Consumer content

Should Apple join new video ecosystem?

news analysis The digital films and TV shows available to consumers now are shackled by numerous DRM schemes. A new consortium of entertainment, software, and retail companies wants to enable consumers to download any digital media from any Web store and enjoy it on any player.

Members include Warner Bros. Entertainment, Best Buy, Toshiba, Sony, Comcast, Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, NBC Universal, and Paramount Pictures. The group, called the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), says its mission is to combat piracy by making the act of buying media so easy that people won't be tempted to steal.

To do that, … Read more

Yahoo Music stops selling and starts pointing

A music subscription and download service didn't work out for Yahoo, so the portal is now trying a much safer approach.

Yahoo is planning to be a sort of guide to the Web's top music services, executives said this week. Yahoo Music users will be able to set up Web pages where they can track content offered by sites such as iTunes, YouTube, Amazon, Last.fm, and Pandora.

The move is part of an overhaul of Yahoo's home page, designed to aggregate content from other sites. The move will make Yahoo much more like the directory it … Read more

Yahoo Open: Finally, a real answer to Google

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--On Friday, 300 programmers will descend upon Sunnyvale, Calif., to plant the seeds of what Yahoo hopes will be an answer to Google's Internet might.

The event is called Open Hack Day 2008, and at it the coders will be the first from outside the company to get their hands on a number of programming interfaces Yahoo is releasing in an attempt to enliven its stodgy but still powerful Internet properties.

There's no guarantee that the release, a key step in what the company calls its Yahoo Open Strategy, will improve Yahoo's financial misfortunes. But … Read more

Signs point to impending iLike developer launch

It looks like social music site iLike will launch its developer platform early next week.

The Seattle-based company, which announced plans to build a third-party developer platform in July, has begun notifying news outlets that it will have a "significant technology announcement" on Wednesday.

Two weeks ago, iLike's President Hadi Partovi, wrote an e-mail to third-party developers notifying them that the company was "gearing up to prepare for launch" of the platform. According to Partovi's e-mail, the iLike Developer Platform is designed to add "interactive music features to Facebook apps and Web sites.&… Read more

Report: SEC looks into posting of old United story

Updated 4:50 p.m. PDT with Google comment.

Officials at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission are wondering if there was any improper conduct behind the online release last weekend of a 6-year-old news story that lead to a 75 percent drop in the stock of United Airlines on Monday, according to The Wall Street Journal (subscription required).

The SEC has opened a "preliminary inquiry" into the online distribution of a Chicago Tribune article from 2002 about United Airlines' bankruptcy filing, people familiar with the matter said.

The Tribune Co. said in a statement on Wednesday … Read more

David Filo: No browser for Yahoo

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--Google just announced its Chrome Web browser, but Yahoo co-founder David Filo doesn't expect his company will follow suit.

"I don't think you're going to see a browser from us," Filo said in an interview Thursday at the company's headquarters here.

Rather, the company is focusing its attention on improving its current products, for example by opening up the Yahoo home page, the My Yahoo customized start page, Yahoo Mail, and search to others' applications, Filo said. Those are examples of what's enabled by the Yahoo Open Strategy, which the … Read more

Yahoo gives a taste of its 'open' overhaul

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--Yahoo showed its vision for what its Yahoo Open Strategy makes possible, demonstrating how it hopes to engage users more by enabling its existing sites to grow beyond their current confines.

Ash Patel, head of Yahoo's Audience Products Division, showed an example that endowed the company's home page, search, and mail sites with the ability to deal with the Netflix video rental site.

The home page was endowed with a new Netflix application that showed movies Patel has ordered and those recommended for him. A search results, augmented with SearchMonkey technology, let him add new movies … Read more

TiVo control coming to BlackBerry

TiVo and Research In Motion are teaming up to enable BlackBerry users to remotely schedule recordings of TV shows on their digital video recorder, the companies announced Thursday.

Under the partnership, BlackBerry users will be able to use their smartphones to review television schedules and set their TiVo DVRs to record select television programming.

"TiVo subscribers will soon be able to wirelessly control their TiVo DVRs using a BlackBerry smartphone--anytime, anywhere--and that is a powerful example of how our respective technologies can complement each other to serve our mutual customers," Jim Balsillie, Research In Motion co-CEO, said in … Read more

Facebook applies a redesign

After several months of beta testing its new design, Facebook on Wednesday began rolling out its new site to all of its 100 million users.

Under the new design, the social-networking giant initiated changes designed to simplify the site's look and feel, provide greater user control over profiles, and dish up recent and relevant information, according to the company's blog posting.

To date, approximately 40 million, or 40 percent, of Facebook users have tried the beta version of the new site, which debuted in July. Of that group, 75 percent remained with the new version, according to the … Read more

Google grab bag: Chrome skins and Gmail tweaks

Time for our semi-irregular roundup of Google items:

Gmail Labs has produced three new features that people can try, according to Google's Gmail blog. One is a keyboard shortcut, "G" then "L," that brings people to a list of labels so they can show a specific category of messages. Another is the ability to move the Gmail control elements around on the left-side navigation bar, so users can reorder instant-messaging contacts, labels, and other items to put their preferred controls at the top. Last is the ability to pick your own colors for labels, … Read more