Kirkland, WA-based Digeo, a 10-year-old home entertainment company backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, has been sold to Arris, a broadband communications firm based in Suwanee, GA, for about $20 million in cash.

Digeo is known for its high-definition digital video recorder, called Moxi. The acquisition gives Arris expertise, intellectual property, and talent in video networking and multimedia services delivery. Arris will gain about 75 Digeo employees (mostly engineers) in Kirkland, which will raise its R&D costs by about $3 million per quarter, the company said.

“Arris delivers the market position necessary to take the Moxi vision to the next level,” said Digeo’s CEO, Greg Gudorf, in a statement. “I am extremely pleased that the Digeo team will continue to drive the evolution of the Moxi platform.”

But observers point out that the purchase price means a substantial loss on the investment for Allen. PaidContent reports Digeo’s total funding was more than $110 million. In an interview with TechFlash, Gudorf said fewer than 10 Digeo employees would lose their jobs in the acquisition, and that he will stay with Arris during the transition. The news of Digeo’s layoffs was first reported by the Seattle Times.

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Whether the fall is back-to-school season for you or not, there’s always more to learn. In last week’s column I outlined three fun weekend projects involving new technologies for digital self-expression. My suggestions covered art (digital “finger painting” with an iPhone app called Brushes), writing (”lifestreaming” with Posterous and Friendfeed), and photography (building three-dimensional photographic spaces with Photosynth). This week I’ve got two more digital projects in mind for you, this time in the areas of podcasting and computer animation. Next week, I’ll finish up with maps and virtual worlds.

I’m writing this three-part column because I think it’s an exciting time for anyone who’s interested in consumer-level digital media tools. Not only are we seeing a profusion of inexpensive new gadgets for capturing media—witness Apple’s announcement Wednesday that the new iPod Nano will have a built-in digital video camera—but there are also many new Web-based services where creators can edit, enhance, share, and promote their media creations. The only way to keep up with all these new technologies is just to jump in and try them. So let’s get back to it:

4. Become an Amateur Podcaster with AudioBoo

When podcasting first took off four or five years ago, most podcasters tried to emulate radio hosts, kitting out their podcasts with fancy musical intros and outros and other audio goodies. Just to experiment with podcasting, you needed a pricey microphone and recording rig, audio editing software, and a working knowledge of RSS, iTunes, and other distribution methods. But thanks to a bit of good old technological progress, the barriers are now much lower. In fact, producing a podcast these days can be just about as easy as making a phone call. Which means that dictating a few off-the-cuff thoughts on your mobile device and uploading them to the Web is becoming a realistic alternative to blogging and other more familar forms of Web-based communication.

This is precisely the point of AudioBoo, a UK-based service that I profiled in July. If you live in the UK (or if you’re willing to splurge on an international phone call), you can call AudioBoo from any phone and record some thoughts, then publish the the recording straight to AudioBoo.fm, which is basically a giant community audio blog featuring recordings or “boos” from all AudioBoo users.

But if you have an iPhone, you can use the nifty AudioBoo app to do the same thing, without the phone calls or the attendant charges. The app has a voice recording function that lets you talk for up to five minutes. It then uses your wireless data connection to upload the finished boo to the AudioBoo.fm, along with a photograph and a map of your location, if you wish. Fans can listen to your boos at the site, or they can subscribe and get new boos delivered via RSS or iTunes. The AudioBoo site also provides some handy code that you can use to embed your boos in your blog.

In fact, by doing a bit of social media marketing to promote your boos, you could turn AudioBoo into your own personal audio publishing empire. Somewhat to my surprise, I haven’t …Next Page »

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Verivue, the Westford, MA-based maker of multimedia distribution switches for cable and telecom operators, has raised $20.1 million in an equity offering, according to regulatory forms filed yesterday. PE Hub, citing a Venture Wire report, says new investor Sigma Partners took the lead in the round. Verivue raised a $40 million Series B round in March of this year, on the heels of a $25 million Series A round in 2007.

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Hillsboro, OR-based TriQuint Semiconductor (NASDAQ: TQNT) announced today it has acquired TriAccess Technologies, based in Santa Rosa, CA. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. TriAccess makes integrated-circuit amplifiers for audio, video, and HDTV applications. TriQuint Semiconductor, founded in 1985, makes wireless communication technologies for mobile manufacturers, cellular base stations, and defense and aerospace contractors.

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“I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding, they learn by some other way—by rote or something,” physicist Richard Feynman once said. “Their knowledge is so fragile!”

Maybe Feynman’s brain was big enough to simply “learn by understanding”—sucking in and comprehending complex realities in a single glance. But what I think he actually meant was that people should learn by exploring and investigating, rather than just memorizing. Only then would their knowledge be useful and durable.

What makes Microsoft Research’s new Project Tuva website so wonderful is not just that it puts some of Feynman’s most famous physics lectures online, but that it invites viewers to explore the subject matter in exactly the way Feynman would have recommended. The Caltech scientist was famous in part for for his lucid way of explaining things like gravity and quantum mechanics—so the lectures certainly stand on their own as educational set-pieces. But the transcripts, note-taking tools, and multimedia “extras” that now show up alongside the videos make the material even more entertaining, accessible, and, well, explorable.

Project Tuva was unveiled last week. It’s named after the central Asian country Feynman famously and somewhat quixotically wanted to visit before he died. (He never got permission from the Soviet Union, of which it was then a part, as his friend Ralph Leighton chronicled in his 1991 book Tuva or Bust!) The site uses Microsoft’s Silverlight software, a Web-based multimedia player similar to Adobe’s Flash platform, to showcase a series of lectures that Feynman gave at Cornell University in 1964. The lectures were filmed by the BBC for broadcast in the United Kingdom, and weren’t available to Web viewers until Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, a longtime Feynman admirer, purchased the rights and asked Microsoft Research to find a way to host digital versions online.

“I said we could host them, but we could also do something much more interesting with it,” says Curtis Wong, who leads a small division of Microsoft Research called the Next Media Research group. I’ve known Wong for years and I make a point of following his work, because he’s always got some great new idea about how to take a cultural resource and increase its value through multimedia technology.

For the concepts behind Project Tuva, Wong told me by phone this week, he reached back to three projects he led in the mid-1990s. The first was an interactive tour, published on CD-ROM, of the Barnes Foundation’s collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings outside Philadelphia. The second was another CD-ROM about Leonardo da Vinci, built around a digital facsimile of one of Leonardo’s notebooks, the Codex Leicester, which also happens to be owned by Bill Gates. (See this May 2008 column for more on those two projects.) The third was an interactive video documentary, developed as a demonstration for PBS but never aired, in which the program’s closed-captioning information was interspersed with hyperlinks that led to related articles in Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia.

Each project represented a step in the development of what Wong calls his information learning model for interactive media; it’s also been called the “contextual pyramid” or “ECR,” for engagement, context, and reference. It’s a simple idea: first, you hook someone—whether they’re using a CD-ROM, watching a video, or visiting a website or a museum—with a story or an object that produces an immediate emotional impact. Then, at the very moment they’re most engaged and curious, you offer them context that broadens their understanding. Finally, you provide a deep reference layer, for the people who get so intrigued that they want to know a lot more.

I’d love to explain all the lovingly crafted ways in which the Barnes and Leonardo CD-ROMs and the PBS demo implemented this model, but it would take too long. Jump back to 2008 or so: as soon as Wong found out about Bill Gates’ quest to put the Feynman lectures online, he realized that …Next Page »

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Seattle-based RealNetworks (NASDAQ: RNWK) announced today the first new version of its RealPlayer media software since May 2007. This beta version of RealPlayer SP lets you download video in any format and quickly put it on your mobile phone or portable media player—whether you have an iPhone, iPod, BlackBerry Storm, Palm Pre, or any of the latest devices. It also lets you share videos with friends on social websites like Facebook and Twitter. Both of these are new capabilities for Real. The software is now available for free download.

It’s a major release, and a big deal for the company. When most people think of RealNetworks, they think of media delivery software, multimedia formats, music, and gaming services (and also its recent dispute with Hollywood studios over digital rights management with its RealDVD product)—not necessarily mobile devices and social networks.

That could be changing. Although its push into mobile and social media is not new, today’s product launch seems to fit within Real’s strategic belief that mobile is increasingly central to how people enjoy digital entertainment. (The division that houses Real’s mobile business, Technology Products & Solutions, accounts for 34 percent of the company’s revenues, and that percentage has been growing.) The launch is also central to turning around Real’s media software and services business, which has been flat or declining in recent years.

The field of online video formatting and converting is crowded, of course. But what seems to separate Real’s software from the competition, at least initially, is how fast and easy it is to use. With just a couple of clicks, you can grab videos from YouTube, say, and put them on your phone automatically without worrying about what format they’re in and whether it matches your device’s settings. “This is a product for everyone,” says John Schussler, senior program manager at RealNetworks. “We make the experience really, really simple.”

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Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group has led a $4.4 million funding round for Animoto, a Web software startup based in New York that lets people automatically create professional-quality videos and slideshows from photos and music. Other investors in the round include Seattle-based Amazon, Palo Alto, CA-based SoftTech VC (run by Jeff Clavier), and Bruce Livingstone, the founder of iStockphoto.

The current round includes an undisclosed amount of financing already announced in May 2008, from Amazon and angel investors. Before that, Animoto had raised a $600,000 seed round from friends and family. So the company has raised an even $5 million since it was founded in 2006.

There’s a lot more to the story. The lead investors in the deal are from Seattle, but that’s only part of the local connection. It turns out that “based in New York” doesn’t really do justice to the roots of Animoto. The company was started by four friends who went to Bellevue High School in the Seattle area: Brad Jefferson, Jason Hsiao, Stevie Clifton, and Tom Clifton (the latter two are brothers). Jefferson, who is now Animoto’s CEO, went on to school at Dartmouth College and got his start as an intern at Bellevue, WA-based Onyx Software, where he began working full-time in 1998, and quickly moved up the ranks.

“He was a rock star,” recalls Onyx founder and Dartmouth alum Brent Frei, now with Bellevue-based Smartsheet. “He’s super smart but very humble. It’s amazing the things he does right naturally.” Frei notes that Stevie Clifton was also a superb Onyx intern. “They have assembled a fantastic team,” he says. (Interesting note: Jefferson was the only one of the four founders who didn’t play in an indie rock band around Seattle—he was more into sports.)

Jefferson got promoted at Onyx in 2000 to run a services team in San Francisco. There, he was roommates with Hsiao when Onyx was acquired by M2M Holdings in 2006. Jefferson opted for the severance package, and the very next day, Hsiao pitched him on the idea of Animoto. The basic concept was an online service to make it easy for people to create “animated photos” to capture the mood of events like weddings and graduations in customized slideshows. Animoto’s software creates moving slideshows that match the beat and feel of the accompanying music you select. A hip-hop track will make the picture movements and transitions fast and edgy like an MTV video, while a classical piece will make the slideshow more staid and elegant.

Animoto finished its first working prototype in December 2006, and started getting user feedback over the next few months. At the time, the company used a traditional hosting provider, but it couldn’t handle huge spikes in traffic. “As I started running the numbers, it was, ‘Oh crap, if we’re successful, we’re gonna fail,’” Jefferson says. So Animoto talked to Amazon Web Services about hosting its applications and data, and spent several months enhancing its product and “pushing everything into AWS,” he says, just in time for public beta trials in August 2007. “It was really a good decision from a capital expenditure perspective. From Day One, we were able to scale to the world.”

Meanwhile, Jefferson was sowing the seeds of future venture investment, even if he didn’t …Next Page »

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San Diego’s NextWave Wireless (NASDAQ: WAVE) said today its Chairman, CEO, and President Allen Salmasi “has transferred the day-to-day operating role” of CEO and President to James Brailean, who heads NextWave’s PacketVideo subsidiary. The company’s COO and CFO have both resigned. NextWave Wireless, founded in 2005, develops embedded multimedia software for mobile devices,and has had approximately 1,000 employees in 27 worldwide locations. The company says it will now focus on PacketVideo as its sole remaining operating business.

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At a luncheon that followed the La Jolla Research and Innovation Summit on Friday, I sat with Bob Dynes, the former President of the University of California system, who began talking about the formation of CalIT2 (Cal-IT-squared) almost a decade ago.

These days, the research center also known as the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology is playing an increasingly central role in multi-disciplinary advances that span academic departments, campuses, and even industries. The prevalence of CalIT2’s influence was evident throughout presentations made at the summit, which was organized for venture investors as a showcase of San Diego’s innovative capabilities. Sony Electronics, for example, used an algorithm developed at CalIT2’s machine perception lab as the basis for the “shutter smile” technology in the company’s latest generation of consumer digital cameras.

“Who would ever have guessed that CalIT2 would look the way it does today!” exclaimed Dynes, who spent 22 years at Bell Labs before arriving at UC San Diego as a physics professor in 1991. Dynes became UCSD’s chancellor in 1996, and told me he began working to create the institute—and to recruit founding director (and Xconomist) Larry Smarr—in 1999.

CalIT2 is one of four institutes for science and innovation that California Gov. Gray Davis officially launched in 2002 by signing legislation that provided $308 million in lease-revenue bonds. Since then, CalIT2 has come to embody Smarr’s ambitious vision for tackling daunting, large-scale problems.

“What we’ve succeeded in is this idea of institutional innovation,” Smarr said in an interview. By using the power of high-speed networks and high-performance computing, Smarr said CalIT2 can take on seemingly intractable problems in everything from molecular biology to atmospheric science by assembling multidisciplinary teams of the best minds, whether or not they are on UC campuses. He calls it a “persistent framework for collaboration.”

New buildings for CalIT2 were built at …Next Page »

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San Diego-based home entertainment semiconductor manufacturer Entropic Communications (NASDAQ: ENTR) has cut approximately 55 employees, or 18 percent of its workforce. In a filing with the SEC today, Entropic says its board approved a restructuring plan that closes offices in Nice, France, and Kfar Saba, Israel, “to better position the Company to operate in current market and financial conditions.” Entropic says it also suspended development of network processors in Israel.

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Updated Nov. 5 with comments from senior vice president Rick Rashid (see below): You did good, Bill Gates. When you decided to build a new computer-science research lab in Beijing in 1998, you probably saw it as a relatively low-risk venture with a high upside. It would be challenging and take a lot of work on the ground, sure, but Microsoft would benefit from tapping top researchers in China and giving back to the local computer-science community, thereby earning good will in a country with huge market potential. From most appearances, the bet has paid off.

Microsoft Research Asia, which turns 10 years old today, is the largest of the company’s research labs outside of Redmond. (The others are located in Silicon Valley; Cambridge, England; Bangalore, India; and the newest one in Cambridge, MA.) It has about 350 full-time researchers and engineers, has employed 2,500 student interns, and has published some 3,000 papers in technical journals and conferences. More than 250 technologies from the lab have apparently been transferred into Microsoft products, including Office, Windows, Xbox, and MSN. Microsoft Research founder Nathan Myhrvold and senior vice president of research Rick Rashid played key roles in establishing the Chinese lab. (You can read more about its rise, and its impact on Microsoft, China, and information technology, in this book by a couple of Xconomy authors.)

This week is about celebrating with the community in Beijing—and getting work done at the same time. The Microsoft festivities include a faculty summit involving hundreds of visiting professors and administrators from the Asia-Pacific region, a technical advisory board meeting, and several lab-hosted banquet dinners. Gates himself won’t be there, but he visited in August during the Olympics. Among the Redmond returnees is Harry Shum, Microsoft’s vice president for search product development, who was the previous head of the Beijing lab. Ya-Qin Zhang, the lab director before him, is now a vice president in charge of Microsoft’s R&D and sales in China. (Microsoft now employs some 5,000 people in China.) I’m guessing the only member of the lab’s founding team who won’t be there is Kai-Fu Lee, who now heads up Google Greater China, after a high-profile split with Microsoft in 2005.

Rashid sent an e-mail to the lab and to the company’s top brass, including Gates and Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer: “I could not be more proud of what has been accomplished. Today was a great milestone for MSR Asia and for Microsoft Research.”

Reached by e-mail yesterday, the Beijing lab’s current managing director, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, said he was “completely occupied” with the week’s events. Hon is a former Apple employee who started working for Microsoft in Redmond on speech and user interfaces in 1995. Born and raised in China, he helped launch the Beijing lab and did a fair bit of recruiting in the early days. Hon moved to Beijing in 2004 to join the lab as assistant managing director, and also headed the lab’s Search Technology Center.

Microsoft’s foreign research labs have always been about finding the best talent around the world, and the Beijing lab has been a pretty striking example of this strategy. “There’s no doubt China produces a lot of engineers, but 10 years ago, no one knew what their quality was, particularly when we talk about people who can do world-class research,” said Hon in a recent interview with a Microsoft press officer. “We proved we could find that top talent and give them an environment in which to succeed.”

The Beijing lab’s main technical areas have evolved somewhat over the years. The researchers now focus on user interfaces, multimedia, data-centric computing (with a recent emphasis on cloud computing), search and ads, and fundamentals like theory, systems, and networking. It will be interesting to see how the lab contributes to the company’s recent initiatives in Web-based software, services, and advertising, and in mobile software. Looking ahead, how does Hon want people to view the Beijing lab—and Microsoft as a whole? “I want them to continue to think of Microsoft as an innovator,” Hon said in the interview. “We have very fierce competition from high-tech companies and people generating new technologies. We cannot sit still.”

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It’s one of the biggest acquisitions of the year in the Northwest. Getty Images, the Seattle-based creator and distributor of online photos and video, is buying New York-based Jupitermedia’s online images business. The acquisition of Jupiterimages is worth $96 million in cash, and will help Jupitermedia pay off its bank debt, according to a statement today.

This is at least the second bid that Getty has made to acquire its smaller rival; a proposed deal in early 2007 fell through. Meanwhile, 2008 has been a busy year for Getty. In February, the company announced it was being acquired by an affiliate of private-equity firm Hellman & Friedman. The $2.4 billion acquisition was completed in July.

Getty Images was founded in 1995, and was among the first companies to license images via the Web. As of 2006, Getty was an $800 million dollar public company with 21 offices worldwide. Today’s acquisition would seem to solidify the now-private firm’s position in the online stock-photo and multimedia marketplace.

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NextWave Wireless (NASDAQ: WAVE), a San Diego company that makes embedded multimedia software for mobile devices, said this week that it’s shutting down Israeli Wi-Fi equipment subsidiary Go Networks as part of a global cost-cutting effort. Earlier in the month, NextWave arranged $100 million in new debt financing and announced a series of cash-conservation moves, including 67 layoffs among its San Diego-based workforce. NextWave’s business has been impacted by delays in adoption of next-generation telecom equipment made by its subsdiaries, according to the San Diego Business Journal.

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Interactive video is finally being reborn.

In the mid-1990s, multimedia artists publishing on CD-ROMs developed a huge catalog of techniques for letting viewers interact with digital video. But as I noted in a column a couple of months go, all of that wisdom seemed to go out the window around 2000, when the broadband Web largely replaced the old-fashioned CD-ROM as a medium for digital distribution. “Internet video” came to mean either regurgitated TV shows or amateur YouTube videos, showing in tiny players embedded in pages full of ugly banner ads.

But now companies like Waltham, MA-based PermissionTV—part of the big Boston-centered cluster of Internet video companies we chronicled in March—are figuring out how to bring high-quality interactivity to Web video. The company released a new development kit for Web publishers last month, and I recently caught up with Matt Kaplan, PermissionTV’s vice president of creative and client services, and Corey Halverson, vice president of product management, who explained that they’re out to make video into a front-and-center feature of the Web—with all of the opportunities for interaction and exploration that surfers have come to expect from text-based Web pages.

“The world tends to look at video as an element of a website,” says Kaplan. “We see it the other way around. We think video can be the backdrop that Web-style interactive experiences are built around.”

Local organizations like the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Pops, Harvard Business School, BobVila.com, and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign have all used PermissionTV’s technology to create online video experiences that go well beyond the typical two-minute Web clip, where “interactivity” tends to be limited to the “play,” “pause,” and “stop” buttons. The Boston Pops site, for example, currently features a large-screen interactive program about “Oscar and Tony,” a CD of Broadway and Hollywood musical scores that the orchestra recently recorded. Text commentary from conductor Keith Lockhart runs alongside the video of the Pops’ performance, and viewers can jump between numbers using a graphical timeline, or follow links to purchase the CD itself.

Here’s a quick demo that PermissionTV let us borrow. [Update, October 6, 2009: The video is no longer supported by the company and has been removed.]

PermissionTV has raised about $18 million in financing since its founding in 2004, including a $9 million round last summer led by Castile Ventures and Point Judith Capital and a $3 million venture debt deal this April with BlueCrest Capital Finance. Along with its development kit—which the company’s own engineers have been using for a couple of years, but has now been opened up so that other media companies can try it out—the company has created an online “solutions hub” demonstrating the platform’s full capabilities, such as subtitles, polls, opt-in request forms, Google ads, and “special offer” graphics leading to retail sites.

In essence, every video fed into the system is annotated with a digital timeline that allows Web designers to specify when such interactive elements should appear, and what should happen next, depending on the choices the viewer makes. “For example, you might be watching a video, and it pauses for a second, and there’s a poll,” says Kaplan. “Your response to that poll drives you down one path of the video versus another path—taking what was traditionally a linear experience and making it a user-driven experience.”

The idea of structuring interactive video around timelines isn’t new. It’s been the central metaphor in multimedia development software ever since the appearance of Macromedia’s pioneering Director software package in the 1990s—and indeed, PermissionTV’s platform is based on the same ActionScript scripting language that’s at the heart of the Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash video format. But PermissionTV’s solutions hub makes it easy to …Next Page »

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On balance, I’m a fan of all things Web. But every successful new medium disrupts or transforms the media that came before—just as the movies killed vaudeville, TV killed episodic radio, MP3s are upending the music industry, and Netflix is killing the neighborhood video store—and it’s important to recognize the value that can be lost in this process. Today I’d like to deliver a short elegy for the educational multimedia CD-ROM, which has been replaced, but not surpassed, by the Internet.

For a brief time in the late 1990s—roughly between the release of Microsoft Windows 95 in 1995 and the widespread availability of DSL-speed Internet access starting around 2000—the typical home computer had a powerful graphical interface capable of displaying at least 256 colors, but was effectively a digital island. At 28 or 56 kbps modem speeds, access to what little photographic, audio, or video content there was on the Web was painfully slow. The only practical vehicle for getting multimedia content onto PC screens and making it interactive in real time was the optical CD-ROM drive, a standard feature of most home computers by 1996 or so.

With nowhere else to turn, artists, writers, and producers excited about the possibilities of interactivity churned out a huge volume of CD-ROM-based games, educational software, reference materials, and “edutainment” titles. It’s this last category that particularly fascinates me. Using, for the most part, a single authoring and playback platform called Macromedia Director (now Adobe Director), publishers created learning-oriented CD-ROMs on everything from volcanoes to Impressionism to World War II history. The theory behind most of these titles was that adding sounds, visuals, animation, and narration to the dry facts of history, art, science, or engineering—and giving users tools for navigating their own way through this material—would lend such subjects an immediacy and vibrancy that older media, such as textbooks, encyclopedias, and TV documentaries, simply couldn’t match.

And for the most part, the theory was correct. I’ve got a large collection of old CD-ROM titles that I still pop into my Windows laptop from time to time—the way an audiophile who won’t part with his vinyl albums might break out the old LP player. As I re-watch these titles, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that multimedia authoring, as an art form, reached a kind of pinnacle around 1996-97. That was the era, for example, of Dorling Kindersley’s live-action, interactive version of David Macaulay’s classic The Way Things Work, and of James Cameron’s Titanic Explorer from Fox Interactive, a stunning 3-disc collection of blueprints, news footage, and first-person accounts of the sinking of the Titanic, structured around sequences from Cameron’s blockbuster movie.

But the absolute masters of the CD-ROM genre were a team of producers brought together by Corbis, the digital image archive founded by Bill Gates in 1989. As I explained in a previous column, the original idea behind Corbis was to license the digital versions of the world’s best art and photography for display in consumers’ homes. That part of the vision didn’t come to fruition until recently; in the 1990s, meanwhile, the company went through a number of incarnations as it searched for a realistic business model, eventually emerging as an online stock-photo archive focused purely on image licensing (there’s a pretty good history here).

From 1994 to 1996, one of Corbis’s strategies was to publish cutting-edge multimedia titles that showcased its archive’s rich content. And the series of six CD-ROMs it created—especially A Passion for Art (1995), an interactive tour of the Barnes Foundation museum outside Philadelphia, and Leonardo da Vinci (1996), which was built around a digitized version of Leonardo’s Codex Leicester, purchased by Bill Gates in 1994 for $30.8 million—astonished most critics, including yours truly in a review published in Technology Review 10 years ago this spring. The da Vinci disc contains the most accessible and bewitching introduction to Leonardo’s thinking and methods I’ve ever seen. And the Barnes CD-ROM is such an uncannily faithful recreation of the actual museum—with its unparalleled collection of Impressionist masterpieces by Cezanne, Renoir, Matisse, Van Gogh, and others—that when I had the opportunity to visit the foundation several years ago, I felt as if I already knew my way around the entire building, and was able to walk straight to the galleries that held my favorite paintings.

Unfortunately, the Corbis titles never sold well enough (or, if my guess is correct, were never marketed aggressively enough) to cover the vast expense of producing them—for A Passion for Art alone, Corbis had to …Next Page »

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Most radio stations these days have websites where you can listen to streaming versions of their broadcasts. But few have taken the added step of making individual shows available online—in part because there’s little financial incentive, unless they can sell online ads against that content. That’s where EveryZing of Cambridge, MA, thinks it can help—and the company said today that Cox Radio (NYSE: CXR) will use its software to make it easier for consumers (and search engines and advertisers) to find specific radio clips on the websites of all 68 of its FM and AM radio stations nationwide.

We profiled EveryZing, a BBN Technologies spinoff that uses speech-to-text algorithms to create transcripts of Web video and audio content that can then be indexed by search engines, last July and again in February. Up to now, EveryZing has mainly been working to help big media portals like Boston.com monetize their video content. But it has also had a long-running deal with Entercom Boston’s WEEI Sports Radio Network, where, according to EveryZing CEO Tom Wilde, the number of unique users listening to the station’s online clips has increased 16-fold over the last 18 months.

“The paradigm with radio on the Internet to date has been, bring it up in a streaming media player, minimize it, and listen,” says Wilde. “That’s not very interesting. It’s just another pipe. We’re trying to bring a ‘lean forward’ metaphor to the consumption of radio.” Once a company has installed EveryZing’s system, Wilde explains, customers can discover specific clips through web searches and jump precisely to the point of interest within those clips. “That’s what the Web is for and that’s what users want,” says Wilde.

The Cox deal is the biggest deployment to date for EveryZing’s software. “By partnering with EveryZing, we are able to leverage the unique content assets from our terrestrial broadcasts on the web and significantly enhance how that content is discovered, presented, and monetized,” said Gregg Lindahl, vice president of interactive technologies for Cox Radio, in EveryZing’s announcement of the agreement. Cox is in the process of acquiring an additional 18 stations that will give it a presence in 19 radio markets nationwide, including Atlanta, Houston, Miami, Orlando, San Antonio, and Tampa.

Wilde says EveryZing is on a path to keep growing quickly. “As a company we’re having the right conversations and ultimately winning the right deals with established media companies, who are in great need of solutions to transition their businesses successfully into the Internet age,” says Wilde.

But only recently, says Wilde, has the company developed its software to the point where it can be scaled up to work across companies as big as Cox. “If they had come to us six months ago to do a 68-station rollout, it would have crushed us. But we’ve built out the platform with this use case in mind—conglomerates with dozens of units that need to be serviced.” Along with the Cox deal, EveryZing today introduced a new management interface called RAMP—for “Reach, Access, Monetization, and Protection”—that lets clients control how content is presented to search engines and consumers and how advertising should appear alongside that content.

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A 2001 New Yorker essay entitled “Absolute PowerPoint” contained the stunning claim that over 30 million PowerPoint presentations were being given every day. The article attributed this statistic to Microsoft; it did not say how the company gathered the data. But whatever the actual prevalence of PowerPoint in 2001, it’s surely even greater now, given that many more people own laptops today than seven years ago. In fact, PowerPoint has become such a universal medium that it wouldn’t be surprising to see great fields of PowerPoint presentations blooming on the Web, alongside other forms of user-generated content.

And that’s just what is happening. BrainShark of Waltham, MA, today officially opened the world’s first repository for ready-made business presentations, complete with audio narration. Some of the presentations are free; others cost $15 to $50. It’s like YouTube meets Amazon for PowerPoint.

BrainShark, a nine-year-old, 110-employee company that’s raised a total of $23 million in funding from the likes of Flagship Ventures, Ticonderoga Capital, SI Ventures, and Citizens Capital, is known mainly for software that allows users (mainly executives at the large companies that subscribe to the service) to upload PowerPoint presentations to a Web-based authoring tool, then record an audio track over the telephone. Customers or employees can then access the finished presentations online as part of marketing, training, or “e-learning” campaigns. Over 700 companies use the service, including more than a third of the Fortune 100, according to BrainShark CEO Joe Gustafson.

But the company recently realized that there might be demand for a PowerPoint exchange—somewhere a company’s HR executives could go, for example, to find a pre-made but customizable presentation on workplace sexual harassment reporting policies, rather than having to build one from scratch. PowerPoint has long included an “AutoContent Wizard” that provides templates for specific situations such as “Employee Orientation,” “Project Post-Mortem,” and even “Communicating Bad News.” And the New Yorker exaggerated only slightly in saying that these templates are “so close to finished presentations you barely need to do more than add your company logo.” But not even the wizards at Microsoft can think of every business scenario in advance. Enough of the business world’s collective wisdom is now embedded in PowerPoint files (and perhaps nowhere else) that BrainShark believes the time has come for a rich marketplace for presentations.

“A couple of things happened recently that caused us to go to market with a content network,” says Gustafson. “The first is we are just a big enough company now to expand into an additional line of business. Also, in the marketplace you’ve got a confluence of things: a greater interest in multimedia generated by YouTube; a greater interest in user-generated content with blogging and Wikipedia; and people are more and more comfortable accessing information online. And over the years we’ve had customers come to us and say, ‘We bought BrainShark to create our own proprietary content, but we’re often creating content that we could probably buy off the shelves, as long as we could customize 10 or 20 percent of it to fit our needs.’ So we think the whole e-learning market is ripe for being turned on its head.”

Here’s how it works—starting with BrainShark’s existing presentation-authoring process, as explained by Gustafson: “You give us your PowerPoint file and it’s automatically uploaded to our secure servers. We process it to our format, and then we come back to your screen with a telephone number that you dial and enter a secure password. The automated attendant says, ‘To start recording, press this key,’ and from then on your phone is in control over your PC browser. You see your first slide in front of you. Just like with voice mail, you add some dialogue to that slide. Then you press a key on go on to Slide 2. You can stop, listen, edit, delete, and re-record. When you hang up the phone, we process it, put the audio file together with the visuals, and combine it into a link to a regular URL. Anyone who goes to that URL can play back that content on any system from any browser.”

What’s new is the BrainShark Content Network. Say you’re an expert on Sarbanes-Oxley reporting regulations. After registering with BrainShark as an author (which involves some pre-screening, meaning the network isn’t strictly equivalent to YouTube and other user-generated content sites), you can …Next Page »

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Xconomy is reaching a milestone of sorts: some of the startups we profiled last summer when we were just getting started have now had time to evolve through at least one major generation of their technology, giving us the opportunity to come back and see where things stand. That’s definitely the case with Cambridge, MA-based EveryZing, the BBN spinoff we featured last July when the firm was just launching its speech-to-text system for indexing audio and video content and making it discoverable by major search engines.

Last summer, as EveryZing CEO Tom Wilde told me this week, the company was offering “a capability rather than a solution.” The company’s automatic transcription technology produced text files that could be published alongside audio or video files, opening up those files’ contents to traditional text-based Web searches and therefore, in theory, making it easier for the owners of multimedia-rich websites to attract traffic. But it wasn’t a full-service system that companies could simply buy and implement. Today, though, EveryZing is launching the full commercial versions of two products, called ezSEARCH and ezSEO, that establish the company’s technology as a serious platform for publishers who want to boost consumption of their online multimedia content (and, more to the point, of the ads published alongside that content).

Here’s how it works: a client, typically a media company with a large Web property, signs up with EveryZing, whose Web-based service then runs alongside the client’s existing content management system, extracting full-text transcripts from audio and video files and creating an index of these transcripts for search purposes. The ezSEARCH product places a single search box on the publisher’s website that allows visitors to browse all of the site’s multimedia content (or, optionally, all of the site’s content, period, including text). When the search results come up, users can either view clips from the beginning by clicking on them, or, using an innovative time-stamped bar under each file, jump to the moment in the audio or video when their keywords appeared.

If an EveryZing customer also signs up for ezSEO—the letters stand for Search Engine Optimization—a lot more happens behind the scenes. EzSEO is, essentially, an automatic publishing engine. It uses the indexed, time-stamped multimedia files as the core content for hundreds or thousands of new “landing pages” organized around keywords drawn from the text transcripts. These new pages aren’t necessarily reachable via links from inside a publisher’s website; while they have plenty of interesting, human-viewable content, they’re designed primarily to attract the attention of—and get highly ranked by—the general search engines.

Wilde argues that getting a site’s multimedia content noticed by Google or Yahoo is a much more sure-fire way of drawing traffic than just waiting for users to stumble across the content while browsing, or publishing it via special video portals such as YouTube. “There are all these vertical multimedia search engines like Google Video, Yahoo Audio Search, and Yahoo Image Search, but honestly, users don’t want to search that way; they really want to use the single, Google-style search box,” Wilde says. “And when the industry created Web search technology, it was centered around HTML and text, and it still is, and it will be that way for a while. What we do is to optimize multimedia content for the big Web search engines—because that’s where 80 or 90 percent of the search activity is happening.”

For an example of the EveryZing system in action, check out Boston.com, one of EveryZing’s largest customers during the ezSEARCH and ezSEO beta-testing phase. Actually, start at Google, by typing in “Tom Brady audio video.” The first result will likely be …Next Page »

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Back in August we wrote about Concord, MA-based EnjoyMyMedia, which was beta-testing a system it’s positioning as everyman’s media-sharing technology. The company describes itself as a mini-TV network; at its site, you can download a program that lets you turn any folder on your computer into a “transmitter” that will “broadcast” any file you put there to friends or family who subscribe to your private “channel.”

This week the company officially launched the service, and added a few features that weren’t there in August—including the ability to watch Flash versions of large video files while the original MP4 or MPEG files download, the ability to track files as subscribers forward them to others, and the ability to scan print items and transmit them with a single click.

EnjoyMyMedia CEO Keith Loris calls this latter feature “a small technical thing,” but says it’s illustrative of the company’s philosophy. “We do not view our mission as file-sharing; we’re trying to help you share your personal life, and a lot of people’s personal lives are not digital,” Loris says. “If you have a desktop scanner, this lets you scan a piece of paper right into your channel, whether it’s the portrait of Grandma on the wall or the picture your kid drew at preschool.”

The Flash feature is another seemingly small but useful enhancement to the service. If you’re trying to share an hour-long video of your daughter’s ballet recital, Loris points out, you don’t want to make viewers wait while their computers download a 1-gigabyte file. EnjoyMyMedia transcodes MP4, MPEG, and other video formats into Flash. The file then starts playing in a subscriber’s browser immediately, regardless of the size of the original file, which continues to download in the background. “It makes long videos really usable for casual Internet users for the first time,” Loris says.

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If you fancy yourself an amateur TV network exec, the Web now has any number of tools to help you create and broadcast your own personal multimedia channel. I’ve tested several, including SplashCast, Vizrea, Veodia, and Bubbleshare, and have several more on my list to try, such as MixerCast, Flektor, Stickam, Ustream, blip.tv, Vpod.tv, Kyte.tv, and Cozmo.tv. But all of these services suffer from what I’ll call a high “geek quotient” that will probably limit their adoption. You have to know something about creating, formatting, and uploading media files in the first place. And then, to embed the channels in your Web pages, it really helps to have an understanding of HTML and blogging tools.

But why should geeks have all the fun? The guys at EnjoyMyMedia (yeah, none of us here much like that name, either), a small, self-funded startup based in Concord, MA, have been working on what they call a “brain-dead-easy” media-sharing system that mainstream netizens can use to broadcast their photos, videos, audio files, and other files to friends and family members without learning a line of code. At the heart of the system is the Really Simple Syndication or RSS standard, which, despite its name, is a somewhat technical way to subscribe to Web content. But EnjoyMyMedia’s software masks the details behind a truly easy-to-master interface and a familiar television metaphor revolving around “transmitters” and “receivers.”

“My 72-year-old dad is a target customer for this, and if you asked him what a blog or a social-networking site is, he would not have a clue,” says Keith Loris, EnjoyMyMedia’s president and CEO. “But if you say I’m going to have a transmitter on my PC and you’ll have a receiver with my channel, he gets it right away, because he watches TV.”

Loris says he and partner Bill Oncay, the company’s chief technology officer, set out to build EnjoyMyMedia two years ago. Their motivation: both had ReplayTV DVRs and were both fans of the fast-paced Fox show 24, but were frustrated because there was no easy way to swap video files if one of them forgot to record an episode. “It was like, why can’t I send this to you?” recounts Loris. “We could have FTP’d it [that is, used the ancient File Transfer Protocol--eds.], or set up a website for temporary storage, and we actually had the skills, but it would have been a pain. That was the impetus—-thinking that there’s got to be a better way.”

The pair designed a PC program would monitor a hard drive for new content, then send the content automatically to another PC, but the transfer mechanism was still a quandary. “At one point we had the bright idea of marrying that with RSS,” Loris says. All Web browsers today allow users to subscribe to RSS feeds, which are essentially notification services that alert subscribers whenever a new media item has been published somewhere on the Web. Loris and Oncay took that a step further, devising a way to create an RSS feed for an individual Windows folder on a user’s computer.

To begin “netcasting” on EnjoyMyMedia, a user simply has to designate a folder on their hard drive as the “channel” for the data to be transmitted, then send invitations through the EnjoyMyMedia website to friends or family members. Subscribers can add channels to the free RSS receiver pages provided by iGoogle, Firefox, Internet Explorer, My Yahoo, Facebook, and the like. Every time the netcaster adds a file to the designated folder, a thumbnail representation of it shows up immediately in every subscriber’s RSS feed. But only when a subscriber clicks on a thumbnail is the file actually transmitted.

By making media-sharing so simple, Loris, Oncay, and partner Warner Jones (the company’s vice president of website products) hope to attract a user base of average families—the kind of people who exchange birthday-party photo prints as a matter of course, but wouldn’t be likely to sit down and spend several hours uploading digital photos to a site like Flickr.

And given this family orientation, the company is putting an emphasis on security—even at the expense of some convenience. “I don’t want a video of my 15-year-old daughter just floating out there on the Web, where who knows who’s going to watch it,” says Loris. Subscribers are required to enter a username and password to view the thumbnails they click; a password is good for 24 hours, after which the viewer must log in again. (Security was once Loris’s bailiwick: He was president and CEO of Softlock, a company that earned fame for providing the digital-rights-management software protection for “Riding the Bullet,” a Stephen King novella published solely in e-book form by Simon & Shuster in 2000.)

EnjoyMyMedia’s basic service is free, and includes a 200-megabyte online locker where frequently viewed files can be stored so that others can download them “on demand,” i.e., even if the netcaster’s PC is off. The company plans to earn revenue by offering larger on-demand lockers—$4.99 a month for 10 gigabytes and $9.99 for 40 gigabytes. Paying users will have advertising-free channels, while people on the receiving end of media posted by free netcasters may see targeted ads.

Other software packages, such as Adesso Systems’ Tubes, also turn Windows folders into vehicles for private file-sharing across the Internet. But most require some kind of software to be installed on both ends of the connection, and that, Loris believes, means that none of these services are as simple or as straightforward as EnjoyMyMedia. “There are companies out there with ‘tubes’ and ‘pipes,’ but what does all of that mean to the average user?” says Loris. “Now, broadcasting—I kinda get that.”

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