LG Decoy has a built-in Bluetooth headset

(Credit:
Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

(Credit:
SpiralFrog.com)

As for Pakman’s question about what the important metrics are for judging SpiralFrog’s success, it doesn’t matter. The company isn’t talking about them…anymore.

What this means is that Mohen no longer has to reveal his company’s progress–or lack thereof–since reporting a dismal third quarter. For the quarter that ended September 30, SpiralFrog posted a loss of $3.4 million on revenue of just $20,400.

Pakman continued: “Shouldn’t the only two metrics that matter from SpiralFrog be the number of downloaded free songs, and the amount they have paid the labels? How is the number of free sign-ups a meaningful measure of any success?”

(Credit:
Alexa.com)

Warner Music is one of the top four record companies. And SpiralFrog, which last week claimed the position of third-largest music download site on the Web, has toiled for five years to convince the major labels about the soundness of its ad-supported business model. But so far, SpiralFrog has signed a deal for full rights to offer music with just one of them: Universal Music Group.

“This claim is silly,” David Pakman, eMusic’s CEO, said in an e-mail to CNET News.com. “(SpiralFrog is) a free ad-supported service, right? It costs nothing to sign up, right? You simply put in a username and password, no credit card required, right? And they only have 850,000 signups? We have well more than 400,000 paying subscribers. Those are people who have enrolled in a pay service with a valid credit card and are being billed. Those people have paid for and downloaded almost 200 million songs.”

SpiralFrog cut a deal with EMI’s publishing unit 18 months ago, for example, but you still won’t find any of EMI’s songs on the site. No recording rights.

SpiralFrog, which had previously reported earnings, was supposed to report them this week for the quarter that ended December 31. Music fans, journalists, and insiders were finally going to get a peek at how the service, which launched in September, was faring during its first full quarter in business. In 2006, SpiralFrog drew wide press coverage after announcing that it planned to compete with illegal file sharing by giving away ad-supported downloads. The business model was experimental and, at the time, the record labels appeared desperate to find a legal alternative to piracy.

A check of Alexa.com, which measures Web traffic, shows eMusic far outpacing SpiralFrog in rank, reach, and pageviews.

Updated 6:20 AM PDT to reflect the official announcement from SpiralFrog.

SpiralFrog trails eMusic and Rhapsody in page views, according to this comparison on Alexa.com

“We have more registered users than eMusic,” he responded. He added that Amazon doesn’t count because it’s a store. SpiralFrog is an ad-supported service where consumers don’t buy anything. I didn’t bother pointing out that iTunes is also a store. It was obvious SpiralFrog’s carefully tailored triumph could come apart all too easily.

What’s sad about the Warner/Chappell licensing deal, which SpiralFrog announced Monday, is that the troubled music service may be years away from actually featuring music from James Blunt, Green Day, Linkin Park, or any other Warner Music artist. That’s because in addition to gaining the music’s publishing rights, SpiralFrog must also acquire the recording rights in order to offer the music.

It’s important to note that SpiralFrog is not a public company. Its shares do not trade on any exchange. An unusual arrangement with some early investors required the New York-based company to publicly report. Turns out new investors aren’t as fussy about public disclosure, and the board decided to do away with the practice. According to Mohen, some of the company’s partners also didn’t like SpiralFrog revealing details of its business model to the public.

If you’re actually looking for substance from SpiralFrog, you’re missing the point. What makes this company so fascinating to watch is how it continues to deliver more pretense than substance. The latest example came Friday when Joe Mohen, SpiralFrog’s founder and chairman, came to San Francisco and met with me. I was led to believe that we were meeting to discuss the company’s upcoming earnings report.

“Shouldn’t the only two metrics that matter from SpiralFrog be the number of downloaded free songs, and the amount they have paid the labels? How is the number of free signups a meaningful measure of any success?” –David Pakman, eMusic CEO

During my meeting with Mohen, no sooner had we sat down then SpiralFrog’s public relations people sheepishly told me that the company was filing a Form 15 with the Securities and Exchange Commission later that day. SpiralFrog would no longer be reporting them publicly.

“What about Amazon and eMusic?” I asked Mohen.

SpiralFrog’s “silly” claim
So the public doesn’t get any insight into SpiralFrog’s business model. What the company offered instead were highly questionable claims. Last week, SpiralFrog announced that it had topped 850,000 registered users, making it the third-largest music download site on the Web behind iTunes and RealNetworks’ Rhapsody music service.

Remember that Monty [co-founder of MySQL] chose to go open source only after the world totally ignored his work. There is a real value that goes along with being open source that lends itself well to adoption. If you have to pay, then that will deter adoption of immature products in ways that it won’t with free products.

The question, however, remains for all open-source projects: Is it fair or productive to close off the code after open source has made it popular?

Commercializing open source is a tricky balancing act, as open-source Funambol’s name suggests (It means “tightrope walker”). For MySQL, it’s a “tightrope” it has been walking for more than 10 years, which decade has seen the company on both sides of the open source/proprietary divide.

It’s not as if the grass is brilliantly green on the commercialization side of the fence, either, as my friend goes on to point out:

commentary

His take on Monty’s reasoning is a bit strong, and I don’t agree that MySQL had been ignored, but still he has a point: Open sourcing one’s code can lead to far greater adoption in a short period of time than proprietary source.

So for those of us that get caught up in MySQL’s decision to keep some extensions closed to paid subscribers, perhaps a refresher course in MySQL history will make it seem a bit less shocking. (Also be sure to check out the early 2001 brouhaha over trademark violations surrounding MySQL.org. Fascinating stuff.)

As I’m occasionally reminded, MySQL didn’t start out as open source. In fact, MySQL’s original license was very similar to what it is trying to achieve today: Free for noncommercial use, but not-so-free for commercial use. It didn’t decide to go open source (GPL) until 1999.

Ultimately, the only thing we know is that Marten, Monty, Zack, and team mean well and generally do well. They seem to balance better than most.

This is the crux of the MySQL/Sun commercialization problem: They can’t make the enterprise version diverge or they lose the adoption benefit, and enterprise sales are still long, high ceremony and costly.

With that said, there’s an ongoing tension between commercialization and adoption that MySQL (and all commercial open-source projects) have to manage. As a friend noted in an email to me yesterday:

No, no. Now it’s “only in the area between Preston and Blackpool.”

Gary Dean, a British businessman, who seems to have made quite a lot of money out of advertising, is deeply sensitive to public relations.

It used to be that your plans to marry had to be read out in churches. (This allowed parishioners to raise an objection. “He’s stumpy and stupid.” “She’s far too beautiful for you.” That sort of thing.)

“I have been painted in some quarters as a greedy, tight, ruthless bastard who abandoned my wife and children, walking off with millions and leaving my family almost destitute,” he writes. “It’s simply not true at all and I’ve decided that instead of allowing the rumour-mill to continue churning out nonsense – I’d just set out the actual facts to stop it.”

Please forgive me, but how does anyone cherish number plates (or, as they’re known in certain parts, license plates)?

Mr. Dean declares that the rumors had resonated “mainly in the area between Preston and Blackpool,” which would at the very least suggest precise market research is one of his strengths.

(Credit:
banjo d)

I find myself wondering just how skin-tighteningly heinous the gossip must have been for Mr. Dean to feel the necessity to express his views with such bowel-assaulting sincerity.

They used to say “only in America”, right?

Now, divorce settlements are being slapped on websites.

And why would anyone feel the need to publicize the sheer power of this number-plate cherishing in a divorce settlement?

But I find myself struggling with both my mental and physical equilibrium to read that he also gave her “cherished number plates 7HD and 10HD.”

He was so upset that people were calling him unpleasant names like “greedy” when he divorced his wife of nineteen years that he set up a website (at cost, I’m thinking) and published their divorce settlement.

His ex-wife declared in court that without her, Mr. Parlour would have been a mere journeyman hacker. Which many observers had thought he always had been.

It would also suggest that these rumors came from a wet, windy wilderness as desolate as the location of “No Country For Old Men,” but with far better beer.

Mr. Dean feels very strongly about this:
“With no disrespect to her, or indeed to my ex-wife, success in business or on the playing field, at least in my opinion, are based on the abilities of the ‘player’. To my mind it wouldn’t have mattered how much support Mrs Parlour had provided to Ray – if he’d been crap on the pitch they wouldn’t have been getting the cash they both enjoyed.”

And to publicly declare that his wife received around $7.5million, plus
cars, child maintenance and jewelry.

Not in the area between Preston and Blackpool

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This week, Robert Vamosi spoke with co-authors Brian Chess and Jacob West of Fortify about their report.

A new report (PDF) looks at all the systems currently in use–from paper ballots to Direct-Recording Electronic machines–and the issues that surround them. Researchers at Fortify analyzed threats against three phases of an election (voter registration, casting votes, and tabulating votes), highlighting specific ways voting systems have been compromised, summarizing the strengths and weaknesses of current voting techniques, and then providing guidance for voters to ensure their votes are handled properly in upcoming elections.

Voting–it’s the cornerstone of our democracy. But in recent years, both the systems we use and the trust we have in the accuracy of our votes have been challenged.

On the contest site, organizers list six reasons for hosting this event:

Contestants will be given a sample set of viruses and malicious code that they must modify and then upload through the contest portal. Once accepted, the sample will be sent through a number of leading antivirus engines (perhaps using VirusTotal.com to provide real time test results). The first team or individual who manages to evade all the antivirus engines wins that round. The organizers promise that each round will increase in complexity.

A new contest to be held at this year’s DefCon in Las Vegas in August hopes to prove that signature-based antivirus is dead, a move that one leading antivirus researcher says is “not a good idea.”

But Dave Marcus, security research and communications manager at McAfee Avert Labs, said: “Encouraging research that results in better evasion techniques for malware writers is not a good idea. How many identities will be lost and how much data will be stolen from users as a result of the new techniques and evasions that are created? Security research should center around bettering detection not evasion.”

Reverse engineering and code analysis is fun.
Not all antivirus is equal and poorly performing antivirus vendors should be called out.
Signature-based antivirus products can be easily circumvented.
It’s easier to modify malicious software than it is to write signature protection for it. Signature-based antivirus is dead. Antivirus is just part of the larger picture, you need patching, firewalling and sound security policies to remain virus free.

The goal of the Race to Zero is simple: obfuscate a malicious code so that it evades well-known antivirus engines.

DefCon 16 will be held August 8-10 at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas.

More importantly, the Broken Steel expansion makes it possible for characters to continue to gain experience and new skills in the game (if you’re conversant with RPG lingo, the level cap has been raised from 20 to 30). The open-ended design that removes the game’s hard ending also leaves the door open to further expansions.

One of the games to best take advantage of this is Bethesda’s Fallout 3, a post-apocalyptic role-playing game that topped many best-of-2008 lists. To augment the game’s 50-plus hours of content, Bethesda has previously released two downloadable expansions, called Operation: Anchorage and The Pitt, both of which add several hours of new storylines and characters to the game (both are available for around $10 on Xbox Live or the Games for Windows marketplace).

From what we got to see of Broken Steel, it looks like the most ambitious of the three Fallout 3 expansions, and fans will be especially pleased that it takes place in the actual bombed-out Washington, D.C., ruins Fallout 3 is set in, rather than a smaller, stand-alone area, as in Operation: Anchorage (which took place in a virtual version of Alaska), and The Pitt (set in Pittsburgh).

Taking one of the biggest complaints about Fallout 3 to heart–the abrupt ending that comes after completing the game’s main quest–Broken Steel instead rewrites that ending, allowing players to continue to explore the game’s world at their leisure. The plot is an epilogue to the original game’s main story arc, and has you mopping up some of the left-over villains (remnants of the evil Enclave army), and adds the opportunity to go to new locations, find new weapons, and fight new monsters (such as the imaginatively named Super Mutant Overlord).

The near universal penetration of broadband Internet connections on home video game consoles is giving rise to a new business model for games. With publishers able to reach consumers directly through
Xbox Live, Nintendo’s Virtual Console shop, and the
PlayStation Network Store, there’s a growing trend toward offering small, variably priced, incremental content to expand existing games, rather than focusing on a handful of expensive tent-pole projects that can take years to develop.

The third, and most ambitious expansion, called Broken Steel, will be available May 5, and we sat down with Bethesda recently for a preview to find out what we can expect.

Although AT&T’s two expanded data plans offer the discounted data roaming package in 67 countries, such as China, India, Israel, and the United Kingdom, the rate outside of these areas is higher.

A 1 cent per KB rate is charged for areas outside the 67 countries, but a higher rate of nearly 2 cents, or 0.0195, per KB applies in 20 countries such as Bolivia, Mongolia, Saudi Arabia,Turkey, and Venezuela.

AT&T also advises iPhone users to save data costs by taking several steps, such as using Wi-Fi whenever possible, turning off automatic e-mail checks, and keeping data roaming in the preset off position.

“AT&T has worked diligently to provide affordable options for international roaming because the feature-rich mobile experience of iPhone is indispensable to users,” Bill Hague, AT&T wireless operations international executive vice president, said in a statement. “With these new international data plans, iPhone users can access more data in more countries for less cost.”

Under the expansion, which is slated to begin Wednesday, iPhone users can add one of two international plans to their existing service.

The 100MB iPhone plan will cost an additional monthly fee of $119.99, while the 200MB plan will run an additional $199.99 a month. Both plans can be added or dropped from users’ existing plans at any time, without penalty.

On a pay-per-use data basis, users could pay as much as 0.0195 cents per kilobyte, which translates into nearly $40 for 2MB of data, according to AT&T.

I’ll explain what happened and provide a detailed review of the HR21-700 over the next few days.

I should have held out longer. I had problems getting the appointment set up, big problems with the work done by the installer, more problems with DirecTV customer service, and now I’m stuck with a mediocre DVR, DirecTV’s HR21-700, that doesn’t do all the things my HR10-250 did.

Late last year, DirecTV started calling me, inviting me to upgrade my equipment so that I could start receiving the new MPEG-4 channels. The representatives explained that the MPEG-2 HD channels I was watching on the DTC100 and HR10-250 would be phased out, and I would need to get new receivers eventually anyway.

But eventually I forced myself to accept that wasn’t going to happen, so when DirecTV called again last month and offered to give me a new receiver to replace the DTC100, a new DVR to replace the HR10-250, and free installation of a new dish antenna, I gave in and scheduled the appointment.

But I really didn’t want to upgrade. See, DirecTV and TiVo don’t get along any more. DirecTV sells its own DVRs, and all the reports I read online said these non-TiVo models were pretty bad. I wanted to hang onto my HR10-250 as long as possible, hoping there’d be a new TiVo-branded DirecTV DVR before the old MPEG-2 channels were cut off.

I’ve been a DirecTV subscriber for many years. In fact, I signed up in 2000 because I wanted to take a look at the then-new RCA DTC100 HD receiver. I didn’t even have an HDTV, but I did have a high-quality 21″ CRT computer monitor that the DTC100 could drive. It wasn’t good for large audiences, but for one or two people at a time, it was a real eye-opener. Eventually I got a real HDTV and the Hughes HR10-250 TiVo DVR (digital video recorder) for DirecTV. That was a great combination, one of the best high-tech purchases I’ve ever made.

Once you tell Delver who you are, it builds your social graph by itself. It correlates your identities across sites like MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, Facebook, Digg, and more, and creates a list of who your friends are. It also layers in a list of your friends of friends. Then, when you search for something, it gives precedence to content and links from your friends and their friends. So if you’re looking for an Italian restaurant recommendation in New York, you’ll get results from people you know, or people your friends vouch for. Delver CEO Liad Agmon clearly believes that online content from people you know is more valuable than generic Google results. He says, “The Web is no longer just a collection of documents. It’s made up of microcontributions.”

In using Delver, I liked how it told me the relationship of the person whose results it gave me. Some results came from my direct contacts, some from friends of friends, and some were selected because they were from people who went to the same school I did or worked in the same company.

You can also help Delver build your social search graph by feeding it sites and blogs where you hang out and have friends. Or to really supercharge it, feed it your FriendFeed page, where the “fusion” of multiple online personalities is already coded in. But you don’t have to do this, and that’s one of Delver’s very cool features: It discovers your network on its own.

One of my favorite companies from the January, 2008 Demo conference was Delver, a search engine that takes into consideration who your friends are and what they’ve said and bookmarked in its results. I liked the idea in January (see Damn clever: Delver makes search social) and I like it still–I’ve brought it up in several posts since then.

Delver is well-funded, which is important since search is an expensive problem to solve. The company will make money the old-fashioned way: From search advertising. Agmon has not yet revealed which advertising network his company will use.

In this query, Delver gave me a search result from a guy who went to the same college as Josh, who’s in the first ring of my social network.

Coming later, possibly at the TechCrunch 50 event, will be a widget for bloggers: a “grey-label” search solution that gives blog readers an opportunity to get search results filtered by writers’ social networks. Agmon says this will let bloggers “become prisms to the world,” for their readers. We’ve seen custom search engines before (Eurekster, Rollyo), but this does sound like a nice add-on product for Delver.

Delver can only extract results from people who post content or link to Web pages. If your friends are quiet online, you won’t get much in the way of relevant personal responses. But you can, if you like, define anyone as your “search buddy,” and then when you search, the results they would get become yours. You can even set up multiple search buddies to blend together the results from several people who have good online networks.

Related posts:
Google’s view: Three trends in social networking
Social networking meets search: Sightix
All Webware stories mentioning Delver

However, in the alpha, I often got random (non-friend) results ahead of results from my social circle. Also, Delver doesn’t index Twitter, and won’t directly do so, according to Agmon. All those tiny posts would clog the Delver engine. Instead, eventually, Delver will clump Twitter posts into groups and index those intermediate pages. (Which doesn’t explain how Summize manages to index Twitter.)