S. newspapers, and it also has its own simple front end to Amazon (CEO Cayce Roy was VP there). Users can get onto the Web directly from the app if they want; it has a portable version of
Firefox built in to it.

People already accustomed to using another Web-based e-mail service can reconfigure the app to use it instead of the built-in e-mail. However, it can’t integrate with client-side e-mail products like Outlook or Eudora.

This picture of a Samsung OLED laptop prototype raises more questions than it answers. Just how thin and light is it? Is touch-typing possible on that keyboard? Where’s the mouse pad? What’s that panel behind the display? Why is the woman pictured on the display checking her pulse? When can I have one?

(Credit:
Samsung)

(Via Engadget)

What a translated-from-the Korean Samsung page does reveal is that it’s an AMOLED (active matrix organic light-emitting diode) laptop prototype that Samsung’s display division developed for the Society for Information Display’s gathering in Los Angeles next week. According to Samsung, the prototype features a 12.1-inch screen with a 1,280×768 resolution. Perhaps we’ll be able to glean more information next week when the display scientists, engineers, and manufacturers get together. As for when we might see this product on store shelves, Samsung has previously stated it’ll start rolling out OLED TVs, monitors, and laptops in 2009.

“Our customers are always our first priority,” Charter said a statement. “As such, we are not moving forward with the pilots at this time. We will continue to take a thoughtful, deliberate approach with the goal to ultimately structure an advertising service that enhances the Internet experience for our customers and addresses questions and concerns they’ve raised.”

Charter’s plans had also raised the attention of prominent members of Congress, including Massachusetts Democrat Edward J. Markey, who chairs the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet. Shortly after Charter’s announcement, Markey released a statement praising the decision to suspend the program but questioning whether it violated the law:

Given the serious privacy concerns raised by the sophisticated ad-serving technology Charter Communications planned to test market, I am pleased to hear that the company has decided to delay implementation of this program, which electronically profiled individual consumer Web usage. I urge other broadband companies considering similar user profiling programs to similarly hold off on implementation while these important privacy concerns can be addressed.

Internet service provider Charter Communications announced Tuesday that it was indefinitely suspending the use of a controversial tool to track its customers’ movement on the Web.

Charter, the fourth-largest cable operator in the U.S., announced in May that it would use technology from a company called NebuAd to monitor some of its broadband customers’ Internet habits to provide advertisers with information to target online ads to individual customers. Privacy advocates had likened the service to Internet wiretapping.

The move comes as targeted Web advertising efforts ramp up. Earlier Tuesday, Google announced a tool called Ad Planner that lets advertisers find Web sites whose visitors match various demographic attributes. The tool, which competes with market leaders ComScore and Nielsen Online, also can show in detail how many people visit a particular Web site.

Cloud computing is designed to cut costs for companies by moving such functions as data storage, security, and enterprise applications onto the Internet. A company can control its own cloud system, outsource it in its entirety, or adopt a hybrid model.

IBM on Monday unveiled consulting and implementation services for cloud computing, as well as a related validation program.

IBM Global Business Services, seeking to capitalize on the rising popularity of Internet-based storage and computing, will oversee the company’s cloud-consulting services, aiming to provide customers with assessments as to whether building their own so-called cloud, or transferring data and applications to a hybrid private-public cloud or a public cloud would be most cost-effective. It plans to aid customers in installing, configuring, and delivering cloud-computing services in the data center.

IBM on Monday also unveiled a Resilient Cloud Validation program to provide customers with a means to validate the reliability of third-party partners who deliver applications and services via remote servers.

(Credit: Plastic Logic Limited)

This particular gizmo is very attractive. It uses a large, flexible electronic paper display based on technology from E Ink (the same company that makes the displays for Amazon.com’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader), but the device overall is remarkably thin and light.

More importantly, even as a prototype, the display’s contrast ratio seems to be better than that of the Kindle or Reader, mostly by virtue of the white being whiter–I’d have to make a direct comparison to be sure, though. I also see all of the critical features I want in an e-book reader: good display resolution, reasonable performance, and a touch-sensitive screen to support document markup and an on-screen keyboard. The Kindle’s keyboard just isn’t good enough.

Plastic Logic’s prototype e-book reader

Check out this video from DEMOfall, in which Plastic Logic CEO Richard Archuleta demonstrates the prototype. I see some minor problems in the prototype’s display–some dead lines and odd drawing glitches–but nothing that should interfere with the scheduled launch.

I’m hoping to talk with the folks at Plastic Logic about this gizmo and its other product and technology plans. I’ll be back with an update, once I do.

Plastic Logic–a company founded to commercialize electronics built on flexible plastic substrates–demonstrated a prototype e-book reader (not yet named) and announced that it plans to ship this product in the first half of next year. You can read the press release for yourself.

At DemoFall, Plastic Logic spun the gizmo as a “business reader,” which may be an attempt to justify a premium price for the large display and superior physical robustness, but I think that it has more potential as a consumer product. Business users have laptops already. Plastic Logic may find ways to position its reader as a complement to the laptop–I can think of a few ways myself–but the consumer market opportunity is far larger.

I suspect that it’s no coincidence that Plastic Logic is talking about bringing its gizmo to market “through partners around the world.” Could this be how Barnes & Noble will take on the Kindle? I wouldn’t be surprised.

Overall, I think that this is the first of the third-generation e-book readers: as far beyond the Kindle and Sony’s Reader as those devices were advanced over first-gen products such as the Rocket eBook and Franklin eBookMan.

And the whole thing is somewhat flexible, so it won’t break if it gets slightly bent in a backpack or briefcase. Flexible doesn’t mean invulnerable, but it’s a lot better than the brittle glass displays of existing e-book readers.

Other bloggers have overreacted somewhat by predicting that the Plastic Logic reader will kill the Kindle, but that isn’t going to happen. There’s more to providing a good e-book experience than industrial design. The Kindle is very well supported by Amazon, and it has that unique free-forever wireless-data link. But if Plastic Logic can find a partner with ties to the publishing industry and solve the wireless problem, the result would be a serious challenge to Amazon.

Pricing is said to be “competitive,” and battery life is described as “days”; we’ll have to see what happens to these estimates by the time the product ships. The Kindle has “days” of battery life, but sometimes, it’s just a few days, and I have been occasionally disappointed to find mine dead when I wanted to use it.

In fact, the prototype appears to have only a few physical controls; essentially all of the user interaction takes place through the touch screen. It’s just a smooth white rectangle, like a thin pad of writing paper: about 8.5 inches by 11 inches by 0.3 inches, with a 10.7-inch screen and a total weight less than a pound.

Interesting news from the DemoFall conference held this week in San Diego:

Twenty of the largest cable operators and phone companies in the U.S. only signed up about 887,000 new subscribers during the quarter, the Leichtman Research Group reported Monday. This was the lowest level of new subscribers the research group has seen in the seven years it’s been reporting on the broadband market.

Cable companies now have 35.3 million broadband customers. And phone companies have 29.7 million subscribers. AT'T has the largest number of subscribers with 14.7 million customers. Comcast, the largest cable operator, has 14.4 million.

This change in strategy appears to be an attempt to sign up more valuable customers who won’t drop their service when the one-year promotion ends.

What’s this mean for broadband providers? I think it means that phone companies and cable operators will have to compete even more on price and value. I doubt the phone companies will drop the pricing of their ultra high-speed services much. Instead, I think they will price their bundled services more aggressively to encourage consumers to sign up for broadband services as well as their phone and TV services. They may even try to link their wireless services in with these packages, creating a quadruple play value package that the cable companies won’t be able to compete with.

Meanwhile cable operators managed to sign up around 85 percent as many subscribers as they had during the second quarter of 2007. In the past, cable and phone companies have evenly split the number of new broadband additions. But during the second quarter, cable pulled ahead with a whopping 76 percent of the new business.

“While the relative number of quarterly broadband adds has certainly peaked, the decline in additions this quarter compared to the same period last year was exacerbated by Verizon and AT&T’s emphasis on selling higher speed Fios and U-verse bundled services, often at the expense of the traditional DSL service,” he said in a press release.

Of course, there is still a good proportion of the population that has no Internet connectivity at all, which could provide future growth for the broadband industry. But these customers are likely more price sensitive and some may actually live in areas where broadband service isn’t currently available.

I also predict that the phone companies and cable operators will be forced to extend their promotional offers. Consumers have gotten savvy enough to know that they can cancel their service (or at least threaten to leave) when the promotion is over and move to another provider.

Phone companies appeared to be the hardest hit by the slowdown, only adding about 23 percent of the customers they added during the same quarter a year ago. Bruce Leichtman, president of the firm, said AT&T and Verizon Communications have been emphasizing higher speed and more expensive services to customers over their entry-level DSL services.

While the phone companies’ change in strategy could play a role in the lopsided breakdown of new broadband additions, I think it’s also worth noting that the market is more saturated. Roughly 90 percent of active Internet users today already subscribe to broadband service. This means that there is a smaller pool of people using dial-up who may switch to broadband services.

Cable operators and phone companies signed up about half the number of subscribers in the second quarter of 2008 that they signed up during the same quarter in 2007.

• 1. A chain of trust. As the old security saying goes, “the security chain is only as strong as its weakest link.” Microsoft has done a good job making Windows more secure with each iteration but it really doesn’t matter if the bad guys compromise your data by hacking in at the application layer. Microsoft is suggesting a model where the entire technology stack must adhere to a trust relationship (i.e., each piece is authenticated and validated and all changes must be approved) where every component relies on the others.

• 2. A new identity model. Identity is no longer about user name and password alone. In today’s computing environment, you also have to consider device type (i.e., am I communicating via my PC, cell phone, or PDA?), location, and the user’s work and personal profile. Yes, this complicates things but there is no getting around the fact that I use the same laptop to do my job during the day and then bid on vintage Gretsch guitars at night.

• 3. Industry participation. Microsoft readily admits that it can’t establish end-to-end trust on its own. Of course, Microsoft won’t be shy about suggesting technologies for connectivity and standardization, but it really does need help here. It’s time that the security industry stop its outright mistrust of Microsoft and extend an olive branch.

In past years, Microsoft keynotes were full of product demonstrations and funny video montages. Its End to End Trust discussions demonstrate a new Microsoft focus–and the remaining problems associated with information security.

It’s been a few weeks since the RSA Conference 2008 and I’m now preparing for Interop. Nevertheless, I wanted to get in my two cents worth regarding Craig Mundie’s RSA keynote address on what Microsoft is calling “End to End Trust.”

In my view, Mundie’s keynote was effective in that it really got the industry’s attention. Many security professionals and vendors recognize the need for this End to End Trust model while organizations like the Computer Security Institute (CSI), the National Institute of Standards (NIST), and the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) are already working on similar efforts.

End to End Trust? What about the often-discussed Trustworthy Computing initiative that Microsoft introduced in 2001? It’s still around but Microsoft realized that Trustworthy Computing alone may not be enough. So what else is needed? Craig Mundie mentioned:

(Credit:
Sapphire Energy)

GreenFuel Technologies, which had to scale back a pilot site, said that it has landed a large European customer to make fuel from algae but has not shared any more information.

From green scum to black gold?

The San Diego, Calif.-based company also disclosed that it has raised $50 million from Arch Venture Partners, Venrock, and the Wellcome Trust.

Sapphire said that it developed an algae process to avoid the controversy over using land for fuel crops instead of food crops.

Its process can grow algae using wastewater, and the executive team said it is confident that the technology can scale up to produce gasoline on a commercial scale.

Update on May 30: Corrected name of Arch Venture Partners.

Sapphire’s “green crude” has been certified with a 91-octane rating, but the company disclosed few details about its technology.

Sapphire Energy has come out stealth mode, saying it’s producing the chemical equivalent of gasoline from algae.

Formally launched last May, Sapphire said Wednesday that it has hired Brian Goodall, who led a team of engineers responsible for a cross-Atlantic flight that used algae-based fuel earlier this year.

But at this point, algae fuels are largely experimental and no company is making fuel on a commercial scale.

Sapphire is not the only company creating technology to make hydrocarbons from plants. Others include LS9, Amyris Biotechnologies, Codexis, and J. Craig Venter-founded Synthetic Genomics.

The advantage of this approach is that the fuels can be integrated into existing transmission infrastructure and can run in
cars or planes without modification.

Algae is touted as the feedstock with perhaps the most promise for growing fuels; a number of companies are developing algae farming technologies.