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RIP: Netscape’s Plug Pulled At 13

Globe and Mail — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 18:50:47 +0000

Netscape Navigator, the world’s first commercial Web browser and the launch pad of the Internet boom, will be pulled off life support Feb. 1 after a 13-year run.

Its current caretakers, Time Warner Inc.’s AOL, decided to kill further development and technical support to focus on growing the company as an advertising business. Netscape’s usage dwindled with Microsoft Corp.’s entry into the browser business, and Netscape all but faded away following the birth of its open-source cousin, Firefox.

“While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer,” Netscape Director Tom Drapeau wrote in a blog entry Friday.

In recent years, Netscape has been little more than a repackaged version of the more popular Firefox, which commands about 10 per cent of the Web browser market, with almost all of the rest going to Internet Explorer.

People will still be able to download and use the Netscape browser indefinitely, but AOL will stop releasing security and other updates on Feb. 1. Drapeau recommended that the small pool of Netscape users download Firefox instead.

A separate Netscape Web portal, which has had several incarnations in recent years, will continue to operate.

The World Wide Web was but a few years old when in April 1993 a team at the University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications released Mosaic, the first Web browser to integrate images and sound with words. Before Mosaic, access to the Internet and the Web was largely limited to text, with any graphics displayed in separate windows.

Marc Andreessen and many of his university colleagues soon left to form a company tasked with commercializing the browser. The first version of Netscape came out in late 1994.

Netscape fed the gold-rush atmosphere with a landmark initial public offering of stock in August 1995. Netscape’s stock carried a then-steep IPO price of $28 per share, a price that doubled on opening day to give the startup a $2-billion market value even though it had only $20-million in sales.

But Netscape’s success also drew the attention of Microsoft, which quickly won market share by giving away its Internet Explorer browser for free with its flagship Windows operating system. The bundling prompted a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit and later a settlement with Microsoft.

Netscape eventually dropped fees for the software, but it was too late. Undone by IE, Netscape sold itself to AOL in a $10-billion deal completed in early 1999.

Netscape spawned an open-source project called Mozilla, in which developers from around the world freely contribute to writing and testing the software. Mozilla released its standalone browser, Firefox, and Netscape was never able to regain its former footing.

Compliments of Globe and Mail

Web is Double Edged Sword for Porn

Globe and Mail — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 14:02:47 +0000

It’s a large entertainment entity suing a popular video-sharing site for what it claims is widespread copyright infringement, but it’s not Viacom suing YouTube — it’s a company called Vivid Entertainment Group, one of North America’s largest purveyors of “adult content,” and it has just filed a lawsuit against a site called PornoTube, whose primary offering should be fairly obvious.

According to several reports, Vivid’s claim — which asks for $150,000 (U.S.) in damages per video — states that PornoTube (or rather its parent entity, a company called Data Conversions Inc.) “copied, published, distributed and publicly displayed Vivid’s copyright works through the website PornoTube.com.” The suit adds that PornoTube “knowingly built a library of infringing works to draw Internet traffic” to its site.

This is virtually a carbon copy of the lawsuit launched against YouTube by Viacom, which argued that the video-sharing site — acquired by Google last year for $1.6-billion — built its business on the backs of their content, including clips of “The Office” and “The Daily Show.” In the case of Vivid and PornoTube, the complaint covers popular adult content such as “Night Nurses” and “Where The Boys Aren’t.”

The only major difference with the Vivid lawsuit is that the company is also complaining that PornoTube doesn’t abide by the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act, which requires producers of adult entertainment to conform to certain standards, and to verify (or attempt to verify) that anyone accessing their content is over the age of 18.

It’s more than a little ironic that pornography is widely seen as one of the building blocks of the Internet, in part because it solves the two major problems that have typically confronted the industry: namely, cheap distribution and privacy. Those same features, however, have made it easy for sites such as PornoTube to prosper, and made it harder for “legitimate” providers such as Vivid Entertainment to make a living. As the Los Angeles Times story notes, porn is also more vulnerable to piracy in part because viewers can “get what they are looking for” from a short clip rather than needing to see the full-length version.

Much like the regular entertainment business, the adult industry has been struggling with slumping DVD sales and the decline of traditional distribution methods in general. And just as “user-generated” Web content has provided an alternative outlet for bored TV viewers, the adult industry has also found its business deteriorating in part because of the rise in amateur content. On the Web, it seems, content is content — adult or otherwise — and traditional business models are being rewritten.

Compliments of: the Globe and Mail

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/mingram

Google Opens Up!

Globe and Mail — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 14:38:11 +0000

Is being “open” a competitive advantage – or could it become one? That’s just one of the questions raised by some recent moves that Google and others have made in the technology sector, both on the Web and in the mobile industry.

Google has launched a couple of noteworthy initiatives in the past few months, with one clearly aimed at Facebook – the hot social-networking site with what is (theoretically) a $15-billion (U.S.) market value – and the second aimed at the mobile phone business.

Both are interesting in themselves, but are most notable for what they don’t do.

The first is called OpenSocial, and it’s an attempt by the Web giant to create a kind of platform for social networking – one that would allow users of different networks such as Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn to move their data from one to the other, and to use applications or services that could draw from all of them.

More than one critic has compared Facebook with a “walled garden” – a social network that wants to keep its users inside the boundaries of its service, in order to control what they can do (and in order to sell advertising aimed at them). This is what you might call the America Online model.

Google’s model, however, is closer to the vision expressed by the World Wide Web’s creator, Tim Berners-Lee, in a recent blog post. In his commentary, Sir Tim describes his sense of where the Web is going and concludes that it is becoming more social.

In the beginning, he says, the Internet allowed computers to talk together without having to worry about cables or even location. The next revolution was the Web, which allowed documents to be shared without any complicated technology.

The next move, Sir Tim says, is to allow social data to move around and be integrated without any special software, something he says will allow a truly social Web to emerge.

Although Google wants to be the one to bring together companies to create the OpenSocial standard, the Web company isn’t interested in controlling the new platform, which is unusual for a large technology company.

Google is trying to do something similar with the mobile phone industry, through a venture it calls the Open Handset Alliance. It wants phone makers to agree to a common standard for applications and services that run on phones, so that they can interoperate more easily between different handsets.

In the case of the mobile effort, Google wants to do a bit more than just promote the standard: It wants handset makers to use its operating system, code-named Android – a Linux-based piece of software that would be able to run on virtually any modern handset.

Although Google obviously wants to compete with Apple’s iPhone and other devices, it’s interesting that it wants to do so by being open (its OS is open source, meaning the code is freely available), rather than forcing everyone to adopt a proprietary standard, as other software companies have tended to do.

On Tuesday, another company appeared to be making a bet that open might be a competitive advantage: Verizon announced that its network will support not just its own phones or devices, but any phone or device that meets a certain standard.

Skeptical observers say Verizon’s move may have a cynical side, since auctions for new 700 MHz spectrum licences are taking place in the U.S. soon, and Verizon could stand to gain by appearing to be open and accepting of competition.

Whatever the motivation, when combined with Google’s recent moves, it’s starting to look as though being open may be a more respectable competitive approach than it has been in the past.

Viewer Control is Online Ads’ Goal

Globe and Mail — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 18:23:14 +0000

When advertisers first began moving online they thought it would be enough to throw broadcast commercials into cyberspace and hope for the best. Then marketing executives discovered what YouTube learned: rolling television-style advertising on the Web annoys consumers and fails to take advantage of the Internet’s interactivity.

A recent eMarketer report found that spending for online video advertising is expected to increase by 89 per cent to $775-million (U.S.) this year but is still only expected to represent 9 per cent of all online advertising spending in 2007.

A June survey conducted by the Online Publishers Association found 48 per cent of people in the U.S. who watch videos online would rather pay to see their favourite content than sit through ads to view it for free.

So how are advertisers to navigate this brave new world when the very people they are trying to reach would rather see them booted off the virtual planet?

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