Baidu launches (legal) online video company
Shades of Hulu
By Austin Modine • Get more from this author
Posted in Music and Media, 6th January 2010 22:47 GMT
A Hulu-esque online television channel is being created for internet users behind China's Great Firewall.
The country's top o' the heap search engine Baidu said Wednesday it plans to form a new online venture that will serve free (and legal) copyrighted video content to Chinese internet users.
Baidu will spin-out a new, yet-to-be-named independent company to provide the service, which will generate revenue through online advertising. The search firm said it intends to stream a variety licensed movies, TV series, sport events, animation, and other content on the service, but didn't provide any details on specific licensing deals or partnerships.
Baidu was not immediately available for comment.
The online video venture will be helmed by Yu Gong, formerly the chief executive of China Mobile's 12580 hotline logistics service.
"By establishing this new company, we will be able to better serve our users and customers with superior content and focused resources," said Xuyang Ren, Baidu's vice president of business development in its English-language statement.
Ren said Gong's "strong" industry experience would enable growth through product innovation and a network of partnerships with content providers."
Baidu hasn't always been terribly concerned with copyrights when serving content. In fact, the company owes much of its popularity to a "deep links" unlicensed MP3 music scheme The Reg described in detail a year ago.
More recently, however, China's government has taken a harder hand against its home-grown online music services.
It wasn't mentioned how Baidu's licensed online video foray will affect its investment in PPLive, a separate Chinese web site that streams licensed movies and shows gratis. ®
Thursday, January 7, 2010
How Google Could Have Changed the World With Nexus One — and Still Might
How Google Could Have Changed the World With Nexus One — and Still Might
If you thought that the world would change with the release of a Google-branded phone Tuesday, be assured that sadly it did not.
At least not yet. It just got one more cool phone.
You can buy the Google Android OS phone, dubbed Nexus One, unlocked directly from Google. But in the United States the only place you can really take it to is the country’s fourth largest carrier, T-Mobile. Or you can buy it through T-Mobile for a hair under $200 and pay about as much per month as a Palm Pre owner and about $20 a month less than an iPhone user.
What would something revolutionary have looked like?
How about a smartphone starter plan, deeply subsidized by ads, that offered a cheap data plan to entice the “I don’t need a smartphone” crowd into joining the revolution? Even better, would have been an order form where you could buy the Google phone and then choose from three or more carriers who are competing to provide you with a data and voice plan — just as you do when you buy a laptop. Instead, there’s just the one option — T-Mobile, which costs basically the same as all the other smart phones.
Google clearly wants the mobile-phone world to look different, it’s just not clear that this phone or its current manufacturing strategy will actually bring about the changes in the telecom world that Google is looking for.
Now, getting on par with Apple (and in some ways past it) is no small feat, especially when Google made this phone in partnership with HTC, a business model that rarely leads to the hardware that the design team really wants. Compare the Nexus One, for instance, to the first Apple phone, which the world has seemingly forgotten — the Motorola ROKR. That phone was limited to having 100 songs on it, couldn’t buy songs over the air and was full of compromises. With the Nexus One, Google managed to make a device that Wired magazine’s Steven Levy called “curvy,” “classy” and “impressive.”
And that’s important, because Google has recognized that mobile computing is a massive part of the net’s future — and thus its own.
With the recent $750 million purchase of mobile-ad provider AdMob and its reported overtures to buy the popular local-business–rating site Yelp, Google is showing it clearly thinks that mobile (and local) is the next place on the net to mine for riches. But what it doesn’t like is all the ways that users could get detoured, from the time they pull the phone out of the pocket until the time their search travels to a Google server.
Remember that the more people use the internet and the faster the internet works, the more Google makes money. Low-cost, uncontrolled devices with low-cost connections equals more people using Google software and seeing Google ads, even if that phone is made by Motorola, Nokia or even Apple.
That’s why it’s pushing hard to break down barriers between the average user and an online Google ad, by finishing the mobile-computing revolution that Apple started, but didn’t finish because of Steve Jobs’ fanatical need to control the iPhone.
Google’s created the mostly open source Android OS, which manufacturers can and are using for free. That’s pushing Microsoft out of the market, and keeping carriers from doing stupid things like forcing a user’s browser home page to divert to its software store in perpetuity, no matter how hard they try to change it. And third-party-app developers can write programs for Android devices without getting permission, a stark contrast to Apple, which must approve every iPhone app and controls the only way to add programs to the device.
Google bet more than $4 billion in an FCC wireless auction in 2008 just to make sure that openness rules would adhere to new spectrum, which led the eventual winner — Verizon — to sue the feds. Google’s won a battle in D.C. to make the wireless companies subject to the same FCC rules that force cable and DSL companies to treat all online content similarly.
In short, Google wants to transform the phone market with its complicated charges, long contracts, bizarre fees and bundling of devices with service plans and make it more like how you buy a television or a computer: Buy the device. Then find the service. That’s even as cable and satellite providers look at the wireless companies and decide those contracts look like a mighty good way to keep customers.
But the question becomes how far does Google have to push, how much capital must it invest, how many devices must it design and regulators must it convince, before it can back out of the mobile hardware business and simply focus on software and advertising?
Here’s the scenario that might get us there: Google convinces HTC that it’s not suicide to create a phone that can be used on any U.S. 3G network (maybe two phones — one for GSM and one for CDMA) and then sells it unlocked. It’s a great phone, and lots of people want it, and there are lots of great apps that run on it.
Users then could then take it to whichever carrier they like, and get a data plan a la carte. The carriers will hate this, perhaps create unfairly high prices and very annoying “device registration fees” — trying to protect the money they make offering phones at an initial discount in exchange for a two-year contract.
But the FCC will have passed a rule forcing carriers to accept any device that doesn’t hurt their network — much as Ma Bell was forced to open its lines after 1968 — and Google, regulators and consumers will break down those barriers. Or the market could simply take care of it, with a desperate Sprint breaking ranks with the other large U.S. telecoms and accepting a Nexus or any other device with no registration fee and a fair price for users.
And that’s when Google will stop making phones, and you’ll know that the Nexus One actually meant something.
Photo: Google employee Sara Rowghani looks over a jumbo model of the Nexus One phone at a demo in Mountain View, California, on Tuesday.
Jeff Chiu/AP
If you thought that the world would change with the release of a Google-branded phone Tuesday, be assured that sadly it did not.
At least not yet. It just got one more cool phone.
You can buy the Google Android OS phone, dubbed Nexus One, unlocked directly from Google. But in the United States the only place you can really take it to is the country’s fourth largest carrier, T-Mobile. Or you can buy it through T-Mobile for a hair under $200 and pay about as much per month as a Palm Pre owner and about $20 a month less than an iPhone user.
What would something revolutionary have looked like?
How about a smartphone starter plan, deeply subsidized by ads, that offered a cheap data plan to entice the “I don’t need a smartphone” crowd into joining the revolution? Even better, would have been an order form where you could buy the Google phone and then choose from three or more carriers who are competing to provide you with a data and voice plan — just as you do when you buy a laptop. Instead, there’s just the one option — T-Mobile, which costs basically the same as all the other smart phones.
Google clearly wants the mobile-phone world to look different, it’s just not clear that this phone or its current manufacturing strategy will actually bring about the changes in the telecom world that Google is looking for.
Now, getting on par with Apple (and in some ways past it) is no small feat, especially when Google made this phone in partnership with HTC, a business model that rarely leads to the hardware that the design team really wants. Compare the Nexus One, for instance, to the first Apple phone, which the world has seemingly forgotten — the Motorola ROKR. That phone was limited to having 100 songs on it, couldn’t buy songs over the air and was full of compromises. With the Nexus One, Google managed to make a device that Wired magazine’s Steven Levy called “curvy,” “classy” and “impressive.”
And that’s important, because Google has recognized that mobile computing is a massive part of the net’s future — and thus its own.
With the recent $750 million purchase of mobile-ad provider AdMob and its reported overtures to buy the popular local-business–rating site Yelp, Google is showing it clearly thinks that mobile (and local) is the next place on the net to mine for riches. But what it doesn’t like is all the ways that users could get detoured, from the time they pull the phone out of the pocket until the time their search travels to a Google server.
Remember that the more people use the internet and the faster the internet works, the more Google makes money. Low-cost, uncontrolled devices with low-cost connections equals more people using Google software and seeing Google ads, even if that phone is made by Motorola, Nokia or even Apple.
That’s why it’s pushing hard to break down barriers between the average user and an online Google ad, by finishing the mobile-computing revolution that Apple started, but didn’t finish because of Steve Jobs’ fanatical need to control the iPhone.
Google’s created the mostly open source Android OS, which manufacturers can and are using for free. That’s pushing Microsoft out of the market, and keeping carriers from doing stupid things like forcing a user’s browser home page to divert to its software store in perpetuity, no matter how hard they try to change it. And third-party-app developers can write programs for Android devices without getting permission, a stark contrast to Apple, which must approve every iPhone app and controls the only way to add programs to the device.
Google bet more than $4 billion in an FCC wireless auction in 2008 just to make sure that openness rules would adhere to new spectrum, which led the eventual winner — Verizon — to sue the feds. Google’s won a battle in D.C. to make the wireless companies subject to the same FCC rules that force cable and DSL companies to treat all online content similarly.
In short, Google wants to transform the phone market with its complicated charges, long contracts, bizarre fees and bundling of devices with service plans and make it more like how you buy a television or a computer: Buy the device. Then find the service. That’s even as cable and satellite providers look at the wireless companies and decide those contracts look like a mighty good way to keep customers.
But the question becomes how far does Google have to push, how much capital must it invest, how many devices must it design and regulators must it convince, before it can back out of the mobile hardware business and simply focus on software and advertising?
Here’s the scenario that might get us there: Google convinces HTC that it’s not suicide to create a phone that can be used on any U.S. 3G network (maybe two phones — one for GSM and one for CDMA) and then sells it unlocked. It’s a great phone, and lots of people want it, and there are lots of great apps that run on it.
Users then could then take it to whichever carrier they like, and get a data plan a la carte. The carriers will hate this, perhaps create unfairly high prices and very annoying “device registration fees” — trying to protect the money they make offering phones at an initial discount in exchange for a two-year contract.
But the FCC will have passed a rule forcing carriers to accept any device that doesn’t hurt their network — much as Ma Bell was forced to open its lines after 1968 — and Google, regulators and consumers will break down those barriers. Or the market could simply take care of it, with a desperate Sprint breaking ranks with the other large U.S. telecoms and accepting a Nexus or any other device with no registration fee and a fair price for users.
And that’s when Google will stop making phones, and you’ll know that the Nexus One actually meant something.
Photo: Google employee Sara Rowghani looks over a jumbo model of the Nexus One phone at a demo in Mountain View, California, on Tuesday.
Jeff Chiu/AP
Innovation as Resource and China's New Magnetism
Innovation as Resource and China's New Magnetism
BY Jamais CascioWed Jan 6, 2010 at 1:00 PM
China is set to cut off access to rare-earth elements--and this might be a very good thing.
You've probably seen "neodymium" (actually neodymium-iron-boron) magnets advertised in techie-oriented magazines and gadget blogs. They're actually the strongest type of magnet available, and a pair of them can easily smash fingers. They're also incredibly useful, with small neodymium magnets found in everything from hard drives to wind turbines. Neodymium is one of 17 "rare-earth metals," and these elements have turned out to be critical to the rapidly-growing green technology industries. Rare-earth metals are used in hybrid and electric cars and low-energy lightbulbs, along with windmills (and numerous other greentech applications).
And China is the source for over 95% of the rare-earth metals now in use--something that increasingly looks like a problem. How we respond to this problem can tell us something about how we can respond to other imminent resource and sustainability crises.
Conventional wisdom says that we live in a globalized economy and if China can offer the metals at cheaper prices than other sources (namely, now-closed mines in South Africa, Greenland, and Canada), it's good for us all, right? The fact that many high-tech military technologies rely on Chinese rare-earth metals may give some people pause, but so far, so good. But that model assumes that China is willing to sell as much mineral as it can produce, to whomever wants to buy--and that assumption may no longer be true.
The U.K.'s Independent reports that China has been gradually cutting the amount of rare-earth elements it exports, now down 40% from seven years ago. China now exports only 25% of the rare-earth elements it mines. More worrisome, they say:
Industry sources have told The Independent that China could halt shipments of at least two metals as early as next year, and that by 2012 it is likely to be producing only enough REE ore to satisfy its own booming domestic demand, creating a potential crisis as Western countries rush to find alternative supplies... Beijing announced last month that it was setting exports at 35,000 tonnes for each of the next six years, barely enough to satisfy demand in Japan. From this year, Toyota alone will produce annually one million of its hybrid Prius cars, each of which contains 16kg of rare earths. By 2014, global demand for rare earths is predicted to reach 200,000 tonnes a year as the green revolution takes hold.
With industries relying on rare-earth elements making up a rapidly-growing part of the global economy, this isn't good.
So what are our options? We (as in, the non-China parts of the industrialized world) could try to pressure China to sell more, but that's unlikely to work--and China tends not to respond well to even mild criticism. We could try to rapidly reopen the now-closed rare-earth element mines, but mining is, frankly, an environmental nightmare and incredibly dangerous--hardly a sustainable practice.
Our best option is to innovate our way out of the problem. Ideally, we'd figure out a way to make what we need without those elements. In the shorter term, however, we'd want to figure out a way to obtain those necessary elements without either trying to push China around or reopening dirty mines. If the innovation manages to help solve an otherwise unrelated problem, too--a so-called "economy of scope"--so much the better.
Researchers from Leeds' Faculty of Engineering have discovered how to recover significant quantities of rare-earth oxides, present in titanium dioxide minerals. [...] The Leeds breakthrough came as Professor Jha and his team were fine-tuning a patented industrial process they have developed to extract higher yields of titanium dioxide and refine it to over 99 per cent purity. Not only does the technology eliminate hazardous wastes, cut costs and carbon dioxide emissions, the team also discovered they can extract significant quantities of rare earth metal oxides as co-products of the refining process.
This is, to me, a perfect example of how we should deal with resource problems. Not by simply fighting over the remaining scraps, or trying to get at marginal sources, but by looking at ways to increase supplies while reducing waste, with methods that have a smaller impact on the planet.
Can we do it for every limited resource? Probably not--but focusing research into how to use resources more efficiently, how to extract the resources with less waste, and ultimately how to move beyond them entirely will bring enormous benefits.
BY Jamais CascioWed Jan 6, 2010 at 1:00 PM
China is set to cut off access to rare-earth elements--and this might be a very good thing.
You've probably seen "neodymium" (actually neodymium-iron-boron) magnets advertised in techie-oriented magazines and gadget blogs. They're actually the strongest type of magnet available, and a pair of them can easily smash fingers. They're also incredibly useful, with small neodymium magnets found in everything from hard drives to wind turbines. Neodymium is one of 17 "rare-earth metals," and these elements have turned out to be critical to the rapidly-growing green technology industries. Rare-earth metals are used in hybrid and electric cars and low-energy lightbulbs, along with windmills (and numerous other greentech applications).
And China is the source for over 95% of the rare-earth metals now in use--something that increasingly looks like a problem. How we respond to this problem can tell us something about how we can respond to other imminent resource and sustainability crises.
Conventional wisdom says that we live in a globalized economy and if China can offer the metals at cheaper prices than other sources (namely, now-closed mines in South Africa, Greenland, and Canada), it's good for us all, right? The fact that many high-tech military technologies rely on Chinese rare-earth metals may give some people pause, but so far, so good. But that model assumes that China is willing to sell as much mineral as it can produce, to whomever wants to buy--and that assumption may no longer be true.
The U.K.'s Independent reports that China has been gradually cutting the amount of rare-earth elements it exports, now down 40% from seven years ago. China now exports only 25% of the rare-earth elements it mines. More worrisome, they say:
Industry sources have told The Independent that China could halt shipments of at least two metals as early as next year, and that by 2012 it is likely to be producing only enough REE ore to satisfy its own booming domestic demand, creating a potential crisis as Western countries rush to find alternative supplies... Beijing announced last month that it was setting exports at 35,000 tonnes for each of the next six years, barely enough to satisfy demand in Japan. From this year, Toyota alone will produce annually one million of its hybrid Prius cars, each of which contains 16kg of rare earths. By 2014, global demand for rare earths is predicted to reach 200,000 tonnes a year as the green revolution takes hold.
With industries relying on rare-earth elements making up a rapidly-growing part of the global economy, this isn't good.
So what are our options? We (as in, the non-China parts of the industrialized world) could try to pressure China to sell more, but that's unlikely to work--and China tends not to respond well to even mild criticism. We could try to rapidly reopen the now-closed rare-earth element mines, but mining is, frankly, an environmental nightmare and incredibly dangerous--hardly a sustainable practice.
Our best option is to innovate our way out of the problem. Ideally, we'd figure out a way to make what we need without those elements. In the shorter term, however, we'd want to figure out a way to obtain those necessary elements without either trying to push China around or reopening dirty mines. If the innovation manages to help solve an otherwise unrelated problem, too--a so-called "economy of scope"--so much the better.
Researchers from Leeds' Faculty of Engineering have discovered how to recover significant quantities of rare-earth oxides, present in titanium dioxide minerals. [...] The Leeds breakthrough came as Professor Jha and his team were fine-tuning a patented industrial process they have developed to extract higher yields of titanium dioxide and refine it to over 99 per cent purity. Not only does the technology eliminate hazardous wastes, cut costs and carbon dioxide emissions, the team also discovered they can extract significant quantities of rare earth metal oxides as co-products of the refining process.
This is, to me, a perfect example of how we should deal with resource problems. Not by simply fighting over the remaining scraps, or trying to get at marginal sources, but by looking at ways to increase supplies while reducing waste, with methods that have a smaller impact on the planet.
Can we do it for every limited resource? Probably not--but focusing research into how to use resources more efficiently, how to extract the resources with less waste, and ultimately how to move beyond them entirely will bring enormous benefits.
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