LONDON - News Corporation and NBC Universal will begin testing in October for their rival video website to YouTube, dubbed Hulu, but the date of the site’s formal launch remains unknown.

The two media giants first announced the joint venture back in March, originally referring to it as Newsite, but its new title of Hulu has just been revealed.

Jason Kilar, Hulu chief executive, said: “Objectively, Hulu is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and rhymes with itself.

“Subjectively, Hulu strikes us as an inherently fun name, one that captures the spirit of the service we’re building.”

News Corp and NBC plan to make thousands of hours of programming, movies and clips available from the extensive back catalogue of TV shows and films that the two companies own, which include ‘Heroes’, ‘Battlestar Galactica’, ‘24′ and ‘The Simpsons’, as well as ‘Borat’ and ‘Little Miss Sunshine’.

The service will be an advertiser-funded initiative, launched free to consumers. Several advertisers have already been lined up for the service, including Cisco, Intel, General Motors and Cadbury-Schweppes.

The two companies are seeking to stave off YouTube’s growing popularity with users who illegally upload clips of their favourite shows and movies, as well as their own home-made videos.

They have signed a partnership agreement with Google rivals AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft and MySpace, to distribute videos to their collective audience.

Separately, in April this year, Sony launched a video-sharing rival to Google’s YouTube in Japan called “eyeVio”. The PlayStation3 maker plans to roll out the site to other markets after gauging its initial impact in its Japan. 

www.hulu.com

 George Hotz holds up the hacked iPhone he traded for a car.

 George Hotz, of Glen Rock, New Jersey, said he had reached the deal with CertiCell, a Louisville, Kentucky-based mobile phone repair company.

Hotz posted on his blog that he traded his modified iPhone for “a sweet Nissan 350Z and 3 8GB iPhones.”

**In Australia, a new Nissan 350Z sells for more than $60,000, while in the US an 8GB iPhone can be bought for $US599 ($730).

“This has been a great end to a great summer,” Hotz wrote.

The 17-year-old Hotz said he will be sending the three new iPhones to the three online collaborators who helped him divorce Apple Inc’s popular product from AT&T’s network. The job took 500 hours, or about 8 hours a day since the iPhone’s June 29 launch.

Hotz made the deal with Terry Daidone, co-founder of CertiCell, who also promised the teen a paid consulting job.

“We do not have any plans on the table right now to commercialize Mr. Hotz’ discovery,” Daidone said in a statement.

Thanks to Brandon (Dating Gold) For showing me this article

NEW YORK - A teenager in New Jersey has broken the lock that ties Apple’s iPhone to AT&T’s wireless network, freeing the most hyped cell phone ever for use on the networks of other carriers, including overseas ones.

George Hotz, 17, confirmed Friday that he had unlocked an iPhone and was using it on T-Mobile’s network, the only major U.S. carrier apart from AT&T that is compatible with the iPhone’s cellular technology.

While the possibility of switching from AT&T to T-Mobile may not be a major development for U.S. consumers, it opens up the iPhone for use on the networks of overseas carriers.

“That’s the big thing,” said Hotz, in a phone interview from his home in Glen Rock.

The phone, which combines an innovative touch-screen interface with the media-playing abilities of the iPod, is sold only in the U.S.

Calls to AT&T and Apple for comment were not immediately returned.

The hack, which Hotz posted Thursday to his blog, is complicated and requires skill with both soldering and software. It takes about two hours to perform. Since the details are public, it seems likely that a small industry may spring up to buy U.S. iPhones, unlock them and send them overseas.

“That’s exactly, like, what I don’t want,” Hotz said. “I don’t want people making money off this.”

He said he wished he could make the instructions simpler, so users could modify the phones themselves.

“But that’s the simplest I could make them,” Hotz said.

The modification leaves the iPhone’s many functions, including a built-in camera and the ability to access Wi-Fi networks, intact. The only thing that won’t work is the “visual voicemail” feature, which shows voice messages as if they were incoming e-mail.

Hotz collaborated online with four other people, two of them in Russia, to develop the unlocking process.

“Then there are two guys who I think are somewhere U.S.-side,” Hotz said. He knows them only by their online handles.

PlayboyU is stealing a page from Facebook — Facebook circa 2004, that is — and launching a college-only social network, restricted to people with “.edu” addresses. With help from Ning, it’s starting PlayboyU — but not, sadly enough, delivering the goods in the form of nude coed shots. No matter. The college-only restriction limits the potential audience. And why would college kids, when Facebook and MySpace exist, bother to sign up for this website? The association with a porn brand alone should be enough to scare most students off. One thing Playboy forgot: “.edu” addresses include professors and alumni, who might take an interest in students’ extracurricular activities on the site. We’re placing the site on immediate deathwatch.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US Internet giant Google is to begin running advertisements along with video clips on its popular sharing website YouTube, according to a statement on the YouTube official blog.
The ads will run as “animated overlays that appear on the bottom 20 percent of a video,” said Google late Tuesday, 10 months after the company bought YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars.

Although YouTube attracts nearly 190 million visitors per month, it has until now remained nearly free of advertising, and also revenue.

Internet users can ignore the overlay ads, close them or click on them to go to the advertiser’s page.

The ads, which automatically pause the video, will appear within the first 15 seconds of the launch of a videoclip and end 10 seconds later.

Google said that it plans to post ads only on videos supplied by its official content suppliers, not on the amateur home videos which dominate the site.

Eileen Naughton, Googles director for media platforms, told the New York Times that Google would charge advertisers 20 dollars for every 1,000 times the ads were displayed.

Well Well, lets sum it up here, adult ad world is the relatively newcomer to the battleground of the giants , and look what those guys achieved, seems like they growing so fast, everyone and their momma seems to use them in the adult industry.

We all know Alexa represents not to much those days, but still it certainly speaks of the general trend and slowly aaw dominate the markets.

I remember they started up as a team of 4 and they did so much! , their new so called innovative ways did a lot of good for them, their banners have excellent ctr, and with new publishers joining daily, they’re quickly working their way to the top.

From IQ69 alone, I’d say a good 30-50% of webmasters use them, and why not? They make more money than others and you don’t have to worry about any conversions, just drive traffic and make money.

Of course not everything is good in da hood. We’ve hear many complaints including spyware on sites , commonly reported redirects , random crapware popping up on sites and so on…

Their banners are tricky, maybe even “misleading”, but I suppose you cant blame them. They need to make money in order for us to make money. We can hardly expect them to pay us out of the goodness of their hearts.

Although CPMs have been down lately, I’m sticking with them and really hope they improve and address the complaints people have about them. Most of all, we NEED more active rep’s on the board. They need to follow the threads and at least let us know they are fixing shit up.

I still think those guys achieved so much in so little time. So good work. just don’t stop here , fix it up and so much more people will use you.

San Francisco (InfoWorld) - Skype Ltd. announced late Friday that all users could now again log on to the voice-over-IP service, marking the end of an outage that affected millions and lasted more than 48 hours. At 7:00 p.m. Eastern, Villu Arak, the Skype spokesman who has been posting blackout updates, said: “The sign-on problems have been resolved. [However] Skype presence and chat may still take a few more hours to be fully operational.

According to user statistics gathered via an RSS feed provided by Skype, the number of users connected to the service climbed throughout Friday afternoon, from about 3 million at noon to more than 5.6 million shortly after 6:00 p.m. EDT, a sign that Skype was coming back to life.

Individual users, meanwhile, reported that they were able to reconnect to the service — in some cases for the first time in almost two days — and that their connections remained stable, even if the Skype client was often slow to respond.

Although Skype first confirmed the outage Thursday around 9 a.m. EDT, users writing on the company’s own message forums began reporting problems connecting to the service as early as Wednesday afternoon. The company, a division of online auctioneer eBay Inc., has not provided details of the blackout’s cause, saying only that it was due to a “deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software.”

Speculation that the outage was caused by a distributed denial-of-service attack or by some previously planned maintenance that Skype conducted late Tuesday have been regularly quashed by the company. “No… attack was related to the current sign-on issues in any way,” Arak wrote early Friday.

Users, while relieved that the VoIP and instant messaging service was again alive, continued to blast the Luxembourg-based company for disrupting their business and personal communications.

A user tagged as “free skypeout minutes,” who claimed to work for a Swedish company already heavily reliant on Skype’s for-a-fee services, got to the point. “All plans to incorporate Skype into more of our procedures are now on hold indefinitely.”

Kim Malone, the Google executive in charge of online sales and operations for Google AdSense, doesn’t own a TV. And why should she?

Google today announced a deal with Media Rights Capital (MRC) to distribute original digital content across Web sites in the AdSense content network.

The “multi-million dollar content,” as MRC described it in a statement, will include new animated shows from Seth MacFarlane, creator of animated hits Family Guy and American Dad!, as well as a “How To” series by Raven-Symone and Disney’s “That’s So Raven.”

All the content in the deal will be developed exclusively for digital distribution. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Google will present MacFarlane’s and Symone’s programming bundled with banner ads and in-stream video advertising, which users must click to view the content.

This is a crucial element of Google and Malone’s philosophy that advertisements should invite potential customers, not intrude upon them. The idea is that if users have control over how much advertising they consume, marketers will in turn know which types of ads work and which do not.

As broadband penetration has deepened in the U.S., it’s made Web video as technically feasible for many Americans as cable TV. But so far, the mystery of how to monetize high-quality Web video content has gone largely unsolved.

But MRC Co-CEO Asif Satchu thinks his company may have an answer after first approaching Google a year ago.

“We feel this partnership answers the question of how best to reach viewers online, because the Web is fragmented into millions and millions of viewing destinations,” Satchu said in a statement.

“AdSense connects all of those fragments and offers us access to them in one simple and powerful distribution solution.”

Malone is equally optimistic.

“This combination allows for the creation of original content that was historically too expensive to produce for Internet distribution and connects advertisers with high-quality content,” she said in a statement.

Last summer, Google signed a similar deal with Viacom to distribute MTV content. Given Viacom’s $1 billion suit against Google, it’s perhaps not surprising that a Viacom spokesperson told internetnews.com “That test program concluded. It’s no longer in place.”

Domains are very precious assets. So precious and so profitable that some players out there are pouring millions for just one domain name in order to make even more money out of it. These kinds of people understand the true value of online assets. They also understand that just having the domain is not enough and they have to invest and put work on it to make it profitable.

However there are other people who already possess these domains that can turn them very rich and don’t even know it. They either don’t understand the internet or think the most money they can make out of their 7 figure domains is parking them to make some dollars everyday.

What is considered a prime domain? A single word domain that is no longer than 7 or 8 characters and that represents something valuable in the world today or something commonly used, and that can easily be profitable with just enough imagination.

Here are the top 30 domains that are wasted to the purest form imaginable. PageRank and Alexa are also used in the analysis. It is true that neither of them really represent real traffic levels, but when the domains have both a PageRank of 0 and an Alexa of 5 million, we can safely say that their servers won’t crash anytime soon.

I’m sure a lot of these parked domains are making a lot of money just standing there, and their value will grow over the years as well, but the money they could possibly make if developed is incomparable. Here is the list in no specific order.

1) Cool.com
PageRank: Unranked
Alexa: Over 350,000
This domain is simply parked.

2) Hot.com
A single page with nothing on it except a lame colored logo. The sky is the limit for a domain like this.

3) Porn.com
PageRank: Unranked
Alexa: Unranked
This one is parked too but has a cool design. I’m guessing it’s making decent money, but no where near what a domain of this weight can bring in. Any regular developed porn site attached to this domain could make the profits hit the roof.

Continue reading »

For the first time, Yahoo Inc. has replaced Google Inc. as the No. 1 portal of choice, according to a customer satisfaction survey released today.Yahoo’s score is up 4% to 79 on the 100-point scale of the annual University of Michigan American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) on e-business Web sites. While Yahoo’s stock among users is rising, Google’s is on the wane, according to the report. Google fell 3.7% to 78, the second time in as many years that its score declined.

The results indicate a battle brewing between the two Internet giants.

Yahoo is emerging as the leading portal, fighting Google and losing for the search business, while Google is the leader in search, fighting Yahoo and losing dominance as a portal, Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results, which sponsors the ACSI report, said in a statement.

“Even more important than Yahoo’s first lead over Google is the trend of their scores moving in opposite directions,” Freed said. “Since the ACSI is a leading indicator of financial performance on the macro scale and at the company level, we may see a real turnaround for Yahoo in the next year.”

“Yahoo is pleased with the results of this year’s ACSI study, which reflect our continued efforts to enhance the consumer experience for our more than 500 million users of Yahoo-branded properties around the world,” said Yahoo spokeswoman Meagan Busath in a statement e-mailed to Computerworld. “We believe that this trend will continue as we further leverage our user insights, continue to open up the Yahoo network, and solidify our position as the partner of choice for advertisers, publishers and developers.”

“We are continually working to provide the best online experience for our users and welcome strong competition that helps drive market innovation,” said a Google spokeswoman in a statement via e-mail.

For Yahoo to gain ground on Google in the search market, Yahoo would have to develop an “incredible and far more effective search technology,” which seems unlikely because of the investments the companies have already made in search technology, Freed said in the statement.

In the search market, Google should worry about IAC Search & Media’s Ask.com, Freed said.

Up 5.7% from last year to a score of 75, Ask.com rang up this year’s biggest increase in the Internet portals/search engines category of the ACSI rankings, while AOL.com posted the biggest decline, down more than 9% to 67, Freed said.

“Ask.com is making huge inroads on the other competitors in the portal and search engine category,” Freed said. “And it has done this despite a second relaunch this year, which was apparently carried off so well that it didn’t have the usual backlash of dropping customer satisfaction scores. Ask.com has mastered the crucial mix of evolution and revolution.”

Google could also be challenged by a new or still unknown search company, or a niche company such as GlobalSpec Inc.’s search engine for engineers,he said.

The survey also looked at online news and information sites. ABCNews.com and MSNBC.com tied for the top spot in that category with scores of 74. Rounding out the top five were CNN.com and NYTimes.com, which tied for third with scores of 73, and USAToday.com, which had a score of 72. There was no clear standout in the news category because all the sites are struggling to differentiate themselves and pull away from the pack, Freed said.

In the overall e-business category, which combines the portals/search engines and news and information categories, customer satisfaction was down for the first time this year, dipping more than 1.7% to 75.2, lower than the ACSI national average score of 75.3 across all industries and also lower than the latest average score of 80 posted by e-commerce companies, the survey found.

The annual ACSI survey calculates scores based on responses from about 70,000 people to questions about their experiences on Web sites of various e-business companies