All Things Digital

Sure, most of us can get pretty fired up over the thought of a monthly 250GB bandwidth cap, but what about the companies that provide online video services? After all, as Om Malik pointed out, the cap isn’t about excessive bandwidth usage as much as it is about stymieing online video sources like Hulu, Netflix and Amazon.

Roku, which makes the Netflix player, isn’t worried about the cap. The $99 set-top box maker is more of a facilitator than a provider, but its entire business is built upon delivering video to you over your broadband connection, so a cap could impact its sales.

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In response to today’s news that Google is releasing its own browser, code-named Chrome, I decide to call John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla Corp., the folks behind the fast-growing Firefox browser. My intention was to find out what Lilly thought about this development, especially since Mozilla has been viewed as close personal partner of Google’s.

The open-source browser maker depends heavily on a lucrative financial deal it has signed with the search company. The pair recently renewed the deal to last through 2011. Was Lilly worried about yet another browser in the market?

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On Monday Google launched a new advocacy campaign, Free The Airwaves, an effort by the company to get some traction around white spaces, the tiny slivers of spectrum that reside in the 700 MHz band spectrum vacated by analog television’s switch to digital transmissions. Google has been lobbying hard to get this spectrum unlicensed and make it open to all unlicensed devices. While I am all for more and easier broadband for the masses, I cannot miss the irony that a search monopoly that is printing money wants access to more free spectrum so it can eventually start printing more money by getting more search traffic.

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The third annual WordCamp San Francisco was held this weekend, bringing together WordPress users and developers to discuss the past, present and future of their favorite Web publishing platform. Since its humble beginnings as a fork of the b2\cafelog blog software in 2003, WordPress has grown to become one of the most popular blog publishing platforms. WordPress.com, the hosted version of WordPress, saw the creation of 2.3 million new blogs this year, with 35 million posts.

My history with WordPress goes back to when it first came on the scene in 2003. I was looking at third-party software to manage my personal Web site, which had outgrown the simple content management system I had written. I initially resisted using WordPress until version 1.5 was released in 2005. What pushed me over the top was the inclusion of static pages in the Strayhorn release. This allowed WordPress to be used as a full-blown CMS instead of just a simple blog platform. Over the next last years, WordPress’s CMS capabilities and versatility have grown to the point where it’s a great choice to power a simple blog, a community of blogs or even a corporate Web site. Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher agree–after all, they chose WordPress to power All Things Digital.

Automattic, the folks behind WordPress, are hard at work this year improving the WordPress experience. As millions more people choose WordPress to power their Web sites, the importance of having automatic updates is becoming very evident. During his State of the Word Address, Matt Mullenweg, the lead developer and public face of WordPress, hinted at a future update mechanism (similar to Mac OS X Software Update or Mozilla FireFox) with which updates to WordPress Core, Plugins, and Themes can be applied in real-time without the user having to upload files or type arcane commands into a Terminal session.

Having been to the previous two WordCamps, I can say that Automattic and the volunteers did a fantastic job organizing the 2008 edition. The new space at the Mission Bay Conference Center was a great upgrade over the previous location. Still, a part of me misses seeing Matt sit in one of those thrones at the Swedish American Hall!

For more information and thoughts on WordCamp 2008 SF, check out the great coverage on Andrew Mager’s blog The Web Life on ZDNet. Finally, to find out more about upcoming WordCamps in your area, visit WordCamp Central.

Last July, at the time of the launch of the new iPhone, we asked the question, where are the iPhone games? Looks like we have an answer: they are coming, and in a big way. Of course, you can already buy Tetris and grab Tap Tap Revenge, the No. 1 free app, for, well, free, but the big commercial games are going to be hitting the iTunes App store soon, according to news coming out of the E3 game conference down in LA.

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The battle over Yahoo’s search business, as witnessed over the last few days, seems both ridiculous and petty. And it takes the attention away from what is Yahoo’s true value: a media aggregation platform. Yahoo is the place a lot of people–some 400 million–visit to get their news, sports scores and email. I have always liked that business, and yesterday I experienced, first-hand, the enormous strength of Yahoo.

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Unless you’re using Enron math, BT’s new plan to connect 10 million homes–roughly 40 percent of the United Kingdom–with fiber networks at a cost of £1.5 billion doesn’t quite add up. At today’s conversion rate, that’s about $3 billion–or $300 to wire up each of these proposed 10 million homes.

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Nokia, already a stakeholder in mobile OS maker Symbian, has announced that it will buy the remainder of the company and throw all the assets into a new platform called the Symbian Foundation, which will unite all the flavors of Symbian into a single, common software platform that will go open source in two years. The story is not that this happened but why–and what it means for the mobile industry.

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It should come as no surprise: Incumbents are beginning to act like incumbents. But while the cable companies are the first ones to jump on the tiered-broadband bandwagon, they won’t be the last. Their argument for limiting bandwidth and data transfers based on price sounds like a good idea, especially as a way to get bargain hunters to buy. In the long run, however, tiered broadband is a terrible idea that will bring the innovation inspired by flat-rate broadband to a screeching halt.

Flat-rate broadband–however cheap or expensive (depending on your point of view) it might be–inspired the formation of Skype, YouTube, Facebook, Apple’s iTunes and MySpace, amongst others. It allowed us to freely experiment, to embrace both the applications and the ideas they represented, such as VoIP, online video, digital downloads and social networking.

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Google’s senior-executive exodus continues. YouTube’s head of monetization, Shashi Seth, has now left the company to become the chief revenue officer of Menlo Park, Calif.-based start-up Cooliris. In his new job at the start-up, which has raised some $3 million in Series A funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Seth is going to help develop a new business and advertising model.

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There are two ways to look at Amazon.com: as a retailer, and as a software company that runs a retailing application. Both are accurate, and in combination they explain why Amazon, rather than a traditional computer company, has become the most successful early mover in supplying computing as a utility service. For Amazon, running a cloud computing service is core to its business in a way that it isn’t for, say, IBM, Sun or HP.

In a brief but illuminating video interview with Om Malik, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos underscores this point in describing the origins of Amazon Web Services. “Four years ago is when it started,” he says, “and we had enough complexity inside Amazon that we were finding we were spending too much time on fine-grained coordination between our network engineering groups and our applications programming groups. Basically what we decided to do is build a [set of APIs] between those two layers so that you could just do coarse-grained coordination between those two groups. Amazon is, you know, just a web-scale application.”

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When it comes to the widget ecosystem, lavishly funded companies like Slide, Clearspring and RockYou hog the limelight. But it is Userplane, now a subsidiary of AOL, that seems to be revving up the money engine without much fanfare. The company that started out offering a Web-based chat system has now morphed into a many-faceted business, including owning what might just be one of the largest widget ad networks out there.

At the D6 Conference this week in Carlsbad, Calif., I ran into Userplane founder Mike Jones, who sold his company to AOL in 2006 and now works for AOL. During our conversation, I marveled at the amount of money being pumped into the widget ecosystem while at the same time fretting about the paucity of revenue opportunities. My skepticism about the sector was outlined in an earlier post that focused on Clearspring’s latest round of funding.

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It didn’t quite have the sentimental feeling of the Steve Jobs & Bill Gates talk from last year, but it was interesting to see the dynamic of Steve Ballmer & Bill Gates. I think it was great to see Bill step back and let Steve enjoy the limelight, and not take himself too seriously. I think instead of writing about the whole conversation, I am going to share this tiny bit I captured on video that shows how relaxed Gates is feeling these days, now that he has shifted all responsibilities to Ballmer.

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Twitter, the eponymously named San Francisco company and our favorite narcissistic pursuit, may not have a business model, but it surely has the buzz. Whether it is their new round of funding or their inability to keep the service running–the blog world loves to twitter about Twitter.

After talking to some reliable sources, I have a theory that could help Twitter solve its scaling conundrum and make money.

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It is a sad commentary on the state of affairs in Silicon Valley when Carl Icahn, a known corporate raider from the go-go ’80s, is used as a lightning rod to bring two of technology’s major players, Yahoo and Microsoft, to the table to strike some sort of a deal. And there seems to be some sort of a transaction in the works. And that’s not necessarily a good idea.

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