The DMCA lets copyright holders send takedown messages to various sites, demanding allegedly infringing content be taken offline. It's been rather successful in doing that. A few years ago, a great site, Chilling Effects sprung up to track all sorts of takedown notices (not just having to do with copyright, but any kind of cease & desist threats -- though DMCA takedowns are common). It's a joint effort by the EFF and a bunch of universities, and has been invaluable in tracking the efforts by some to threaten people into taking down various types of content. Now, in a similar effort, MIT is sponsoring a site that will track takedowns of videos on YouTube. The site is creatively named YouTomb. This isn't to say that the copyright holders are wrong in sending the takedown notices -- but it's important to collect information and data on how often these tools are being used and by whom to get a better understanding of whether the system really makes sense.

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Sosauce, a social networking service with a visually-rich interface, is a set of utilities that immediately strike the visitor as unique. While the user can rather quickly intuit the general makeup of the site and its various components, it requires some measure of play. Yes, play. As in fun.

This isn’t a talk-to-you-friends-make-new-friends-then-get-on-with-your-day kind of service. It needs you to linger. To browse. To dabble. Though it isn’t particularly revolutionary in what it wants to help you accomplish, it’s something in which much thought has clearly been placed. It’s not the most efficient mechanism for sharing blog posts or journal entries or documenting where you’ve been or what you’ve seen. There are plenty of services out on the Web that will perform more ably in certain ways than Sosauce can.

But as a complete package, Sosauce is more or less analogous to a diamond among more rough-hewn items. It may not be the most practical venue to coalesce your content and discover new, interesting people. And it’s sometimes slow to complete transitions and load new pages. But its presentation of content and media is impressive. Very impressive. So impressive that you might just excuse its little technical faults. Actually, scratch that. If you give it some quality consideration, there’s really no question that you’ll look over its soft spots.

So, yeah, on the whole, there are compromises to be made with Sosauce. It’s not bound to be a MySpace or Facebook or a Bebo or any other top tier service. I would doubt it could serve the needs and wants of hundreds of millions of users, either technically or philosophically. But there’s something to Sosauce that the most mainstream lack. At that is aesthetics. Great aesthetics. The way it displays photos, the way journals are published, in faux book form? Belissima.

Web design is not dead, folks. Web design is very much alive. Sosauce is proof. Nevermind MySpace or Facebook or any other uber popular bastion of social networking. This one’s a beaut. And hey, it works pretty darn good too, for something very new and very beta. If you interested in collaborating with others - friends, family, strangers - to make cool stuff, Sosauce will give you what you need.

Sosauce 2min Intro from Sosauce on Vimeo.

mashable109:http://mashable.com/2008/05/21/sosauce/

Filed under: Gaming

The EU has doled out some pretty hefty fines in the past, but it looks like Nintendo is pushing back against the one it got slapped with back in 2002, with the company now saying that it was "unfair, illegal, even shocking." That fine (some 140.1 milion Euros, or about $220 million), was the result of some alleged price fixing on Nintendo's part back during the SNES-fueled glory days of 1991 to 1998, during which time European Union regulators say Nintendo colluded with seven different distributors to raise hardware and software prices. For its part, the EU commision maintains that the fine "was not of a capricious nature, or based on wild estimates," and that it "was for an infringement that was considered very serious." No word on Nintendo's next move just yet, but if past appeals of EU rulings are any indication, they certainly seem to be facing an uphill battle.

[Via Pocket-lint]

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Meet SmallWorlds, a free browser-based 3D virtual world that integrates YouTube, Flickr, and a number of other Web 2.0 services. The site is aimed at the teen market, and is designed to be more casual than Second Life. SmallWorlds will be entering a public beta on June 2, but the first 1000 users to register herewill be able to start using the site today.

SmallWorlds revolves around a characters’s room, which resembles a house one might find in The Sims. Users can furnish their rooms with TV sets that feature YouTube videos, posters of Flickr photos, Twitter messageboards, and stereos blasting tunes from Last.fm and SeeqPod. Then they can invite their friends over to their rooms, where they can view videos, photos, and songs together - a feature that will likely have mass appeal. The site facilitates meeting up with friends by assigning each room with a unique URL that will immediately transport avatars to their destination.

The site has a lot of potential. The virtual world looks impressive, featuring a 3D isometric perspective and highly customizable avatars. SmallWorlds is also releasing an API that will allow developers to create widgets that can be shared with friends (like games or other media offerings).

Users have been clamoring for a service that lets them view and comment on web media simultaneously, and SmallWorlds’ approach may be ideal for their target youth audience. We’ve seen a recent wave of similar services from the likes of Userplane and Videophlow, but these are basically just chat windows that sit next to a media window - there isn’t any of the interaction you get from a virtual environment.

On the other hand, there are already a number of well-established virtual worlds aimed at the youth market, including Cyworld and Habbo Hotel, which may make it hard for SmallWorlds to gain traction.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

I just found a more useful way to search than Google. (Sort of.) It only works for a defined use case, but, in a search market that is 85% going on 90% Google-dominated, this can still be significant. The site that provides a better search experience than Google? Business social network LinkedIn. Long time readers of this blog know that I have already chronicled my success at using LinkedIn for both business development and recruiting. So it is not a surprise to me that LinkedIn is seeing easily the highest growth rate among social networking sites.

LinkedIn's 361% year-over-year growth handily beats Facebook's 56% growth in the same period, according to the latest stats from Nielsen:

However many people have pointed out to me that my case is unusual. I have been in business for 30 years and have worked across many markets, in many countries and I have worked the LinkedIn system to get those contacts usable. This puts me in the early adopter end for people of my age, which means that more people like me are likely to use LinkedIn more aggressively in the future. That fits the original mission of LinkedIn, which is to enable people to rebuild their relationship networks built up over years in business. That has been totally successful in my case. I have re-connected with people that I worked with over 20 years ago who are now senior people in specialist areas and I have found those connections valuable in my work.

When LinkedIn Won't Work

However, LinkedIn is less useful to somebody without a deep network. For example, somebody just entering the workforce. Somebody who has probably had a great time at college using Facebook and finds the features on LinkedIn to be relatively primitive and well, kind of boring. And not that useful either, because while they can see who the right contacts are they are no more reachable than they are in ZoomInfo or any other public directory. Just because I have the name, address and email for Michael Moritz at Sequoia Capital does not mean that he will return my email/call. And having a way to spam him via InMail does not really help. Actually Michael Moritz and I attended the same college at the same time and he still won't return my email via LinkedIn. Probably, he knows that we did not actually meet at college and I probably want to pitch him on an investment. (Really, Mr. Moritz, I don't have a pitch for you... well not now at any rate.)

So even if I pay to upgrade to LinkedIn Business for $20 per month for the privilege of spamming (sorry, sending InMail) 3 people I don't know every month, it won't be much more useful than renting a list from a good old-fashioned arms dealer to the spam industry (aka the list rental industry, sometimes called Database Marketing). I have not upgraded and don't intend to on those terms. Herein lies a possible flaw in LinkedIn's business model - the people who will pay are the people without networks who need to sell to those who have networks, which may end up disappointing both parties.

Getting Results Without a Network

Which is why my recent use of LinkedIn was so significant. It did not require my existing network to get results. I used the Questions & Answers feature to get answers to two real world questions. Both involved finding a specialist type of service provider that I needed in a hurry. I got the answer and I have hooked up with enough specialist vendors to get the job completed. Those vendors are now in my network. Done.

Before using LinkedIn, I tried Google. This eventually got me to some sites that maintained directories of these vendors, but it was still a lengthy process from there to get to a short-list. In one case my Google search got me to Yelp, where there was a rating for one of those vendors, but there was only 1 vendor in that category, so the rating wasn't useful.

Using LinkedIn, within 24 hours, I got recommendations on more than one vendor that were precise and ended up being very useful in finding a good fit.

The next day, by accident, I discovered a problem, though I think this problem is fixable by LinkedIn. The day after doing this search, I was talking to a friend about an entirely unrelated matter. He asked me if I had found that vendor that I was looking for. He was just making conversation, but I was concerned. "Did you get an email from me on this?" I asked him. It turns out that Questions send InMails (emails within LinkedIn) to all my contacts. I had no intention of spamming all my contacts to help with my fairly simple search. Sorry. Really. The form on LinkedIn specifically asks me if I want to restrict the Question to my contacts. I did not. I assumed that I needed to trawl wider than that. However I assumed (incorrectly it seems) that my contacts would not be sent InMails.

That is easily fixable by LinkedIn. They will have to fix this or risk really turning off their core community and fall into the, "oh, no, another annoying spammy tool" category. I am confident that LinkedIn is alert to this danger and will fix it.

What I assumed happens is that people with expertise in the area that I was interested in register on the site as willing to look at Questions relating to my area of interest. I am fully aware that this is self-selecting and will get me people with a commercial motivation to provide an Answer. Thats OK, I was not born yesterday, don't believe in Santa Claus and don't believe everything I read online or in print. Questioning every source is an ingrained and essential habit for most people. It still got me a useful short-list quicker than any other source. I did not need to perform lengthy searches on Google for a specialist directory or forum.

Conclusion

LinkedIn clearly needs to develop this feature more. Apart from preventing the spamming of my contacts, I expect them to refine the selection of experts. This is already self-selecting. When you send a Question, you select from categories and sub categories from a taxonomy that is quite intuitive for business people. I selected Hiring and Human Resources and then from that I selected Staffing and Recruiting. That means my Question only went to people who claim expertise in Staffing and Recruiting, which is like an uber-forum capability. I don't need to find a forum to find an expert, I just send a Question and the expert finds me. I can envisage LinkedIn refining the taxonomy further to get more fine-grained areas of expertise as the network grows. They will have to remain alert to commercial manipulation as vendors get more savvy about using this, but there are now fairly well established ways to do that and LinkedIn is a controlled environment, so they can lock out an offender. The Internet, on the other hand, cannot lock somebody from sending emails, despite valiant efforts by the spam cops, and LinkedIn seem quite vigilant to this danger.

I am not sure if this works as well in Facebook. In LinkedIn, business people work to a defined taxonomy that is well accepted. In Facebook it is way more free-form and that is probably a lot more fun. But if Web 3.0, aka the Semantic Web, is "the combination of mass collaboration and structured databases" (my definition) then I may have just seen the early signs of Web 3.0 in action. And it helped me to Get The Job Done.

Hopefully this is a sign of things to come, as Australian mobile company Telstra will be giving laptops away to business users who sign up for a three-year contract for mobile data service. According to the Sydney Morning Herald,

“The company has released a new plan for business customers — only those with an ABN — which offers them a laptop and wireless broadband card at no upfront cost if they sign a 36-month contract.

As well as the laptop, customers will get 1 gigabyte of data usage for $99 [$95 US] a month, although they must also pay 30 cents for each additional megabyte downloaded over their monthly quota.

Telstra’s standard 1GB data download plan on its Next G wireless network costs $84.95, so customers will effectively be paying $14.05 a month for the laptop - $505.80 over the three-year contract.”

This offer will apparently run until the end of June and, although the makes and models of the laptops aren’t yet available, they’ll be ones that normally sell for up to $700 Australian ($674 US).

Editor’s Note: If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion in “The Startup Review” series, please see the details here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: Hook Mobile

20 word description: Hook Mobile provides an open API for social media developers to extend and monetize content to mobile phones via MMS.

CEO’s 100 word description: Hook Mobile is a mobile pioneer utilizing MMS to extend social media to mobile devices; the company is focus on unlocking the billions of images/videos currently generated online and creating new revenue opportunities for social media developers. Hook’s MAX 2.0 platform provides a seamless link between the social media applications and mobile carriers’ messaging networks. By offering an open REST-based API for application developers, Hook Mobile reduces multimedia messaging (MMS) integration with carriers from several months to a few days. The platform supports mobile premium billing, short code routing and video/image/audio transcoding, and it is compliant with MMA Best Practices.

Mashable’s Take: Hook Mobile is trying to make web applications more mobile, specifically by leveraging the MMS capabilities of most handheld devices. What this does is amplify the multimedia experience for mobile use, providing a delivery system that extends the distribution options of various media already found on the web.

For website publishers and content creators, that means there are more ways in which users can consume your media, giving them a mobile option that frees them from having to be in front of an Internet-connected computer. For advertisers, that means there are more ways in which ads can be spread. As mobile advertising sometimes allows for different targeting tactics based on specific media consumption, geo-tagging, localized efforts and other demographics that can be attributed to a mobile user, there’s a growing amount of interest in mobile advertising across various methods of activity and multimedia distribution.

What Hook Mobile is doing is enabling existing networks or application creators to make their apps mobile, using Hook’s platform. Frengo is doing something similar with its new platform. What could really drive the potential of such platforms home is the ability for the platforms to mobilize the quickly growing integrated app sector, which has applications residing on Facebook and other larger social networks. I’ve discussed this potential in great length here.

Sponsored by Sun Startup Essentials
mashable109:http://mashable.com/2008/05/21/hook-mobil/

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Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals, Storage

A full six months after Samsung took the wraps off of GDDR5 memory, along comes word from AMD that the next-generation ATI Radeon graphics cards will boast said technology. Apparently AMD will be tapping Qimonda for its supply of GDDR5 modules, which should boost gaming performance as well as benefit stream processing, "where GPUs are applied to address complex, massively parallel calculations." As Hot Hardware points out, the release comes just weeks away from the rumored debut of the Radeon 4000 series, so if our deductive reasoning is sound, we'd surmise that the looming Radeon 4800 will indeed feature GDDR5.

[Via Hot Hardware]

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From “Babies by Design” to “San Diego Opera Talk” to “Health Matters,” the University of California Television delivers a wealth of highly informative programming to iTunes U. Explore the hundreds of audio and video podcasts you can enjoy on your Mac or PC or take with you on an iPod or iPhone.

From “Babies by Design” to “San Diego Opera Talk” to “Health Matters,” the University of California Television delivers a wealth of highly informative programming to iTunes U. Explore the hundreds of audio and video podcasts you can enjoy on your Mac or PC or take with you on an iPod or iPhone.