Jakob Lodwick, the co-founder of IAC owned video site Vimeo, left the company today. The reason? Apparently Lodwick didn’t see eye to eye with the IAC brass on creative issues, and specifically had a run in with IAC chief Barry Diller three weeks ago.

That’s not surprising, given the picture Lodwick chose to include with his goodbye post. A source close to Lodwick says “he was let go.”

Lodwick’s girlfriend, Julia Allison (who made a scandal at our August Capital party last summer - see video here), wrote a blog post saying “Dear Jakob, I wish I hadn’t found out you left the company you’ve been with for the last seven years from your blog. Love, Julia.”

Lots of drama out in NYC this evening.

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New figures released by comScore show that YouTube remains the outright leader in online video.

Based on videos viewed, Google owned sites (YouTube + Google Video, but mostly YouTube) commanded a 28.3% market share in the United States in September with Fox Interactive Media (FIM) sites (MySpace and others) on 4.2%. The figures (see chart) demonstrate that YouTube doesn’t dominate video viewing as much as would be expected, suggesting that the long tail is alive and well in the sector given the top ten video sites only hold 45.2% of all videos viewed online.

The unique viewer numbers for video destinations also show Google leading, but by a smaller margin of 39.4% vs 22.6% for FIM sites. These figures are for people visiting the actual video sites themselves suggesting that much of YouTube’s dominance comes not from YouTube.com itself, but from people embedding YouTube videos (28.3% of all videos viewed vs 4.2% for FIM).

Notable in its absence from both top ten charts is the IAC owned Vimeo, who according to this post fired founder Jakob Lodwick today. Clearly Vimeo isn’t performing although it has positioned itself well with support for HD video. IAC usually takes long term positions in companies it owns (Ask.com for example) so it’s not on Deadpool watch yet but you’d expect IAC will be looking at ways of improving its performance going forward.

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Looking for an ultra high-end 1080p home cinema projector that you won’t want to hide in a cabinet? Well, Sim2 seems to own this category and the latest edition is now shipping and it looks great. I had the opportunity to check them out and see David Lynch in full HD from his home in California (I think). He loves the Sim2 and picked them out of a handful of other high-end projectors. The C3X 1080 is the smallest and most powerful full HD 3 chip projector available today. It certainly owes a lot to TI’s DLP DarkChip 4 that enables it to output such great video.

The C3X 1080 might be on the hefty side at 22 pounds, but it looks gorgeous thanks to Giorgio Revoldini. The projector is built around three 0.95-inch, 1080p DLP chipsets with the DarkChip 4 being the main attraction. It basically makes the black, blacker and everything brighter.

The C3X 1080 features two HDMI inputs that are HDCP-compliant as well as S- and composite-video and RGB connections. There’s also a USB and RS-232 serial port. And an optical digital-audio output on top of IR sensors.

It comes in high-gloss Gunmetal, Black , Red and Gold. It’s $31,995, but the picture quality is incredible.

Sim2

Just because.

via Consumerist

Filed under: Cellphones

Barely a fortnight after Apple began talking with China Mobile about getting the iPhone into the ginormous Chinese market, it seems that negotiations are off -- or still on, or something. Yesterday, Nanfang Daily reported that China Mobile's CEO felt that the "iPhone model was not suitable for China," but unnamed reporters suggested that the real reason behind the call-off was the inability for both entities to agree on -- surprise, surprise -- a revenue sharing model. Today, however, a report over at Bloomberg notes that Apple has in fact not ended discussions with China Mobile, and moreover, it was said to have "denied newspaper reports" claiming otherwise. 'Course, we've got two sides of the story here, and while Apple may feel that there's still room to negotiate, China Mobile may see things quite differently. Time will tell, we guess.

[Via Macworld]
Read - Nanfang Daily report
Read - Bloomberg report

 

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Brad Templeton notes a problem with Facebook that I have also observed: third party applications on the site are often quite annoying. I pretty regularly get messages from friends asking me to sign up for some random Facebook application that says (as Templeton puts it) "Fred Smith wrote something on your pixie wall!" and I have to sign up for the application to find out what Smith said. Most of the time neither Fred Smith's message or the app is that great, and so I end up quickly deleting it and am annoyed at both Fred Smith and the pixie wall application for wasting my time. I'm now at the point where I mostly ignore application requests. It's a bit of a sticky situation for Facebook. On the one hand, the company doesn't want to stifle experimentation by micromanaging the way applications are deployed. On the other hand, if applications make themselves too much of a nuisance, they might degrade the entire Facebook experience.

At a minimum, Facebook should revise its guidelines to make it clear that applications should, as much as possible, allow users to interact with them without formally signing up with the application themselves. Of course, applications have a strong incentive to ignore this advice in the interest of viral growth. One way to help enforce the guidelines would be for Facebook to put a complaint button right next to all application installation requests. The applications that received the most complaints could be investigated by Facebook staff and asked to clean up their act. One problem is that, as Templeton points out, Facebook itself hardly has clean hands on this issue. When you get a message on Facebook, you receive an email without the body of the message in it. Facebook ought to set a good example by switching this default.

It's true that in the short run that would moderately reduce website traffic. But that's a short-sighted way of looking at it. As I pointed out on Wednesday, one of the reasons Google has been so successful is that they almost never degrade the user experience in pursuit of other objectives like revenue maximization. That enhances their brand and increases user loyalty. By the same token, we at Techdirt provide full-text feeds despite the fact that partial feeds would generate more traffic in the short term. In both cases, the focus is on building the long-term value of the product, and sometimes that means giving up some short-term benefits in order to enhance the user experience. If Facebook doesn't learn this lesson, they are vulnerable to a competitor that offers similar functionality and a better user experience.

Tim Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tim Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Finally, Google’s thinking about making its Street Views map completely anonymous, to protect the privacy of people that show up in the photographs. For its Europe Street Views version, Google will be modifying all photos to ensure that faces and license plates are not visible. It may do the same with the US version, which launched months before Street Views in Europe.

So what took so long? Privacy advocates were all over Street Views when it first came about. And while Google made a few concessions to appease those with privacy concerns by offering to alter images upon request, it looks like Google may finally be doing the right thing when it comes to these Street Views maps.

This could be in part because of the increased amount of pressure being placed on Google as it expands globally. Other countries are far more strict about privacy standards than the US. Thankfully, Google’s announced that it will be thinking about making changes accordingly to the US version as it takes these steps for meeting privacy standards across the world. This will be something that other services, like EveryScape, will have to keep in mind for their own expansion as well.

A possible downfall of modified street views images–getting slightly less funny pictures to poke fun at. What do you think: good for Google, or waste of time?

[via infoworld]

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Filed under: Ask Engadget, Cellphones, Features

You might've noticed the recent uptick in mobile industry news, which comes courtesy of the annual Mobius conference currently taking place in Amsterdam. It's pretty clear that the future is bright, what with 700MHz, 4G, a new Windows Mobile, Android, and a 3G iPhone all on the way, but what about the here and now? What we're wondering is:

"What's the best 3G smartphone currently available in the States?"

And yes, we mean 3G. You know, that hip cool thing that Apple isn't terribly fond of, which brings high speed internets, effective tethering, streaming video and music downloads on the run -- while supposedly beating battery life to a pulp. We're also talking about what's available in the here and now, but it could very well just be time to wait for the next great thing to come along, so be sure to let us know if that's the case for you. If you'd your own question answered, you can to hit us up at ask at engadget dawt com.

 

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Sure, we know that your cellphone won’t explode and kill you now, great. But what about that pesky, pesky radiation? While the jury’s still out on that one, you can look to snake-oil devices that at least make you think you’re doing something to mitigate their problems.

Take the PowerDome, an add-on to your cellphone that supposedly changes the radio frequency your cellphone emits to a lower, and thereby safer level.

It does not do this though. If it did, your cellphone wouldn’t work; the cell towers will be looking for it at a certain frequency, and if it’s not there, you don’t get signal. You might as well put your phone in the Black Hole.

But if you have some non-tech-savvy hypochondriac on your list, this is a perfect stocking stuffer.

Product Page [via Nerd Approved]

TheFunded.com is a popular website here in Silicon Valley for venture capitalists and entrepreneurs alike. The site allows entrepreneurs to post comments and ratings about various VC firms and their partners. Considering how big a role a venture capitalist takes in the life of a startup having more information from those who have dealt with them in the past is tremendously valuable. At the same time, venture capitalists rarely get much feedback on how entrepreneurs feel about them, meaning that some can go on treating entrepreneurs terribly for years -- perhaps without realizing it. TheFunded has helped change that dynamic somewhat, both giving entrepreneurs a way to get more information (and share more information) about the VCs they've dealt with and for VCs themselves to get more feedback. Of course, some of the VCs who are criticized aren't happy about it. Most, however, seem to grudgingly accept the constructive feedback (while also begging their portfolio CEOs to write nice things about them). Earlier this month, the sites previously anonymous founder outed himself in a Wired article, making some wonder what the reaction from the VC community would be.

In at least one case, it appears that the reaction is to reach for the lawyers. As VentureBeat notes, Hercules Technology Growth Capital, which is actually a pretty large venture debt firm (more than venture capital), has sent a cease and desist letter to theFunded after a negative review of Hercules appeared on the site. This seems like a bad idea for a huge number of reasons -- all of which Hercules and its lawyers probably should have realized before sending the C&D. First off, as it seems we have to repeat almost weekly around here, section 230 of the Communications Decency Act very, very clearly states that a site is not liable for content its users post, and any law firm should know that. Second, and more importantly, as you would expect, the Streisand Effect kicks in. Prior to this, not a whole lot of people would see the review of Hercules. Now, however, many, many, many more entrepreneurs will not only see and remember the negative review, they'll see how Hercules responded to it, which may be even more damaging to the firm's reputation.

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